Half the people on this website can't seem to spend 5 seconds to click through to an article, and you expect 340 million people to be able to spend even more time informing themselves so they can think critically about political issues?

Not that I'm disagreeing with the sentiment, but reading an article on this site generally takes 5-30 minutes, not 5 seconds.

They may be implying that many people don't click through to the article.

What's the point of clicking through to the article if you're not going to read it, though?

Then I’m afraid the only option left is to fundamentally change technology. Faster isn’t always better. Maybe if people were forced to stare at loading pages anymore it would compel them to dig deeper instead of mindlessly scroll.

>"invest in education, and give people the ability to spend 30 extra seconds critically thinking about the information they see and where it came from "

People have been demanding we teach critical thinking in education for decades. And it's not like teacher's haven't been trying to get people to think critically all this time.

The truth is, when we see information that conforms to our worldview, we naturally accept it. We only think critically when we see something we disagree with. Try it yourself, just start disagreeing with someone and watch how good they become at critiquing your arguments.

Arguably, the phenomenon of “fake news” was caused by teaching media literacy that only could identify bias and fake stories in respectable mainstream publications. The tools as taught were not designed to handle blatantly absurd claims.

as an example, I think I saw a few days of material on logical fallacy in 10th grade. It should be a basic competency that is made a priority throughout middle school and high school at every year.

I think this is really a human-nature problem rather than an education or lack of training problem. I believe this to be the case because of all the cognitive biases that we are born with. I also think people's willingness to 'think critically' is dependent on the personality they have. Some people are naturally more curious and open minded than others and no amount of education will change that.

I don't think it is a hopeless cause, however, and it's good to teach critical thinking methods. But I look at this in a similar way to health education. We have been teaching people about good nutrition, healthy eating, and the benefits of an active lifestyle for years but most people don't apply the lessons. At some point more education on the same topics isn't going to help anymore because it's a different kind of problem than not having been taught.

Lets invest $1B into a program to objectively measure which people are least vulnerable to logical fallacies, examine how they cultivated that skill, and build a curriculum for use in every public classroom.

Very few teachers would want thinking students.

Teachers want students who listen and believe what they say to be fundamental truth. Most teachers seek obedience they enjoy molding students.

Whenever I see a response like this it feels like the person who wrote it is a prime target for misinformation. When you think that someone who falls victim to a misinformation campaign are just undedicated or lack "the ability to spend 30 seconds critically thinking", you're not acknowledging that we all process far too much information every day to vet all of it. This isn't something that only affects people who are stupid and/or ignorant.

Ironically, your position as I understand it seems to be the most susceptible to misinformation. Outsourcing critical thought to some trusted authority just means you get that authority's version.

Anyway, pretending that critical thinking is the same as vetting every piece of information you see is disingenuous. Like anything else, there is some severity vs ease of checking position that a given putative fact has. If you're going to die imminently, best to make sure you carefully understand. If it's today's urgent revelations on the news about ongoing issue x y or z, why worry too much how accurate it is.

I do agree it's not the same as "stupid or ignorant" and often these labels are applied to people challenging orthodoxy as opposed to those not thinking critically. It has more to do with credulity, need for acceptance/ belonging, and what I would call religious tendencies.

I read your comment as suggesting that this problem only needs to be addressed at the consumption end - that is, by empowering the public with better critical thinking skills. But I fundamentally disagree, both with the premise that people who are affected by misinformation simply lack critical thinking skills, and by the idea that this is a practical solution to the problem.

This perspective is popular among the intellectual crowd because it appeals to our shared love for learning, but also because it's self-congratulatory. It says "if people just had the skills I have, they wouldn't be taken in", but history shows that's not the case as a general statement. We're all affected by advertising, after all.

As for "outsourcing critical thinking to some trusted authority", that's one of the heuristics we all use, no matter how educated we are, and we all have a collection of trusted authorities. Educated people probably tend to have different trusted authorities and different ways of selecting them - they may produce a better outcome but the strategy is very similar.

For my part I think this problem needs to be addressed on the supply /distribution side as well. We need to work against the purveyors of lies and fraud, and that's how it's always been. That was how we cleaned up the patent medicine system and made the stock market more trustworthy, and in some form (probably not through the DoD) we as a society will need strategies to combat other kinds of misinformation as well.

It boggles my mind that we don't have a semester of "Critical News Consumption" (aka "Defense Against Fallacies") required in public grade school.

But who would teach it? Who would write the text book? Who would design the curriculum? How would this be protected from the same abuses that an "anti-misinformation" project would be susceptible to?

How would this happen at meaningful scale without drawing a response like "CRT" is drawing now and "evolution/creation" did before and in some areas still does?

How do we prevent it from just deepening existing divides?

The misinformation age worries me more than any other current threat because it compounds every other problem and I don't really see a solution. I think it's actually just getting started. (And yes of course propaganda is not new, but the scale, effectiveness, and saturation of it has increased observably in my own lifetime. As a species we are getting better at it.)

If someone convinces me this is solvable or not a real problem you'll genuinely make my day; I really want to be super wrong about this...

Logic and rhetoric can be taught without reference to current events.

Then for a final, give them an hour of CNN commentary and an hour of Fox News commentary, and let them tear both to shreds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Informal_fallacy

the textbook already exists, and has for a couple thousand years. Just study, master and apply Aristotle

>How would this happen at meaningful scale without drawing a response like "CRT" is drawing now

What do you mean?

CRT = Critical Race Theory

Some groups (in the US) are actively trying to ban teaching it (or some definition of it) in school and some groups think it's essential learning. I'm guessing most have no idea what actually was or wasn't being taught, but that's another issue. The point here isn't whether they're right or wrong to do so it's that obviously education isn't "neutral territory" or something the country is comfortable leaving to the education community. Creation/evolution is the "classic" example of this.

As soon as you try to do media studies or critical thinking at scale somewhere in K-12 someone is going to think that you're doing it maliciously to advance or attack a worldview and it's going to become a mess. Another commenter mentioned letting kids dissect Fox and CNN - how long before those kids say something to their parent that Really Believes one of those channels and that parent goes to the school board with a mob of other Believers? Or someone tries to get a class started or teach a class that claims to be critical thinking but focuses all its time on the flaws in a particular perspective?

>As soon as you try to do media studies or critical thinking at scale somewhere in K-12 someone is going to think that you're doing it maliciously to advance or attack a worldview and it's going to become a mess. Another commenter mentioned letting kids dissect Fox and CNN - how long before those kids say something to their parent that Really Believes one of those channels and that parent goes to the school board with a mob of other Believers? Or someone tries to get a class started or teach a class that claims to be critical thinking but focuses all its time on the flaws in a particular perspective?

wow, I didn't actually thought about it, but it kinda makes sense

it's hard to believe people would fight (at scale) those old and common topics like logical fallacies.

>Some groups (in the US) are actively trying to ban teaching it (or some definition of it) in school and some groups think it's essential learning. I'm guessing most have no idea what actually was or wasn't being taught, but that's another issue. The point here isn't whether they're right or wrong to do so it's that obviously education isn't "neutral territory" or something the country is comfortable leaving to the education community. Creation/evolution is the "classic" example of this.

I've heard people complaining that teachers are incompetent to teach this, is it true?

were they prepared well?

On the logic front, I'll tangentially throw out that I think the problem isn't invalid arguments, but unsound arguments, which doesn't get properly addressed in discussions of misinformation. We're all blindly talking past each other because no one agrees to the premises or on any means of verifying them.

On teacher competency, I would, on balance, trust the teachers I had growing up and the teachers I know now to handle CRT appropriately if they were teaching my children.

To the CRT (and evolution before it) issue, it's an ideological (rather than practical) debate.

To wit, neither side is making arguments in support of their position in good faith. They're saying whatever they think will accomplish their goals, because they're Right (tm) and the other side is Wrong (tm), and thus anything is justified.

Which is the real tragedy of polarization, in that it reduces thinking, independent human beings into mindless ideological automatons.

I work at a K-12. Digital citizenship and online critical thinking is 100% a part of the curriculum at every grade level. I've gone into classrooms at elementaries, middle schools, and high schools and seen materials explaining how to evaluate the credibility of information online.

Unfortunately, approximately 85% of the voting population will never benefit from these classes, because the idea of them being necessary or useful had not occurred to anyone when they were in school. It's the same reason nobody over 50 learned how to use a computer in grade school. They did not exist.

This is a problem that will become vastly less serious three generations from now.

Do you have any keywords for looking up current curriculums? Is it in whatever they're calling Social Studies nowadays?

All schools are local, etc., but with family in K-12 education, I haven't found great or numerous examples of it being taught.

The subject is usually called "digital literacy", although it's often paired with "digital citizenship" because they're closely related or taught together. You might also include "credibility," "media literacy," or "social media literacy."

Including "K-12" or "curriculum" will get you more resources that teachers might use.

Thanks! I'll check them out.

hopefully society can wait that long

Every high school english class I took covered this, save for British Literature. The problem is that grade school is inundated with busywork, memorization, and standardized test prep that no one but the top students cares about anything beyond their SAT score, if not just passing classes.

Grade school needs to be rethought entirely. It's completely broken for the Information Age; no one needs to bother with memorizing minutia anymore, we need to focus on critical thinking.

Personal hot take: memorization still serves both practical and brain developmental goals.

Most kids nowadays can't even do basic single digit multiplication in their heads. Because they never memorized tables.

How they're going to work through complex higher math problems efficiently, when every multiplication (and therefore every division) is a trip to the calculator, is beyond me.

And furthermore, I can't believe all that memorization happened without changes in brain structure, especially at those ages.

IMHO, we need to re-evaluate what we're having them memorize, and probably reduce the amount in favor of more critical thinking, but there's still a requirement for it.

If nothing else, so that you're prepared for higher education, where one of the goals is to cram the fundamental information for your profession into imediate recall.

Right, yes. There are certainly some things you need to know off the top of your head to facilitate learning. Generally the sets of data we explicitly have to memorize are fine- I’m more talking about exams where you’re tested over minutia rather than your understanding of the content as a whole.

For example, I took a history exam where it asked “which of these books was not important to the civil rights movement?” listing three books explicitly mentioned in one sentence of the text and one that wasn’t. That’s the kind of memorization we need to get rid of- we need to be teaching people how to analyze concepts as a whole rather than simply being able to regurgitate the text.

It boggles my mind they allow people to graduate without being able to read, write, or do math.

> invest in education, and give people the ability to spend 30 extra seconds critically thinking about the information they see and where it came from

Where might people who are long out of school receive such an education, if they are not seeking it? And what if it doesn't work as well as you hope it would?

doing nothing is also a choice, with consequences(which are observably harmful) should be considered against the possible benefits/consequences of trying.

To me it is seems worth the attempt, but I'm also not an expert in education policy

> doing nothing is also a choice, with consequences(which are observably harmful) should be considered against the possible benefits/consequences of trying.

> To me it is seems worth the attempt, but I'm also not an expert in education policy

My point is that relying on an ill-specified "invest[ment] in education" with idealistic hopes for its effectiveness is pretty much equivalent to "doing nothing." The people who most need it will not seek it out. If it works (a big if) and it's incorporated into compulsory education, it'll take at least a decade to show any results at all, and whole generation or two to work its way through the population and have a chance to actually solve the problem. And like another commenter mentioned, it's not like our current educational system hasn't been trying to instill critical thinking since before any of us were born, so I have little hope that some new investment will solve that problem.

Relying on education in this case is like having window break during a rainstorm and deciding to fix the problem by ordering a new window from the manufacturer, with a lead time of a month. That might eventually fix the broken window, but it's not going to solve the problem of rain pouring through the broken window now. If you've got a rainy month ahead, the incomplete solution may even lead to more problems, like mold.

This is a problem that requires both long-term strategic and shorter-term tactical solutions.

Nobody in government or political class wants people to actually think critically. They want people to blindly swallow whatever they are told from "approved sources" and consider any dissenting opinions to be "fake news". Its in nobody's interest except the individual's to think critically. You don't need to look very far in any direction right now to see how frowned upon critical thought is

Would be nice if people invested their own money if they felt like it, and kept their hands out of my pocket.

With the atrocious behavior of teacher unions, ignorant government initiatives, and corruption of boards, the education sector is due to be burned, leveled, and completely reinvented at this point.

that's part of living in a society. I agree the current state of education could use a major overhaul, but even what's in your pocket doesn't have inherent value. It is entirely dependent on the strength of the Country issuing its currency. It is ultimately self defeating to desire the country go to shit so you can pay a few less % in taxes