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

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?