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This is approaching from the wrong angle. Trying to stop the tide of bullshit is futile without hundreds of thousands of "fact checkers", what's needed is teach

This is approaching from the wrong angle. Trying to stop the tide of bullshit is futile without hundreds of thousands of "fact checkers", what's needed is teaching people good epistemological hygiene. How to read an article, how to respect quantification, what sort of things to be suspicious of, how to find out accurate information and when to withhold judgement.

volta83 5y ago
> what's needed is teaching people good epistemological hygiene. How to read an article, how to respect quantification, what sort of things to be suspicious of, how to find out accurate information and when to withhold judgement. Good luck trying to teach a >20 year old this. When you teach children that the scientific method is useless, logic is not necessary, and therefore Creationism is fine, repairing that "damage" once Children are older is pretty much impossible. You have "habituated" them to the lie, just in the exact same way that "child soldiers" and "terrorist" get habituated. Part of the habituation process is making them personally invested on the lie, e.g., for a child soldier or a terrorist that's their first "kill". From that moment on, either they are right, or they are a horrible human being. Same here, it might start with Creationism, then shaming someone for wanting an abortion, etc. One of these is going to be their first "kill" moment, their point of no return, and then the only way to "heal" is for them to discover that they are horrible human beings. Pretty much impossible to heal in practice. In the exact same way that this is not the child soldiers fault, it is not the fault of children that have been educated their way to end up raiding the capitol. I'd go as far that it is not the fault of these children to even then lobby as adults for the process to continue, for more creationism, for more extremism, etc. Maybe at some point someone in the USA was at fault for allowing this to happen. But at this point I think that a big part of the population particularly in central america are just victims of the system. They were raised into what they are now, and lots of psychological hard work would be required to "fix" any single one of them. Simplifying this issue to "this people are just dumb, and facebook should send them a link to a page that teaches them how to read" would be as effective as trying to address terrorism by repeating on TV that killing people is bad.
netcan 5y ago
>> what's needed is teaching people good epistemological hygiene. What's needed of who? I agree that epistemological hygiene is good, but how is FB supposed to tackle this. Even the education system may have trouble, and even if they don't it will take a generation. Problems need to be framed in ways that don't avoid dealing with them.
- concordDance 5y ago
  My view is that asking Facebook to tackle it is asking way too much. Indeed, I wouldn't want the government to try and control what people can communicate either. Yes, it will take a generation for people to figure out how to navigate a world like this, but ultimately its the only option that doesn't end up with a centralised arbiter of truth restricting communication (where a dystopia will inevitably follow in a few decades).
atoav 5y ago
While I agree these are important skills that everybody should learn, especially in todays world, I don't think this is the whole problem. Quite often it is not the issue that people don't know they might be wrong, but that they don't care whether they are. In their worldview small (or sometimes even big) lies are justified in a "war" that conveys "a bigger truth". In their eyes, people who stick with the truth no matter what are naive, stupid or both. As with the deprogramming of Nazis like my grandfather after WWII, the hardest ones to get back to the truth are ot the ones that couldn't tell, but the ones that could tell, knew it was wrong, knew what was going on and went for it anyways.

volta83 5y ago

> what's needed is teaching people good epistemological hygiene. How to read an article, how to respect quantification, what sort of things to be suspicious of, how to find out accurate information and when to withhold judgement. Good luck trying to teach a >20 year old this. When you teach children that the scientific method is useless, logic is not necessary, and therefore Creationism is fine, repairing that "damage" once Children are older is pretty much impossible. You have "habituated" them to the lie, just in the exact same way that "child soldiers" and "terrorist" get habituated. Part of the habituation process is making them personally invested on the lie, e.g., for a child soldier or a terrorist that's their first "kill". From that moment on, either they are right, or they are a horrible human being. Same here, it might start with Creationism, then shaming someone for wanting an abortion, etc. One of these is going to be their first "kill" moment, their point of no return, and then the only way to "heal" is for them to discover that they are horrible human beings. Pretty much impossible to heal in practice. In the exact same way that this is not the child soldiers fault, it is not the fault of children that have been educated their way to end up raiding the capitol. I'd go as far that it is not the fault of these children to even then lobby as adults for the process to continue, for more creationism, for more extremism, etc. Maybe at some point someone in the USA was at fault for allowing this to happen. But at this point I think that a big part of the population particularly in central america are just victims of the system. They were raised into what they are now, and lots of psychological hard work would be required to "fix" any single one of them. Simplifying this issue to "this people are just dumb, and facebook should send them a link to a page that teaches them how to read" would be as effective as trying to address terrorism by repeating on TV that killing people is bad.

netcan 5y ago

>> what's needed is teaching people good epistemological hygiene. What's needed of who? I agree that epistemological hygiene is good, but how is FB supposed to tackle this. Even the education system may have trouble, and even if they don't it will take a generation. Problems need to be framed in ways that don't avoid dealing with them.

concordDance 5y ago
My view is that asking Facebook to tackle it is asking way too much. Indeed, I wouldn't want the government to try and control what people can communicate either. Yes, it will take a generation for people to figure out how to navigate a world like this, but ultimately its the only option that doesn't end up with a centralised arbiter of truth restricting communication (where a dystopia will inevitably follow in a few decades).

atoav 5y ago

While I agree these are important skills that everybody should learn, especially in todays world, I don't think this is the whole problem. Quite often it is not the issue that people don't know they might be wrong, but that they don't care whether they are. In their worldview small (or sometimes even big) lies are justified in a "war" that conveys "a bigger truth". In their eyes, people who stick with the truth no matter what are naive, stupid or both. As with the deprogramming of Nazis like my grandfather after WWII, the hardest ones to get back to the truth are ot the ones that couldn't tell, but the ones that could tell, knew it was wrong, knew what was going on and went for it anyways.