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Comment by lostphilosopher | Hacker News Reader

But who would teach it? Who would write the text book? Who would design the curriculum? How would this be protected from the same abuses that an "anti-misinformation" project would be susceptible to?

How would this happen at meaningful scale without drawing a response like "CRT" is drawing now and "evolution/creation" did before and in some areas still does?

How do we prevent it from just deepening existing divides?

The misinformation age worries me more than any other current threat because it compounds every other problem and I don't really see a solution. I think it's actually just getting started. (And yes of course propaganda is not new, but the scale, effectiveness, and saturation of it has increased observably in my own lifetime. As a species we are getting better at it.)

If someone convinces me this is solvable or not a real problem you'll genuinely make my day; I really want to be super wrong about this...

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Logic and rhetoric can be taught without reference to current events.

Then for a final, give them an hour of CNN commentary and an hour of Fox News commentary, and let them tear both to shreds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

the textbook already exists, and has for a couple thousand years. Just study, master and apply Aristotle

>How would this happen at meaningful scale without drawing a response like "CRT" is drawing now

What do you mean?

CRT = Critical Race Theory

Some groups (in the US) are actively trying to ban teaching it (or some definition of it) in school and some groups think it's essential learning. I'm guessing most have no idea what actually was or wasn't being taught, but that's another issue. The point here isn't whether they're right or wrong to do so it's that obviously education isn't "neutral territory" or something the country is comfortable leaving to the education community. Creation/evolution is the "classic" example of this.

As soon as you try to do media studies or critical thinking at scale somewhere in K-12 someone is going to think that you're doing it maliciously to advance or attack a worldview and it's going to become a mess. Another commenter mentioned letting kids dissect Fox and CNN - how long before those kids say something to their parent that Really Believes one of those channels and that parent goes to the school board with a mob of other Believers? Or someone tries to get a class started or teach a class that claims to be critical thinking but focuses all its time on the flaws in a particular perspective?

>As soon as you try to do media studies or critical thinking at scale somewhere in K-12 someone is going to think that you're doing it maliciously to advance or attack a worldview and it's going to become a mess. Another commenter mentioned letting kids dissect Fox and CNN - how long before those kids say something to their parent that Really Believes one of those channels and that parent goes to the school board with a mob of other Believers? Or someone tries to get a class started or teach a class that claims to be critical thinking but focuses all its time on the flaws in a particular perspective?

wow, I didn't actually thought about it, but it kinda makes sense

it's hard to believe people would fight (at scale) those old and common topics like logical fallacies.

>Some groups (in the US) are actively trying to ban teaching it (or some definition of it) in school and some groups think it's essential learning. I'm guessing most have no idea what actually was or wasn't being taught, but that's another issue. The point here isn't whether they're right or wrong to do so it's that obviously education isn't "neutral territory" or something the country is comfortable leaving to the education community. Creation/evolution is the "classic" example of this.

I've heard people complaining that teachers are incompetent to teach this, is it true?

were they prepared well?

On the logic front, I'll tangentially throw out that I think the problem isn't invalid arguments, but unsound arguments, which doesn't get properly addressed in discussions of misinformation. We're all blindly talking past each other because no one agrees to the premises or on any means of verifying them.

On teacher competency, I would, on balance, trust the teachers I had growing up and the teachers I know now to handle CRT appropriately if they were teaching my children.

To the CRT (and evolution before it) issue, it's an ideological (rather than practical) debate.

To wit, neither side is making arguments in support of their position in good faith. They're saying whatever they think will accomplish their goals, because they're Right (tm) and the other side is Wrong (tm), and thus anything is justified.

Which is the real tragedy of polarization, in that it reduces thinking, independent human beings into mindless ideological automatons.

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