Thanks for this - treating easily-debunked fakery as a boomer problem is absurd. Entire sites like Mic exist to convert shoddy n=8 studies or narrow statistical

Thanks for this - treating easily-debunked fakery as a boomer problem is absurd. Entire sites like Mic exist to convert shoddy n=8 studies or narrow statistical observations into grand narratives for 20-somethings to believe uncritically. I've gotten really good at catching misleading statistics. In the areas where I have expertise I have a lot of practice with noticing reverse causation, un-normalized data, p-hacking, manipulated time windows, and so on. Every so often, I see someone cite evidence for a claim I strongly disbelieve that's really convincing, that looks clear and direct and immune to basically all the usual tricks. And it can take me an embarrassingly long time to remember that I should go and check the damn source. Because even in a world of fancy statistical tricks, there's nothing stopping people from making claims that simply don't appear in their source, or outright falsifying the claim. There's nothing quite as irritating as somebody claiming a "twenty year high" in something and citing a paper about a "twenty year low". And I always wonder just how hopelessly screwed up my - and everyone else's - knowledge base is. If a "vaccines cause autism" claim gives me so much whiplash I check the source and find it's fake, how many plausible claims did I not run down? If I read a Vox article and barely catch a statistical mistake that invalidates the entire claim, how many stories have completely-invalidating flaws I don't catch? Deepfakes might be important as a way to disrupt some of our strongest forms of proof. Something like an uncut high-fidelity video of a politician saying something atrocious is basically undeniable today. That can help convince people biased against believing the story, or let untrusted sources provide trustworthy contributions. But deepfakes are going to be a mere ripple on the total amount of bullshit; that's been high for decades, riding on totally disprovable claims.