Combating disinformation with humility

[0] http://confidence.success-equation.com/

Are you living in a valley? Maybe not. But what makes a valley, and how big can it be?

Are those mountains in the distance?

You can spend your whole life walking through horizons to be sure that, so far, no, you haven't been trapped. Most people just have better things to do.

One aspect of humility might be to avoid abstract generalizations and stick to shallow observations. For example, instead of arguing that some kinds of architecture are good and other kinds of architecture are terrible, and speculating about why, you could simply say, “this building looks good to me” and “I don’t like how this building looks.”

Or you could say that a particular article seems plausible or implausible to you, rather than saying it’s true or false.

But making universal-sounding claims is an ingrained habit that seems hard to shake.

>Be it the denigration of Covid vaccines or promotion of a particular election candidate, we have seen the usage of Disinformation time and time again...

Pretty ironic. Wouldn't business and government want to encourage people to get vaccines? It gives them an enormous amount of leverage over the herd. They'll use disinformation to make vaccines seem safer and more effective than they really are, in order to secure universal compliance from the masses. If you control people's immune systems, you win.

But I see a couple problems with this article:

1) Psychology and cognitive science, as they currently stand, are mostly guess-work and observations. We don't know enough to make concrete diagnosis or prescribe solutions in such a steadfast manner, unless we're happy with possibly inflicting more damage (which we often do). Intellectualizing distrust by claiming it's because of a lack of humility and the mechanisms of ontological security seems a bit much. Why not approach combatting disinformation by becoming trustworthy?

2) The author conflates conflicting narratives with disinformation. How do they know what's true? Did they figure it out themselves or did they listen to a specific narrative? Why should anyone trust their opinion?

Humble people don't value themselves and instead refer to authority. That lets misinformation spread since there will always be a lot of badly informed leaders around. The only way to fix that is to stop being humble, start distrusting your leaders and make your own judgements. But of course that would mean some people make the wrong judgement and will still be wrong, but at least since they made their own judgements they can be reasoned with unlike the humble people who never thought about it properly in the first place.

The entire idea of a "fact" is flawed. We simply have more good evidence for some things than others. Teaching people to critically evaluate and compare the evidence is the trick.

Perhaps studying different perspectives of a politically neutral historic event would help people to understand.

If you have humility (accepting the possibility that you are fallible and wrong), you are less susceptible to be fooled by disinformation that is based on appealing to the naive individual's sense of infallibility.

It does not speak to "combating disinformation" as in actually duking it out against disinformants, and winning, so that the objective quantity of disinformation in the world is diminished.

There, humility won't help you very much. The bad actors can simulate humility. In fact that is one common strategy. Spreaders of misinformation typically claim that they are rational, unbiased and willing to be wrong---in contrast of whatever they speak against.

A common pattern argument used by disiformants, for instance in this recent area of Covid-19 vaccines, is that science is arrogant and self-assured of its own infallibility (in effect, that science lacks humility). A good proportion of the masses is taken in by this, because, why, in fact, the way that the public officials have been behaving does in fact exhibit a lack of humility: they just assert they are right based on what the science is telling them this week, and then tell people what they can and cannot do, or must do.

("Science is arrogant and self-assured, lacking humility" is nothing new; for instance, it's a staple of the creationist argument against evolution.)

> It is easy to wake up a person who is sleeping but it’s hard to wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep.

At least to me, it doesn't seem to mesh all that well with what he wrote in the overall article, but maybe I'm missing something?

Do it on a daily basis, do it with your family, friends, colleagues, but mostly do it yourself.

> .. the individual would never have qualms about subjecting his beliefs or observations to open scrutiny and even discard it entirely in case enough facts and evidence are presented in its disfavor.

The best engineer types I have worked with are highly intelligent, and although they would certainly fight their corner ferociously, they are also capable of recognising when they are wrong - they almost delight in it. Like "ha ha, you got me!"

But I would never describe them as humble.

If someone has a very specific agenda and wants people do something specific, such as yes to vaccinate, instead of no to vaccinate, then what people believe becomes a problem.

The one with the specific agenda calls information that does not lead the wished specific action, disinformation and it is willing allocates resources to combat a war against that. This is easier and cheaper if the resources allocated really believe into that specific agenda themselves. Those that control education and have more presence in the media and in the social platforms have better cards.

This is propaganda in the making no matter what is the true direction. The reality is more complex that a simple truth that someone combatting for it can reveal to rest of us by being humble like Buddha. These are techniques used in advertising and politics to manipulate consent.

I've seen very little attempts at unbiased science. We'll see in the winter in Europe/North America if the vaccine actually works as advertised.

This could be the textbook description of the average commenter on HN's threads debating the merits of capitalism.