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As a society we place too much weight on confidence in being right in relation to how much misinfo, disinfo and plain distorted narratives about correct facts there are floating around at any given time firstly because humans are always arbitrarily filling gaps in their imperfect knowledge, secondly because they are beneficial to parties spreading them thirdly because of how difficult it is to prove statements wrong and get that proof known to and accepted by people even when it exists. I would argue that it's a downright impossible task for individuals to reliably tell correct from mistaken in such an environment and instead they should learn to prepare to be wrong, keep around multiple conflicting theories on uncertain things and not act rashly on what they think is most likely to be correct if a false positive seems clearly riskier than a false negative. But that's not really how you make it in this world, is it? People make it by confidently failing upward pandering to the biases of their superiors or audience. And that is the behavior everyone is taught to respect, and the cycle continues. So on both fronts of stopping the flow of misinfo and making people resistant to it, it seems more or less impossible to win the war at this point. It must be made winnable in the first place, which in itself would take confident risky maneuvers targeting weak points based on woefully incomplete understanding of how to bring the system to reach closer to ideality, while acting contrary to the ideal being fought for. My utopian vision is a system of experimental science tailored for all to participate in in some capacity so that they learn to judge certainty and uncertainty, apply a scientific sort of criticism and self-criticism, and take up the task of adding to society's knowledge rather than thinking of it as some outside institution's job. People aren't going to think critically and voice their criticism just because they are taught some abstract skills contrary to their base instincts, the only way to rationally develop one's instincts is countless repeats of the actions that one wants to become second nature.
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Jul 7, 2019 09:04
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 09:13 |
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