5 ms·

It is! It's good for their health, but at a much finer grain and for different purposes than protecting them from, for example, buying beef that's full of arsen

by saulrh 8y ago

It is! It's good for their health, but at a much finer grain and for different purposes than protecting them from, for example, buying beef that's full of arsenic or a bottle of tylenol 500mg +/- 2000mg. Being able to read critically is absolutely a necessary skill. But it's fallen behind as a defensive measure against outright attacks on your knowledge base. There's simply no level of critical reading that can keep your opinions correct in the face of a torrent of falsely-attributed hate speech.

Moodles 8y ago
Perhaps you are right that the most effective long-term way to stop the masses believing bullshit and eating shitty food is by forcing the companies to do something about it, rather than teaching kids to think and look after themselves. I hope you're wrong, though. It just seems that teaching kids good habits early on will kill off all the bad habits, fake news nonsense at the source. Fake news would die by natural section because everyone would see through it. I hope it is possible. It would be nice to see more of a focused effort on teaching kids that anyway. Perhaps evidence shows it's futile, though. The current state of affairs is very disheartening in any case.
- sp332 8y ago
  I was thinking about this yesterday. You can't really "see through" someone lying to you. It's already basically impossible to know if one person is lying to you if they're consistent about it, so how could you know if there were a coordinated campaign of misinformation? What critical thinking skills let you tap into an extra-sensory source of truth beyond any information you actually have access to?
  - Moodles 8y ago
    It's not as hard as you're making out I think. If people have access to Facebook, they have access to other websites and sources of information to crosscheck any fake news.
    - scruple 8y ago
      It is too hard, though... The average person is not going to spend the time and energy it takes to seek out and understand dissenting information. I see this behavior in myself, my family, my friends, professionals that I interact with, acquaintances, and colleagues. Cognitive bias is a hell of a drug. Case in point: There's an article near the top of HN /active _right now_ where if you click through the sources you'll arrive at the conclusion that the article is a) an opinion piece passed off as fact, b) quite literally fake news. And, yet, that thread has something like 130 comments talking earnestly about the so-called "statistics" presented in the article (derived from a single voluntary digital survey executed by a company owned by an international private equity firm, with the survey data strategically placed in articles alongside actual US Government BLS data points to wash the stink off). The headline is juicy and people can't resist.
      - Moodles 8y ago
        I agree that those sorts of cases are very hard to deal with. However, I think the "fake news" the MPs are trying to combat is actually really trivial stuff that pretty much nobody on HN would pay attention to. Stuff like: "Yoko Ono: ‘I Had An Affair with Hillary Clinton in the ’70s’". Just absolute nonsense where anyone with a modicum of critical thinking would realize that such a story would be on multiple news sites. I think it's possible to at least eradicate basic fake news like that with education. We can try our best to teach kids statistics and how to analyze them, but I agree that is a very hard problem as many people are just mathematically illiterate in general anyway.
        scruple 8y ago
        Yes, and you're right, of course. There is certainly a lot of blatantly incorrect tabloid-esque stuff floating around today that people take as fact at the headline-level. I suppose, in my defense, that it's easy to forget those sorts of things exist in digital form if you don't come across them frequently.
vixen99 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy

by saulrh 8y ago

Moodles 8y ago

Perhaps you are right that the most effective long-term way to stop the masses believing bullshit and eating shitty food is by forcing the companies to do something about it, rather than teaching kids to think and look after themselves. I hope you're wrong, though. It just seems that teaching kids good habits early on will kill off all the bad habits, fake news nonsense at the source. Fake news would die by natural section because everyone would see through it. I hope it is possible. It would be nice to see more of a focused effort on teaching kids that anyway. Perhaps evidence shows it's futile, though. The current state of affairs is very disheartening in any case.

sp332 8y ago
I was thinking about this yesterday. You can't really "see through" someone lying to you. It's already basically impossible to know if one person is lying to you if they're consistent about it, so how could you know if there were a coordinated campaign of misinformation? What critical thinking skills let you tap into an extra-sensory source of truth beyond any information you actually have access to?
- Moodles 8y ago
  It's not as hard as you're making out I think. If people have access to Facebook, they have access to other websites and sources of information to crosscheck any fake news.
  - scruple 8y ago
    It is too hard, though... The average person is not going to spend the time and energy it takes to seek out and understand dissenting information. I see this behavior in myself, my family, my friends, professionals that I interact with, acquaintances, and colleagues. Cognitive bias is a hell of a drug. Case in point: There's an article near the top of HN /active _right now_ where if you click through the sources you'll arrive at the conclusion that the article is a) an opinion piece passed off as fact, b) quite literally fake news. And, yet, that thread has something like 130 comments talking earnestly about the so-called "statistics" presented in the article (derived from a single voluntary digital survey executed by a company owned by an international private equity firm, with the survey data strategically placed in articles alongside actual US Government BLS data points to wash the stink off). The headline is juicy and people can't resist.
    - Moodles 8y ago
      I agree that those sorts of cases are very hard to deal with. However, I think the "fake news" the MPs are trying to combat is actually really trivial stuff that pretty much nobody on HN would pay attention to. Stuff like: "Yoko Ono: ‘I Had An Affair with Hillary Clinton in the ’70s’". Just absolute nonsense where anyone with a modicum of critical thinking would realize that such a story would be on multiple news sites. I think it's possible to at least eradicate basic fake news like that with education. We can try our best to teach kids statistics and how to analyze them, but I agree that is a very hard problem as many people are just mathematically illiterate in general anyway.
      - scruple 8y ago
        Yes, and you're right, of course. There is certainly a lot of blatantly incorrect tabloid-esque stuff floating around today that people take as fact at the headline-level. I suppose, in my defense, that it's easy to forget those sorts of things exist in digital form if you don't come across them frequently.

vixen99 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_illiteracy