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A good place to start might be in mandating some level of media literacy in the national curriculum. Media Studies tends to be a bit of a meme but it’s becomin

A good place to start might be in mandating some level of media literacy in the national curriculum. Media Studies tends to be a bit of a meme but it’s becoming increasingly important.

consumer451 3y ago
The issue is that it will be seen as "political" if one political side's media happens to be cited more often in examples of misinformation, and one will.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  I don't think there'd be an issue in finding sufficient material for any political side.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    Selecting from a biased population into an “unbiased” sample is itself also political. Like having one fringe scientist on stage with one mainstream scientist, giving the illusion that their ideas have equal acceptance among their peers.
    - leereeves 3y ago
      Sometimes that fringe scientist turns out to be right. Ideas should be judged on their own merit, not based on the resistance of those who've built their careers on the currently accepted ideas.
      - ethanbond 3y ago
        That’s a nice maxim and all but in actual reality, the vast majority of people on the vast majority of topics have to use heuristics to build (and disconfirm) their beliefs. The people who are actually close enough to a topic to even be able to judge an idea “on the merits” are few and far between. If you want people to have an accurate model of reality, you have to care about maintaining heuristics that at least somewhat track with the consensus (or the lack thereof) of the underlying group of people who actually have a chance of knowing things from first principles and direct experience. Deliberately sampling an “unbiased” subset of an actually biased underlying population is not just allowing the heuristic to stray from reality, it’s deliberately destroying that heuristic and deliberately misleading people. In imaginary “everyone can/should judge on own merits”-land, that’s perfectly fine. In reality, where almost no one can actually judge almost anything of substance on its merits, you are actively sabotaging truth-seeking. The way that fringe scientist gets to declare s/he is right is by convincing their peers of it, not by convincing the public in a format that violates the heuristics the public has to rely on. Of course everyone should always be open to this possibility, most of all their peers (and to your point they often aren’t!)
        squigz 3y ago
        I wish more people understood this - that most (all?) people are missing the required years of knowledge and understanding of nuance to be able to judge an idea "on its merits", particularly scientific/technological ideas. Trusting expert consensus - while certainly not perfect - is the only logical (and relatively safe) way forward. What's of even more concern to me is the prevalence of this in the HN crowd - ostensibly a bunch of very intelligent people with expert knowledge in their respective fields and who thus understand what goes into actually understanding something...
        Der_Einzige 3y ago
        Gell-mann amnesia effect is a powerful drug.
        squigz 3y ago
        Could you please elaborate on what you mean by this?
        leereeves 3y ago
        Scientists get to declare they are right by finding evidence that their theory works. Convincing their peers makes that easier (they'll have more resources and help in the search for evidence), but ultimately the evidence should be clear to everyone. Do germs grow in a heated, sealed flask? No. Clear evidence for germ theory, disproving the accepted view at the time, spontaneous generation. Do nuclear fission and modern electronics work? Clear evidence for quantum physics, even though Einstein argued against it till the end. Is GPS accurate before or after adjusting for time passing faster in orbit? (After.) Clear evidence for general relativity, despite how wild it seems. On the other hand, when a group of people collectively tell you their ideas are right, and that other ideas are "fringe", without clear evidence, that's an ideology or a religion.
        logicchains 3y ago
        To quote Max Planck: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with.". Groupthink holds back science.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    Now that you mention it, I wasn't even thinking this through in my original comment. Even if you found a perfect balance, I can imagine little Bobby coming home from school to see his parents invested in their favorite TV news program and saying: "Mr. Forrester told us that's a type of misinformation, mom." I would not want to be Mr. Forrester in that scenario. Just imagine the school board meetings.
- ptero 3y ago
  That is a solvable issue -- give examples of manipulation and misinformation for both sides in roughly equal quantities. There is no shortage of examples for any argument. Nothing helps making people manipulation resistant like seeing manipulation from the side of the argument they support.
  - WhoAmThing 3y ago
    That still doesn't solve the issue, manipulation and misinformation are entirely personal and highly emotional. See the current status on inflation and words from the white house. Or the situation between Palestine / Israel. You are always being manipulated and lied to by both sides because it is in their best interests to have you aligned.
    - ptero 3y ago
      This is exactly what I am suggesting to address. We currently have separate narratives of "<side 1> engages in manipulation, here is their misinformation" which polarizes and causes highly emotional reactions against the evil supporters of that side. This also means that people, due to that emotional response, are unwilling to consider opposite views and we get the polarized society we have today. If instead we are teaching with examples of manipulation of both sides of the same argument, people see the value of debating on merits, instead of emotions, cross checking references and correcting for the speaker's viewpoint. They also get less affected by misinformation, since they have seen it, many times, including coming from the side near and dear to their hearts. This last thing is critical. One would not get too riled up about messaging if they see both sides doing that. My 2c.
      - WhoAmThing 3y ago
        I was taught that multiple times under sections on political cartoons/propaganda, at least when I went to school. The issue is not that people are not well educated, its that there is not enough reason for individuals at a large scale to invest time deep-diving into a topic when they can use other things like social cues and popularity to more or less decide where they fit on the spectrum. The issue is not that manipulation is invisible to the untrained eye, on the contrary I'd argue a lot more people are aware of political manipulation than you realize. It doesn't take much logic to see politicians only start caring about you once elections come around, regardless of where you fall on the political slider. People are optimizing for social harmony and the security of their livelihood. This means that more or less whatever the opinions of those in my community / work / place of worship are, I will reciprocate those signals to some degree or another unless there is an issue that resonates strongly enough. Insert mass-scale reach with social media and the law of large numbers in human population and I hope you can see why there is no non-technological solution to this problem. We have created a dopamine machine in our pocket capable of satisfying the natural urges of every permutation of the mind. Your bigger picture and moral appeal is given a moment of consideration by an ever-shrinking percentage.
- jonnyone 3y ago
  Media (and corresponding manipulation) could be created specifically for teaching purposes, aiming to keep the material as apolitical as possible while still retaining the techniques of manipulation.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    That actually sounds like a great idea.
mark_l_watson 3y ago
Right on. Also just having the same high quality US civics classes, like I had when I was a kid, would help young people develop scepticism, learn the value of reading good books, often classic books, instead of hours on social media. While I think the Patriot Act was a horror show for the health of our country, and I am suspicious of the very broad reach of the proposed ban TicToc legislation, the military system also does a lot of good work that benefits our society in non-military ways.
542458 3y ago
Agreed. This is a social problem and no amount of technical solutioneering will solve it. A significant chunk of the US believes Obama is a Muslim and/or Kenyan on the weight of approximately no evidence. Large numbers of people treat images of people with glossy skin and mangled hands on Facebook and Instagram as photographic fact. VFX videos that would be lambasted as amateurish and unconvincing in a film are treated as undeniable evidence by many commenters on YouTube and TikTok. These are not highly sophisticated lies, and yet many people accept them uncritically because they haven’t learned any better.
- jfengel 3y ago
  They have in fact learned the opposite. We've spent decades carefully separating ourselves from even the most obvious critical thinking skills that a child would employ. Long before sophisticated disinformation tools people readily slurped up the most obvious lies. I'm really at a loss.
- 93po 3y ago
  > yet many people accept them uncritically because they haven’t learned any better. The political establishment doesn't necessarily want critical thinking - they just want you to believe their version of lies. People uncritically accept anything negative about Trump all the time and people who own media channels don't want that to change.
greg_V 3y ago
Just mandate all media to be in latin, and maintain a class of experts versed in the language to interpret it to the masses.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tjpnz 3y ago
Throw in some basic statistics too? Many of the graphs cookers throw into their Instagram posts are from real studies but have been manipulated to push misinformation.
MyFedora 3y ago
How useful is it to teach media literacy when nobody applies it? I'd argue it's the opposite of useful: Harmful. People who learned media literacy feel more resilient against disinformation, but they likely don't care enough about any single news piece to apply the frameworks to verify whether anything is indeed correct. So, quite ironically, the fact that they feel more resilient against disinformation makes them more susceptible to disinformation than the average uneducated person in terms of media literacy. Figure out how to teach media literacy correctly before spreading the current, rather flawed media literacy teachings, so we don't end up with more wannabe media literate people who are actually more susceptible to disinformation than the average person.
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  > How useful is it to teach media literacy when nobody applies it? How can people apply something they've not been taught?
netbioserror 3y ago
"Media literacy". Aka, "How to interpret everything through the horse blinders and funhouse lens of the dominant neoliberal ideology of the US ruling class."
- iamacyborg 3y ago
  I'm British and thinking about this in that context, not an American one, for what it's worth.

A good place to start might be in mandating some level of media literacy in the national curriculum. Media Studies tends to be a bit of a meme but it’s becoming increasingly important.

consumer451 3y ago

The issue is that it will be seen as "political" if one political side's media happens to be cited more often in examples of misinformation, and one will.

iamacyborg 3y ago
I don't think there'd be an issue in finding sufficient material for any political side.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  Selecting from a biased population into an “unbiased” sample is itself also political. Like having one fringe scientist on stage with one mainstream scientist, giving the illusion that their ideas have equal acceptance among their peers.
  - leereeves 3y ago
    Sometimes that fringe scientist turns out to be right. Ideas should be judged on their own merit, not based on the resistance of those who've built their careers on the currently accepted ideas.
    - ethanbond 3y ago
      That’s a nice maxim and all but in actual reality, the vast majority of people on the vast majority of topics have to use heuristics to build (and disconfirm) their beliefs. The people who are actually close enough to a topic to even be able to judge an idea “on the merits” are few and far between. If you want people to have an accurate model of reality, you have to care about maintaining heuristics that at least somewhat track with the consensus (or the lack thereof) of the underlying group of people who actually have a chance of knowing things from first principles and direct experience. Deliberately sampling an “unbiased” subset of an actually biased underlying population is not just allowing the heuristic to stray from reality, it’s deliberately destroying that heuristic and deliberately misleading people. In imaginary “everyone can/should judge on own merits”-land, that’s perfectly fine. In reality, where almost no one can actually judge almost anything of substance on its merits, you are actively sabotaging truth-seeking. The way that fringe scientist gets to declare s/he is right is by convincing their peers of it, not by convincing the public in a format that violates the heuristics the public has to rely on. Of course everyone should always be open to this possibility, most of all their peers (and to your point they often aren’t!)
      - squigz 3y ago
        I wish more people understood this - that most (all?) people are missing the required years of knowledge and understanding of nuance to be able to judge an idea "on its merits", particularly scientific/technological ideas. Trusting expert consensus - while certainly not perfect - is the only logical (and relatively safe) way forward. What's of even more concern to me is the prevalence of this in the HN crowd - ostensibly a bunch of very intelligent people with expert knowledge in their respective fields and who thus understand what goes into actually understanding something...
        Der_Einzige 3y ago
        Gell-mann amnesia effect is a powerful drug.
        squigz 3y ago
        Could you please elaborate on what you mean by this?
      - leereeves 3y ago
        Scientists get to declare they are right by finding evidence that their theory works. Convincing their peers makes that easier (they'll have more resources and help in the search for evidence), but ultimately the evidence should be clear to everyone. Do germs grow in a heated, sealed flask? No. Clear evidence for germ theory, disproving the accepted view at the time, spontaneous generation. Do nuclear fission and modern electronics work? Clear evidence for quantum physics, even though Einstein argued against it till the end. Is GPS accurate before or after adjusting for time passing faster in orbit? (After.) Clear evidence for general relativity, despite how wild it seems. On the other hand, when a group of people collectively tell you their ideas are right, and that other ideas are "fringe", without clear evidence, that's an ideology or a religion.
        logicchains 3y ago
        To quote Max Planck: "a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with.". Groupthink holds back science.
- consumer451 3y ago
  Now that you mention it, I wasn't even thinking this through in my original comment. Even if you found a perfect balance, I can imagine little Bobby coming home from school to see his parents invested in their favorite TV news program and saying: "Mr. Forrester told us that's a type of misinformation, mom." I would not want to be Mr. Forrester in that scenario. Just imagine the school board meetings.
ptero 3y ago
That is a solvable issue -- give examples of manipulation and misinformation for both sides in roughly equal quantities. There is no shortage of examples for any argument. Nothing helps making people manipulation resistant like seeing manipulation from the side of the argument they support.
- WhoAmThing 3y ago
  That still doesn't solve the issue, manipulation and misinformation are entirely personal and highly emotional. See the current status on inflation and words from the white house. Or the situation between Palestine / Israel. You are always being manipulated and lied to by both sides because it is in their best interests to have you aligned.
  - ptero 3y ago
    This is exactly what I am suggesting to address. We currently have separate narratives of "<side 1> engages in manipulation, here is their misinformation" which polarizes and causes highly emotional reactions against the evil supporters of that side. This also means that people, due to that emotional response, are unwilling to consider opposite views and we get the polarized society we have today. If instead we are teaching with examples of manipulation of both sides of the same argument, people see the value of debating on merits, instead of emotions, cross checking references and correcting for the speaker's viewpoint. They also get less affected by misinformation, since they have seen it, many times, including coming from the side near and dear to their hearts. This last thing is critical. One would not get too riled up about messaging if they see both sides doing that. My 2c.
    - WhoAmThing 3y ago
      I was taught that multiple times under sections on political cartoons/propaganda, at least when I went to school. The issue is not that people are not well educated, its that there is not enough reason for individuals at a large scale to invest time deep-diving into a topic when they can use other things like social cues and popularity to more or less decide where they fit on the spectrum. The issue is not that manipulation is invisible to the untrained eye, on the contrary I'd argue a lot more people are aware of political manipulation than you realize. It doesn't take much logic to see politicians only start caring about you once elections come around, regardless of where you fall on the political slider. People are optimizing for social harmony and the security of their livelihood. This means that more or less whatever the opinions of those in my community / work / place of worship are, I will reciprocate those signals to some degree or another unless there is an issue that resonates strongly enough. Insert mass-scale reach with social media and the law of large numbers in human population and I hope you can see why there is no non-technological solution to this problem. We have created a dopamine machine in our pocket capable of satisfying the natural urges of every permutation of the mind. Your bigger picture and moral appeal is given a moment of consideration by an ever-shrinking percentage.
jonnyone 3y ago
Media (and corresponding manipulation) could be created specifically for teaching purposes, aiming to keep the material as apolitical as possible while still retaining the techniques of manipulation.
- consumer451 3y ago
  That actually sounds like a great idea.

mark_l_watson 3y ago

Right on. Also just having the same high quality US civics classes, like I had when I was a kid, would help young people develop scepticism, learn the value of reading good books, often classic books, instead of hours on social media. While I think the Patriot Act was a horror show for the health of our country, and I am suspicious of the very broad reach of the proposed ban TicToc legislation, the military system also does a lot of good work that benefits our society in non-military ways.

542458 3y ago

Agreed. This is a social problem and no amount of technical solutioneering will solve it. A significant chunk of the US believes Obama is a Muslim and/or Kenyan on the weight of approximately no evidence. Large numbers of people treat images of people with glossy skin and mangled hands on Facebook and Instagram as photographic fact. VFX videos that would be lambasted as amateurish and unconvincing in a film are treated as undeniable evidence by many commenters on YouTube and TikTok. These are not highly sophisticated lies, and yet many people accept them uncritically because they haven’t learned any better.

jfengel 3y ago
They have in fact learned the opposite. We've spent decades carefully separating ourselves from even the most obvious critical thinking skills that a child would employ. Long before sophisticated disinformation tools people readily slurped up the most obvious lies. I'm really at a loss.
93po 3y ago
> yet many people accept them uncritically because they haven’t learned any better. The political establishment doesn't necessarily want critical thinking - they just want you to believe their version of lies. People uncritically accept anything negative about Trump all the time and people who own media channels don't want that to change.

greg_V 3y ago

Just mandate all media to be in latin, and maintain a class of experts versed in the language to interpret it to the masses.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tjpnz 3y ago

Throw in some basic statistics too? Many of the graphs cookers throw into their Instagram posts are from real studies but have been manipulated to push misinformation.

MyFedora 3y ago

How useful is it to teach media literacy when nobody applies it? I'd argue it's the opposite of useful: Harmful. People who learned media literacy feel more resilient against disinformation, but they likely don't care enough about any single news piece to apply the frameworks to verify whether anything is indeed correct. So, quite ironically, the fact that they feel more resilient against disinformation makes them more susceptible to disinformation than the average uneducated person in terms of media literacy. Figure out how to teach media literacy correctly before spreading the current, rather flawed media literacy teachings, so we don't end up with more wannabe media literate people who are actually more susceptible to disinformation than the average person.

iamacyborg 3y ago
> How useful is it to teach media literacy when nobody applies it? How can people apply something they've not been taught?

netbioserror 3y ago

"Media literacy". Aka, "How to interpret everything through the horse blinders and funhouse lens of the dominant neoliberal ideology of the US ruling class."

iamacyborg 3y ago
I'm British and thinking about this in that context, not an American one, for what it's worth.