22 ms·

Critical ignoring as a core competence for digital citizens (2022)

183 points by BryantD 3y ago

chiefalchemist 3y ago
re: "Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention," Well, yeah. But frankly, it's the least of my worries (personal). My BS detector is sensitive enough that I don't get sucked into these type of pointless distractions. My problem is consuming things that are generally higher-quality, not misleading, are relatively interesting, etc. but are *for me* - at least for the foreseeable future - completely useless. I have to catch myself with, "Mark, you're not prepping for Jeopardy" or "Cocktail party fodder is cool, but you're not going to any cocktail parties anytime soon" and then try to move on to something useful. More and more that seems to be silence and my own thoughts. It's not easy. Often it's simple and easy to turn on some media source and be a passive consumer. "Don't make it think" but to a fault.
oblib 3y ago
I've gotten pretty good at ignoring/blocking trolls over the years. FB has become a favorite place for old geezers to crap on each other. About 5 years ago I started whittling down my "Friends List" to less than 100 because so many started ignoring/stopped caring about truth and facts and started getting so belligerent that keeping them around because a sort of self abuse. I don't regret that all because things haven't gotten better since.
- swayvil 3y ago
  I hate it when people ignore the truth. We need a website called "truth.com" just to make it really clear what the truth is.
  - oblib 3y ago
    I think the core problems are some people love bullshit and others are willing to sell it to them. That's become a booming business nowadays. Those that love and buy bullshit being sold don't care that it's bullshit. I have literally been told "I don't care if it's a lie, it's still the truth."
    - swayvil 3y ago
      Bullshit is like fiction. You know it isn't real, but you enter it anyway. And go along with it. And pretend its real. Maybe the love of bullshit is related to the love of fiction. Fiction is almost universally popular.
swayvil 3y ago
Ignoring is easy if you have something important to focus your attention on. The ignoring just happens automatically. Like, given 1000 things, if you focus on 1 you automatically ignore 999. But if you don't have something to focus your attention on then its gets tricky. This is where "habitually focused" people have an advantage. (otoh, being habitually focused can be bad too. You might ignore the 999 so long that you forget it's there.)
rez9x 3y ago
Their three methods are all things I've employed for a long time and find to be fairly obvious, but I realize a lot of people don't employee even one of them. I use lateral leading extensively, even when the source seems reputable. Having multiple reputable sources before you spread that knowledge to others is important to your own credibility. Even with that understanding, I've had multiple people tell me that they don't have time for that and prefer to just believe whatever their preferred source tells them. I think that's where a lot of the problems with corporate media started; They knew their viewers/readers would believe anything they told them and abused that.
klysm 3y ago
Dancing around epistemology without talking about directly
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Care to expand on that?
kazinator 3y ago
Your finely tuned critical ignoring can be gamed by attention-getting specialists. They are beavering away analzying how people think and what causes their eyes not to stop on something. The losers end up being the people who have something genuine to say, but don't have those "AGO" (attention getting optimization) specialists working for them.
raydiatian 3y ago
Anybody with even a cursory understanding of Adversarial Networks and critical thinking skills can conclude that this is a horrible idea. The end result will be better forged information, indistinguishable by anyone (in the limit). We probably need rubes as a buffer.
dredmorbius 3y ago
That informational abundance or disinformational abundance create a scarcity of attention is hardly novel. Unfortunately most advice tends toward conscious and deliberate rejection of such sources, which continue that assault on attention. As anyone who's implemented an adblocker or similar online annoyance filters is aware, automating the process of distraction rejection is a vastly more effective and less-attention-costly approach. Rather than individually reject cookies, or cookie notices, or trackers, or ads, or various interstitials / "recommendations" / nags / pop-ups / fly-overs, and the like, I've applied and created sets of tools which remove those without my further conscious awareness. Users of PiHole may occasionally check the dashboard blocking statistics and be amazed at how much not only useless but actively counterproductive crud has been avoided. Information overload requires cheap, fast, regret-free rejection tools.[1] I've come to suspect that worldviews and models specifically function in this manner, identifying key information which we should focus on, and costlessly discarding the rest.[2] The article does nod to this briefly, particularly in the note referencing Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011, but on balance misplaces its emphasis, most especially in its suggestions. Another surprisingly effective tool is randomness, whether in sampling or in decisionmaking directly. Random sampling is a statistical tool for choosing a very small set of observations of interest, where the absolute number is utterly relevant rather than the sampled fraction. That is, a sample size of 30, or 300, or 3,000, is equally effective whether the total population size is ten thousand, ten million, or ten billion.[3] Within a media environment, in which there are publishers, channels, and distributors, the challenges shift somewhat. One exceedingly useful tool is noise rejection, or as I put it on Mastodon, "block fuckwits".[4] By blocking those who are misleading, annoying, toxic, or simply cannot or will not engage productively, noise levels fall tremendously. One key feature of the Fediverse is a panopoly of filtering, blocking, and limiting tools, from keyword filters to lists to muting (temporarily or permanently) to blocking (by or against individuals, or entire instances, gradated as silencing or complete exclusion). As a result antisocial behaviour carries sharp consequences. Timeboxing, and other mechanisms of setting a media budget can also help. Most of use hugely overestimate our message-processing capabilities. Even highly prolific individuals or groups typically have an upper bound of a few hundred incoming messages per day, and perhaps 50 outbound (most of which are exceedingly short --- acknowledgements or yes/no decisions). See Walt Mossberg and Stephen Wolfram, both averaging about 150--300 inbound daily emails. Content moderators seem to have an upper capacity of about 700-800 items/day, which affords about 35--40 seconds of attention to each item, if no other tasks are included at all in an eight-hour workday.[5] Scheduling email and media breaks at specific times of day, perhaps gradated between high-priority (boss, clients) and lower (the rest of the world) contacts is also hugely useful. My email schedule is largely now a few times per year.... A feature lacking from many mainstream tools and platforms is precisely this ability, and especially at the aggregate level. Within, say, YouTube, application stores from Apple and Android, or marketplaces such as Amazon, there is not ability to permit or deny presentations of offerings from a specific channel. Nor is there any way for groups to aggregate their own blocking behaviours. Put another way, providers, merchants, and channels carry no high-cost risk of low-value offerings. If the cost of putting out a crap app, video, book, or merchandise was immediate and permanent blocking by individuals or whole groups, behaviours might improve.[6] Contrast alternatives such as the Debian GNU/Linux package repository where specific sets of policies and behavioural requirements eliminate entire classes of end-user-hostile behaviours. Debian's organisational orientation and premise is focused on its users.[7] Documents aren't enough, the project also has institutional and social conventions for achieving those goals. Removing apps and disabling notifications is a start. Blocking sites entirely is even more preferable. A fairly recent development has been the emergence of alternate front-ends to major commercial social media platforms which permit directed access whilst avoiding much of the social manipulation, and incidentally, privacy-abusing surveillance, of them. Threadreader and Nitter for Twitter; Invidioius, Piped, yt-dlp, and freestanding media apps (mpv, xine, mplayer, etc.) for YouTube (and a host of other video and audio platforms), Teddit for Reddit, and more.[8] PiHole or similar adblockers, mentioned above, can be used not only to block advertising, but entire sites and domains exhibiting toxic practices. These blocklists are often collaboratively generated and distributed, which extends the reach and effectiveness on them; they're de facto means for citizens of the Internet to reject the terms and practices imposed by Internet monopolies and publishers. Power law distributions mean that even relatively short lists are surprisingly effective. Hacker News itself incorporates a similar mechanism through a list of 67k+ banned sites.[9] Legislation, regulation, class-action lawsuits, and other forms of collective action are the underrepresented remedies lacking from most discussion of this topic. Much as neither Soviet Communism nor Western corporate capitalism finally addressed labour exploitation or environmental concerns, but rather collective unionisation, organising, advocacy, protest, lawsuits, legislation, and regulation did, I think we're facing a similar situation here. Market failures aren't resolved by marketing-it-harder solutions. Boycotts and wallet advocacy have some utility, but are ultimately limited especially where monopolies are absolutely pervasive. That's a slow, long, and expensive battle, but most battles worth fighting are. ________________________________ Notes: 1. A point I've made before: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365180> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365180> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795> 2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255> (Listed in note 1 as well.) 3. This concept is central to modern statistics, but hugely misunderstood by the general public. The sample size is sensitive to the size of the effect you're trying to measure, such that if only a very small portion of the entire population is behaving in some manner of interest, you'll need to scale your sampling such that a representitive number of that subgroup are included. Still, small samples can be highly effective. I'd seen this directly when assessing how many Google+ profiles had ever been active, or were recently active. Those numbers turned out to be about 9% and 0.6% of the totals. I'd had a reasonable estimate of the first value after checking only 100 randomly-selected profiles, and within 1,000 or so, of the second. I ultimately checked about 50,0000 profiles (using Google's own sitemaps). A subsequent study increased that sampling tenfold (and ran some more robust checks and processes to ensure effective random sampling), but largely confirmed my own results. See: <https://web.archive.org/web/20150130125653/https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://web.archive.org/web/20150130125653/https://ello.co/d...> and <https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the...>. 4. <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019> I'll note that blocking can be made absolutely without prejudice, as a recognition that another party may be harmed by, or react poorly to, your own posting. Or with varying degrees of prejudice, where appropriate. It's also entirely at the discretion of the blocking party, and grousing about being blocked is virtually always exceedingly poor form, and a validation of the action. 5. Wolfram: <http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/ http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/> Mossberg from an interview I'd at least 7 years ago based on my prior HN references. NYTimes moderation: <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approve-or-reject-moderation-quiz.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv...> 6. Why this is hasn't been sufficiently studied to my view, though Cory Doctorow's concepts of enshittification and chokepoint capitalism demonstrate how forcing low-relevance search results on both customers and vendors can, at least in the short term, maximise the profits of the monopolist. 7. See Debian's Philosophy <https://www.debian.org/intro/philosophy https://www.debian.org/intro/philosophy>, Social Contract and Free Software Guidelines <https://www.debian.org/social_contract https://www.debian.org/social_contract>, Constitution <https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution>, and Policy Manual <https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/>. 8. LibRedirect is a browser extension that automatically ... redirects ... to alternatives for these and other services: <https://libredirect.github.io/ https://libredirect.github.io/> 9. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131212>
acumenical 3y ago
This is not a solution or in any way clever. Critical ignoring of wrongthink is praised, while critical ignoring of the winning party is punished.
aucisson_masque 3y ago
> For instance, reddit.com’s AskHistorians subreddit, one of the largest history forums online, removes questions that use the JAQing technique to deny the basic facts of the Holocaust I feel like this « reason » is also widely used to shut anyone asking annoying question that doesn’t fit the narrative.
- throw10920 3y ago
  > I feel like this « reason » is also widely used to shut anyone asking annoying question that doesn’t fit the narrative. It absolutely is. It's a classic tactic of social justice warriors (in the party-agnostic sense) in particular, and authoritarians in general - "you're not arguing/asking questions in good faith, you don't get to talk any more." I read up on "JAQing" in particular, and it's very clearly just a way to shut down opposing thoughts without having to discuss why.
HanyouHottie 3y ago
"[...] false information and conspiracy theories, whose prevalence may lead people to doubt the very existence of 'truth' or a shared reality." This is an insane modern take that I have yet to understand. Can anyone shed some light on how this notion of subjective truth came to be? There have always been conspiracy theorists and rumor spreaders and communities within which they flourished, and discerning the reputation of a source of information has always been a required skill in order to not fall victim to actors like these. What changed?
- rawgabbit 3y ago
  Laws against false political speech have been curtailed. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12180 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12180 The former legal counsel for FOX argued internally that the First Amendment protected the network for spreading lies about election fraud even the employees privately thought there was no election fraud. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-08-11/fox-corp-general-counsel-viet-dihn-is-leaving-the-company https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... In other words, there are little repercussions for the blatant political lies and as a result people don’t know what to believe. I have a member of family who used horse dewormer on himself when he got Covid. He also was not vaccinated because he believed it would alter his DNA. I used to make fun of dumb hicks and now I realize I am part of a family of dumb hicks.
t0bia_s 3y ago
- This infodemic is nontrivial because exposure to misinformation has been shown to reduce people’s intention to be vaccinated against COVID-19 (Loomba et al., 2021). Article about ignorance make conclusions that are nowdays justified by noneffectivnes or even harmful results from medical intervention like taking poorly tested vaccine against covid. A lot of people just ignored common narrative about effectivnes because it needs time for proof. Basically article use language that trying to speak against which is hypocritical.
roenxi 3y ago
1) People are actually a bit resistant to "Low-quality and misleading information". We can see people generally turning to higher quality sources than have previously been available which is why everything is getting fragmented. It is becoming impossible to maintain the fake illusion of consensus by the corporate media; the opposing voices are just too persistent and - in an uncomfortable number of cases - too reasonable no matter how much muck gets slung at them. 2) Special award for having a freely available 5,000 word pure-text article and being unable to display it without Javascript and 300kB of downloads. Cookie to the product manager, keeping devs employed. Probably have some wicked Kubernetes admin skills in their technical organisation to serve this small quantity of text.
- mrangle 3y ago
  The problem with "articles" such as the one under discussion is that information veracity is inherently subjective, assuming no true perfect framing of the information (such as is the case with history), and therefore the truth will be under the type of constant debate that breathes life into democratic societies. To my point and yours, such articles are unlikely to be referencing falsehoods presented by corporate media but instead contrary views. Which means that the hypothetical "ignoring" curriculum that the authors suggest would devolve into, if not start as, lessons in how to ignore most else but the corporate media view. Given the dogma that ostensibly serves to reinforce democracy in ideal conditions but has obviously instead enforced oppression in every other environment: that the media is the primary and honest arbiter of truth.
- itsanaccount 3y ago
  I'd agree lot of people have good skills to know what to ignore. Like knowing to go through a persons post history to get context on the kind of beliefs held that correlate with saying: >It is becoming impossible to maintain the fake illusion of consensus by the corporate media
  - roenxi 3y ago
    Literally your last comment included a "At its worst its propoganda to convince people its ok to keep buying things and living as they currently do as the rich abscond with the profits." so it seems we're on a similar page about there being propaganda out there. Articulate your complaint here. I have, as advised, glanced at your comment history. I'm not sure what you don't like.
frud 3y ago
I wish I knew 1984 better so I could find an apposite quote.
- canadiantim 3y ago
  Just ask AI
  - nxobject 3y ago
    Even better, ask AI to finally write that 1984/Brave New World mashup for us so we can just have one thing to quote from!
- fein 3y ago
  You could probably randomly turn to just about any page in BNW or 1984 at this point and find a sentence that applies.
hn8305823 3y ago
> Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. Step 1: disable all notifications and background app refresh on your phone for all social media apps. Your mental health and battery life will improve dramatically. Give them your attention on your own terms and schedule, not theirs.
- baxtr 3y ago
  My newest hack: I have a note on my phone called “Things I should do instead of checking twitter”. I have also hidden the app. So whenever I want to start it up, I have to search for it and now also the note shows up… I usually first check the note and get reminded of all the productive, cool, fun things I could do instead. It works about 50% of the time.
  - dredmorbius 3y ago
    Generate an image from that note and set it as your phone's wallpaper. One I've used myself is based on Harold Lasswell's model of communication: - Who? - Says what? - Through which channel? - To whom? - With what effect? - With what intent? The last line being my addition. I find it useful in assessing many types of media. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communic...> An implied further question is "is this worth my time?" Late edit: Lasswell model note.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- polishdude20 3y ago
  Yep, and clearly read the terms and conditions checkbook when you sign up for stuff to make sure it doesn't also include the ability to send marketing emails.
  - 3y ago
helen___keller 3y ago
Strongly agree. I realized this in 2016 when I introduced my mother in law to YouTube for cooking videos, and within a few months she was excitedly describing how she found videos giving her “secret truths” about the world, then showed me a website explaining Hillary and Obamas place in a satanist cabal. She was a person who literally did not consume any politics prior. It’s hard to understand for those of us delving social media daily. How do you know what to trust and distrust? It’s not actually so obvious in a world of user submitted content, without existing bias to guard yourself with. We build this bias over years spent in online discourse. So what if you’ve never been part of online discourse before?
- avgcorrection 3y ago
  [flagged]
- dfxm12 3y ago
  This is the same woman who probably taught your SO not to take candy from strangers. I don't think you need to be engaged in social media from a young age to tune your BS detector. On this specific video, which demonizes democrats as scary satanists, do keep in mind that conservatives have learned to focus on fear based messaging: https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/conservative-politicians-campaign-on-fear-and-it-works.html https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/conservative-politician... Also on that note, I do think education (especially humanities and social science) plays a role in being able to tell the difference between something being discussed in good faith and complete hokum, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that conservatives are trying to lower the quality of education Americans get as well: https://newrepublic.com/article/167375/republican-plan-devastate-public-education-america https://newrepublic.com/article/167375/republican-plan-devas... This is part of a cycle that keeps Americans undereducated to make it easier to scare them into voting R.
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    > This is the same woman who probably taught your SO not to take candy from strangers. I don't think you need to be engaged in social media from a young age to tune your BS detector. I don’t feel like repeating a specific advice not to take candy from strangers indicates any critical reasoning personally
golol 3y ago
I use the same strategy. When I see an information grabbing headline I note that "X may be true" but unless this affects my life or it is a subject I'm interested in I'm perfectly fine with keeping it uncertain.
umvi 3y ago
Critical skepticism should be a core competence as well. Even well known and highly respected journals like Nature or NYT likely have biases at the editor/peer review level. They should be read with at least one eye toward skepticism that [money/prestige/desire to get published/etc] have influenced the results of the paper/article. I've read that scientists often have to "massage" their papers if publishing on a divisive/politicized topic like climate change or transgenderism in order to not have their paper dismissed out of hand (for example, one I saw recently: https://patricktbrown.org/2023/09/05/the-not-so-secret-formula-for-publishing-a-high-profile-climate-change-research-paper/ https://patricktbrown.org/2023/09/05/the-not-so-secret-formu...).
- johnny22 3y ago
  honestly i see the opposite more often. people being skeptical to the point of absurdity. They also never seem to trust anybody.
  - walr000s 3y ago
    There's plenty of stuff in NYT that should by eyed with extreme skepticism. It's got an agenda and is bending its content around that agenda like every other mainstream commercial news outlet.
    - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
      As if non-mainstream news outlets are objective.
    - throw10920 3y ago
      I would relax "plenty of stuff" to "everything" - the New York Times has adopted a policy of "advocacy over reporting" for several years now[1] and is untrustworthy as a journalistic entity as a result. They're no long a news organization, they're an activism organization that uses news as their political vehicle. [1] https://www.city-journal.org/article/slouching-toward-post-journalism https://www.city-journal.org/article/slouching-toward-post-j...
  - 3y ago
scotty79 3y ago
Ignoring irrelevant stuff was always necessary when interacting with computers. My mum had this problem that she was trying to read the screen like a page of a book, starting in the top left. Not the best strategy when the screen contains multiple windows and the most recent message is usually centered in it's own little window that has it's own title and sometimes even menubar.
mwilding 3y ago
I have taken to hitting " don't recommend channel" if I get a whif of sensationalism from the YouTube channel thumbnail.
- sneak 3y ago
  The problem is that while sometimes the thumbnails are crap, some of the best and highest quality content is marketed that way. I don't blame them: it works, and part of the process of making a great video is also making sure as many people see it as possible, to maximize return on investment from developing and producing it. You have to learn to discern the relative quality of the specific producers/brands/channels. It's a lot of work and it takes years. I use yt-dlp in a cronjob to make local mirrors of all the videos from a set of channels I consume. https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/youtube-dl-docker https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/youtube-dl-docker https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/youtube-dl-docker/src/branch/master/videolist.txt https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/youtube-dl-docker/src/branch/maste...
  - mrguyorama 3y ago
    The specific issue is that youtube is a competitive market, where competition is enforced. Youtube stopped showing people their own subscriptions, and now only shows users whatever the algorithm wants. If the content you make doesn't achieve a high enough "conversion" rate, ie people clicking the thumbnail and watching the video, youtube doesn't just stop promoting it to new viewers, but also doesn't show it to people who have explicitly subscribed to you! This means that you HAVE to play the dumb click bait games or your channel simply dies, no matter how good your content is. It doesn't matter that there is very little overlap between your viewers and Logan Paul's viewers, you are still competing with their conversion rate. Every single channel that considers themselves "above" clickbait has tried avoiding it and seen how hard youtube punishes them for daring to be different. Clickbait isn't about getting slightly more revenue, clickbait is about attempting to stay afloat in youtube's absurd machine.
    - x3n0ph3n3 3y ago
      > Youtube stopped showing people their own subscriptions, and now only shows users whatever the algorithm wants. Do people really not just go to their subscriptions page? I usually start there and only go to recommendations after that.
Roark66 3y ago
I'm often amazed how old people that lived the majority of their lives under a communist regime (in my country) that exposed them to propaganda all the time can fall so easily for for various "youtube revelations". I feel if anyone it is the younger generation that should be more susceptible to such misinformation. Everyone who lived during the communist times knew media as worthless. It's reflected in the jokes of the era, for example "- Have you seen today's newspaper? - No. I'm a non smoker" (explanation is - no one would ever buy a newspaper for news, only smokers buy it for rolling cigarettes).
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Interesting observation, though there's an explanation which suggests itself. Under Soviet Bloc regimes, propaganda was an instrument of the state, and was emitted through state organs, such as Pravda and Isvestia, Russian for "truth" and "news", leading to the Soviet-era ironic quip: there is no truth in Pravda and no news in Isvestia. <https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/31/world/russia-s-purveyor-of-truth-pravda-dies-after-84-years.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/31/world/russia-s-purveyor-o...> That is, the principle mechanism for avoiding propaganda was to ignore the "mainstream press" under such regimes. Which would suggest putting more faith in alternative sources and the rumour / gossip channel. Whilst there remain issues with mainstream media, even in non-authoritarian states, it's far more often the alternative media and (largely online) gossip channels which now serve propaganda. This is a case where previously-useful adaptations now prove poor guides.
- pixl97 3y ago
  The problem is you're ignoring the propaganda they did fall for. In the US we have the "America is the best and most free country in the world" propaganda that tons of us fall for. Also the "police are great and are only out for your good" propaganda. Then, especially the older generation are completely surprised every time a hidden cam video of the cops doing some bad crap and say "well, that's just cops now, it wasn't like that back then". We all have biases and propaganda we fall for. The issue with the internet versus past media is we now have unlimited sources of propaganda 24/7, rather than it just being select articles in the paper or on the news. Even if you only fall for something 1% of the time, if you see 1000 of it a day, you still fall for crap all the time.
pixl97 3y ago
At the end of the day even this will fail because of human limits. The 'firehose of falsehood' loves to flood the field with bullshit to purposefully get your to ignore as much as possible. The bullshit asymmetry theory says that even the act of ignoring requires entropy expenditure of which you as an individual have a limited amount of. After this your default state is one of disbelieve and a default ignore state. Your political enemies can then abuse this to insure you ignore critical information that is important to your future well being. We humans are screwed. We are not designed to pick important information at a worldwide scale where events thousands of miles away can affect your life nearly instantly. This will only get worse as agent based intelligence becomes more common and able to work at scales far beyond any individual.
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  We can and have build tools for that.
  - pixl97 3y ago
    Very highly complex tools, yes, which introduce their own sets of biases and the biases of their creators. There is no free lunch here.
photochemsyn 3y ago
After reading this entire article, I can't help but conclude that the authors are promoting conformist in-the-box thinking above all else - with the caveat that the section on lateral approaches is good - meaning not relying on single sources, not even the ones you tend to trust, but instead conducting alternative searches that rely on completely different sources. While that's good advice, the overall conclusion isn't one I like very much: > "As long as students are led to believe that critical thinking requires above all the effortful processing of text, they will continue to fall prey to informational traps and manipulated signals of epistemic quality. At the same time that students learn critical thinking, they should learn the core competence of thoughtfully and strategically allocating their attentional resources online. This will often entail selecting a few valuable pieces of information and deliberately ignoring others." Given that more propaganda resources are directed at college-atending students than perhaps any other demographic, with one goal being recruiting them into faith in institutional pronouncements, teaching them not to question the official 'trusted sources' is a recipe for the rise of totalitarian thinking. Systematic institutional corruption is a fact of life - when pharmaceutical and fossil fuel and financial and weapons and tech corporations are deeply integrated into governmental and academic institutions, what else can you expect? There are dozens of examples, and certainly the more historical ones are less likely to cause immediate blowback - but let's take the issue of modern viral biotechnology research, which is now entirely capabale of taking just about any mammalian virus and converting it into a human pathogen via direct manipulation of its cell-surface receptor binding motifs such that they specifically target human cells. After the outbreak of Covid, a vast governmental and corporate disinformation campaign was instituted to hide this fact (and its highly probable role in the Covid outbreak) from the public - and this disinformation campaign was run via the 'trusted sources.' See also: the existence of WMDs in Iraq, the necessity for Wall Street bailouts in 2008-2009, why the public should approve of warrantless domestic mass surveillance, the notion that all cancers are due to personal dietary choices and parental genetics (rather than industrial carcinogens), etc. Most of the alternative views on the above topics appeared in what the authors would probably call fringe sources, and they appear to be saying that such sources should be categorically ignored. Brainwashing 101?
blueyes 3y ago
I fully support critical ignoring, and would just note that it has to be done programmatically. That is, you have to block things before they appear on the screen, through many of the tools mentioned in this thread. (For those who have to interact with social media professionally, but want to limit its lure, New Feed Eradicator is a godsend. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...) The reason you have to "ignore" them before you even see them is because of the "clickbait asymmetry principle", a corollary to Brandolini's bullshit asymmetry principle. Don't spend time vetting the stuff that wants to behaviorally addict you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law#:~:text=Article%20Talk,it%20in%20the%20first%20place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law#:~:text=Art....
Mezzie 3y ago
Here are the things that I think most discussions of Digital Citizenship/Information Literacy/Disinformation Mitigation etc. miss: * People's time and especially their mental bandwidth are limited and there exist large swaths of the citizenry who are not students. This paper touches on this when it suggests that lateral research into a source is a less onerous task than reading the text itself deeply and acquiring the necessary background context to evaluate content on its own. But that still requires knowledge, skills, and expertise that a lot of the population does not have. Acquiring it is likely feasible for students, but it is not for a single mom of 3 kids working 2 jobs, many retirees, etc. A lot of America's population (the country I am most familiar with) is running with 95%+ of their bandwidth taken up at all times, especially post COVID when so many places are understaffed and it's more cost effective to force existing employees to do 2+ jobs. Tired people do not have the energy to change their habits, learn new tools, etc. There's also much less tech literacy than we would expect. As an example, my current boss who has run a successful local business for over a decade can't sort a Google Sheet. Expecting her to sit down and learn these skills when she's running a business and parenting 2 children under five is futile. * Information Literacy skills are not stagnant as the falsehood/clickbait/etc. problem is an arms race with several well-funded and well-researched actors having incentives to adapt to whatever tools and habits people do adopt. We can't just teach one set of skills and expect them to work 30, 40+ years on. As an example, lateral researching works well if your other sources stay stable and reliable but that is not what happens. Enshittification, buy-outs, etc. mean that constant re-evaluation of sources is needed. It is not a one and done, and there are great economic incentives to fight people doing this. * Almost all work addressing the problem has focused on people attacking misinformation and falsehoods from an individual standpoint. Most people evaluate information in some sort of community context. One reason I think that I do alright is that I have families that are all tech-literate and span 5 generations and multiple political views and none of us have turned into conspiracy theorists. If my cousins and I roast each other for using poor information sources, we can trust that we a.) have an idea of what we're talking about and b.) have each other's best interest in mind despite our disagreements. This makes it far easier to listen to critique from the 'other' side and to have our filter bubbles pierced. My POV: I'm a librarian from a tech family who has been online for over 30 years. I've also done professional fact-checking and worked in politics/civics communication.
avgcorrection 3y ago
I think people's heuristics naturally change. You could spend entire evenings watching television a couple of decades ago. Now too, but now there are competitors. (Unfortunately you can also scroll while in bed and really most places outside your living room.) There is probably at least a million times more informational content now compared to three decades ago. But is that information filtering/overload a problem which is proportionally bigger? Not really. The major “problem” is that people have changed their heuristics from trusting the Mainstream Media to a wide variety of more and less legitimate sources. So before people might think “I don't trust this because a journalist didn't say it” while now they might think “I actively distrust it because a journalist said it”. (Of course that's just one example of many heuristics now that we are all so “fragmented” (Oh no! Filter bubbles!).) On another note: these academic/straight-laced approaches to the problem (or supposed problem) feel just like being back at school. You are given homework which is ostensibly about making you an independent “citizen”, but the coursework and framing is so narrow and top-down that it's more of an exercise in being instructed by credentialed experts. Maybe school really is (and ever was post-Prussian Empire) a factory for conformity.
deleted 3y ago
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nxobject 3y ago
I'm glad they're putting it specifically under the "psychological science" box, too – systematically understanding things beyond "turn your notifications off! don't read the news!" is going to be very useful once the next startup figures out another way to "optimize engagement" with a different type of content.

183 points by BryantD 3y ago

re: "Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention," Well, yeah. But frankly, it's the least of my worries (personal). My BS detector is sensitive enough that I don't get sucked into these type of pointless distractions. My problem is consuming things that are generally higher-quality, not misleading, are relatively interesting, etc. but are *for me* - at least for the foreseeable future - completely useless. I have to catch myself with, "Mark, you're not prepping for Jeopardy" or "Cocktail party fodder is cool, but you're not going to any cocktail parties anytime soon" and then try to move on to something useful. More and more that seems to be silence and my own thoughts. It's not easy. Often it's simple and easy to turn on some media source and be a passive consumer. "Don't make it think" but to a fault.

oblib 3y ago

I've gotten pretty good at ignoring/blocking trolls over the years. FB has become a favorite place for old geezers to crap on each other. About 5 years ago I started whittling down my "Friends List" to less than 100 because so many started ignoring/stopped caring about truth and facts and started getting so belligerent that keeping them around because a sort of self abuse. I don't regret that all because things haven't gotten better since.

swayvil 3y ago
I hate it when people ignore the truth. We need a website called "truth.com" just to make it really clear what the truth is.
- oblib 3y ago
  I think the core problems are some people love bullshit and others are willing to sell it to them. That's become a booming business nowadays. Those that love and buy bullshit being sold don't care that it's bullshit. I have literally been told "I don't care if it's a lie, it's still the truth."
  - swayvil 3y ago
    Bullshit is like fiction. You know it isn't real, but you enter it anyway. And go along with it. And pretend its real. Maybe the love of bullshit is related to the love of fiction. Fiction is almost universally popular.

swayvil 3y ago

Ignoring is easy if you have something important to focus your attention on. The ignoring just happens automatically. Like, given 1000 things, if you focus on 1 you automatically ignore 999. But if you don't have something to focus your attention on then its gets tricky. This is where "habitually focused" people have an advantage. (otoh, being habitually focused can be bad too. You might ignore the 999 so long that you forget it's there.)

rez9x 3y ago

Their three methods are all things I've employed for a long time and find to be fairly obvious, but I realize a lot of people don't employee even one of them. I use lateral leading extensively, even when the source seems reputable. Having multiple reputable sources before you spread that knowledge to others is important to your own credibility. Even with that understanding, I've had multiple people tell me that they don't have time for that and prefer to just believe whatever their preferred source tells them. I think that's where a lot of the problems with corporate media started; They knew their viewers/readers would believe anything they told them and abused that.

klysm 3y ago

Dancing around epistemology without talking about directly

dredmorbius 3y ago
Care to expand on that?

kazinator 3y ago

Your finely tuned critical ignoring can be gamed by attention-getting specialists. They are beavering away analzying how people think and what causes their eyes not to stop on something. The losers end up being the people who have something genuine to say, but don't have those "AGO" (attention getting optimization) specialists working for them.

raydiatian 3y ago

Anybody with even a cursory understanding of Adversarial Networks and critical thinking skills can conclude that this is a horrible idea. The end result will be better forged information, indistinguishable by anyone (in the limit). We probably need rubes as a buffer.

dredmorbius 3y ago

That informational abundance or disinformational abundance create a scarcity of attention is hardly novel. Unfortunately most advice tends toward conscious and deliberate rejection of such sources, which continue that assault on attention. As anyone who's implemented an adblocker or similar online annoyance filters is aware, automating the process of distraction rejection is a vastly more effective and less-attention-costly approach. Rather than individually reject cookies, or cookie notices, or trackers, or ads, or various interstitials / "recommendations" / nags / pop-ups / fly-overs, and the like, I've applied and created sets of tools which remove those without my further conscious awareness. Users of PiHole may occasionally check the dashboard blocking statistics and be amazed at how much not only useless but actively counterproductive crud has been avoided. Information overload requires cheap, fast, regret-free rejection tools.[1] I've come to suspect that worldviews and models specifically function in this manner, identifying key information which we should focus on, and costlessly discarding the rest.[2] The article does nod to this briefly, particularly in the note referencing Gigerenzer & Gaissmaier, 2011, but on balance misplaces its emphasis, most especially in its suggestions. Another surprisingly effective tool is randomness, whether in sampling or in decisionmaking directly. Random sampling is a statistical tool for choosing a very small set of observations of interest, where the absolute number is utterly relevant rather than the sampled fraction. That is, a sample size of 30, or 300, or 3,000, is equally effective whether the total population size is ten thousand, ten million, or ten billion.[3] Within a media environment, in which there are publishers, channels, and distributors, the challenges shift somewhat. One exceedingly useful tool is noise rejection, or as I put it on Mastodon, "block fuckwits".[4] By blocking those who are misleading, annoying, toxic, or simply cannot or will not engage productively, noise levels fall tremendously. One key feature of the Fediverse is a panopoly of filtering, blocking, and limiting tools, from keyword filters to lists to muting (temporarily or permanently) to blocking (by or against individuals, or entire instances, gradated as silencing or complete exclusion). As a result antisocial behaviour carries sharp consequences. Timeboxing, and other mechanisms of setting a media budget can also help. Most of use hugely overestimate our message-processing capabilities. Even highly prolific individuals or groups typically have an upper bound of a few hundred incoming messages per day, and perhaps 50 outbound (most of which are exceedingly short --- acknowledgements or yes/no decisions). See Walt Mossberg and Stephen Wolfram, both averaging about 150--300 inbound daily emails. Content moderators seem to have an upper capacity of about 700-800 items/day, which affords about 35--40 seconds of attention to each item, if no other tasks are included at all in an eight-hour workday.[5] Scheduling email and media breaks at specific times of day, perhaps gradated between high-priority (boss, clients) and lower (the rest of the world) contacts is also hugely useful. My email schedule is largely now a few times per year.... A feature lacking from many mainstream tools and platforms is precisely this ability, and especially at the aggregate level. Within, say, YouTube, application stores from Apple and Android, or marketplaces such as Amazon, there is not ability to permit or deny presentations of offerings from a specific channel. Nor is there any way for groups to aggregate their own blocking behaviours. Put another way, providers, merchants, and channels carry no high-cost risk of low-value offerings. If the cost of putting out a crap app, video, book, or merchandise was immediate and permanent blocking by individuals or whole groups, behaviours might improve.[6] Contrast alternatives such as the Debian GNU/Linux package repository where specific sets of policies and behavioural requirements eliminate entire classes of end-user-hostile behaviours. Debian's organisational orientation and premise is focused on its users.[7] Documents aren't enough, the project also has institutional and social conventions for achieving those goals. Removing apps and disabling notifications is a start. Blocking sites entirely is even more preferable. A fairly recent development has been the emergence of alternate front-ends to major commercial social media platforms which permit directed access whilst avoiding much of the social manipulation, and incidentally, privacy-abusing surveillance, of them. Threadreader and Nitter for Twitter; Invidioius, Piped, yt-dlp, and freestanding media apps (mpv, xine, mplayer, etc.) for YouTube (and a host of other video and audio platforms), Teddit for Reddit, and more.[8] PiHole or similar adblockers, mentioned above, can be used not only to block advertising, but entire sites and domains exhibiting toxic practices. These blocklists are often collaboratively generated and distributed, which extends the reach and effectiveness on them; they're de facto means for citizens of the Internet to reject the terms and practices imposed by Internet monopolies and publishers. Power law distributions mean that even relatively short lists are surprisingly effective. Hacker News itself incorporates a similar mechanism through a list of 67k+ banned sites.[9] Legislation, regulation, class-action lawsuits, and other forms of collective action are the underrepresented remedies lacking from most discussion of this topic. Much as neither Soviet Communism nor Western corporate capitalism finally addressed labour exploitation or environmental concerns, but rather collective unionisation, organising, advocacy, protest, lawsuits, legislation, and regulation did, I think we're facing a similar situation here. Market failures aren't resolved by marketing-it-harder solutions. Boycotts and wallet advocacy have some utility, but are ultimately limited especially where monopolies are absolutely pervasive. That's a slow, long, and expensive battle, but most battles worth fighting are. ________________________________ Notes: 1. A point I've made before: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365180> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365180 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35365180> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255> <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31254795> 2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22208255> (Listed in note 1 as well.) 3. This concept is central to modern statistics, but hugely misunderstood by the general public. The sample size is sensitive to the size of the effect you're trying to measure, such that if only a very small portion of the entire population is behaving in some manner of interest, you'll need to scale your sampling such that a representitive number of that subgroup are included. Still, small samples can be highly effective. I'd seen this directly when assessing how many Google+ profiles had ever been active, or were recently active. Those numbers turned out to be about 9% and 0.6% of the totals. I'd had a reasonable estimate of the first value after checking only 100 randomly-selected profiles, and within 1,000 or so, of the second. I ultimately checked about 50,0000 profiles (using Google's own sitemaps). A subsequent study increased that sampling tenfold (and ran some more robust checks and processes to ensure effective random sampling), but largely confirmed my own results. See: <https://web.archive.org/web/20150130125653/https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq https://web.archive.org/web/20150130125653/https://ello.co/d...> and <https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the-activity-on-google-plus/ https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the...>. 4. <https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019 https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/104371585950783019> I'll note that blocking can be made absolutely without prejudice, as a recognition that another party may be harmed by, or react poorly to, your own posting. Or with varying degrees of prejudice, where appropriate. It's also entirely at the discretion of the blocking party, and grousing about being blocked is virtually always exceedingly poor form, and a validation of the action. 5. Wolfram: <http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/ http://quantifiedself.com/wolfram/> Mossberg from an interview I'd at least 7 years ago based on my prior HN references. NYTimes moderation: <http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approve-or-reject-moderation-quiz.html http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/09/20/insider/approv...> 6. Why this is hasn't been sufficiently studied to my view, though Cory Doctorow's concepts of enshittification and chokepoint capitalism demonstrate how forcing low-relevance search results on both customers and vendors can, at least in the short term, maximise the profits of the monopolist. 7. See Debian's Philosophy <https://www.debian.org/intro/philosophy https://www.debian.org/intro/philosophy>, Social Contract and Free Software Guidelines <https://www.debian.org/social_contract https://www.debian.org/social_contract>, Constitution <https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution https://www.debian.org/devel/constitution>, and Policy Manual <https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/ https://www.debian.org/doc/debian-policy/>. 8. LibRedirect is a browser extension that automatically ... redirects ... to alternatives for these and other services: <https://libredirect.github.io/ https://libredirect.github.io/> 9. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37131212>

acumenical 3y ago

This is not a solution or in any way clever. Critical ignoring of wrongthink is praised, while critical ignoring of the winning party is punished.

aucisson_masque 3y ago

> For instance, reddit.com’s AskHistorians subreddit, one of the largest history forums online, removes questions that use the JAQing technique to deny the basic facts of the Holocaust I feel like this « reason » is also widely used to shut anyone asking annoying question that doesn’t fit the narrative.

throw10920 3y ago
> I feel like this « reason » is also widely used to shut anyone asking annoying question that doesn’t fit the narrative. It absolutely is. It's a classic tactic of social justice warriors (in the party-agnostic sense) in particular, and authoritarians in general - "you're not arguing/asking questions in good faith, you don't get to talk any more." I read up on "JAQing" in particular, and it's very clearly just a way to shut down opposing thoughts without having to discuss why.

HanyouHottie 3y ago

"[...] false information and conspiracy theories, whose prevalence may lead people to doubt the very existence of 'truth' or a shared reality." This is an insane modern take that I have yet to understand. Can anyone shed some light on how this notion of subjective truth came to be? There have always been conspiracy theorists and rumor spreaders and communities within which they flourished, and discerning the reputation of a source of information has always been a required skill in order to not fall victim to actors like these. What changed?

rawgabbit 3y ago
Laws against false political speech have been curtailed. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12180 https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF12180 The former legal counsel for FOX argued internally that the First Amendment protected the network for spreading lies about election fraud even the employees privately thought there was no election fraud. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-08-11/fox-corp-general-counsel-viet-dihn-is-leaving-the-company https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/20... In other words, there are little repercussions for the blatant political lies and as a result people don’t know what to believe. I have a member of family who used horse dewormer on himself when he got Covid. He also was not vaccinated because he believed it would alter his DNA. I used to make fun of dumb hicks and now I realize I am part of a family of dumb hicks.

t0bia_s 3y ago

- This infodemic is nontrivial because exposure to misinformation has been shown to reduce people’s intention to be vaccinated against COVID-19 (Loomba et al., 2021). Article about ignorance make conclusions that are nowdays justified by noneffectivnes or even harmful results from medical intervention like taking poorly tested vaccine against covid. A lot of people just ignored common narrative about effectivnes because it needs time for proof. Basically article use language that trying to speak against which is hypocritical.

roenxi 3y ago

1) People are actually a bit resistant to "Low-quality and misleading information". We can see people generally turning to higher quality sources than have previously been available which is why everything is getting fragmented. It is becoming impossible to maintain the fake illusion of consensus by the corporate media; the opposing voices are just too persistent and - in an uncomfortable number of cases - too reasonable no matter how much muck gets slung at them. 2) Special award for having a freely available 5,000 word pure-text article and being unable to display it without Javascript and 300kB of downloads. Cookie to the product manager, keeping devs employed. Probably have some wicked Kubernetes admin skills in their technical organisation to serve this small quantity of text.

mrangle 3y ago
The problem with "articles" such as the one under discussion is that information veracity is inherently subjective, assuming no true perfect framing of the information (such as is the case with history), and therefore the truth will be under the type of constant debate that breathes life into democratic societies. To my point and yours, such articles are unlikely to be referencing falsehoods presented by corporate media but instead contrary views. Which means that the hypothetical "ignoring" curriculum that the authors suggest would devolve into, if not start as, lessons in how to ignore most else but the corporate media view. Given the dogma that ostensibly serves to reinforce democracy in ideal conditions but has obviously instead enforced oppression in every other environment: that the media is the primary and honest arbiter of truth.
itsanaccount 3y ago
I'd agree lot of people have good skills to know what to ignore. Like knowing to go through a persons post history to get context on the kind of beliefs held that correlate with saying: >It is becoming impossible to maintain the fake illusion of consensus by the corporate media
- roenxi 3y ago
  Literally your last comment included a "At its worst its propoganda to convince people its ok to keep buying things and living as they currently do as the rich abscond with the profits." so it seems we're on a similar page about there being propaganda out there. Articulate your complaint here. I have, as advised, glanced at your comment history. I'm not sure what you don't like.

frud 3y ago

I wish I knew 1984 better so I could find an apposite quote.

canadiantim 3y ago
Just ask AI
- nxobject 3y ago
  Even better, ask AI to finally write that 1984/Brave New World mashup for us so we can just have one thing to quote from!
fein 3y ago
You could probably randomly turn to just about any page in BNW or 1984 at this point and find a sentence that applies.

hn8305823 3y ago

> Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. Step 1: disable all notifications and background app refresh on your phone for all social media apps. Your mental health and battery life will improve dramatically. Give them your attention on your own terms and schedule, not theirs.

baxtr 3y ago
My newest hack: I have a note on my phone called “Things I should do instead of checking twitter”. I have also hidden the app. So whenever I want to start it up, I have to search for it and now also the note shows up… I usually first check the note and get reminded of all the productive, cool, fun things I could do instead. It works about 50% of the time.
- dredmorbius 3y ago
  Generate an image from that note and set it as your phone's wallpaper. One I've used myself is based on Harold Lasswell's model of communication: - Who? - Says what? - Through which channel? - To whom? - With what effect? - With what intent? The last line being my addition. I find it useful in assessing many types of media. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasswell%27s_model_of_communic...> An implied further question is "is this worth my time?" Late edit: Lasswell model note.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
polishdude20 3y ago
Yep, and clearly read the terms and conditions checkbook when you sign up for stuff to make sure it doesn't also include the ability to send marketing emails.
- 3y ago

helen___keller 3y ago

Strongly agree. I realized this in 2016 when I introduced my mother in law to YouTube for cooking videos, and within a few months she was excitedly describing how she found videos giving her “secret truths” about the world, then showed me a website explaining Hillary and Obamas place in a satanist cabal. She was a person who literally did not consume any politics prior. It’s hard to understand for those of us delving social media daily. How do you know what to trust and distrust? It’s not actually so obvious in a world of user submitted content, without existing bias to guard yourself with. We build this bias over years spent in online discourse. So what if you’ve never been part of online discourse before?

avgcorrection 3y ago
[flagged]
dfxm12 3y ago
This is the same woman who probably taught your SO not to take candy from strangers. I don't think you need to be engaged in social media from a young age to tune your BS detector. On this specific video, which demonizes democrats as scary satanists, do keep in mind that conservatives have learned to focus on fear based messaging: https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/conservative-politicians-campaign-on-fear-and-it-works.html https://slate.com/technology/2015/10/conservative-politician... Also on that note, I do think education (especially humanities and social science) plays a role in being able to tell the difference between something being discussed in good faith and complete hokum, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that conservatives are trying to lower the quality of education Americans get as well: https://newrepublic.com/article/167375/republican-plan-devastate-public-education-america https://newrepublic.com/article/167375/republican-plan-devas... This is part of a cycle that keeps Americans undereducated to make it easier to scare them into voting R.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  > This is the same woman who probably taught your SO not to take candy from strangers. I don't think you need to be engaged in social media from a young age to tune your BS detector. I don’t feel like repeating a specific advice not to take candy from strangers indicates any critical reasoning personally

golol 3y ago

I use the same strategy. When I see an information grabbing headline I note that "X may be true" but unless this affects my life or it is a subject I'm interested in I'm perfectly fine with keeping it uncertain.

umvi 3y ago

Critical skepticism should be a core competence as well. Even well known and highly respected journals like Nature or NYT likely have biases at the editor/peer review level. They should be read with at least one eye toward skepticism that [money/prestige/desire to get published/etc] have influenced the results of the paper/article. I've read that scientists often have to "massage" their papers if publishing on a divisive/politicized topic like climate change or transgenderism in order to not have their paper dismissed out of hand (for example, one I saw recently: https://patricktbrown.org/2023/09/05/the-not-so-secret-formula-for-publishing-a-high-profile-climate-change-research-paper/ https://patricktbrown.org/2023/09/05/the-not-so-secret-formu...).

johnny22 3y ago
honestly i see the opposite more often. people being skeptical to the point of absurdity. They also never seem to trust anybody.
- walr000s 3y ago
  There's plenty of stuff in NYT that should by eyed with extreme skepticism. It's got an agenda and is bending its content around that agenda like every other mainstream commercial news outlet.
  - downWidOutaFite 3y ago
    As if non-mainstream news outlets are objective.
  - throw10920 3y ago
    I would relax "plenty of stuff" to "everything" - the New York Times has adopted a policy of "advocacy over reporting" for several years now[1] and is untrustworthy as a journalistic entity as a result. They're no long a news organization, they're an activism organization that uses news as their political vehicle. [1] https://www.city-journal.org/article/slouching-toward-post-journalism https://www.city-journal.org/article/slouching-toward-post-j...
- 3y ago

scotty79 3y ago

Ignoring irrelevant stuff was always necessary when interacting with computers. My mum had this problem that she was trying to read the screen like a page of a book, starting in the top left. Not the best strategy when the screen contains multiple windows and the most recent message is usually centered in it's own little window that has it's own title and sometimes even menubar.

mwilding 3y ago

I have taken to hitting " don't recommend channel" if I get a whif of sensationalism from the YouTube channel thumbnail.

sneak 3y ago
The problem is that while sometimes the thumbnails are crap, some of the best and highest quality content is marketed that way. I don't blame them: it works, and part of the process of making a great video is also making sure as many people see it as possible, to maximize return on investment from developing and producing it. You have to learn to discern the relative quality of the specific producers/brands/channels. It's a lot of work and it takes years. I use yt-dlp in a cronjob to make local mirrors of all the videos from a set of channels I consume. https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/youtube-dl-docker https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/youtube-dl-docker https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/youtube-dl-docker/src/branch/master/videolist.txt https://git.eeqj.de/sneak/youtube-dl-docker/src/branch/maste...
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  The specific issue is that youtube is a competitive market, where competition is enforced. Youtube stopped showing people their own subscriptions, and now only shows users whatever the algorithm wants. If the content you make doesn't achieve a high enough "conversion" rate, ie people clicking the thumbnail and watching the video, youtube doesn't just stop promoting it to new viewers, but also doesn't show it to people who have explicitly subscribed to you! This means that you HAVE to play the dumb click bait games or your channel simply dies, no matter how good your content is. It doesn't matter that there is very little overlap between your viewers and Logan Paul's viewers, you are still competing with their conversion rate. Every single channel that considers themselves "above" clickbait has tried avoiding it and seen how hard youtube punishes them for daring to be different. Clickbait isn't about getting slightly more revenue, clickbait is about attempting to stay afloat in youtube's absurd machine.
  - x3n0ph3n3 3y ago
    > Youtube stopped showing people their own subscriptions, and now only shows users whatever the algorithm wants. Do people really not just go to their subscriptions page? I usually start there and only go to recommendations after that.

Roark66 3y ago

I'm often amazed how old people that lived the majority of their lives under a communist regime (in my country) that exposed them to propaganda all the time can fall so easily for for various "youtube revelations". I feel if anyone it is the younger generation that should be more susceptible to such misinformation. Everyone who lived during the communist times knew media as worthless. It's reflected in the jokes of the era, for example "- Have you seen today's newspaper? - No. I'm a non smoker" (explanation is - no one would ever buy a newspaper for news, only smokers buy it for rolling cigarettes).

dredmorbius 3y ago
Interesting observation, though there's an explanation which suggests itself. Under Soviet Bloc regimes, propaganda was an instrument of the state, and was emitted through state organs, such as Pravda and Isvestia, Russian for "truth" and "news", leading to the Soviet-era ironic quip: there is no truth in Pravda and no news in Isvestia. <https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/31/world/russia-s-purveyor-of-truth-pravda-dies-after-84-years.html https://www.nytimes.com/1996/07/31/world/russia-s-purveyor-o...> That is, the principle mechanism for avoiding propaganda was to ignore the "mainstream press" under such regimes. Which would suggest putting more faith in alternative sources and the rumour / gossip channel. Whilst there remain issues with mainstream media, even in non-authoritarian states, it's far more often the alternative media and (largely online) gossip channels which now serve propaganda. This is a case where previously-useful adaptations now prove poor guides.
pixl97 3y ago
The problem is you're ignoring the propaganda they did fall for. In the US we have the "America is the best and most free country in the world" propaganda that tons of us fall for. Also the "police are great and are only out for your good" propaganda. Then, especially the older generation are completely surprised every time a hidden cam video of the cops doing some bad crap and say "well, that's just cops now, it wasn't like that back then". We all have biases and propaganda we fall for. The issue with the internet versus past media is we now have unlimited sources of propaganda 24/7, rather than it just being select articles in the paper or on the news. Even if you only fall for something 1% of the time, if you see 1000 of it a day, you still fall for crap all the time.

pixl97 3y ago

At the end of the day even this will fail because of human limits. The 'firehose of falsehood' loves to flood the field with bullshit to purposefully get your to ignore as much as possible. The bullshit asymmetry theory says that even the act of ignoring requires entropy expenditure of which you as an individual have a limited amount of. After this your default state is one of disbelieve and a default ignore state. Your political enemies can then abuse this to insure you ignore critical information that is important to your future well being. We humans are screwed. We are not designed to pick important information at a worldwide scale where events thousands of miles away can affect your life nearly instantly. This will only get worse as agent based intelligence becomes more common and able to work at scales far beyond any individual.

RandomLensman 3y ago
We can and have build tools for that.
- pixl97 3y ago
  Very highly complex tools, yes, which introduce their own sets of biases and the biases of their creators. There is no free lunch here.

photochemsyn 3y ago

After reading this entire article, I can't help but conclude that the authors are promoting conformist in-the-box thinking above all else - with the caveat that the section on lateral approaches is good - meaning not relying on single sources, not even the ones you tend to trust, but instead conducting alternative searches that rely on completely different sources. While that's good advice, the overall conclusion isn't one I like very much: > "As long as students are led to believe that critical thinking requires above all the effortful processing of text, they will continue to fall prey to informational traps and manipulated signals of epistemic quality. At the same time that students learn critical thinking, they should learn the core competence of thoughtfully and strategically allocating their attentional resources online. This will often entail selecting a few valuable pieces of information and deliberately ignoring others." Given that more propaganda resources are directed at college-atending students than perhaps any other demographic, with one goal being recruiting them into faith in institutional pronouncements, teaching them not to question the official 'trusted sources' is a recipe for the rise of totalitarian thinking. Systematic institutional corruption is a fact of life - when pharmaceutical and fossil fuel and financial and weapons and tech corporations are deeply integrated into governmental and academic institutions, what else can you expect? There are dozens of examples, and certainly the more historical ones are less likely to cause immediate blowback - but let's take the issue of modern viral biotechnology research, which is now entirely capabale of taking just about any mammalian virus and converting it into a human pathogen via direct manipulation of its cell-surface receptor binding motifs such that they specifically target human cells. After the outbreak of Covid, a vast governmental and corporate disinformation campaign was instituted to hide this fact (and its highly probable role in the Covid outbreak) from the public - and this disinformation campaign was run via the 'trusted sources.' See also: the existence of WMDs in Iraq, the necessity for Wall Street bailouts in 2008-2009, why the public should approve of warrantless domestic mass surveillance, the notion that all cancers are due to personal dietary choices and parental genetics (rather than industrial carcinogens), etc. Most of the alternative views on the above topics appeared in what the authors would probably call fringe sources, and they appear to be saying that such sources should be categorically ignored. Brainwashing 101?

blueyes 3y ago

I fully support critical ignoring, and would just note that it has to be done programmatically. That is, you have to block things before they appear on the screen, through many of the tools mentioned in this thread. (For those who have to interact with social media professionally, but want to limit its lure, New Feed Eradicator is a godsend. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicator/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/news-feed-eradicat...) The reason you have to "ignore" them before you even see them is because of the "clickbait asymmetry principle", a corollary to Brandolini's bullshit asymmetry principle. Don't spend time vetting the stuff that wants to behaviorally addict you. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law#:~:text=Article%20Talk,it%20in%20the%20first%20place https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law#:~:text=Art....

Mezzie 3y ago

Here are the things that I think most discussions of Digital Citizenship/Information Literacy/Disinformation Mitigation etc. miss: * People's time and especially their mental bandwidth are limited and there exist large swaths of the citizenry who are not students. This paper touches on this when it suggests that lateral research into a source is a less onerous task than reading the text itself deeply and acquiring the necessary background context to evaluate content on its own. But that still requires knowledge, skills, and expertise that a lot of the population does not have. Acquiring it is likely feasible for students, but it is not for a single mom of 3 kids working 2 jobs, many retirees, etc. A lot of America's population (the country I am most familiar with) is running with 95%+ of their bandwidth taken up at all times, especially post COVID when so many places are understaffed and it's more cost effective to force existing employees to do 2+ jobs. Tired people do not have the energy to change their habits, learn new tools, etc. There's also much less tech literacy than we would expect. As an example, my current boss who has run a successful local business for over a decade can't sort a Google Sheet. Expecting her to sit down and learn these skills when she's running a business and parenting 2 children under five is futile. * Information Literacy skills are not stagnant as the falsehood/clickbait/etc. problem is an arms race with several well-funded and well-researched actors having incentives to adapt to whatever tools and habits people do adopt. We can't just teach one set of skills and expect them to work 30, 40+ years on. As an example, lateral researching works well if your other sources stay stable and reliable but that is not what happens. Enshittification, buy-outs, etc. mean that constant re-evaluation of sources is needed. It is not a one and done, and there are great economic incentives to fight people doing this. * Almost all work addressing the problem has focused on people attacking misinformation and falsehoods from an individual standpoint. Most people evaluate information in some sort of community context. One reason I think that I do alright is that I have families that are all tech-literate and span 5 generations and multiple political views and none of us have turned into conspiracy theorists. If my cousins and I roast each other for using poor information sources, we can trust that we a.) have an idea of what we're talking about and b.) have each other's best interest in mind despite our disagreements. This makes it far easier to listen to critique from the 'other' side and to have our filter bubbles pierced. My POV: I'm a librarian from a tech family who has been online for over 30 years. I've also done professional fact-checking and worked in politics/civics communication.

avgcorrection 3y ago

I think people's heuristics naturally change. You could spend entire evenings watching television a couple of decades ago. Now too, but now there are competitors. (Unfortunately you can also scroll while in bed and really most places outside your living room.) There is probably at least a million times more informational content now compared to three decades ago. But is that information filtering/overload a problem which is proportionally bigger? Not really. The major “problem” is that people have changed their heuristics from trusting the Mainstream Media to a wide variety of more and less legitimate sources. So before people might think “I don't trust this because a journalist didn't say it” while now they might think “I actively distrust it because a journalist said it”. (Of course that's just one example of many heuristics now that we are all so “fragmented” (Oh no! Filter bubbles!).) On another note: these academic/straight-laced approaches to the problem (or supposed problem) feel just like being back at school. You are given homework which is ostensibly about making you an independent “citizen”, but the coursework and framing is so narrow and top-down that it's more of an exercise in being instructed by credentialed experts. Maybe school really is (and ever was post-Prussian Empire) a factory for conformity.

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nxobject 3y ago

I'm glad they're putting it specifically under the "psychological science" box, too – systematically understanding things beyond "turn your notifications off! don't read the news!" is going to be very useful once the next startup figures out another way to "optimize engagement" with a different type of content.