Have you ever been mislead by misinformation yourself?
What are ways we can guard against being hoodwinked, and kept mentally on our toes?
I find myself, upon occasion, missing a whole lot.
For example, The Economist ran an article a while back on something I happen to know about. I read this article, was like hum, but I didn't really have an 'adverse reaction' to it, as it were, and just carried on about my day - it took someone I know independently in the field to write a long critique of the article for me to 'realise' it was essentially pedalling pseudo-pop science. (NB: I think The Economist is a perfectly fine publication. This article was not.)
This wasn't because this critique brought things I didn't know about to the table, rather, it is more like those neurons simply didn't fire when I was mindlessly doing some browsing. I find this happens to myself quite a bit.
Sorry for the long ramble, but do you relate to this or see this kind of thing featuring in how misinformation spreads? I know for example that pseudoscience sometimes runs off tautology after tautology so fast that you can't possible disentangle it; often the criticisable claims and trains of thought are heavily obfuscated. It seems plausible that this allows for the possibility of things to be kind of shoehorned into us.
haelaeif4 karma
Have you ever been mislead by misinformation yourself?
What are ways we can guard against being hoodwinked, and kept mentally on our toes?
I find myself, upon occasion, missing a whole lot.
For example, The Economist ran an article a while back on something I happen to know about. I read this article, was like hum, but I didn't really have an 'adverse reaction' to it, as it were, and just carried on about my day - it took someone I know independently in the field to write a long critique of the article for me to 'realise' it was essentially pedalling pseudo-pop science. (NB: I think The Economist is a perfectly fine publication. This article was not.)
This wasn't because this critique brought things I didn't know about to the table, rather, it is more like those neurons simply didn't fire when I was mindlessly doing some browsing. I find this happens to myself quite a bit.
Sorry for the long ramble, but do you relate to this or see this kind of thing featuring in how misinformation spreads? I know for example that pseudoscience sometimes runs off tautology after tautology so fast that you can't possible disentangle it; often the criticisable claims and trains of thought are heavily obfuscated. It seems plausible that this allows for the possibility of things to be kind of shoehorned into us.
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