| ▲ | ezst 2 days ago | |
Or you were just reading confabulations, without a way to tell, corrupting your knowledge in the process. In general, I believe the problem of our time (sociopolitical divide, echo chambers, propaganda, people getting pulled to extreme viewpoints ...) isn't so much about the difficulty to access truthful information (most people would know how to fact check their beliefs and assumptions given enough time and motivation), but about the constant information overload that makes this process impractical. You are essentially softening your brain into accepting large volumes of information as facts, unchecked, and pretend that it's a good thing. You essentially don't know anymore the extent of what you know. Worse, you no longer know how you came to know, because the underlying principles and processes of knowledge (natural laws, models, theories, ...) were not involved in the learning (you could assert that day means light, and that night brings darkness because you have seen it repeated extensively and convincingly, but you wouldn't internalise this knowledge through the model of the earth orbiting the sun, and so you wouldn't know how to generalize from this knowledge into thinking about seasons or do any abstract reasoning on your own). That is to say, we should be much much more cautious about what and how we read and learn about stuff. | ||
| ▲ | intended 2 days ago | parent [-] | |
You will probably love Network Propaganda. This is most definitely the issue, and I’d would say you can go a step further. There are groups of people who don’t know how to stay safe in the information environment, while others who understand how to shape the environment. The latter group is able to shape the content available to the former. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/10/network-propa... | ||