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from the By-the-inch,-it's-a-cinch-but-a-mile-takes-a-while dept.
We've previously discussed ( https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/12/11/1847236 ) how it becomes impossible to reverse the polarization of a community once their differences become too great, and how that plays out both here at SN and in the wider world. Science Blog has a piece ( https://scienceblog.com/527745/computer-model-seeks-to-explain-the-spread-of-misinformation-and-suggest-counter-measures/ ) about a PLOS paper titled "Cognitive cascades: How to model (and potentially counter) the spread of fake news" ( https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0261811 ) which uses an interesting computer model to explore how this actually happens.
The model demonstrated that if the new information is too much at odds with a person's existing belief, it will be ignored. Furthermore, if that belief is connected with the person's identity, their current belief will be strengthened as a defense against cognitive dissonance. Interestingly, though, a succession of new information that gradually nudge the person to adjust their beliefs can, over time, cause the person to adopt a belief that is very different from the one they started with. This sounds like how psy-ops manipulate targets to accept extreme views.
What was the gradual change of ideas that have led national political parties to be ever more different from one another, and who fed them those messages?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday January 16 2022, @11:06AM (26 children)
is critical thinking, and a willingness to cross-check sources.
That comes with education, and that takes roughly 20 years.
The state of education in the US for the past few decades explains why misinformation is so successful today. Whereas in my days, 3/4 of what flies around today would have been quickly laughed at and dismissed outright by people with even a moderate school attendance record. Sorry if I sound old or "ageist" as they say today, but that's the plain old truth.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @12:30PM (1 child)
The problem is that you will not check the sources even if you want to.
I was looking at most of news in my country's outlets and NEVER seen the information about source. Really. Even when it is about the recently published law act - there is a national site in which you can see new law acts published, there are no links to it. The only links are advertisements and they are paid links.
So news outlets got what they wanted: they don't point to the sources, so they got misinformation. Sorry, that's how it works, you asked for it.
(Score: 1, Troll) by khallow on Sunday January 16 2022, @05:51PM
Sounds like a pulled out of your ass problem. Maybe you need to find a better class of problem?
When the reader gets blamed first thing for some perceived fault from a position of complete ignorance of the reader's context, I look elsewhere for the actual problem.
Then sounds like you're looking in the wrong places. Look elsewhere. We really do have this figured out, seriously. News isn't some scientific journal. They routinely don't link to sources. You have to do the work yourself. So do the work yourself.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Sunday January 16 2022, @12:47PM (6 children)
>is critical thinking
Unfortunately no. Humans just can't overcome their innate irrationality, at least not consistently. There are plenty of contemporary examples of esteemed individuals who clearly have critical thinking faculties and yet fall victim to "misinformation". As a bonus, there are examples for every side of every COVID-19 topic, so everyone can participate in this exercise. And if you feel there are no examples against your chosen side and you fancy yourself a critical thinker, you might want to do a bit of soul searching; you'll find an example right under your nose.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @07:10PM
“Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty” Albert Einstein
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @07:57PM (4 children)
100% correct, and I see it as based in ego. I think the pandemic is causing human nature in people to tend toward survival mode. I'm seeing worsening of "me me me, screw you" in US "society", and probably much of the rest of the world.
To oversimplify, if we look at the human brain as 2 hemispheres, with one being more imagination and creativity where much of the ego is, and the other side rational ("critical thinking"), the more emotional / impulsive side wins out in crises.
I also think the speed of information / communication (and therefore misinformation and miscommunication) plays into the more impulsive / ego side.
The more rational side is much slower acting. "Sleep on it" is a great old snippet of wisdom. It means: don't make impulsive decisions, rather, give your brain time to process all of the complex data. Huge supercomputers take time to calculate pi, or DNA, or whatever. We don't just stop the machine and take whatever it has at the moment (I hope we don't!)
The incredibly wise founders / framers of the USA understood that, and that's why they formulated a republic that became one of the greatest nations on earth. The sheeple are too gullible, too easily influenced, and as we've seen over and over, make very bad decisions. The hope was and is that no matter who eventually wins elections, that the process hopefully filters, such that any of the final candidates for political office will be pretty good.
But those founder / framers didn't foresee the power of the speed and quantity of "information" of electronic "media".
No matter your political leanings, pretty much everyone thinks the other side is misinformed. So at least we all agree on misinformation being a major problem.
I think a very powerful component of the solution is to break up the media monopoly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @08:11PM (2 children)
> the media monopoly
The media monopoly doesn't exist in a vaccuum. It's the propaganda arm of corporations wealthier than most countries. Break them up? How?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @10:18PM (1 child)
International general strike.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @04:15PM
That will accomplish little. You need to get those corporations into court, and fuck them up in court. Silly strikes might sting them a little, but they'll shake that off and continue 'business as usual'. A determined court can destroy the biggest of corporations. A coordinated effort by a dozen of the most powerful governments will bring the biggest multinational to their knees in short order.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @08:58PM
>To oversimplify, if we look at the human brain as 2 hemispheres, with one being more imagination and creativity where much of the ego is, and the other side rational ("critical thinking"), the more emotional / impulsive side wins out in crises.
It's nothing to do with the hemispheres, and everything to do with the amygdala and hypothalamus and executive feedback loops.
>they formulated a republic that became one of the greatest nations on earth.
They had the benefit of a largely uncontested and immensely wealthy land possessed of virtually every resource in an era when technology was sufficiently advanced for efficient extraction of that wealth. They had the biggest leg-up of any nation in the world. This is a correlation/causation issue and I'd posit that given the state of affairs today it's reflective of the fact that the system, like all governments before it, is the problem. The fact of the matter is that it is exploitable, and has been exploited, and has been so for decades largely unchallenged because of the immense inertia it possesses. And all the process does is obfuscate by implying itself as democratic while ingraining a self-perpetuating aristocracy who at the end of the day tends to be incompetent because there simply isn't a real metric to measure them against.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Sunday January 16 2022, @01:15PM (4 children)
It would be evil if educational standards are intentionally lowered down. Sorry for bringing him into the discussion, but Hitler once said, after taking (I think it was) Ukraine and was met with resistance from intellectuals, that their local school system had to be changed. He said: "as servants they only need to be able to count up to 100, so they will be too stupid to revolt".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @04:09PM (3 children)
Given the thread, don't you think you should have provided a citation at least for the quote, or were you just making a point by not doing so?
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday January 17 2022, @12:25AM (2 children)
It's in ISBN 342116607 on page 76. The quote was actually written by Bormann, but he just wrote down Hitler's ideas: "Die slawische Fruchtbarkeit is unerwünscht... Bildung ist gefährlich. Es genügt, wenn sie bis hundert zählen können".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday January 18 2022, @05:04AM (1 child)
(Score: 3, Informative) by inertnet on Tuesday January 18 2022, @07:49AM
ISBN 342116607
Title: Die letzten Notizen von Martin Bormann. Ein Dokument und seine Verfasser.
Author: Lew Besymenski
The book was originally written by Russian historian Besymenski. The Russians were the first to enter Berlin at the end of the war, and they brought a lot of documents to Russia. Their historians had a lot to work with. The book was later translated to German and I bought it for some research I did. The "count to 100" quote was actually meant for all Slavic people including Russia. But if I remember correctly it was because the Germans met some resistance by Ukrainian intellectuals and concluded that intellectuals are undesirable among "Untermensche".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @06:23PM (9 children)
Sorry, but much of education is the process of ERADICATING critical thinking and stuffing heads with the desired worldview. You generally don't get the best grade by disagreeing with the teacher. Science and math courses are of course not opinion based but generally fields with a "correct" answer, so what I said is a liberal arts problem.
English and history departments (psychology for upper studies) are the worst about this because they are based on story telling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @07:13PM (7 children)
The polarization in politics began with education. Non-STEM education was an easy target, but also convenient as philosophy is an easy economic target and helps minimize anyone that criticizes the creep towards fascism. Wonder why it took conservatives so long to reize how fascist the US is, but it is also scary how it was eadily done through lies. Things are going to get much worse before better
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @07:55PM
The camo, black outfits and military worship are a subtle clue...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn1VxaMEjRU [youtube.com]
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @08:39PM (5 children)
Define fascist, 'cause that's quite a fucking non-sensical buzzword that gets tossed around by both sides with an impossibly fluid definition. And it has been for a long time, Orwell wrote on it in fact.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @10:24PM
Fascism [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 16 2022, @11:08PM (3 children)
It's not a buzzword. It has clear meaning, though perhaps more expansive than mathematicians would prefer. Fascists benefit when others insist on narrow, binary definitions.
I shall polnt out an excellent resource [theanarchistlibrary.org], written by Umberto Eco, which highlights how important it is that fascism exists in multiple dimensions. Three takeaways:
Orwell's take is a great starting point. But it's only a start. Eco made the problem comprehensible to non-academics. Rigid definitions, as Aristotle pointed out, are only useful in one field (and it's not politics).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @11:51AM (2 children)
And yet you fail to both refute his point and to define fascism.
Historically (and the original definition), fascism was the amalgamation of state power and corporatism.
Currently, "Fascism" is a derogatory term that means "Authoritarians I don't like".
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @02:56PM (1 child)
I'm not doing the homework for some random stranger whose primary feature is being a disingeneous asshole on the internet.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @04:21PM
Fascist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 17 2022, @04:18PM
True, as a generality. But, there have been times and places that bucked the trend.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday January 17 2022, @06:26PM (1 child)
The people who are against education are the same group that would do away with thought control and would forbid any dark sarcasm.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18 2022, @12:08AM
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/teenager-who-went-viral-after-arguing-with-his-teacher-that-there-are-only-two-genders-told-it-s-not-ok-for-him-to-return-to-the-school-a4180816.html [standard.co.uk]