Prevention is always cheaper than treatment, but much harder to get people to understand the value of because the threat isn't in front of them.
It's not that people don't deserve compassion and empathy, but don't ever expect positive things from others if you want to avoid spending your life perpetually disappointed.
Why would politicians want to educate their constituents, when it's so much easier to get reelected by uneducated ones?
This is squarely Facebook's fault. They had completely vulnerable systems in spite of being a source for news and information for hundreds of millions of americans. If we didn't have the DMCA they should and would probably be shut down.
Is it possible in your philosophy for two "educated" people to disagree? On more than just personal preference like whether blue is better than green, but indeed on seemingly foundational issues like what is real and what is imaginary?
I'm not talking about educated people agreeing or disagreeing, I'm not sure where you're going with that. I'm talking about leaving people with the skills to tell the difference between something reported as fact and an opinion. It's about knowing how to verify, or debunk, claims presented without evidence. It's about being able to detect complete fabrication. After all, what "educated" people thought Pizzagate was real?
Basically I'm asking you to define "education" and why the solution to so many problems is simply more of it. After all, what "educated" people thought Christ was crucified and then resurrected?
How many come to believe that having never heard it prior to completing their education?
Ben Casnocha wrote: "Rule of thumb: Be skeptical of things you learned before you could read. E.g., religion."
Ok, you're arguing on a false premise then. When education budgets are reduced, kids don't have up to date textbooks. Classrooms don't have proper supplies and too many kids get crammed into too few classrooms, which is not a situation conducive to teaching or learning.
This is a whole side-show commentary however. My main line of questioning remains: how do you define education and in what way does lacking it matter for the purposes you claim to care about (being able to distinguish reality and fantasy)? Do you want to even venture at broaching the religious question? I'm ok with leaving that to the side.
Maybe we can start with the downsides you've extracted out. What subjects are the important ones for which kids must have up to date textbooks in-class, the lack of which will hurt them in distinguishing reality and fantasy? What supplies are proper? What are some objective impacts to learning something when there are student-teacher ratios of 10:1 vs 20:1 vs 50:1? Does the extent of the impact matter by subject? (For the last I'd bet yes given many well funded universities have ratios in the hundreds for certain courses with apparently few if any seriously ill effects.)
(To head off another possible point of miscommunication, I don't dispute that nebulous unfactored "education" can have more benefits than just distinguishing reality and fantasy and that various positive aspects might not impact that particular aspect at all, I just want to target that particular one for what you'd like to focus on when "more education" is pumped in, either by the schools that are having their budgets reduced or by the politicians themselves. Maybe that's another form of the question to ask instead? How specifically do you expect the ideal politician to education their constituents (and what's the ideal educator:educatee ratio?))
I'm sure governments are going to come down hard on Zuck for "allowing disinformation to be spread", but won't give a second thought about cutting education budgets.
It's hard for politicians to make it illegal to lie or to run a platform where people might lie. People are always going to lie and try to deceive others. It would be more effective for these politicians to actually educate their constituents. This is just one of many benefits of having educated citizenry...