People are clearly better educated than they used to be. What was the literacy rate in 1900, for example? How many people had college degrees in 1960?

I think it's simpler than that. When anyone can pull out their smartphone and record someone or criticize someone in a blog post, it's hard to hide behind the naive notion that the authorities know what they are doing. For any given person or position you can find hundreds of examples of dishonesty, incompetence, or pure stupidity.

In that environment, why would anyone trust the traditional gatekeepers? They aren't the gatekeepers anymore and in a bid to remain relevant they often sacrifice objectivity in search of cheap gimmicks and entertainment.

Fareed Zakaria has put forward the notion that elites in the 50s and 60s used to see themselves as having a civic duty. That doesn't exist anymore. An easy comparison is the Ivy League generations of Bushes vs Trump.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Future_of_Freedom

...This is then applied to America to argue that the increased democratization of American society and culture is what has caused the perceived failures of the government and governing elites.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/books/overdoing-democracy....

It sounds WASPish on its face, but there are some good points.

I like your idea that being inundated with information is part of the cause. That seems likely.

Still, I feel like the phenomenon that I'm trying (perhaps poorly) to articulate is distinct from education. I mean related to some degree, certainly, but I see it in highly educated people as well as the uneducated.

E.g., a mechanical engineer with multiple degrees from prestigious universities going on about how the Sandy Hook mass murder of 20 young children was actually a hoax perpetrated by the US government as part of an elaborate scheme to rescind gun rights.

He's a smart guy, at least in other contexts in which I've interacted with him; he should be able to use the information readily available to him and come to his own conclusion that this idea is completely preposterous. And yet, he can't.

Or less heart-stopping but still baffling: a fake news item I actually saw people I know professionally forwarding around during the election: "Outrage: Obama bans national anthem from all major sporting events!"

I mean you don't have to click through to know. That's not real; it can't be real; no president has ever or would ever do that; etc...

And these people are educated, I mean they are at least college graduates, mostly...

I agree that trust in gatekeepers has declined, but I think that makes sense.

I suspect though, that people in America are also declining in their ability to serve as their own judges of information, and that is the thing I am talking about.

It's of course possible that I'm wrong; maybe it just used to be less evident how many people were unable to arrive at a plausible conclusion from a set of facts, and now it's more obvious because the culture normalized confidently spewing completely unsubstantiated horseshit, while the technology has emerged to let anybody who feels like it do it all day long...

I think you're really on to something here. We're more educated, in the sense that we're attaining higher levels on average (i.e. tertiary education). But this also means our knowledge is far more specialised. It almost seems like the more proficient someone is in their specialist field (mechanical engineering, for instance) the more likely they are to mistake this highly specialised proficiency for a more generalised one. It's only my anecdotal experience, but I find that these specialists are much more likely to believe all manner of crazy nonsense in areas outside their speciality.

And I suspect this is compounded by the fact that at least some people will see a highly proficient mechanical engineer/author/ex-playboy model and think 'Wow, that person is smart. There really must be something to this whole vaccine thing.'

For proof, you can check out the well known book by Archibald MacLeish: https://www.amazon.com/National-Stevenson-Archibald-MacLeish...

or Stewart Alsop on the decline of the WASP elite (early 1970s)

I suspect it is more of a result of changes to the overall societal context as a whole, of which the formal education system is just one part.

For instance, we are certainly all much more exposed today to people ranting pure bullshit than we were in decades past. That seems likely to be part of it... seeing so many people spouting absurd nonsense, and then seeming to "win" the interaction, must normalize that behavior and encourage people to try it themselves.

But I think it is not just about "knowing fewer facts" but also about "having less ability to reason about things and derive a fact (or reasonable hypothesis) for yourself, even about simple matters".