What I find interesting about this is that the author doesn't indicate the internet and social media as the root cause of the modern disinformation epidemic. Rather, he points to biased...
What I find interesting about this is that the author doesn't indicate the internet and social media as the root cause of the modern disinformation epidemic. Rather, he points to biased traditional media (basically Fox News and ClearChannel Radio) and the internet is just an intensifier. I think it's probably a little more responsible than that, perhaps a sort of interaction effect between the two of them. But I do like the emphasis on dereliction of responsibilities within traditional media as well as the traditional "legitimacy granting" institutions for eroding much of the ability of people to trust in expertise.
The state of science journalism is a good example. If there is an attention-grabbing headline every other week about weight loss that seems to contradict everything else, then what are people supposed to take away from this and update their ideas about "this is how things work?" Instead what they learn is "nobody knows anything and anyone who says they do is a liar." The journals and papers themselves (when they're not p-hacking) tend to be pretty careful to caveat and list the limits of their internal and external validity of their findings but all that caution goes to the winds when it's time to draft the press release.
To say that "nobody knows anything" would be overgeneralizing, but "there is a lot of nonsense when it comes to nutrition, and it's hard to figure what's really true" seems pretty accurate....
To say that "nobody knows anything" would be overgeneralizing, but "there is a lot of nonsense when it comes to nutrition, and it's hard to figure what's really true" seems pretty accurate.
Unfortunately, we aren't that good at living with uncertainty.
It definitely is, but that is the overall impression your layperson just trying to parse all this conflicting information is going to walk away with. Once that happens they are, of course, opened...
To say that "nobody knows anything" would be overgeneralizing
It definitely is, but that is the overall impression your layperson just trying to parse all this conflicting information is going to walk away with. Once that happens they are, of course, opened to predation by any huckster shilling something that "hundreds of studies" validate.
I wonder how that works? It seems more intuitive to me that generalized skepticism would make people less likely to fall for such sales pitches? And yet people do sometimes latch onto things...
I wonder how that works? It seems more intuitive to me that generalized skepticism would make people less likely to fall for such sales pitches? And yet people do sometimes latch onto things despite being overall pretty distrusting.
It needs to be tempered with a bit of humility about what's knowable. Without that you just end up in a place where you believe what you believe and nobody can tell you different.
I wonder how that works? It seems more intuitive to me that generalized skepticism
It needs to be tempered with a bit of humility about what's knowable. Without that you just end up in a place where you believe what you believe and nobody can tell you different.
What I find interesting about this is that the author doesn't indicate the internet and social media as the root cause of the modern disinformation epidemic. Rather, he points to biased traditional media (basically Fox News and ClearChannel Radio) and the internet is just an intensifier. I think it's probably a little more responsible than that, perhaps a sort of interaction effect between the two of them. But I do like the emphasis on dereliction of responsibilities within traditional media as well as the traditional "legitimacy granting" institutions for eroding much of the ability of people to trust in expertise.
The state of science journalism is a good example. If there is an attention-grabbing headline every other week about weight loss that seems to contradict everything else, then what are people supposed to take away from this and update their ideas about "this is how things work?" Instead what they learn is "nobody knows anything and anyone who says they do is a liar." The journals and papers themselves (when they're not p-hacking) tend to be pretty careful to caveat and list the limits of their internal and external validity of their findings but all that caution goes to the winds when it's time to draft the press release.
To say that "nobody knows anything" would be overgeneralizing, but "there is a lot of nonsense when it comes to nutrition, and it's hard to figure what's really true" seems pretty accurate.
Unfortunately, we aren't that good at living with uncertainty.
It definitely is, but that is the overall impression your layperson just trying to parse all this conflicting information is going to walk away with. Once that happens they are, of course, opened to predation by any huckster shilling something that "hundreds of studies" validate.
I wonder how that works? It seems more intuitive to me that generalized skepticism would make people less likely to fall for such sales pitches? And yet people do sometimes latch onto things despite being overall pretty distrusting.
It needs to be tempered with a bit of humility about what's knowable. Without that you just end up in a place where you believe what you believe and nobody can tell you different.