> Where else can the general population find truth and begin to recognize the difference?

Watch CNN, then watch Fox. Now you have the lies. So throw all that away. Look at the what the people involved in the issue actually said. Not what Twitter says they said, or what Facebook says they said, or what the opposing political party says they said, but what the people actually said. Then make up your own mind.

How do you know what the people involved in the issue actually said, if you can't trust any media source that provides quotes or transcripts? Are you going to personally interview everyone involved?

Tools like https://pol.is/home give me hope. (It also got it's first big showcase in Taiwan, who sibling comments mention)

The importance is to develop tools that allow us to perceive which ideas are fringe, which are in the liminal space between groups, which are at the center of groups large & small. We can do the rest of the nuanced social computation so long as we have this info.

Assistive tools that put intuitive layers on dimensionality reduction techniques (like Principal component analysis, and others) and imho the key to getting through this current crisis

Taiwan’s strategy for combating disinformation from its belligerent neighbor is quite interesting:

https://cpj.org/2019/05/qa-taiwans-digital-minister-on-comba...

> Each of our ministries now has a team that is charged to say if we detect that there is a disinformation campaign going on, but before it reaches the masses, they're in charge to make within 60 minutes an equally or more convincing narrative. That could be a short film, that could be a media card, that could a social media post. It could be the minister herself or himself doing a livestream. It could be our president going on a standup comedy show. It could be our deputy premier watching a livestream of a video game.

> Our observation is that if we do that, then most of the population reach this message like an inoculation before they reach the disinformation, and so that protects like a vaccination.

This is a rather beautiful idea -- and sounds to be rather beautiful in implementation. Taiwan really is a special place if you've ever had the good fortune to visit.

I used to go to Kaohsiung repeatedly over the years when I did Oceanographic research -- my first visit the Love river was borderline industrial waste and it's shores kept with the theme.

From one trip to the next though it had been transformed. I don't think I've ever seen part of a city "become beautiful again" as fast as the Love river ...

That sounds very pragmatic and effective, thanks for posting.

Could such a service exist within China itself, though? I'd not be surprised if a US-based 'minister' immediately encountered a disinformation campaign aimed at discrediting them.

>How can the public learn to perceive truth from disinformation from misinformation.

They cannot. Hence politicians/bad guys thrive.

Is “you don’t need to know” a bad answer?

Teach logic in school so people can recognize fallacious arguments, it will also help combat the barrage of nonsense spread by China & Russia as most of it rests upon logical fallacies(Whataboutism is a prime example).

Beware of logic alone, because it works just as well with false axioms and gives no tools for navigating the map between the precise discrete objects of pure abstract logic and the fuzzy constructs of reality.

I don't have much faith in any single educational approach to deal with changes that are coming at us in sub-12-year timelines. We have to fix education, but that fixes prospective 12-year-out challenges, which I think we can safely assume we haven't the first clue what they'll be. For our current challenges, we must change the space outside minds, to add assistive tools that help untrained minds read the landscape better.

Logic is literally a toolkit for dealing with BS, and can be taught in one semester, so no it would not take 12 years. Make it a required class in high school.

Logic is hopelessly useless in dealing with the kinds of BS you encounter in most discussions. It's trivial to construct logical arguments that are utterly false or misleading. A lot of the disagreements you'll see people complain about aren't even about logic - they are about the very premises.

Let's take just one simple example: is the Earth actually warmer than it was 50 years ago? Of course, the real answer is yes. But to actually believe this in the middle of a very cold winter, you would have to either become a climate scientist yourself, or trust in the scientific community - a classic appeal to authority fallacy if I ever saw one!

Another example: Is the earth warmer 100 years ago than it was 10,000 years ago. Yes, but obviously not because of anything humans did. So another logical fallacy: climate change theory is based on cherry-picked data.

That's as simple as explaining to someone the difference between 'climate' and 'weather'. You don't need to be a climate scientist and you don't need to trust the scientific community, you could simply look at the recorded average temperatures for the last 100 years or so and then you could make up your own mind about this.

There aren't many problems of that magnitude that would require so little in terms of evidence and understanding as that one. Once you agree on the basic terminology.

What are these average temperatures? Why should I trust they are accurately computed? Why should I trust they are meaningful? Why should I trust that the model will hold and it's not just a bump? How do I know estimates of historical temperatures are accurate?

These are all questions for which the only two answers are to trust the scientific community or to essentially become a climate scientist yourself.

Just to be clear, please note that my intention is not in any way to call man made global warming into question - I fully believe that it is the most pressing concern for the global economic system. I'm only trying to point out that logic is not enough to accept even basic facts - you need a good deal of understanding of natural (climate vs weather, greenhouse effects) and human processes (the scientific community and its workings).

Fair enough, but all things being equal you'd have to just weigh the evidence produced by people who say global warming is real vs those who say it isn't.

But that's assuming that people really will want to know what is going on, rather than that they will do their damnest to believe the things that are most convenient to them, and that will make all your carefully prepared evidence moot. It won't matter at all how right you are, you will lose the argument.

> But that's assuming that people really will want to know what is going on

Yes, this is an excellent point. People rarely try to do the work of rationally weighing the evidence presented to them, and instead take shortcuts like accepting the version that seems more favorable, or that's more in line with their existing world view, or that is presented by someone they trust.

I still believe that this is something that can be nudged through education, but I think we would need a class that's more focused essentially on applied logic rather than just explaining pure logic. It's also something that would have to be consistently emphasized throughout the curriculum.

However, even more important than changing things through education would be to create the institutions necessary for thought-out debate for the general population. The internet that exists today is a better medium for this than television or radio ever were, but it's still absolutely horrible compared to in-person meetings. Most people are extremely disengaged when consuming content online, picking up only a few phrases and ideas here and there, instead of thinking rigorously and intensely on what is being said. This is inherent to a medium that allows you to browse while taking the subway, when your attention is usually low.

Good point. I suppose I just don't think education on frameworks of the individual mind are the main path out of this. Frameworks of the social spaces and relationships between minds are where I'd place my bets. I feel re-education campaigns, essentially sowing of specific knowledge into minds, are overrepresented in the solution space, prob because it's how we did it in the past. I'm more a believer in primarily changing/repairing the SHAPE of the network, and deemphasizing focus on the content flowing through it.

Of course, neglecting either is ignorant. I just think we've leaned in recent history quite hard on hand-tuning information flowing in the network, and the world is changing in ways that weaken that

If it's not practiced constantly, it will not work. People will forget how it's done [1], and it will be a lost skill within a few years of completing high school. Couple that with the fact that most people would rather take the easy way out instead of thinking harder about problems and information, and we're back to square one: a population that struggles to think critically.

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/let-s-get-digital-from...

US government is a required class in high school.

So first we have to fix education...

There are several ways forward. Some are incompatible with our current way of life in the US but work elsewhere. Others you might not find palatable.

People need something to believe in. Religion can be an answer. If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.

If we all believed in universal humanism we wouldn’t be fighting race and class wars in our police departments.

If we all believed in communism we wouldn’t be fighting about distribution of wealth because there would be nothing to distribute.

If the US was actually 50 tiny countries, each could choose better what they believe in. Vermont and Texas have very little in common with each other both geographically and socially.

One path forward is to do what the USSR did: come down hard on being uneducated. It was culturally unacceptable to be an anti-intellectual in the late USSR. Today in the US you have people like Bush winning presidential campaigns against people like Kerry because Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy. We don’t trust smart, preferring accessible.

Another path is to have a unifying event that galvanizes the country. WWII certainly got people to be more on the same page than not... At the cost of millions of lives of course because humans will be oblivious to anything but the most obvious things put in front of them.

Education can help, if you accept that it is a form of indoctrination. Few college grads or those with advanced degrees believe in the flat earth. Is that something you are ok sacrificing?

Basically, it’s trade offs. You can’t have universal absolute freedom and consensus on what facts are because if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will.

"If we all"

You're right, it's easy for solutions to exist when everyone is unified. And in the past it was pretty easy. The nation state/religion you lived in pretty much exterminated anyone that disagreed.

So, I guess my question is, "Is there a way forward without massive amounts of death and suffering"

Freedom of thought means dissent. Dissent means there are others who you want to convince that your point of view is more correct. You can do this through honest means or you can do it through misinformation, which currently is a lot cheaper. Think about the amount of money we have to spend to convince people COVID is real vs how much YouTube pundits spend to convince people otherwise.

So the only real solution will be economic: make lies expensive. But by definition lies are easier to manufacture than the truth. Opinions are cheaper than research. And passion tends to be more believable than things people have to read and math they have to check for themselves. You could make the cost social: spread lies, get permanently labeled as a liar and never be able to show your face anywhere again. Can work ok for public figures but less so for /u/QAnon123. You can do it through law: spread lies and go to prison (fines are only punishment for those that don’t have a lot of money). Or you could do it with cruel and unusual punishment so much so that it makes it so taboo that enforcement happens like four times a century. But in either case you will have some death and suffering because someone will be collateral damage.

Yes. This is a big part of the problem: lying is almost free and spreading the truth is relatively costly. As the old adage has it "by the time the truth has put on its boots a lie will be halfway around the world". There is another analogy too: destruction is much cheaper than construction.

The offsetting factor with destruction is that you rarely want to just destroy something. Destruction for the sake of itself is really kind of rare on a large scale. Usually we do it so we can build something different where the old thing was: a new government, a new building, a new way of thinking, whatever. And at that point it’s often times easier to avoid total destruction and instead just do more precise application of force. A revolution is destruction in a way but there is a reason why revolutionists always try to take over existing government structures (physical and ideological): it is cheaper to declare yourself president or king or whatever than to create a nation from scratch.

If we look at it that way, you can’t keep lying forever, right? At some point you either become North Korea or the USSR and try to hide behind the iron curtain, which is nearly impossible in today’s interconnected world, or you have to base your ideology on some version of the truth. Peddlers of misinformation can’t win in the long term.the question is how much damage can they do in the meantime?

The Roman Catholic Church has always supported some level of separation between church and state. They're happy to be named as an official state religion but don't want a theocracy.

That’s only because they really want to be elevated above monarchs. Check out the history of Florence and the Medici family for a great example of the kind of separation the RCC is after.

> If we were all Roman Catholics we might not need to question who won the election because there would be no elections, just clergy.

You should check out Poland.

> Kerry is too intellectual and Bush is a “salt of the earth” kind of guy.

I remember that election and for me it was nothing to do with Kerry's intellect it was that he's a pretentious, lecturing windbag.

> if people are free to believe that our politicians are lizard people from another planet without much consequences to that lunacy, some will

Yes, some will. Not enough to really matter, and I think you do more harm than good by drawing attention to it. I vote Republican but I never heard of Qanon until people on the left started talking about it.