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Respectfully disagree. > media literacy just isn't enough How would we know? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy,"

Respectfully disagree. > media literacy just isn't enough How would we know? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning." Very little of that is taught because the educational institutions who would be responsible for teaching it have curriculums that cannot withstand it. Hand-waving to students that "u shuld do critical thinking" is not sufficient to actually teach critical thinking. Also our educational institutions totally ignore the distribution of intelligence in the population. The curriculum is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator which does an incredible disservice to high (or even average) intelligence individuals. > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. This is true, to an extent. But, that's what journalism is supposed to solve. Instead of spending 1000 hours researching some issue as an individual, have 100 journalists spend 10 hours researching it and collaborate on the reporting. Sadly, we have very little actual journalism anymore, which I'll explain next.. > people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive This, I totally agree with. Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative. If not through advertising, but by buying the media companies directly. Further, if you give a "journalist" a choice between working for 10 hours to tell the truth or working for 1 hour to tell a lie, getting paid the same amount either way, the outcome is obvious. Moreover, declining educational standards, and especially lack of critical thinking skills, has led to a deadening of the public palette. The market is not incentivizing actual journalism because objectivity is hard, opposes too many special interests, and the public (at large) doesn't have a taste for it. The only takeaway from this ought to be obvious. We can't rely on the institutions and corporations who created this problem to solve it. Clearly they're leading us to "thought police" and censorship. I think, however, the lights should be turned on and the public at large should get a crash course in critical thinking.

UncleMeat 6y ago
> It's not really taught. It is. This is one of the major outcomes of a strong history curriculum. Interpreting sources and narratives. Every single major university offers a four year degree that is basically nothing but this sort of thing. And engineers consistently yell and scream that it isn't real education.
- meekmind 6y ago
  That's a fair point, however we don't reach university until after 12 years of compulsory state-run education in the U.S. By that time, many developmental windows have been missed, a persons personality is already solidified. University is too late for these fundamentals, which IMHO ought to be taught in primary school. I think we horribly underestimate the ability of children to do this. Which I attribute to the assembly-line education that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
  - rualca 6y ago
    > University is too late for these fundamentals, which IMHO ought to be taught in primary school. There are so many fundamentals that are skipped throughout compulsory education. Stuff like basic taxes and home economics and labour law, which is the kind of stuff we all have to endure throughout our lives. School is not designed from the point of view of the citizen. It's designed from the point of view of the elites running the nation.
- notahacker 6y ago
  I'd add that the UK history curriculum taught us about interpreting sources from the age of 11. Which also goes to show that teaching has its limits. (I'm not sure how much this has been eroded since 2010 by the Gove reforms aimed at teaching history as chronology)
- kortilla 6y ago
  It shouldn’t take 4 years to learn those skills though. Just the fundamentals of identifying what the biases of the authors and institutions are is something that should be taught for a year in high school. It’s not complex and doesn’t require 4 years of classes, but it does require practice and it’s better to start early before you develop a bunch of political views and ideological blind spots.
  - UncleMeat 6y ago
    > It shouldn’t take 4 years to learn those skills though. No skill is binary. You can learn some of this in a single class. You get more practice if you take two dozen classes. You get even more practice if it is your profession. Quality humanities education teaches empathy and the ability to analyze and judge sources created by humans, especially written text. That can absolutely happen at an earlier age. I'm certainly on board with increasing the amount of history education offered to high schoolers, though I suspect that many people are not.
csnover 6y ago
> How would we know [media literacy isn’t enough]? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning." While I also think it is true that we do a terrible job in general of educating people to think critically, it is not simply a failure of education—or at least, not in the traditional sense of “if you just force knowledge into someone, they will understand it”. I feel like there is real merit to the idea that media literacy may not be enough to save us from the firehose of the internet. Human brains are reckless and love to engage in motivated reasoning, filtering, and other cognitive distortions to protect us from information that threatens our core values. I’ve known engineers with impeccable critical thinking and reasoning skills—but only when they were programming. On other matters, where any sort of emotional or value judgment was involved, they would uncritically accept false information which meshed with their belief of how the world is. For example, someone once told me that they didn’t think that vaccination actually caused the decline in measles rates because the MMR vaccine wasn’t developed until after infections started going down. OK, great, valid reasoning, except their next thought should’ve been that maybe there was a different measles vaccine that came first (because there was). They didn’t go there, though, because they have a deeply held belief that vaccines are bad/scary, and their brain conveniently suppressed the critical thinking process that might’ve lead them to need to reevaluate their position. You might argue that this person doesn’t have “true” critical thinking skills, and maybe that’s true, but I also know that I tell myself stories and avoid seeking out contradictory evidence in order to protect some of my most deeply held beliefs—even though truth and honesty are what I value above all else. Some cows are just too sacred. > Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative. I feel like this is a reductive answer to a very complex problem. I think you’re spot on that the market is not incentivising high quality reporting, but there are many factors at play beyond “journalists got bought out” and “educational standards are bad”. There are so many diverse interests who don’t want people to think critically, including a lot of ordinary people! It’s hard to think critically all of the time. The world is unfathomably complex. You and I may be hanging on, just barely, thanks to genetic and/or socioeconomic lotteries giving us slightly better hands in life. Most people don’t have those advantages and are highly motivated to pound reality into an uncomplicated place where there are only two distinct genders, or all cops are bastards, or it’s all the mainstream media’s fault, or we can save the planet from global warming by just planting a trillion trees, or whatever. There’s no one single source of this quagmire, and no One Simple Trick that will solve it.
dxdm 6y ago
> It's not really taught. Critical reading of sources is part of the German high school curriculum, introduced around 8th grade; it is kept up until the end, and most people seem to come out none the wiser. I think we regularly overestimate the role rational thought plays in people's decisions and opinions. It's not nearly enough to make rational appeals or offer factual evidence to convince people of anything.
- adrianN 6y ago
  Recall that around 20% only reach a Hauptschulabschluss (or the equivalent in their state), where critical reading takes a back seat to just reading. A few percent don't finish secondary education at all. Here[1] for example are the learning goals for Berlin. Assessing the quality of an informational text and weighing the arguments is skill level G and H (page 27). This is explicitly not a goal for these students. [1] https://bildungsserver.berlin-brandenburg.de/fileadmin/bbb/unterricht/rahmenlehrplaene/Rahmenlehrplanprojekt/amtliche_Fassung/Teil_C_Deutsch_2015_11_10_WEB.pdf https://bildungsserver.berlin-brandenburg.de/fileadmin/bbb/u...
- corty 6y ago
  Critical reading in the german curriculum is far from unbiased in the selection of topics: Should we have the death penalty? Of course not, arguing otherwise will get you a bad grade. What about the yellow-press? Universally bad of course, Katharina Blum is required reading. Religion? All are nice and equally fine, criticizing religion is a nono and "fear of god" is an aim of all education mandated by the constitution. So please read Nathan der Weise critically and regurgitate what the official comment says. Do we need a military? Of course not, why would you want to invade Poland again? Workers rights? Good and well, but compromise is necessary for the good of the economy and society. Except in the case of teachers, as state officials they always get a bad deal supposedly... I've come to see "critical reading" to be just a furtherance of the teachers' and the states' biases and aims by means of a more sophisticated cloak. You are supposed to be able to fake a little critical thinking, but arrive at the predetermined conclusions. Don't rock the boat, stay inside the lines, but do this little hand-wringing ritual so you don't seem like an unsophisticated sheep.

UncleMeat 6y ago

> It's not really taught. It is. This is one of the major outcomes of a strong history curriculum. Interpreting sources and narratives. Every single major university offers a four year degree that is basically nothing but this sort of thing. And engineers consistently yell and scream that it isn't real education.

meekmind 6y ago
That's a fair point, however we don't reach university until after 12 years of compulsory state-run education in the U.S. By that time, many developmental windows have been missed, a persons personality is already solidified. University is too late for these fundamentals, which IMHO ought to be taught in primary school. I think we horribly underestimate the ability of children to do this. Which I attribute to the assembly-line education that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
- rualca 6y ago
  > University is too late for these fundamentals, which IMHO ought to be taught in primary school. There are so many fundamentals that are skipped throughout compulsory education. Stuff like basic taxes and home economics and labour law, which is the kind of stuff we all have to endure throughout our lives. School is not designed from the point of view of the citizen. It's designed from the point of view of the elites running the nation.
notahacker 6y ago
I'd add that the UK history curriculum taught us about interpreting sources from the age of 11. Which also goes to show that teaching has its limits. (I'm not sure how much this has been eroded since 2010 by the Gove reforms aimed at teaching history as chronology)
kortilla 6y ago
It shouldn’t take 4 years to learn those skills though. Just the fundamentals of identifying what the biases of the authors and institutions are is something that should be taught for a year in high school. It’s not complex and doesn’t require 4 years of classes, but it does require practice and it’s better to start early before you develop a bunch of political views and ideological blind spots.
- UncleMeat 6y ago
  > It shouldn’t take 4 years to learn those skills though. No skill is binary. You can learn some of this in a single class. You get more practice if you take two dozen classes. You get even more practice if it is your profession. Quality humanities education teaches empathy and the ability to analyze and judge sources created by humans, especially written text. That can absolutely happen at an earlier age. I'm certainly on board with increasing the amount of history education offered to high schoolers, though I suspect that many people are not.

csnover 6y ago

> How would we know [media literacy isn’t enough]? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning." While I also think it is true that we do a terrible job in general of educating people to think critically, it is not simply a failure of education—or at least, not in the traditional sense of “if you just force knowledge into someone, they will understand it”. I feel like there is real merit to the idea that media literacy may not be enough to save us from the firehose of the internet. Human brains are reckless and love to engage in motivated reasoning, filtering, and other cognitive distortions to protect us from information that threatens our core values. I’ve known engineers with impeccable critical thinking and reasoning skills—but only when they were programming. On other matters, where any sort of emotional or value judgment was involved, they would uncritically accept false information which meshed with their belief of how the world is. For example, someone once told me that they didn’t think that vaccination actually caused the decline in measles rates because the MMR vaccine wasn’t developed until after infections started going down. OK, great, valid reasoning, except their next thought should’ve been that maybe there was a different measles vaccine that came first (because there was). They didn’t go there, though, because they have a deeply held belief that vaccines are bad/scary, and their brain conveniently suppressed the critical thinking process that might’ve lead them to need to reevaluate their position. You might argue that this person doesn’t have “true” critical thinking skills, and maybe that’s true, but I also know that I tell myself stories and avoid seeking out contradictory evidence in order to protect some of my most deeply held beliefs—even though truth and honesty are what I value above all else. Some cows are just too sacred. > Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative. I feel like this is a reductive answer to a very complex problem. I think you’re spot on that the market is not incentivising high quality reporting, but there are many factors at play beyond “journalists got bought out” and “educational standards are bad”. There are so many diverse interests who don’t want people to think critically, including a lot of ordinary people! It’s hard to think critically all of the time. The world is unfathomably complex. You and I may be hanging on, just barely, thanks to genetic and/or socioeconomic lotteries giving us slightly better hands in life. Most people don’t have those advantages and are highly motivated to pound reality into an uncomplicated place where there are only two distinct genders, or all cops are bastards, or it’s all the mainstream media’s fault, or we can save the planet from global warming by just planting a trillion trees, or whatever. There’s no one single source of this quagmire, and no One Simple Trick that will solve it.

dxdm 6y ago

> It's not really taught. Critical reading of sources is part of the German high school curriculum, introduced around 8th grade; it is kept up until the end, and most people seem to come out none the wiser. I think we regularly overestimate the role rational thought plays in people's decisions and opinions. It's not nearly enough to make rational appeals or offer factual evidence to convince people of anything.

adrianN 6y ago
Recall that around 20% only reach a Hauptschulabschluss (or the equivalent in their state), where critical reading takes a back seat to just reading. A few percent don't finish secondary education at all. Here[1] for example are the learning goals for Berlin. Assessing the quality of an informational text and weighing the arguments is skill level G and H (page 27). This is explicitly not a goal for these students. [1] https://bildungsserver.berlin-brandenburg.de/fileadmin/bbb/unterricht/rahmenlehrplaene/Rahmenlehrplanprojekt/amtliche_Fassung/Teil_C_Deutsch_2015_11_10_WEB.pdf https://bildungsserver.berlin-brandenburg.de/fileadmin/bbb/u...
corty 6y ago
Critical reading in the german curriculum is far from unbiased in the selection of topics: Should we have the death penalty? Of course not, arguing otherwise will get you a bad grade. What about the yellow-press? Universally bad of course, Katharina Blum is required reading. Religion? All are nice and equally fine, criticizing religion is a nono and "fear of god" is an aim of all education mandated by the constitution. So please read Nathan der Weise critically and regurgitate what the official comment says. Do we need a military? Of course not, why would you want to invade Poland again? Workers rights? Good and well, but compromise is necessary for the good of the economy and society. Except in the case of teachers, as state officials they always get a bad deal supposedly... I've come to see "critical reading" to be just a furtherance of the teachers' and the states' biases and aims by means of a more sophisticated cloak. You are supposed to be able to fake a little critical thinking, but arrive at the predetermined conclusions. Don't rock the boat, stay inside the lines, but do this little hand-wringing ritual so you don't seem like an unsophisticated sheep.