4 ms·
huh. this naive approach is cute. but here is the thing: the amount of effort required to refute bullshit is at least an order of magnitude higher than the effo
by mirceal 4y ago
huh. this naive approach is cute. but here is the thing: the amount of effort required to refute bullshit is at least an order of magnitude higher than the effort required to produce it.
we don’t have unlimited time an unlimited attention spans. we also deal with uneducated, easily manipulated people that will just discard anything that does not match their world view and just amplify the bs.
- memish 4y agoCorrect. No one can deal with all that shit. But it's distributed. You can ignore most of it, or all of it if you want. There are plenty of us autists to overwhelm it. Sending Flat Earthers off to their own dark corner is how they become entrenched. Leave them in the public square, in broad daylight, so they are exposed to evidence to the contrary. That's how you defeat bad ideas over time.
- mrtranscendence 4y agoEmpirically, that doesn’t work. Bringing misinformation into the public square simply allows it to spread. It’s almost immune to “evidence to the contrary”, at least for those who are apt to believe misinformation and conspiracy theories.
- sneak 4y agoEmpirically, the church is still here, and yet we mostly now hold heliocentric beliefs. We didn't need to censor anyone to get here. On longer timescales, the truth wins, because it is real, and everything else is not. False beliefs are persistent but simply can't compete with reality.
- mirceal 4y agothis approach of letting people air bs and having them be shamed by the level-headed individuals may work if the people airing the bs are just misinformed but are open to a discussion and changing their mind. a lot of people, on the internet, are not open to this and will chose the bs over any fact, argument, reason.