It was a conference that was organized by a organization that holds one of the major initiative against false news, and where one of the main tracks was about addressing the issue of false news. Last year they had a massive booth at the middle of the conference hall about false news. This year they brought in a key note speaker which brought several political slides while making misleading conclusions that was later proven to be false, but the whole thing echoed with the audience. It seemed to not matter a bit that it also just happened to be false.

When facts get in the way of a political message, even the most educated seems to let the facts go if its align with their own views. I wish education would work, but I don't see it as a proven method to solve echo chambers or political news.

It's a far cry from the NYT or Fox News reporting incorrect things, whether deliberately or not, to someone called Foxx News or Non York Times reporting that Islam causes prostate cancer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites#Lis...

Have we forgotten about the Spanish American war?

Fake news has a slightly different approach because it's much easier to reach an audience online and elude trademarks.

Community news/comments can be wrong, but that's a far far different than a site intentionally promoting fake propaganda, which is the true meaning of a fake news site.

And even then, propaganda can blur into a political view, then even farther into down right lies.

I believe the parent might be referring to 'education' as in logic, political history, philosophy so that the student can retrace the historical steps and recreate a societal scaffold that may or may not look like society today in the same way civil engineers are taught trig, calculus, static mechanics etc so the engineer can retrace historical steps and engineer the structures that may or may not reinforce or criticize our engineering approaches today.

No fewer than 6 of the coveted "swing states" switched from blue to red[0], and many counties across the country flipped as well. What persuaded hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of 2012 Obama voters to be 2016 Trump voters? Trump himself educated them, in his speeches. I'm one such person, spent the entire election season commenting and chatting with others on Reddit and YouTube with others, and there were countless Trump supporters who had been Obama supporters. Trump educated us more about the political system than any politician or journalist ever has. He taught people the phrase "lobbyists, donors, and special interests." That itself had a very powerful effect.

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/president

This is primary school stuff in my country at least, along with the explanation for why political ads on TV are banned here.

But how do educate yourself though ?

The same argument was already made about books or newspapers: depending of the subject a lot of them are trash. Same for TV news. Wikipedia is also not a defacto trustable source.

Except for first hand experience on a subject, you will never be able to find a source that is inherently trustable (and you might even interpret your experience the wrong way, so you should doubt yourself too...).

To educate yourself, there's a point where you have to try to trust some of the information you get. Having that info come from a trusted source or with a high level of peer review is a useful first level of filtering. From there you can (and surely should) invest in more time to double check or cross check if you want, but IMO quick filtering is necessary, and can't be brushed away saying "people should know better".

Even first hand experience isn't trustworthy. Our memory is so deeply flawed that I can't even tell with certainty which first-hand experiences I had. Simply presenting "evidence" that you should remember something can cause your brain to make that memory up. And if the experience is genuine and and I try to remember some detail I didn't pay close attention to, my brain will most likely just make it up. So the only reliable way to learn from personal experience is to learn during the experience, but confirmation bias will make me miss most opportunities to learn.

Honestly, it's amazing that we are capable of learning at all.

Being able to further educate yourself and judge the trustworthiness of sources are direct results of a good primary education.

Many western states have criminally decreased education expanses for decades and the current state of the civilization is in big parts a result of that.

This shit is infectious, too. Many stupid people think their kids don't need a good education, even if there's a chance for them to get one.

http://www.textbookleague.org/103feyn.htm

Mindless regurgitation of facts doesn't really help anyone - and that's the majority of what I've seen in highschools in America.

For instance some politicians make a bold move that has clear and immediate positive effect. Yet if it has huge indirect and long term consequences that only surface once they are out of office, from your perspective they will get all the credits and none of the blame.

Having different perspectives from “experts” is in my opinion important. The problem is of course to find the right experts, and to have an insight on their limits or their biases, which is usually the beginning of become a kind of expert yourself.

I believe this is a design issue (systems design, not UI design). Filter bubbles and confirmation bias can reinforce each other in a vicious circle. Financial incentives for "news outlets" to mislead people make it worse. That's the heart of facebooks issue.

With a herculan effort we might be able to overcome that with education, but improving Facebook's design to lessen the impact of echo chambers and social confirmation would be much easier and faster. Removing all interaction is one way to do that, though I agree that that's a bit heavy handed and goes against Facebook's incentives.

I agree, but it's impossible to educate everyone on any subject. I think in this case, people who are experts in the matter, should give a reputation rating on the article. That would be really great. For example, I am no expert in theoretical physics, but I may enjoy an article about it, but how do I know it's not a bunch of bullshit I am reading? If I see that Stephen Hawking gave it a 5 star reputable source rating, I "know" I can believe it.

Critical thinking is universal though. It's not a necessity to have a solid judgment of a piece. "Critical abstention" is a possibility, and primarily formal analysis is another (eg. search for common communication red flags).

I don't think that the parent idea of removing likes and counts is realistic (in any imaginary scenario I can think of).

I'm assuming you don't spend a lot of time on Facebook?

People everywhere are going away from this model as "experts" are consistently bribed through various means.

There is no good short-term fix. People need to become more educated and adapt. If the argument is that they can't, well, maybe our brains have been defeated entirely by advertising and messaging. It wouldn't be the first time a complex problem was mostly solved.

See, I can make things up too. Furthermore the amount of education necessary to judge the trustworthiness of all potential subjects is not obtainable by an individual, meaning they have to hope the experts they choose to listen to aren't making it up.

If all you do to measure trustworthiness is check if the person has an expert tag, I can see your problem.

Just as a sort of general, broad response to this sentiment: yes absolutely. I envy your optimism, but the belief amongst the Hacker News set that humans are universally capable of educating their way out from under deeply-rooted biological faults is misguided. You're not going to educate people out of conferring status on the most popular people/stories/posts/etc. You're competing against at least a few hundred thousand years of evolution (and many of these processes go back much, much further than that.) You won't win.

So, yes, absolutely we should be working on ways to acknowledge and route around human foibles, not pretending we can eliminate them.

But https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/25/546127444/epis... convinced me that this is a case where education is NOT enough and there's a time where the only solution is plain censorship, unfortunately.

The censorship doesn't have to be confidential. It can be auditable and publicly recorded. But in that case in Ukraine, they did all the education stuff and let the fake news through, and that wasn't enough to stop the country from being ripped apart.

You will never educate the masses and even if you did, some of what you taught them would be wrong.