Perhaps one angle to tackle the problem is to educate the group(s) of people who continue to believe whatever they read on Twitter, Facebook, etc.
When you make your age distinctions, you might be talking about people who are non-technical.
Early Internet techies predicted situations like this before they happened. (Pre-Web, we had all kinds of sci-fi predictions, awareness from historical analogues, etc. Post-Web, I talked with startup founders 20 years ago, who would also be 40yo+ by now, who predicted that their company's accounts would be used for shill identities for things like manipulation, and the implications of that.)
Passive consumers, of your under-40 group, who grew up in it never knew anything else, have had things framed for them, and are just starting to realize the situations we're now in.
My concern about younger folks is that the world is shrinking as large corporations try and squeeze as much revenue as possible out of markets - the movement of Apple to lock down the app store and force people into safe walled gardens just so they can control the revenue stream might be one of the worst blows of tech literacy of the modern world. Instead of young folks getting devices and struggling with malware and hacking at programs to make them do what they want. They're growing up in a sterile environment full only of buttons: this button causes "A" to appear on the screen and this button plays a movie. God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get "A" to appear over the movie - doing that is hacking and very naughty so you should never do it.
I remember programming solitaire for an introductory java programming course in uni and hacking a BufferedImage to force some cards to be overlaid by writing in the different card images at different offsets that is not the right way to do that but it works - we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
this. My friends (I'm in highschool) that aren't as experienced in technology (use it as you describe, "God forbid you ever want to try and see if you can get 'A' to appear over the movie") are genuinely terrified of opening the terminal and using anything just slightly out of how it was meant to be used because they don't want to 'hack anything'.
> we need to make sure that new generations are brought up empowered to hack things in creative ways.
also this. Unfortunately, much easier said than done.
I'm not sure kids who grew up with an iPad appliance are really more generally technically literate on average than GenXers who entertained themselves trying to write Choose You Own Adventure-type stories in BASIC on their Commodore 64s ... or who, at least, managed to get their pirated copy of Stellar 7 to run.
It used to be the GUI was basically the same as a CLI but with clicks instead of typing out "cp" "mv" etc. Now the GUI to CLI relationship is severed. You have an iPhone and the GUI it runs is basically running on top of the underlying CLI that apple hides from you (and you need to jailbreak the phone in order to gain access).
Imagine if Apple just gave these kids root and a terminal app, and the files app actually showed you the directory structure of the device. They could be scripting on these machines and learning about how they function same as we did growing up.
Instead, apple things we need to hold these kids hands and should learn Swift and other low code efforts instead. IMO these kids don't need an easy bake oven to learn to cook, they need a kitchen and the freedom to learn how to burn themselves like we had. Apple is afraid of letting their customers operate the stove they bought.
Did you once have a myspace page or live journal where you said very controversial things or vented angst in a manner that you'd rather your co-workers didn't see? Well sorry but all that stuff now goes into your facebook feed where it will be with you forever.
It takes real determination to stay actually anonymous on the internet today and someone trying to stumble into it is likely going to screw it up - when we millennials were growing up that personal data you accidentally leaked onto a forum (maybe during a spicy exchange of direct messages) can't follow you since that forum no longer exists - it was probably hosted on PHPBB and either an admin accidentally deleted the DB at some point or the whole server was chucked in the trash - even if someone had access to those messages it would be harder to definitively tie it back to someone since user fingerprinting was so non-existent.
That all said, I was in the middle of University when folks were learning that bong-shots on your facebook page might hurt your long term job prospects so we did get to see it start to emerge as a concern.
Unfortunately this isn’t just limited to the over 40 crowd. People are willing to believe whatever affirms their beliefs. Growing up on the Internet does not change this.
Any propaganda from more than a couple of decades ago seems immediately corny to kids.
The impersonation can be more damaging than the content, because it's a variety of toxic mental pollution - a form of betrayal - that lowers the SNR of the entire Internet.
Just go browse reddit for 10 minutes if you don't believe me. I recommend the /r/GME cult for instance, but there are many others. People will gladly listen to anybody if they tell them what they want to hear.
Young minds know how to deal with the polluted informational space and learn to get value out of it one way or another.
The informational gems that we need to hold up with high regard are examples of sincere discussion and debate between those who disagree with each other and yet have a genuine goal to hear and be heard by the counter-party, a deep reluctance to deploy rhetorical tricks, and a willingness to support controversial views if they are supported by uncontroversial fact.
for instance people insist the election was stolen, not because they literally know it to be true, but rather because the outcome, that democrats control national politics, is somehow unacceptable. a productive discussion would start here, with why that’s unacceptable, not quibbling over whether the election was actually stolen or not (it wasn’t).
also, those false projections are 99.9% of the content on twitter, facebook, etc.
It's gotten to the point that I don't really trust anyone on Facebook in certain contexts - although I'm more likely to trust someone if their position shows some flexibility and avoids purely tribal thinking, and also if they show some evidence of background knowledge and general thoughtfulness.
I'm less likely to trust anyone whose position encourages extreme polarisation, who appears to be disguising intent, whose posts are repetitive, and who tend towards inflammatory emotive language and insinuation.
This isn't infallible and I know I've made mistakes in both directions. But I hope it's better than just getting astroturfed.
Edit: I don't think critical thinking skills help as much as they should. This isn't about assessing evidence, it's about assessing intent - which is a different problem.
This is news to me. What countries are you referencing?
Teaching critical thinking skills is not some revolutionary idea and it's not like educators want to avoid teaching people how to do it.
Since we're just comparing anecdata at this point (or at least I am), if you have any data/studies or anything like that it would be appreciated.
People claim that critical thinking is not taught in schools because it's an easy claim to make when you perceive that so many other people are thinking uncritically. But, make a claim they disagree with and watch how good they become at it. Everyone falls into a trap of thinking that society at large lacks 'common sense' or 'critical thinking' because we all assume our worldview is true and anyone who disagrees must have deficient thinking. Ultimately I think people are taught how to think critically, but the real problem is when they choose to think critically. And that, I think, is a result of human nature, not lack of education.
I remember when I was dating a doctor being appalled by her complete inability to think through a problem, and I later learned medical school is basically mass memorization. I am obviously cherry picking medicine here, but if doctors aren't even taught that by the time they're practicing in the United States I think it's fair to say critical thinking is sorely lacking in our education system. She was a neurologist who was unable to help me with my migraines, and I later figured them out on my own using ~drumroll~ critical thinking. I also saw at least a half dozen specialists at prestigious hospitals, all of whom were equally unhelpful in solving my problem. They were all very quick to prescribe pain medication though, in fact it seemed to be the only thing any of them were ever interested in doing. Some of them accused me of lying about my symptoms, and some told me I shouldn't even bother trying to get better.
If US doctors - some of the best educated and most highly trained professionals in the world - aren't good at thinking critically about medicine, I'm not confident that it's being taught in the US. In fact I'm quite confident it's not taught in the US (or at least it wasn't). I was never taught critical thinking in a classroom setting, and I have multiple degrees from the US.
Sure, it’s not every doctor. But throw a dart at a map and you’re bound to hit one who’s like this more often than not.
"Knowledge-Based Education – We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills (HOTS) (values clarification), critical thinking skills and similar programs that are simply a relabeling of Outcome-Based Education (OBE) (mastery learning) which focus on behavior modification and have the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority."
Page 13: https://web.archive.org/web/20120629111643/http://s3.amazona...
One would think if it were integrated with other studies it would be mentioned somewhere other than Edutopia and Walden adverts.
I did, in a very rural, very underfunded school district - all of those things are critical thinking.
It is integrated into other studies. But there tend to not be "This lesson is critical thinking" sorts of headers on the lesson plans.
Look for the phrase "lifelong learner". That tends to be where the "critical thinking" lives for many schools.
It’s been awhile, but would wonder how unbiased today’s history books are. I can’t see the State of Texas board being nuanced about the Alamo.
I can see a rural district where teachers/schools have much more control over curricula, so enlightment or indoctrination is easier to influence. I dont see this scaling to large administrative/measurement bound districts. How does one test to CT outside perhaps secondary effects of STEM or AP results? It does appear that higher percentages of students are taking AP tests though.
Being educated by Jesuits, we started with Socrates/Plato. But looking at my classmates FB feeds I don’t see any evidence of sober CT skills. Skepticism is a synonym of conspiricism in today’s generations. Biases are polar bound.
No, this isn’t the reason, you’re missing some crucial context about the early to mid 90s Internet - most people were using institutional accounts. It was very clear that someone with a whatever.ac.uk or .edu or .mil or even most .com that weren’t ISPs were who they said they were, and anons were explicitly anons. Many people even had phone numbers and addresses in their .sig blocks posting on Usenet, or on their homepages. There was a pretty high degree of trust, it was comparatively civilised!
The problem is that people got stuck in that assumption.
I really don't think that's the case. The issue isn't knowing how to use a computer or not, it's being able to vet sources. That is taught at few schools and actually applied by fewer still.
Digital natives are even more susceptible to internet propaganda imo, since listening to obscure internet voices (with no real credibility beyond the size of their flock of sheep of subscribers/followers) has become so normalized over listening to actual domain experts. A lot of people like to get their current events from some talking head on youtube who selectively explains these topics in a biased way, rather than reading primary sources and developing their own interpretation themselves.It's not geriatrics and baby boomers buying this dropshipped junk from all these influencers, after all. Plus look at all the millenials who stormed the capitol a few months ago based on some conspiracy theory. No, being able to use gmail and microsoft office do not make you tech savvy or immune to propaganda.
I have previously downvoted comments on my opinion on some instances of this on HN lol