(This comment brought to you by a verifiable human with real biases free of charge by Y Combinator.) I think it's much simpler to start with a risk-based calcu

(This comment brought to you by a verifiable human with real biases free of charge by Y Combinator.) I think it's much simpler to start with a risk-based calculation. That is, you have to evaluate what the "risk" of believing something is, which fundamentally is "what harm will there be if I act as if this is true but it is not" (severity) times "the probability that this thing is not true." (likelihood) And then when you take the two part proposition that 1) In the attention economy, truth or evenhandedness is not valuable. There are many people who will gladly and purposely mislead you to gain your attention, influence, votes, dollars, and (in extreme cases) your permission to commit and/or condone violence, crime, hate, etc. against others. That is, the likelihood that what you are reading is not true (by commission or omission) is very high. At best, it will be partially to mostly true. 2) Most people view content as a form of wish fulfillment, not critical analysis. They're happy to delude themselves and avoid any introspection that what they believe is wrong. That is, they completely discount the severity of believing something not true. They've already "amortized" that into their decision to read the content they do - they know it agrees with their beliefs (even if they're both wrong.) And even if it is a bit wrong or extreme, see point #1: so is everything else on the Internet. It's easy to see it has nothing to do with "critical" "ignoring" - most people have already done a very uncritical "ignoring" at a macro level by creating filter bubbles and only see things they want to see, and those spaces are saturated with folks from #1 who convert that wish fulfillment into revenue streams. No easy answers here, we're tribal apes navigating a low-trust environment.