A good place to start might be in mandating some level of media literacy in the national curriculum.
Media Studies tends to be a bit of a meme but it’s becoming increasingly important.
Media Studies tends to be a bit of a meme but it’s becoming increasingly important.
I'm really at a loss.
The political establishment doesn't necessarily want critical thinking - they just want you to believe their version of lies. People uncritically accept anything negative about Trump all the time and people who own media channels don't want that to change.
While I think the Patriot Act was a horror show for the health of our country, and I am suspicious of the very broad reach of the proposed ban TicToc legislation, the military system also does a lot of good work that benefits our society in non-military ways.
Deliberately sampling an “unbiased” subset of an actually biased underlying population is not just allowing the heuristic to stray from reality, it’s deliberately destroying that heuristic and deliberately misleading people. In imaginary “everyone can/should judge on own merits”-land, that’s perfectly fine. In reality, where almost no one can actually judge almost anything of substance on its merits, you are actively sabotaging truth-seeking.
The way that fringe scientist gets to declare s/he is right is by convincing their peers of it, not by convincing the public in a format that violates the heuristics the public has to rely on. Of course everyone should always be open to this possibility, most of all their peers (and to your point they often aren’t!)
What's of even more concern to me is the prevalence of this in the HN crowd - ostensibly a bunch of very intelligent people with expert knowledge in their respective fields and who thus understand what goes into actually understanding something...
Do germs grow in a heated, sealed flask? No. Clear evidence for germ theory, disproving the accepted view at the time, spontaneous generation.
Do nuclear fission and modern electronics work? Clear evidence for quantum physics, even though Einstein argued against it till the end.
Is GPS accurate before or after adjusting for time passing faster in orbit? (After.) Clear evidence for general relativity, despite how wild it seems.
On the other hand, when a group of people collectively tell you their ideas are right, and that other ideas are "fringe", without clear evidence, that's an ideology or a religion.
Even if you found a perfect balance, I can imagine little Bobby coming home from school to see his parents invested in their favorite TV news program and saying: "Mr. Forrester told us that's a type of misinformation, mom."
I would not want to be Mr. Forrester in that scenario. Just imagine the school board meetings.
Nothing helps making people manipulation resistant like seeing manipulation from the side of the argument they support.
See the current status on inflation and words from the white house. Or the situation between Palestine / Israel.
You are always being manipulated and lied to by both sides because it is in their best interests to have you aligned.
We currently have separate narratives of "<side 1> engages in manipulation, here is their misinformation" which polarizes and causes highly emotional reactions against the evil supporters of that side. This also means that people, due to that emotional response, are unwilling to consider opposite views and we get the polarized society we have today.
If instead we are teaching with examples of manipulation of both sides of the same argument, people see the value of debating on merits, instead of emotions, cross checking references and correcting for the speaker's viewpoint. They also get less affected by misinformation, since they have seen it, many times, including coming from the side near and dear to their hearts.
This last thing is critical. One would not get too riled up about messaging if they see both sides doing that. My 2c.
The issue is not that people are not well educated, its that there is not enough reason for individuals at a large scale to invest time deep-diving into a topic when they can use other things like social cues and popularity to more or less decide where they fit on the spectrum.
The issue is not that manipulation is invisible to the untrained eye, on the contrary I'd argue a lot more people are aware of political manipulation than you realize. It doesn't take much logic to see politicians only start caring about you once elections come around, regardless of where you fall on the political slider.
People are optimizing for social harmony and the security of their livelihood. This means that more or less whatever the opinions of those in my community / work / place of worship are, I will reciprocate those signals to some degree or another unless there is an issue that resonates strongly enough. Insert mass-scale reach with social media and the law of large numbers in human population and I hope you can see why there is no non-technological solution to this problem.
We have created a dopamine machine in our pocket capable of satisfying the natural urges of every permutation of the mind. Your bigger picture and moral appeal is given a moment of consideration by an ever-shrinking percentage.
Figure out how to teach media literacy correctly before spreading the current, rather flawed media literacy teachings, so we don't end up with more wannabe media literate people who are actually more susceptible to disinformation than the average person.
How can people apply something they've not been taught?