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> The problem is that this has been an issue for a long time. My first interactions with the internet in the 90s came along with the warning "don't automaticall
by SllX 2y ago
> The problem is that this has been an issue for a long time. My first interactions with the internet in the 90s came along with the warning "don't automatically trust what you read on the internet".
I received the same warnings, actually it was more like “don’t trust everything you read on the internet”, but it quickly became apparent that the last three words were redundant, and could have been rephrased more accurately as “don’t trust everything you read and hear and see”.
Our parents and teachers were living with their own fallacious assumptions and we just didn’t know it at the time, but most information is very pliable. If you can’t change what someone sees, then you can probably change how they see it.
- DowagerDave 2y agoI feel like there was also a brief window where "many amateur eyes in public" trumped "private experts"; wikipedia, open source software, etc. This doesn't seem the case in a hyper-partisan and bifurcated society where there is little trust.
- throwaway98797 2y agoBelieve half of what you see and none of what you hear
- SllX 2y agoTrue!
- ben_w 2y ago> Our parents and teachers were living with their own fallacious assumptions and we just didn’t know it at the time, but most information is very pliable. Indeed. When I was 14-18 in the UK, the opinion pieces in the news were derogatorily describing "media studies" as "Mickey Mouse studies". In retrospect such courses were teaching critical analysis of media sources, in much the same way that my history GCSE went into the content of historical media and explored how both primary and secondary sources each had the potential to be either accurate or biased. Even now, even here, I see people treat the media itself as pure and only the people being reported upon as capable of wrongdoing — e.g. insisting that climate scientists in the 70s generally expected an imminent ice age, because that's what the newspapers were saying.