Since the website is down, I clicked on one of the links qagg.news. I'm actually surprised at how well-designed the site is to vacuum in the human mind. As so

Since the website is down, I clicked on one of the links qagg.news. I'm actually surprised at how well-designed the site is to vacuum in the human mind. As someone who is well-aware that the Qanon stuff is bullshit, my first thought on opening the link was 'fascinanting,' and I wanted to explore more. Unfortunately, I could see how someone could get sucked into this. Most people don't objectively assess the world around them, they rely on heuristics. If your heuristics are based on information relayed to you by those around you, rather than a mainstream average of the interpretation of what's going on around you (from reading NYT, WaPo, a more educated friend-group) in your community, why wouldn't you fall for this? At some point, I hope there is a shift in the high-school curriculum to make sure that every American gets a class that at least somewhat resembles this syllabus: 1. Introduction to bullshit 2. Spotting bullshit 3. The natural ecology of bullshit 4. Causality 5. Statistical traps 6. Visualization 7. Big data 8. Publication bias 9. Predatory publishing and scientific misconduct 10. The ethics of calling bullshit. 11. Fake news 12. Refuting bullshit https://www.callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html https://www.callingbullshit.org/syllabus.html There is a lot of anti-news sentiment on HN. Unfortunately, when people ignore the news, don't live in a more-educated area like SV, and rely on their community for their interpretation of the world, this kind of thing seems like a very natural extension of that. We tend to get off in the weeds on discussions of bias and such, but we really should be concerned about what happens when you totally divorce from reality by utterly abandoning information about the world around you from a mainstream source.