> media literacy just isn't enough
How would we know? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning."
Very little of that is taught because the educational institutions who would be responsible for teaching it have curriculums that cannot withstand it.
Hand-waving to students that "u shuld do critical thinking" is not sufficient to actually teach critical thinking.
Also our educational institutions totally ignore the distribution of intelligence in the population. The curriculum is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator which does an incredible disservice to high (or even average) intelligence individuals.
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
This is true, to an extent. But, that's what journalism is supposed to solve. Instead of spending 1000 hours researching some issue as an individual, have 100 journalists spend 10 hours researching it and collaborate on the reporting. Sadly, we have very little actual journalism anymore, which I'll explain next..
> people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive
This, I totally agree with.
Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative. If not through advertising, but by buying the media companies directly. Further, if you give a "journalist" a choice between working for 10 hours to tell the truth or working for 1 hour to tell a lie, getting paid the same amount either way, the outcome is obvious.
Moreover, declining educational standards, and especially lack of critical thinking skills, has led to a deadening of the public palette. The market is not incentivizing actual journalism because objectivity is hard, opposes too many special interests, and the public (at large) doesn't have a taste for it.
The only takeaway from this ought to be obvious. We can't rely on the institutions and corporations who created this problem to solve it. Clearly they're leading us to "thought police" and censorship. I think, however, the lights should be turned on and the public at large should get a crash course in critical thinking.
Critical reading of sources is part of the German high school curriculum, introduced around 8th grade; it is kept up until the end, and most people seem to come out none the wiser.
I think we regularly overestimate the role rational thought plays in people's decisions and opinions. It's not nearly enough to make rational appeals or offer factual evidence to convince people of anything.
Here[1] for example are the learning goals for Berlin. Assessing the quality of an informational text and weighing the arguments is skill level G and H (page 27). This is explicitly not a goal for these students.
[1] https://bildungsserver.berlin-brandenburg.de/fileadmin/bbb/u...
I've come to see "critical reading" to be just a furtherance of the teachers' and the states' biases and aims by means of a more sophisticated cloak. You are supposed to be able to fake a little critical thinking, but arrive at the predetermined conclusions. Don't rock the boat, stay inside the lines, but do this little hand-wringing ritual so you don't seem like an unsophisticated sheep.
And why wouldn't all religions be treated equal in a country that guarantees religious freedom? Quite an important lesson to learn, if you ask me. Death penalty? Abolished in Germany, so I don't get your point of arguing for it. That being said, you can. If the arguements are good, it shouldn't impact your grades. If it does, well, grades in German (literature) are highly subjective as well. And try arguing against Catholic dgma in Catholc religion class. Religion calsses are, by the way, mandatory in all (most?) German states, and the church has huge sa in who teaches it.
Bavaria re-introduced crosses in classrooms several years ago, with very shady arguments.
> "And why wouldn't all religions be treated equal in a country that guarantees religious freedom?" and "Religion calsses are, by the way, mandatory in all (most?) German states, and the church has huge sa in who teaches it."
The notion of religious freedom that you promote and that schools promote explicitly excludes freedom from religion, i.e. Atheism or Agnosticism. Just like forced religious education (couldn't pick ethics as an alternative for lack of teachers, and as soon as ethics was available, noticed that the religion curriculum is literally "dancing and singing" while ethics is hardcore philosophy to keep pupils away from the subject and from any kind of acceptable grades).
Oh, and that the death penalty was abolished is beside the point. If you pick "death penalty" as a subject of discussion, then of course it must be an equally valid outcome of the discussion to be pro death penalty, if the arguments provided weigh more heavily. Changing policy isn't the intent here. Learning to discuss such matters critically is. Which doesn't work if the outcome is predetermined and you will be punished with bad marks for arriving at the "wrong" conclusion.
Regarding your last argument, following that logic would include argueing genocide as a solution as well. Which you obviously cannot. There is no way why China's human righs abuses should be tolerated or supported. Tolerated to the degree geopolitical realities dictate, sure. Learning why realities are what they are and why China is doing what they do, of course. Finding arguments supporting their actions for the sake of the argument and "critical thinking" excersise, no way. Same goes for the death penalty.
It is. This is one of the major outcomes of a strong history curriculum. Interpreting sources and narratives. Every single major university offers a four year degree that is basically nothing but this sort of thing. And engineers consistently yell and scream that it isn't real education.
By that time, many developmental windows have been missed, a persons personality is already solidified.
University is too late for these fundamentals, which IMHO ought to be taught in primary school. I think we horribly underestimate the ability of children to do this. Which I attribute to the assembly-line education that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
There are so many fundamentals that are skipped throughout compulsory education. Stuff like basic taxes and home economics and labour law, which is the kind of stuff we all have to endure throughout our lives.
School is not designed from the point of view of the citizen. It's designed from the point of view of the elites running the nation.
(I'm not sure how much this has been eroded since 2010 by the Gove reforms aimed at teaching history as chronology)
It’s not complex and doesn’t require 4 years of classes, but it does require practice and it’s better to start early before you develop a bunch of political views and ideological blind spots.
No skill is binary. You can learn some of this in a single class. You get more practice if you take two dozen classes. You get even more practice if it is your profession.
Quality humanities education teaches empathy and the ability to analyze and judge sources created by humans, especially written text. That can absolutely happen at an earlier age. I'm certainly on board with increasing the amount of history education offered to high schoolers, though I suspect that many people are not.
My friends that went down the 4 year history/literature path appear to be just as susceptible to spreading biased bullshit full of logical fallacies on social media as anyone else.
While I also think it is true that we do a terrible job in general of educating people to think critically, it is not simply a failure of education—or at least, not in the traditional sense of “if you just force knowledge into someone, they will understand it”. I feel like there is real merit to the idea that media literacy may not be enough to save us from the firehose of the internet. Human brains are reckless and love to engage in motivated reasoning, filtering, and other cognitive distortions to protect us from information that threatens our core values.
I’ve known engineers with impeccable critical thinking and reasoning skills—but only when they were programming. On other matters, where any sort of emotional or value judgment was involved, they would uncritically accept false information which meshed with their belief of how the world is. For example, someone once told me that they didn’t think that vaccination actually caused the decline in measles rates because the MMR vaccine wasn’t developed until after infections started going down. OK, great, valid reasoning, except their next thought should’ve been that maybe there was a different measles vaccine that came first (because there was). They didn’t go there, though, because they have a deeply held belief that vaccines are bad/scary, and their brain conveniently suppressed the critical thinking process that might’ve lead them to need to reevaluate their position.
You might argue that this person doesn’t have “true” critical thinking skills, and maybe that’s true, but I also know that I tell myself stories and avoid seeking out contradictory evidence in order to protect some of my most deeply held beliefs—even though truth and honesty are what I value above all else. Some cows are just too sacred.
> Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative.
I feel like this is a reductive answer to a very complex problem. I think you’re spot on that the market is not incentivising high quality reporting, but there are many factors at play beyond “journalists got bought out” and “educational standards are bad”. There are so many diverse interests who don’t want people to think critically, including a lot of ordinary people! It’s hard to think critically all of the time. The world is unfathomably complex. You and I may be hanging on, just barely, thanks to genetic and/or socioeconomic lotteries giving us slightly better hands in life. Most people don’t have those advantages and are highly motivated to pound reality into an uncomplicated place where there are only two distinct genders, or all cops are bastards, or it’s all the mainstream media’s fault, or we can save the planet from global warming by just planting a trillion trees, or whatever. There’s no one single source of this quagmire, and no One Simple Trick that will solve it.
> media literacy may not be enough
I would grant that there is an intelligence distribution in the population and the capacity to acquire critical thinking skills is clamped by something that is largely genetic (and somewhat random), not to mention education or experience. Further, people who are on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum need some way of reasoning about the world even without that capacity. They then must rely on more intelligent people to analyze and synthesize a cohesive perspective that will work for them and their level of interpretation. In other words, I agree that objectively it's not enough for everyone. But still, we certainly ought to educate as many people as possible and certainly the capacity of society to manage a consistent cohesive perspective for those people would increase as well.
> Human brains are reckless
This and your following point about engineers compartmentalizing their thinking ability is hard to refute. However I would say two things on the matter.
1. It's a matter of degrees and having a system which optimizes human development (e.g. parenting, family) to leverage as many developmental windows as possible (on an individual basis) would minimize reckless thinking.
2. At scale, a functioning and diverse media with a healthy amount of honest journalism also minimizes the likelihood that reckless thinking would persist for very long.
> this is a reductive answer
True. It's difficult to know what level of interpretation is appropriate in any context. I agree that there are complex issues and forces in play, however I would argue that after a certain point it is necessary to trim the fat and synthesize a cohesive, if not simplistic, perspective. Western civilization is known for it's ability to do that and maintain much of the original value of a thought. I'm not an oncologist, but there is a vested public interest for oncologists to "spread awareness" and educate people about cancer. We typically don't challenge the oncologist when they make an analogy, don't describe cancer with exactly the correct technical terminology, or unpack every individual aspect of cancer in their explanation.
Your point about ordinary people having an incentive to minimize critical thinking is very true and insightful. None of this occurs in a vacuum, and to some extent there is a degree of personal responsibility to be sure. Personally I am less inclined to lay this problem at the feet of an individual, who in my estimation, was sabotaged for generations by corrupted media and educational institutions. However, I will definitely acknowledge the pendulum of moral responsibility swings in both directions.
> There’s no one single source of this quagmire, and no One Simple Trick that will solve it.
This is true in analysis but not in synthesis. Abuse and predation, in particular against children (primarily perpetrated by parents) is the single biggest and impactful source of this quagmire. The One Simple Trick: peaceful parenting.
Or where everyone is created equal and there are no important differences between races and sexes. Where their political opponents are all evil and stupid. Where different government systems (representative democracy? Monarchy? Whatever the CCP is?) are obviously horrible. Where weird new ideas are destined to fail or have already been tried and found to fail (like reusable rockets, Musk was far from the first person to think it might be a good idea).
So... YouTube. YouTube is the arbiter of truth we should accept?
Does that sound any less creepy to you? That a handful of people whose management is headquartered in a few zip codes in San Francisco can determine what people are allowed to talk about?
"Four people who received Pfizer's vaccine developed Bell's palsy, a form of temporary facial paralysis"
The trouble is, this one's a bit different than a slippery slope argument. We'll have to decide whether we want to allow fringe news at all.
If YouTube announced tomorrow that they would ban opposition to the new vaccine, would that feel as comfortable?
Do you think people should be able to make up their own minds? Unfortunately, all of those actions you mention run contrary to that premise.
E.g., look at medical licensing. One could oppose it, on the grounds that people should be able to make up their own minds as to whether somebody is competent to perform surgery on them. Saying that a person can't call themselves a medical doctor is just denying them freedom of speech! Who is the government to come between private parties! Etc, etc.
But in practice that would lead to incredible harm for little gain. I think individual freedom is an important value, but not the only one, and that real-world concerns require balancing values.
I'm not sure if it is too much to ask from folks, but progress doesn't come easy anyway.
One reason is the bullshit asymmetry principal: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Another is that liars get a lot more practice in selling their lie than people do in analyzing and refuting a particular lie. A third is that people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive; if I blow $10 on a stupid purchase due to lying ads, I'm out $10, but the liar is making a living. And that's before we even get to the asymmetry in mass communication, where a liar can reach millions. Or the modern micro-targeting era, where lies can be tuned to the audience and hidden from debunkers. Or the way the whole idea of truth can be weakened by authoritarian behavior and mass disinformation.
So we really can't expect individuals to keep up on their own. As much as I love cynical skepticism, it's not enough these days.