Yes, There Is a Cure for Bullshit
nautil.us
nautil.us
Also note that since 2012, it is now legal for US IC to use propaganda on US citizens https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/mhastings/congressmen-s...
The reality is, you cannot "educate" people to do critical thinking. You can expose them to knowledge and challenge them to verify whether said knowledge is true, but in the end you can only hope that they start questioning their own beliefs. I don't want to sound pretentious, because I know that I follow the same fallacy, but realistically: How many people question the information they absorb from their environment? And with an outlook into the future, how many people will have the facilities to do so in an effective way?
It's a stupid example, but ask people around you on what factual basis they believe the planet Mars exist. If they do, ask them how they can verify their knowledge and whether they have ever seen it with their own eyes. Mars is visible to the naked Eye in both hemispheres, which is why I find it so fascinating to ask: It's easy to verify by just looking up at night. If they can't give you a plan on how to verify it after a while (just look up!) I like to ask how they know that Mars isn't an elaborate hoax created by the government to fool them.
To be clear, we're all vulnerable to IW in varying degrees. Thinking critically at the very least makes people more skeptical of the information they consume, and lowers the chance they would spread it further and "infect" others.
There's no easy protection against IW or a quick cure from the effects of it. It takes at least a couple of decades to educate a new generation of people to slow down the bleeding, and for the oldest "infected" generation to die out. But first the nation's government must realize that they are indeed a victim of IW, which is difficult to do because there's no direct link that points to it since it's an operation that spans decades, and because of the confused state it inflicts in its victims. Judging by the actions of most Western countries, they haven't even accepted this as a possibility yet.
This is an interesting interview[1] where all this was outlined 40 years ago. So this is certainly well known to all intelligence agencies.
Why would you think that? It is a learned skill, of course you can.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave
"Slowly, his eyes adjust to the light of the sun. First he can see only shadows. Gradually he can see the reflections of people and things in water and then later see the people and things themselves. Eventually, he is able to look at the stars and moon at night until finally he can look upon the sun itself (516a)."[2] Only after he can look straight at the sun "is he able to reason about it"
The fallacy here though is believing that there exists a teacher that can drag you out of the cave. I'm not some nutjob that believes in the government trying to indoctrinate our children, but my teachers happily repeated the whole bit about the personal carbon footprint to us, when years later it was revealed that it was a huge (and by reasonable thinking somewhat obvious) false flag campaign led by Exxon.
You need to apply some critical thinking to your position on this topic ;)
Critical thinking seems to me like a immune response, if stimulated with study and pratice (outside world knowledge), and -sane- social interactions.. get strong, and there are the danger of an over-response too, too critic can lead to -no-critic-. And -probably- people is not rational, but has rationality aside others thing. When rationality is not needed, it weaken, and BS are not eliminated and accumulate.
Science's public credibility has always fully depended on its publicly perceived integrity, not the public's "critical thinking".
Science / academia undermined its foundation decades ago and the current whining about it being challenged by soccer dads amounts to wanting to avoid acknowledging the sociopolitical consequences of science's self-debasement. It amounts to wanting to both own and eat cake. It's a child's whine.
The reality is that official representatives of science cannot successfully browbeat people into giving it and them credibility, especially not in one of the most politicized environments that this Nation has known. That credibility had to be earned and maintained, and it wasn't. And so now the situation is that people will instinctually look for perceived inconsistencies (lies) as their technique in order to try to survive science and its representatives.
Science created this situation. Its doubters did not.
We see that the irony isn't lost on you to claim "psyops", being "under attack". and disparaging "conspiracies" in the same paragraph. We might assume that this roughly correlates with positions that you do and do not agree with.
> We might assume that this roughly correlates with positions that you do and do not agree with.
I'm not agreeing nor disagreeing with anything in that paragraph. I'm just pointing out that the bullshit TFA refers to are signs of information warfare, and that the sociopolitical climate we've seen in Western countries in recent years is a clear effect of it. I'm also saying that nudging people to think critically can help a small percentage of people, as the referenced study shows, but that this isn't a cure for the high efficacy of IW.
(This comment is a statement of opinion.)
There's also the opportunity to use prediction markets to hold policymakers accountable.[1] Claiming you can reduce emissions by X year is easy, but what's harder is convincing a prediction market to agree with the statement "If X is implemented, will X policy lower emissions by 10% by the year Y?"
[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/prediction-market-faq
[1] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/instead-of-pledging-to...
1) temporal reduction of serotoninergic transmission in the right hemisphere of the human brain; 2) caloric vestibular stimulation (of the left ear);
all of which are supposed to induce some critical thought. Caloric vestibular stimulation is basically pouring cold water into the left ear, which is supposed to induce a specific pattern of activity in the right hemisphere, which have been shown to reverse pattern non-recognition.
Why can't psychiatrists prescribe those treatments for politicians etc? Because psychiatry itself is a bullshit medicine.
In a small human group (in the last, say 50k years, but probably a lot more), there are no space for BS, apart jokes, or seriously consequences on survival will occur.
Today billion of humas live in a global group, words/information/data come fast and in quantity unmanageable. Reason has to work hard, and BS in the flux come and has spaces to stay, and consequences are delayed and indirect, damped by so many complexity/levels in the social structures (to simplify a lot).
At the beginning of newspapers era, come also some BS (propaganda), but action was manageable, it was not too fast, too much/per-day, we have time to rethink about the news of the past day, bu neverthles bring nations in wars and begin revolutions..
Now simply is an overload, we can't manage it. It's like a virus (pardon L.Anderson), and any cure is totally on the peculiarity of the intellectual-immune-system of the single, but for the humankind exposed is a caos, litterally, like pollution, is simple too much.
The cure for bullshit is the Scientific Method. Find "facts" from that source that you can verify locally, and check them yourself. Asking someone is never verifying something. Only checking for yourself if verifying.
Worse, if you take facts from your life you'll inevitable draw a smaller and more biased sample size. Maybe the people you know are already doing HIIT. Maybe you know knowledgeable/ignorant people who are more/less aware of exercise. Maybe by random chance you know three people who actually listened to their doctor, and nobody who didn't listen will admit it.
It's probably better to do the Actual Scientific Method and search Google Scholar to see if anyone made a funnel plot to check for publication bias, if the meta-analyses look okay, if there are replications by other people, if there's an ongoing war between two groups of scientists who both have good points and superficially-similar studies in opposite directions, and basically just trusting that if there are ten studies from different institutions they can't all be committing academic fraud.
No. No. No. This is confirmation bias.