To me, the solution is obviously better education. When people believe the Earth is round only because that's what they were told, it's not that hard for a clever talker to convince them the Earth could be flat. When people know the Earth is round because they actually understand the physics behind it, there's no way you're ever going to convince them the Earth is flat.
Instead of admitting our education system has failed, people's ignorance is being used as an excuse to tighten control over the media even further.
I'm gonna guess you don't have children. Children like easy-to-follow directions. They don't understand nuance at all. It's not because it's "easier on parents and teachers", it's because it's what works.
You add nuance later in middle and high school.
I don't have kids myself, but I do remember how it is to be a child, having been one myself a while ago :D
I can assure you kids understand nuance quite well if they're explained things properly, patiently, in a friendly manner.
I'm not arguing against easy-to-follow directions, so I don't quite see your point. I'm against parents and schools encouraging unquestioning obedience to their directions.
If you take children to be under 18 then the statement seems valid because I don't think there's a lot of nuance going on in most middle or high schools.
Every night from the time I was 6 we had to read 50 pages in a book he assigned and discuss it. This was after he came home from 10 hour days at work.
Most parents are (1) too lazy to properly explain things to their children, (2) unwilling to say when they don't know the answer, (3) lack the critical thinking skills themselves to evaluate statements, (4) lack the basic research skills needed to validate or invalidate a proposition.
That is the problem in America.
When I was about 8 years old we were riding in the car with a couple my parents were friends with and their children who were similar in age to us. The son asked the father why the sky was blue. The father turned around and said, "well, it reflects the ocean". I said, "no, you're wrong, it's the color the atmosphere refracts light" (or something like that). The father and son both stared at me in shock because I would tell an adult they were wrong. My father just laughed.
I don't think I was necessarily smarter than other children by nature. I was just brought up with the idea that it is everyone's personal responsibility to read, to learn, to say when you don't know the answer, to find reliable sources. And above all, never to memorize answers without fully understanding them.
Which is why I love writing code ;)
That doesn't mean they accept everything as fact. They may simply not choose to question because of fear of punishment, or for any other number of reasons.
>Then when they're adults they lack any kind of critical thinking skills because they've been miseducated and they're easy targets for disinformation.
That is a giant leap of logic.. or faith. Case in point :- I went to a religious school (though, it was more of a hippie religious school), and many of my classmates became atheists later in life. :)
I think there a large room for even further nuance about how humans develop and all the factors that shape our thinking. Simply forcing a 'critical thinking' class into the curriculum won't give them any benefit any more than attending an entrepreneurship class will make you an entrepreneur.
The powers that be, haven't got the memo yet that it doesn't benefit them anymore to have a populous which is easily manipulated. In the past, old media acted as parameter control, though concentrated ownership. Sure they had vested interests, but they were generally alined with American values; capitalism, stable democracy, international leadership by America, etc. But now each of the 340 million brains in this country can be accessed directly by foreign adversaries. Parameter control can not work anymore, unless we shut down the internet. We must bring the security to each individual endpoint.
Some will argue that we should shutdown the internet or censor it. But is that the world we want to live in? That would stifle economic growth and i do not believe it is compatible with the ideals of liberal democracies.
>We must bring the security to each individual endpoint.
Why? Why must we treat adults as children that we have been entrusted with, and that it is our responsibility to give them 'mental medicine'? What makes our thinking superior to others' that we need to lord over them in this way?
>Some will argue that we should shutdown the internet or censor it. But is that the world we want to live in? That would stifle economic growth and i do not believe it is compatible with the ideals of liberal democracies.
I believe that these ideals are bottom-up. We form governments that align with the ideals of the people, not the other way around. If the people out of choice or ignorance no longer care about the ideals of liberal democracy, who are we to force them onto others?
>Why? Why must we treat adults as children
I am suggesting the opposite. Rather than treat adults as children and censoring what they can and can not see. I am suggesting we give them the skills to critically analyze input they receive.
> that we have been entrusted with, and that it is our responsibility to give them 'mental medicine'? What makes our thinking superior to others' that we need to lord over them in this way?
Why provide any education at all then? As a society it is our responsibility to skill the next generation with the skills they need to operate in our society. I believe critical thinking skills is one of these required skills.
> I believe that these ideals are bottom-up. We form governments that align with the ideals of the people, not the other way around
I agree with this. But to get the best form of government we need educated and intelligent citizens.
> If the people out of choice or ignorance no longer care about the ideals of liberal democracy, who are we to force them onto others?
We really are fucked then aren't we. I kind of like living in a liberal democracy. If we throw our current system out due to ignorance I am very confident what comes next will not be superior. I'm not willing to accept that as path we take.
There are several views on education. It used to be that you went to school/college to be educated, but lately it seems like the schools are just places where you get trained so that you can get a job. Would parents send their kids to school if primary goal was education, and getting a job was just incidental?
Personally, I don't think critical thinking skills can be taught in a school via a curriculum en-masse. It requires a personal approach tailored to each individual's needs based on their upbringing and cultural context.
>We really are fucked then aren't we. I kind of like living in a liberal democracy. If we throw our current system out due to ignorance I am very confident what comes next will not be superior. I'm not willing to accept that as path we take.
Yes, we might very well be fucked in the near-term. But I'm not saying we throw everything out, I'm saying we have to trust people more than systems. How many people are willing to earnestly engage with the other side? We have to do our part to foster safe-zones where people can express any and all ideas without fear of being ridiculed or shamed. We're all responsible in some way for the decline in public trust in several pillars of democracy - especially the news media. To make it personal, several of my family members are Trump voters, and I do not think they're racist or evil. I understand them, and they hold varying beliefs with varying degrees of certitude but they feel trapped where they cannot even express an opinion without being shouted down and ridiculed.
> Personally, I don't think critical thinking skills can be taught in a school via a curriculum en-masse. It requires a personal approach tailored to each individual's needs based on their upbringing and cultural context.
Upbringing and cultural context are certainly heavy influences. But it is totally possible to teach / develop critical thinking skills in students. Instead of focusing on memorizing facts & information, we should focus on the techniques used to break down problems, seek evidence, extract alternate readings & motivations, etc. Easy. The problem is this stuff isn't taught in school, and if it is, it's only brushed over as a particular topic and not part of everything. This stuff needs to be embedded in the core operating system of our citizens.
Putting the fate of liberal democracies aside. I believe the economic activity lost from the under development and under capitalization on the potential of our populous is significant.
The problem with understanding things from their fundamentals is that it doesn't scale. The world is too complex.
Are vaccines safe? Maybe I'll just should read through the Institute of Medicine's definitive, 900 page "Adverse Effects of Vaccines: Evidence and Causality."
Can these robust explanations be simplified for lay people? Yes, but faced with competing, simplified explanations, can lay people dependably evaluate which is correct? Can they do it better than a domain expert?
I have some understanding of how vaccines work, from school and popular science literature. But if tomorrow leaders in the field of medicine broadly announced that all of our understanding of vaccines up until now had been mistaken and that there was now some new explanation, well I would accept that new explanation. Whatever education I have had on the topic, it is obviously not going to be better than the education of experts in the medical field.
Epistemic humility and a consequent reliance on domain experts is an essential part of being informed in our wonderfully complex world. This also means it is possible to be mislead by experts who are in the wrong, but I don't really see how this can be entirely avoided.
Having attended school through tenth grade... There were maybe a couple of assignments over the years in which we were told to choose a topic, do research on it while following some of the above (explicitly stated) strategies, and write it all up.
The rest of the time, though, it was a lot more like "this stuff is fact" and you're not really encouraged to doubt it or look closely into the evidence chain. Evidence or proof might be presented (textbooks often mention it), or might not. I wouldn't say that the whole "skeptically evaluating your chosen experts" thing was considered a core skill or habit to cultivate (probably a few teachers considered it such, but their curricula didn't really emphasize it).
I bet most of the views on flat earther’s videos are just people looking for non artificial comedy.
I can understand the call for censorship, but I don't see any particular value in the opaqueness.
One proposed solution is to simply filter the more 'extreme' standpoints out of the dialogue. Hence censorship.
But I don't think that filtering and moderation are going to help much if people still stay isolated in their bubbles. All you're doing is superficially fighting symptoms; but the root cause remains.
I don't want to give an example since those usually get confused for the subject but I'll share 2 things that made me laugh at the time: 1) I use to think people are logical beings. I believed the first half of my life that we act based on logic and reason. Then one day I noticed this is simply something I like to believe to be true. That I can think this without a shred of evidence is evidence in it self of the opposite. 2) We build, create and design to make things as easy and convenient as possible for ourselves and for other people. Comfort is taken on faith as a valid goal so obvious that it needs not be questioned. In the process we distance ourselves from the core mechanics of our existence and we fail to challenge our mind as well as our body. If we can build the apparatus we are happy to forget how to tie our shoes. We no longer need to know what we can eat in the forest, when to plant crops, how to make all of those nice wooden things, how to forge metals, how to have a productive conversation (which requires disagreement) we think we benefit from calling that taxi but what we really needed was the 3 km walk in the sun or snow, fresh air and to see those birds fly over that old tree. Even the shoes are a solution to their own problem.
:-)
The world is filled with models that are simple enough to use and accurate enough to be useful, sadly that doesn’t make them correct.
Censorship seems so simple on the surface, but like everything else the implementation rarely matches the theory. I would argue for disclaimers as a much better option, even if they also fail.
Perhaps it isn't the right question. Say you have a bunch of people as raw resources. What should you make from those? I kinda like my people as-is but this seems a moving target.
Ah, the Paradox of Tolerance and the Age-Old Quandry of "Is unconditionally punching a Nazi consistent with liberalism?"
The fact is, you can't try to stabilize or bring stability to the system by cutting off or ignoring the "fringes". The entire system is always seeking an equilibrium, and the increased relevance of the fringes indicates the direction the Overton window is shifting in. Cutting things off on one side just guarantees an unsympathetic schism forming on the other, where the people just barely this side of the schism point are left wondering whether the folks on the other side may have had a point. Rinse repeat. Authoritarianism in all forms tends to capture the public imagination in times of crisis. The issue right now is magnitude, and if you keep pushing the censorship button now, there's going to be a loss of quite a few reasonable people previously amenable to putting their differences aside.
For those without ShowDead on, there is a user, AnHonestComment, who has apparently run afoul of some moderation policies, and tends to get his posts nuked from orbit (likely by the user base) as a response, I figured that it was worth pointing out the irony of his attempted statement "This is what HN wants," sans the combative tone with regards to the moderation team.
If you take a spin through his comment history, it's not terribly unreasonable aside from a serious chip on his shoulder with regards to the moderation team.
AnHonestComment, if you're still reading this, you aren't necessarily shadowbanned or anything like that, you're just inviting downvote bombing with the constant references to the moderation by the community.
You seem a decent sort, and I know as well the harrowing plight of the conscientious objector. There is a place here for it, even if it might be well advised to build up some karma first. It shouldn't be that way arguably, but it is, and it's what we've all got to work with.
Fast forward 50-70 years, we realize that the balance has swung too much to one side so we try to do a sharp turn. That action causes an overcompensation which is when revolution and violence happen. Finally we end up back at some sort of liberalism and the circle begins anew.
I see it as a result of generation gap. We don't know the value of something until we lose it. Right now the public doesn't value freedom of speech as much as it used to so we are right on track to have it more limited.
As with many such rituals, -and as long as everyone sticks to the prescribed acts- this reduces the bloodshed immeasurably. With a little luck, the only victims are dead trees and broken pencils.
Currently we are at the bit of the loop where the underclasses are thrashing out and the elites are trying to channel that rage somehow.
Even if it's a matter of picking the right start and stop times to a cycle, every iteration would be heterogeneous enough that calling it a cycle is probably missing some important behaviors.
Otherwise, it'll just turn into DnD 3.5e where every action has a rule in a book somewhere, it'll be blasphemy if you handwave it before looking it up, and yet somehow that one guy always has their character just so to skirt that same rule.
I posit that the lack of censorship is the reason that social media exists. Similarly, the printing press. Why on earth would anybody want to read the Bible, or any other book, by themselves? All truth is taught in Church. To think otherwise is blasphemy.
Who knows, maybe in theory land there's no reason we can't have it both ways. But it seems to me that in the real world precisely the opposite is true. We can't demand increasingly invasive and opaque mechanisms to prevent the spread of misinformation (once upon a time many examples of which would have just been called "gossip" or the "rumor mill") and then act surpised when radicals for our own important causes get swept up in the net. At some point we either have to admit that what we really want to build is a like-minded dictorship or we have to start discussing (in a sober manner devoid of the histrionics and gamesmanship that have come to envelope contemporary dialogues) what an intellient compromise in objectives might look like.