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)