> Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning This is the fundamental, core challenge of epistemology. Most people are staggeringly unintelligent. They

> Fact checking has been laughable from the beginning This is the fundamental, core challenge of epistemology. Most people are staggeringly unintelligent. They suffer from such a deficit of basic critical thinking skills that they need to squeeze all the complexity of the world into a model in which experts have figured out The Absolute Truth and anyone wio disagrees needs to be brutally crushed, or in the modern world, simply silenced. (The similarity to the notions of scripture and heresy is 0% a coincidence). The problem is that this model inevitably undermines its own foundations: the faith that a Science deity hands down truth on clay tablets is only sustained by a process of knowledge-generation that requires a full engagement with the nuance, uncertainty, and ambiguity inherent to trying to understand reality. The simpletons for whom Believe in Science is a dogma are always going to be an obstacle to the process by which those with adult-level cognition _actually create the level of certainty we do have in societal knowledge_. It's encouraging to see that the (obvious) contradictions of a centrally "fact-checked" social media ecosystem are already revealing themselves in ridiculous examples like this. But I'm probably too cynical to be convinced that we won't just blow through to a new equilibrium where an important conduit for communication has a content filter on it that boils down to "don't think things about sensitive topics that a layman would find 'weird' " .