I'll have to go back and read all of that again. I found myself skimming ahead to see if two rather major points would come up, and unless I skimmed too lightly, they didn't.
1) Opens with the infuriating tale of Wm. Casey (and thank-you; I'm learning how quickly such crimes are forgotten). But the rest skips the obvious point that there are real conspiracies. Casey and many others in the "Intelligence Community" conspired to sell those various lies and affect policy. The first Iraq War was sold with the fake babies-thrown-from-incubators story that the entire Bush I government conspired to sell. The second, they just invented a conspiracy theory about a dictator giving his worst enemies a nuke for laughs.
How are you going to debunk unless the government itself comes clean? In the USA, at least, they have a lot of admitting to do.
2) It should start in school. School has been remiss in teaching basic logic and logical fallacies; cowardly about teaching that MLMs and most herbal remedies are scams. If you can't equip kids to avoid Herbalife, you can't protect them from Steve Bannon.
It's just plain history, how Big Tobacco muddled the science on smoking, too, I think schools can get away with criticizing that. I think they could also teach about gambling addiction, the actual certainty of losing when you gamble, and look at the advertising of gambling - as a fun night out with attractive young people - versus the reality.
Broadly, they could teach that "advertising", "propaganda", and "public relations" all describe the same process, distinguished only by motive. Go over how advertising lies on many levels, study historical public relations statements versus the truth.
Remarkable how careful I have to be even suggesting that schools teach things that are inarguably true, but would harm the business model of a profitable business like Amway. Or any casino.
I was thinking through it while walking the dog — by the time I got back, I had so many ideas that I decided to put a pin in it for a future dispatch. So it's missing because I'm saving it for a future edition.
On 2: I'm always in favor of better education on this sort of thing. I think you could so far as to add media literacy and critical thinking — and more fundamentally, the theory of knowledge itself — to every single class at every single grade level throughout 6-12. Couldn't agree more.
But also, same conclusion as the above: It won't solve this problem, not even in the ~20 years it will take to come into effect. As I occasionally plagirize: The problem with misinformation isn't ignorance, it's overconfidence.
In some cases, a really robust education ends up making you *too* critical. Sometimes focusing on a long list of the horrible things we've done to each other makes you a cynical, paranoid crank.
This piece is actually a little preview of a thing I'm doing for Foreign Policy, on the right-wing effort to go after misinformation researchers. One of the worst culprits is Matt Taibbi. Here's a guy who is the epitome of being awake to how business, media, and politics colludes to make us crazy. Then he falls into many of the same traps, and finds himself perpetuating this bullshit.
I think the logical extension of what I'm getting at is: Misinformation, and the broader trust issue it indicates, isn't a personal issue that can be fixed by fixing people; it's a societal issue that will be fixed by solving out collective relationships.
I guess I should blow some dust off some old Foucault books.
Yeah, I have this boundless faith that people will just make the right choice with the right education. There's not a lot of evidence out of the Ivy League for that, I admit.
Robert Putnam probably has it right: we need more bowling leagues and choirs.
Very glad I came back to read it all again. This topic is SO covered, I tend to start skimming when I see a familiar intro.
The wikipedia matter is really crucial, I think. Radical transparency rather than a lot of control, transparency is clearly the winning strategy. As it was when science was getting invented!
The other example to look at, Justin, if you do a whole piece on it, is Slashdot. May have been the first "blog" before there was such a word, certainly the first big one. Still going, despite being sold off to owners who only think about money (lost some people then, isn't as good now, but it's still going).
Slashdot lets anybody post anything, but *randomly chosen* members rate stuff up or down. There's no banning, but every rater can "shadow ban" if you will, at least for people who only read stuff with thumbs-up ratings. (Any one rater can add +1 or -1, and ratings go from -1 to 5; lots of people only read "above 3" posts.) It works!
Slashdot tackled the original huge controversies, like PC vs Mac - the rhetoric is so vicious because the stakes are so small - and didn't fold up. It handled global warming, nuclear power.
All without top-down control! Slashdot's success has not been studied enough.
“In some cases, a really robust education ends up making you *too* critical.” Never heard that before but I can certainly imagine it. Like Roy, I too would like to see a return to classic studies like civics, critical thinking and would add formal debate. But after reading this article I’m wondering if that’s another example of “one-solution” thinking.
Anecdotally, I have to admit my twitter life was much more peaceful after trump and Milo I. were banned (even though I secretly rather liked Milo outside twitter sometimes…).
Thank-you very much for this thoughtful piece. I’m saving it to read again, and look forward to checking out the links you’ve provided.
To be clear, there's no such thing as too much education! It's just one of those weird unintended consequences you can never really control for. Butterfly effect and all that.
Just an aside if you don’t mind me bringing this up here, your article in the Toronto Star that you linked pretty much echoes my own thoughts. Although the nooses are being prepared for the hanging party, how can anyone who doesn’t know the facts have a strong opinion? I’ve never cared for the Green Party but I must admit Elizabeth May seems like the adult in the room here.
I think the strongest opinion we should have is frustration with a government that doesn't trust us to receive the information. It's a thread that goes through this government, to its very inception — a mixed belief that we can't handle the truth, and that they must never overrule the security services. It's not leadership.
I agree that sites like Wikipedia appear to be reliable sources, but I see three problems:
1) If there is strong popular sentiment towards a particular interpretation, the lone dissenter will be edited out.
2) I suspect there are paid "contributors" or even "editors" who serve as the gatekeepers (to use today's popular word) that will remove or add to entries to get their desired page. Can volunteer contributors compete with someone whose job it is to monitor Wikipedia? Wasn't an edit traced back to some MP's office?
3) A few days ago, I was watching CBC news and a recorded story started off with reference to 215 Kamloops residential school graves. The Wikipedia entry says "investigations into the reported mass graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia have ended with no conclusive evidence of such graves."
CBC is fed to me, but I have to seek out Wikipedia. How many of us have the initiative?
Wikipedia can only be one piece of a broader, better internet. But I think, as a model, it's a good framework around how we can make things better.
1) Correct. Wikipedia is good at consensus, not dissent — but it still allows for the latter, but in the backend. It's a nice compromise.
2) Yes, but those editors' decisions are subject to review, appeal, debate, dissent, etc. You get institutional voices (politicians, government agencies, etc) trying to impose truth, but that tends to get overturned very quickly. The rule of thumb for most pages is incremental change, not overhaul. It means things change a lot gradually, Ship of Thesus style. So it does reduce the power of individual editors/contributors — which is a good thing.
3) The idea of Wikipedia being heterdox and not easily swayed to the 'politically correct' view is a huge asset, imo. Journalists are trying to approach the residential schools issue with sympathy and tact — as they should — while Wikipedia has leeway to be a bit more blunt and cold in its language. One isn't better than the other, they should exist as two sides of the same die.
I may write a longer thing about Wikipedia in the future!
I'll have to go back and read all of that again. I found myself skimming ahead to see if two rather major points would come up, and unless I skimmed too lightly, they didn't.
1) Opens with the infuriating tale of Wm. Casey (and thank-you; I'm learning how quickly such crimes are forgotten). But the rest skips the obvious point that there are real conspiracies. Casey and many others in the "Intelligence Community" conspired to sell those various lies and affect policy. The first Iraq War was sold with the fake babies-thrown-from-incubators story that the entire Bush I government conspired to sell. The second, they just invented a conspiracy theory about a dictator giving his worst enemies a nuke for laughs.
How are you going to debunk unless the government itself comes clean? In the USA, at least, they have a lot of admitting to do.
2) It should start in school. School has been remiss in teaching basic logic and logical fallacies; cowardly about teaching that MLMs and most herbal remedies are scams. If you can't equip kids to avoid Herbalife, you can't protect them from Steve Bannon.
It's just plain history, how Big Tobacco muddled the science on smoking, too, I think schools can get away with criticizing that. I think they could also teach about gambling addiction, the actual certainty of losing when you gamble, and look at the advertising of gambling - as a fun night out with attractive young people - versus the reality.
Broadly, they could teach that "advertising", "propaganda", and "public relations" all describe the same process, distinguished only by motive. Go over how advertising lies on many levels, study historical public relations statements versus the truth.
Remarkable how careful I have to be even suggesting that schools teach things that are inarguably true, but would harm the business model of a profitable business like Amway. Or any casino.
Heh, it's funny you mention this.
While I was writing through it (maybe this is plainly obvious, but I don't always know where the piece is going when I first start writing it) I was reading this, in Freddie deBoer's Substack: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/many-conspiracy-theories-have-in
I was thinking through it while walking the dog — by the time I got back, I had so many ideas that I decided to put a pin in it for a future dispatch. So it's missing because I'm saving it for a future edition.
On 2: I'm always in favor of better education on this sort of thing. I think you could so far as to add media literacy and critical thinking — and more fundamentally, the theory of knowledge itself — to every single class at every single grade level throughout 6-12. Couldn't agree more.
But also, same conclusion as the above: It won't solve this problem, not even in the ~20 years it will take to come into effect. As I occasionally plagirize: The problem with misinformation isn't ignorance, it's overconfidence.
In some cases, a really robust education ends up making you *too* critical. Sometimes focusing on a long list of the horrible things we've done to each other makes you a cynical, paranoid crank.
This piece is actually a little preview of a thing I'm doing for Foreign Policy, on the right-wing effort to go after misinformation researchers. One of the worst culprits is Matt Taibbi. Here's a guy who is the epitome of being awake to how business, media, and politics colludes to make us crazy. Then he falls into many of the same traps, and finds himself perpetuating this bullshit.
I think the logical extension of what I'm getting at is: Misinformation, and the broader trust issue it indicates, isn't a personal issue that can be fixed by fixing people; it's a societal issue that will be fixed by solving out collective relationships.
I guess I should blow some dust off some old Foucault books.
Yeah, I have this boundless faith that people will just make the right choice with the right education. There's not a lot of evidence out of the Ivy League for that, I admit.
Robert Putnam probably has it right: we need more bowling leagues and choirs.
Thanks!
Very glad I came back to read it all again. This topic is SO covered, I tend to start skimming when I see a familiar intro.
The wikipedia matter is really crucial, I think. Radical transparency rather than a lot of control, transparency is clearly the winning strategy. As it was when science was getting invented!
The other example to look at, Justin, if you do a whole piece on it, is Slashdot. May have been the first "blog" before there was such a word, certainly the first big one. Still going, despite being sold off to owners who only think about money (lost some people then, isn't as good now, but it's still going).
Slashdot lets anybody post anything, but *randomly chosen* members rate stuff up or down. There's no banning, but every rater can "shadow ban" if you will, at least for people who only read stuff with thumbs-up ratings. (Any one rater can add +1 or -1, and ratings go from -1 to 5; lots of people only read "above 3" posts.) It works!
Slashdot tackled the original huge controversies, like PC vs Mac - the rhetoric is so vicious because the stakes are so small - and didn't fold up. It handled global warming, nuclear power.
All without top-down control! Slashdot's success has not been studied enough.
Oh, that's a great recommendation. I forgot Slashdot was still around!
Overall, I get the gist of your article that we cannot rely on government or big tech to solve the disinformation plague.
Left out in your piece is irrespective of tech’s role in poisoning the information well, they still need to be regulated hard and fast now.
“In some cases, a really robust education ends up making you *too* critical.” Never heard that before but I can certainly imagine it. Like Roy, I too would like to see a return to classic studies like civics, critical thinking and would add formal debate. But after reading this article I’m wondering if that’s another example of “one-solution” thinking.
Anecdotally, I have to admit my twitter life was much more peaceful after trump and Milo I. were banned (even though I secretly rather liked Milo outside twitter sometimes…).
Thank-you very much for this thoughtful piece. I’m saving it to read again, and look forward to checking out the links you’ve provided.
To be clear, there's no such thing as too much education! It's just one of those weird unintended consequences you can never really control for. Butterfly effect and all that.
Education is, yup, just one piece of the puzzle.
Just an aside if you don’t mind me bringing this up here, your article in the Toronto Star that you linked pretty much echoes my own thoughts. Although the nooses are being prepared for the hanging party, how can anyone who doesn’t know the facts have a strong opinion? I’ve never cared for the Green Party but I must admit Elizabeth May seems like the adult in the room here.
Of course I don't mind!
I think the strongest opinion we should have is frustration with a government that doesn't trust us to receive the information. It's a thread that goes through this government, to its very inception — a mixed belief that we can't handle the truth, and that they must never overrule the security services. It's not leadership.
I agree that sites like Wikipedia appear to be reliable sources, but I see three problems:
1) If there is strong popular sentiment towards a particular interpretation, the lone dissenter will be edited out.
2) I suspect there are paid "contributors" or even "editors" who serve as the gatekeepers (to use today's popular word) that will remove or add to entries to get their desired page. Can volunteer contributors compete with someone whose job it is to monitor Wikipedia? Wasn't an edit traced back to some MP's office?
3) A few days ago, I was watching CBC news and a recorded story started off with reference to 215 Kamloops residential school graves. The Wikipedia entry says "investigations into the reported mass graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia have ended with no conclusive evidence of such graves."
CBC is fed to me, but I have to seek out Wikipedia. How many of us have the initiative?
What is truth anyway?
Wikipedia can only be one piece of a broader, better internet. But I think, as a model, it's a good framework around how we can make things better.
1) Correct. Wikipedia is good at consensus, not dissent — but it still allows for the latter, but in the backend. It's a nice compromise.
2) Yes, but those editors' decisions are subject to review, appeal, debate, dissent, etc. You get institutional voices (politicians, government agencies, etc) trying to impose truth, but that tends to get overturned very quickly. The rule of thumb for most pages is incremental change, not overhaul. It means things change a lot gradually, Ship of Thesus style. So it does reduce the power of individual editors/contributors — which is a good thing.
3) The idea of Wikipedia being heterdox and not easily swayed to the 'politically correct' view is a huge asset, imo. Journalists are trying to approach the residential schools issue with sympathy and tact — as they should — while Wikipedia has leeway to be a bit more blunt and cold in its language. One isn't better than the other, they should exist as two sides of the same die.
I may write a longer thing about Wikipedia in the future!