And that's fine. A productive discussion can be had along those lines. However if someone refuses to even acknowledge that there are facts then there's no discussion to be had.

It almost feels like we're in an age with a kind of new post-modernism. Everyone can have their own reality and make up their own "facts" to fit. This makes science and philosophy irrelevant because there is no shared reality that can be investigated and no "fact" that can be disproven.

IMHO, it stems from never updating our basic education from an information-scarce world to an information-flooded one.

I'm firmly in favor of making a media consumption class mandatory for primary education. Essentially a mix of logic & fallacies, evaluating sources, and meta scientific news literacy.

This would be actively fought against, at least in the United States, as an attempt to indoctrinate kids with "liberal biases".

Which is, if one thinks about it, the real problem at hand: when the political ideology of half a country requires complete and uncritical rejection of...yanno... the things happening in front of one's face, you can't actually fix the thing. People have to agree that it's broken first.

FWIW, I went to a public middle school in rural Michigan in the 90s (not exactly a liberal bastion), and we learned how to differentiate between untrustworthy/legitimate sources on the internet. It may have just been a one or two computer lab sessions, but it has stuck with me.

So, while I’d support a policy from high that guarantees everyone this type of education, a single computer lab teacher can have a major impact on their own.

I went to school in Maine; I have a feeling that you and I had a very similar experience.

I think the good faith available has rather remarkably drained out of even that, today.

Yeah, that sounds like you're touching on something important. I'm not sure that a bit of tweaks to basic education are anywhere near the whole story, but yeah, our society seems to be organized around information scarcity, and simply can't cope with information overload.

There are other problematic sacred cows that are really hard to broach that similarly touch on information overload. We've got copyrights that allow rent-seeking behavior even where the value lies not in the creation, but in the shared social history, and in any case have durations that are out of whack with the encouragements needed to create. We've got a first amendment protection of speech that protects very valuable discourse and the ability to criticize, yet is only protects from the government, not the increasingly important non-governmental organizations (like but not exclusively social-media platforms). And it's a blunt tool too; it protects from imposed silence, but it does not protect from drowning out with noise. There's no framework for dealing with, essentially, really smart spam - and even if there were some countermeasure, the first amendment would likely render it illegal! And while I think it's perfectly reasonable for corporations to have a voice, I don't think people really considered the downsides of lobbying and other intentionally misleading messaging when reinterpreting incorporation to include first-amendment protections.

But suggest that the first amendment is flawed now, and people immediately jump to the conclusion that you personally must want to live in a Stalinist dictatorship.

No amount of education is going to save you if the truth isn't viable. The truth isn't "climate change exists". The truth is "climate change exists and you are going to pay for it". And there isn't much of an alternative to that. I don't like populism either, but what alternative do you have? If the way to promise development is by cutting down the Amazon, that is what is going to happen unless there is a viable alternative.