Comment by awesomeMilou | Hacker News Reader

Comment by awesomeMilou | Hacker News Reader

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The whole idea of "information warfare" is based on the assumption that people are rational and have a vested interest in learning the truth. What if they don't? Nazism doesn't only work because of misinformation, it works because people are happy and content with accepting easy answers to complex problems. This has such far reaching consequences that people leave school with a feeling of contentedness, believing because they attended an institution that claims to teach critical thinking, they're now able to categorize information with total clarity, forever, without any major effort.

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.

I mostly agree with what you said, but critical thinking can indeed be taught in elementary education. Children can learn from an early age to question the reality presented to them, to apply analytical reasoning to arrive at their own conclusions, and perhaps most importantly in this golden age of bullshit, to be extremely critical of the information they consume online, from mainstream media sources, and even their peers. Not all children will pick up this practice equally and carry it through their adult life, but it's important that they're presented with these crucial tools that can help them be less susceptible, though not invulnerable, to information warfare. Unfortunately, education is mostly based around memorizing and regurgitating facts, rather than teaching people critical thinking skills.

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.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOmXiapfCs8

>The reality is, you cannot "educate" people to do critical thinking.

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.

> you cannot "educate" people to do critical thinking

Why would you think that? It is a learned skill, of course you can.

Because what constitutes as actual critical thinking, i.e. when do you know something over mere belief is a problem going back to ancient greece:

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.

An example where it was done wrong absolutely does not prove that something is not possible.

You need to apply some critical thinking to your position on this topic ;)

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