Comment by IlikeKitties | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IlikeKitties | Hacker News Reader

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> So instead of speaking from the high ground, please, tell us what your solution about mass disinformation happening from US social media megacorps, Russia mass disinformation, mass recruitment of people for sabotage on critical infrastructure.

Education. Education. Education. The only thing that ever worked. is Education. Censorship and a total surveillance state aren't an option. Why bother protecting freedom and democracy if you have to destroy freedom and democracy to do so?

And in case of sabotage of critical infrastructure, the answer is three-fold: 1. Apply the law to the saboteurs. 2. Retaliate in asymmetric fashion. We can't sabotage their hospitals but we can stop buying russian oil and gas, take their money and 3. arm ukraine.

> Tell us, how can we keep living in free society when this freedom is being used as a leverage by forces trying to destroy your union.

Are you or have you ever been a communist? We surveived the cold war and the warsaw pact. We can survive a third rate petrol station masquerading as a state.

> Please, give us your political solutions to the modern problems instead of earning a fortune by a performance free speech activism.

Who is earning a fortune here?

> Education. Education. Education.

The problem is that many of the most highly educated people are the ones fully supporting censorship in the fight against disinformation. Higher education has become a bastion of illiberal ideology.

I think it’s because once you educate yourself, you see how the masses behave and it’s like the ultimate revelation.

They are consumers. Feeders. They want to be told what to think.

Most people don’t even have an internal monologue and many people say they don’t even think much, not even a thought.

You thought for yourself. You used your brain. But you are outnumbered. Vastly.

> Most people don’t even have an internal monologue

Is there any scientific indication that whether private thoughts are automatically verbalized actually has an impact on cognitive activity or function?

Also where do you get this idea that most people lack an internal monologue? Afaik research indicates that totally lacking verbal thinking is very rare.

There is a person thinking about how to solve actual problems at the bus/rail stop. The other person is totally reactive (someone FaceTimes them), mostly glued to doomscrolling (consuming non stop). There are disproportionately more of the latter than the former.

There’s nothing wrong with that it’s just how humans are wired. It’s pretty obvious.

Just because some education implementations have problems doesn't mean education itself must be excluded from the solution.

Public education and universities played a large role in freeing me from generations of magical thinking and religious indoctrination.

Universities may have cured us of some forms of indoctrination but exposed us to others: for example, nuclear power was demonized for decades is academia and our avoiding it has set us back as a civilization.

The "answer" here isn't education per se. A would-be censor might look at the spread of an inconvenient idea and conclude the education isn't working and therefore harder measures are justified.

The answer is epistemic humility and historical literacy. A good education instills both. They teach us that one can be wrong without shame, that testing ideas makes us stronger, and that no good has come out of boost ideas beyond what their merits can support.

Specifically, I want universities to do a much better job of teaching people to argue a perspective with which they disagree. A well-educated person can hold the best version of his opponent's idea in mind and argue it persuasively enough that his opponent agrees that he's been fairly heard. If people can't do that at scale, they're tempted to reach for censorship instead of truth seeking.

Another thing I want from universities (and all schools) is for them to inculcate the idea that the popularity of an idea has nothing to do with its merits. The irrational primate brain up-weights ideas it sees more often. The censor (if we're steelmanning) believes that coordinated influence campaigns can hijack the popularity heuristic and make people believe things they wouldn't if those ideas diffused organically through the information ecosystem.

This idea is internally consistent, sure, but 1) the censorship "cure" is always worse than the disease, and 2) we can invest in bolstering epistemics instead of in beefing up censorship.

We are rational primates. We can override popularity heuristics. Doing so is a skill we must be taught, however, and one of the highest ROI things we can do in education right now is teach it.

Nuclear isn't a silver bullet. Producing, handling, and disposing of its fuel is dangerous and carbon-intense. My state college wasn't anti-nuclear. I think the fundamentals just don't make much sense as solar, wind, and other sources have improved.

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