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> What about your grandma? How would she fare? Grandma’s still falling for the phone and mail scams. No amount of legislation is going to fix the reality of te

> What about your grandma? How would she fare? Grandma’s still falling for the phone and mail scams. No amount of legislation is going to fix the reality of technological illiteracy among the oldest adults. Deepfakes might fool some of today’s adults who don’t quite understand, but we are raising a generation that has turned into a meme: “Everything you read on the internet is true” -Abraham Lincoln I think the real silver lining here is that the internet is an alternate reality. Many of us refuse to believe that, but social media has created manufactured people. The only solution is to bring people back to the real world. The people are real here. Their opinion, no matter how controversial, comes from a real mouth, and the face you see is the one they were born with. If anyone forms their worldview based entirely on things they read on the internet, they probably would be just as susceptible to our real world forms of propaganda/gaslighting/ whatever you want to call it.

skybrian 7y ago
This essentially means the web is too difficult for some users and they need something else, like maybe an app store. Maybe some company will win big by providing a safer (or apparently safer) alternative? Previous examples: Gmail had a better spam filter. Apple and Google did a better (though not perfect) job of protecting users from arbitrary code execution, as did the web itself, way back when. This doesn't happen all that often, but if it succeeds, power users will scoff at how nerfed the new thing is. I'm reminded of an old story [1] about an early game for children: > I found myself unable to reconcile the idea of a virtual world, where kids would run around, play with objects, and chat with each other without someone saying or doing something that might upset another. Even in 1996, we knew that text-filters are no good at solving this kind of problem, so I asked for a clarification: "I’m confused. What standard should we use to decide if a message would be a problem for Disney?" > The response was one I will never forget: "Disney’s standard is quite clear: No kid will be harassed, even if they don’t know they are being harassed." But maybe text filters will be better if you throw enough machine learning at the problem? [1] http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...
- bostik 7y ago
  > This essentially means the web is too difficult for some users and they need something else I think you are on the right track, but not going all the way. The bigger issue here is that media literacy is incredibly hard. You need a wide body of knowledge, essentially an educated[ß] mind, and an almost unhealthy skepticism against absolutely everything you read, see or hear. As a short cut, a good first approximation is to be a cynic. Assume everyone is pushing their own agenda, and that even at best you can only see half of it. (If you are asking yourself what agenda I am pushing with this post, well done. You're off to a good start.) ß: The ability to question information, conduct research, cross-check the results of research, and have the mental agility to identify your own biases - these are not natural tendencies, but learned traits. We can lump them all under the "educated" label, even if that's not the optimal term.
  - skybrian 7y ago
    Yes, it is hard. But I think it's not just education, but epistemic humility. We have no direct knowledge of what's going on in other parts of the world. The past is often not recorded accurately, the future often unpredictable. So our default assumption should often be that we don't know what's going on. Highly educated people in the grip of an ideology can dream up conclusions far beyond the limited and unreliable evidence we get from media consumption. They are often rewarded for this. And one of these ideologies is the myth of rugged individualism (or competent adulthood), the idea that each person can and should figure out what's going on by themselves. It's obviously not true of children and the elderly, but most of us outsource a lot of our thinking. Living in modern civilization inherently means having a lot of trust and dependency on others. The ideals of media literacy are simply unrealistic for most people. It's not clear what the alternative is, though.

skybrian 7y ago

This essentially means the web is too difficult for some users and they need something else, like maybe an app store. Maybe some company will win big by providing a safer (or apparently safer) alternative? Previous examples: Gmail had a better spam filter. Apple and Google did a better (though not perfect) job of protecting users from arbitrary code execution, as did the web itself, way back when. This doesn't happen all that often, but if it succeeds, power users will scoff at how nerfed the new thing is. I'm reminded of an old story [1] about an early game for children: > I found myself unable to reconcile the idea of a virtual world, where kids would run around, play with objects, and chat with each other without someone saying or doing something that might upset another. Even in 1996, we knew that text-filters are no good at solving this kind of problem, so I asked for a clarification: "I’m confused. What standard should we use to decide if a message would be a problem for Disney?" > The response was one I will never forget: "Disney’s standard is quite clear: No kid will be harassed, even if they don’t know they are being harassed." But maybe text filters will be better if you throw enough machine learning at the problem? [1] http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-toontowns-speedchat-or-blockchattm-from-disney-finally-arrives/ http://habitatchronicles.com/2007/03/the-untold-history-of-t...

bostik 7y ago
> This essentially means the web is too difficult for some users and they need something else I think you are on the right track, but not going all the way. The bigger issue here is that media literacy is incredibly hard. You need a wide body of knowledge, essentially an educated[ß] mind, and an almost unhealthy skepticism against absolutely everything you read, see or hear. As a short cut, a good first approximation is to be a cynic. Assume everyone is pushing their own agenda, and that even at best you can only see half of it. (If you are asking yourself what agenda I am pushing with this post, well done. You're off to a good start.) ß: The ability to question information, conduct research, cross-check the results of research, and have the mental agility to identify your own biases - these are not natural tendencies, but learned traits. We can lump them all under the "educated" label, even if that's not the optimal term.
- skybrian 7y ago
  Yes, it is hard. But I think it's not just education, but epistemic humility. We have no direct knowledge of what's going on in other parts of the world. The past is often not recorded accurately, the future often unpredictable. So our default assumption should often be that we don't know what's going on. Highly educated people in the grip of an ideology can dream up conclusions far beyond the limited and unreliable evidence we get from media consumption. They are often rewarded for this. And one of these ideologies is the myth of rugged individualism (or competent adulthood), the idea that each person can and should figure out what's going on by themselves. It's obviously not true of children and the elderly, but most of us outsource a lot of our thinking. Living in modern civilization inherently means having a lot of trust and dependency on others. The ideals of media literacy are simply unrealistic for most people. It's not clear what the alternative is, though.