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We should be educating people to think for themselves instead of advocating for centralized authorities who think for you.

• verdverm 2y ago
  People don't have the time to become familiar enough with every subject to form well reasoned opinions. It's the same reason we don't build everything we own for ourselves. Specialization and deferring to experts has been a natural human behavior forever While I don't disagree that people could be better prepared by our education system, they also have to want to be capable of thinking for themselves.
  • ddxxdd 2y ago
    By all means, feel free to fact check our textbooks, news broadcasts, and statements from official sources. But when I log on to social media to rant about how UFOs are time-traveling humans, I don't want a teal-colored, official-looking div element to alert the world that the online version of my personal expression is objectively wrong.
    • verdverm 2y ago
      The problem is that someone can say "they are eating the cats, they are eating the dogs" and that turns into hate and violence in the real world. They are not separate spaces, both the physical and the digital are part of the same world So where does the line get drawn? Many believe that American style free speech goes too far and enables the malicious freedom to manipulate Also, online platforms are currently anti-competitive, so when you don't agree with the provider, there are significant costs to choosing another. That's why efforts like ATProto & ActivityPub are important to the next generation of social media applications.
  • proc0 2y ago
    Well, I do agree but to an even further extent. Not only can we not become familiar with all the information, but experts also cannot do this. There is way too much information, and it updates way too quickly. There are of course exceptions when the domain is specific and focused enough, but in general, even experts will make mistakes and cannot process so much information. For me it's about keeping an open mind, and being conscious of getting exposed to a variety of opinions and perspectives. The problem from both the general public and the experts tends to be lack of epistemic humility, i.e. getting too entrenched in your own beliefs and refusing to consider alternatives.
• Craighead 2y ago
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• techfeathers 2y ago
  I watched this debate between Destiny and a centrist influencer and the centrist influencer was really confident in their perspectives, but also said they mostly used heuristics to learn things. There’s nothing wrong with heuristics, but they played this game where Destiny tried to guess the centrist influencers perspectives on things, and came pretty close to all the opinions. And the influencer admitted their heuristics were really shallow. One of the weirdest things I’m reckoning with is that objectivity isn’t optimal. That you’ll be most successful based on a relative positioning of beliefs (either towards or against a given common perspective) rather than being “objective” in most areas. I suspect actually if you want to shape public opinion you do what Twitter and Meta are probably doing by the scenes, put your thumb on the scales around what goes viral. Which is much more terrifying than “fact checking”
  • proc0 2y ago
    The people who put the thumbs on the scales are subject to the same bias and relative positioning of their beliefs. Whatever the issue is with the average person sorting through information will also affect the authorities and experts. Maybe not as much, however when it does happen because they have more control it tends to be more impactful. So in the end it amounts to the same difference, average people will believe wrong things often with little impact, experts will believe wrong things rarely with lots of impact. Additionally, it's not like experts or authorities cannot contribute, they would just be on a more equal footing and would need to do more work than in a situation where there is censorship or control of information.