Our Problem Is Gullibility, Not Disinformation

https://danielmiessler.com/blog/our-real-weakness-is-gullibility-not-disinformation/

by danielrm26 • 6 years ago

51 38 6 years ago

This feels like a rehash of "guns don't kill people, people kill people".

kwhitefoot• 6 years ago

No it is more like 'guns kill people but a lot of people don't believe that and we need to educate them so that they will understand it'

_qulr8• 6 years ago

The major difference is that your own brain can stop disinformation, but it can't stop a bullet.

adamnemecek3• 6 years ago

Why does propaganda work if it's so simple then?

xkcd-sucks• 6 years ago

Most examples cited in this article seem like problems of faith, in that they concern matters that individual Deplorables cannot (practically) observe themselves. Or of "misplaced" faith, in the case of Jesus, demons and ghosts.

Which is not too surprising - people have gotten screwed by faith forever: Uncritical belief of the Church, the State, the salesman or prophet, etc. often leads to the believers' exploitation for the basest of ends.

Which is not to say that killing bullshit once and for all is impossible or an unworthy goal, but it's high effort and messy.

redis_mlc• 6 years ago

matters that individual Deplorables cannot (practically) observe themselves.

During this pandemic, the deplorables continued to farm and deliver food, keeping us alive while the elites burned our cities down. (Dr. VDH.)

The deplorables voted in Trump because the elites couldn't be bothered enforcing immigration (the wall) or maintaining factory jobs in the USA (outsourcing to China.) (Dr. VDH.)

So I would suggest you develop an understanding of how our country was hollowed out before criticizing the very people the elites destroyed financially.

Regarding religion, at the moment, our young people worship Tinder hookups and Instagram selfies, the twin gods of narcissism, instead of Jesus, resulting in the total destruction of the family unit. How's that working out? (RPMH)

FYI: you sound exactly like the coastal elites that got us into this mess. The California HSR is a perfect example of how worthless they are - all hot air, no rail.

When Trump wins his second election by a landslide, you can refer to this post for the reasons why.

krageon• 6 years ago

You present a lot of opinions but not really anything to back them up. Furthermore, this is incredibly US-centric in a way that's just not relatable at all if you're not mired in all the tv drama there.

notduncansmith3• 6 years ago

high effort and messy

This, especially when the definition of success changes depending on who you ask and at what point in their lives. In the last decade alone I’ve made quite a few reversals.

Kamic• 6 years ago

I think the faith and spirit examples are a low blow. No one can explain why any of us are here. The other examples are dead on.

techbio• 6 years ago

The Salesman should be capitalized, it isn't one person, it's the foundational driver of most of the information that people create and consume in digital and mass-communication.

dmerks7• 6 years ago

The patch to gullibility is critical thinking. Rudimentary critical thinking in any field requires general knowledge of it. Citizens of democracies need to think critically on many topics, hence they need to know a lot in many fields, and to learn ongoingly throughout their lives. Education becomes important. But Education costs a lot...

Maybe the solution is to gradually make learning as accessible, inexpensive and beneficial as possible.

notduncansmith3• 6 years ago

I think you’re spot-on with making learning as accessible as possible to have a more informed populace, but making the information available is only half of getting people to take it in. Trauma blocks critical thinking and internal honesty, and we have a massive trauma and PTSD problem, to the point where poverty and food insecurity meaningfully reduces effective IQ. Thankfully MAPS is working on treating PTSD at scale. I have set up a recurring monthly donation and I encourage anyone who values intellectualism to do the same, so that we may swell our ranks with those who are currently too hurt to think clearly.

spicybright• 6 years ago

Can you be more specific with this "mass trauma" idea? Never heard of it before.

jdietrich• 6 years ago

we have a massive trauma and PTSD problem

Do we, or are the diagnostic criteria of PTSD so broad that the disorder is being massively over-diagnosed?

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/da.20586

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.09.006

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/1745691613504115

pbronez• 6 years ago

Can you provide some more information about MAPS?

varispeed• 6 years ago

Government is also blocking research and treatment of PTSD using certain drugs to help pharmaceutical companies. For many years getting medical cannabis or other substances deemed illegal was next to impossible without becoming a criminal.

dmerks7• 6 years ago

Helping those in need overcome their difficulties and become ready to learn is a part of accessibility to Education. It's a part of offering equal opportunity to all.

_qulr8• 6 years ago

I'm not sure you can teach critical thinking. In my experience, people are mostly "born" with it... or not. I say this as a former academic philosopher who actually taught "critical thinking" classes at the university level. They amounted to a hodgepodge of subject-specific wisdom collected under a generic title. (I didn't design the courses but merely adopted the preexisting curriculum and textbooks.)

In general, individual students vary widely in their receptiveness to education of any kind. A lot of them are just "seat fillers" who barely pay attention and are only there out of fear of the negative consequences of nonattendance. It's incredibly difficult to get through to them. In this world where information is easily available everywhere, at your fingertips, ignorance is a deliberate choice.

_qulr8• 6 years ago

In fairness, maybe we just start way too late? I mean, I'm all in favor of debates over the existence of God for example in elementary school, at the same age kids start getting forced to go to Sunday school. But a lot of parents would have fits over that topic in public schools, which is why we can't do it until college, at which point it's unlikely to make much difference.

The formative years of a child are almost completely under control of the parents. It's a chicken and egg problem, because it's difficult to change the public education policy without the consent of the parents who themselves were not raised to think critically. There's near universal agreement that math education is important, but "critical thinking" is controversial at best among parents. A lot of them would rather home school their kids than allow exposure to different ways of thinking.

dmerks7• 6 years ago

If I tell a child who knows squirrels are usually white, brown, grey or black, and say "hey look! A purple squirrel!", chances are the child will think I'm fooling around. If I say the same thing to a child who has never seen a squirrel, he's more likely to turn his head without doubting my words.

Is knowing the possible colors of squirrel fur an innate trait, or is it something that is learned?

I agree, critical thinking is difficult to teach directly. I can't tell the child-- or an adult for that matter-- to foretell something he doesn't know. The focus of Education is knowledge in various fields like politics, history, physics, mathematics, linguistics, etc.

I was an academic as well. Some classes were certainly funded, maintained and encouraged because of ignorance or political reasons. The entire educational system were I live was reformed based on political reasons. The pilot study in numerous schools failed miserably 20 years ago. The results were never shared with the public before its nation wide implementation. The reform is still in place today. The only copy of the evaluation I know of is a university library and was printed by the professor who was its director and who was subsequently demoted. This happened in a G8 country. Universities are far from immune from selfish or poor decision making.

Try telling the 100000+ homeless students in NY that ignorance is a deliberate choice. Maybe it is a deliberate choice for those in power to dictate others' ignorance. It's also tough being a good learner when you're both a full time worker and student.

When I was a student, I remember not being particularly interested in listening to TA drones regurgitate empty words either, especially when I was sleepy.

thu21112• 6 years ago

I think that's not enough. Our societies problem is not that learning (or information) is expensive and inaccessible. The internet has solved that problem already, with open access papers lagging behind general progress but that is now being resolved as well.

The problem is deeper. Critical thinking requires you to be willing to engage in criticism. Or phrased another way, it's about skepticism.

Skepticism is deeply unpopular. People who engage in critical thinking are shamed, censored, fired, sometimes punished by the police if their critical thinking leads to them to criticise the beliefs of those in power. There are a lot of people in the world, and especially in the sort of Hacker News reading social groups, who are deathly afraid of critical thinking of any form because they don't believe most people can really do it. They would much prefer blind, automatic belief and credulity.

This article is a prime example of the genre, but you can see this in the way Wojcicki makes YouTube block anyone who doesn't "believe" in the pronouncements of the WHO, even though the WHO has constantly changed its own advice and thus anyone engaged in critical thinking could easily have disagreed with it at any point. LinkedIn has the same policy.

However these people are usually the worst at critical thinking. The author himself is so poor at it that he's spreading misinformation and making loony claims, whilst railing against others he accuses of doing so.

For instance, he provides a list of things Americans supposedly don't believe or believe. He says, "Millions don’t believe in vaccination". What does it mean to "believe" in vaccination? His citation for this is a Washington Post report on polling that actually asked people two rather specific questions:

1. Should vaccination be mandatory? (~33% said no)

2. Is the measles vaccine harmful? (in the west, ~90% said it's safe)

The vast majority of people say no and no, which are the conventional answers. In fact the statement is useless - the population of the US is so large that for "millions" of Americans to believe something requires only 0.5% of the population to believe it, and in this case he isn't even precise about what he means by "believe". When you drill into the actual data it's hardly an issue.

As for "45% of Americans believe in ghosts and demons", does he really believe people will take a poll like that seriously? Only someone incapable of critical thinking would take such a claim at face value. If half of Americans believed in ghosts and demons, there would be a thriving industry of anti-ghost and anti-demonic services. There'd be ghostbusting shops in every town. There aren't, but there sure are a lot of people who will troll pollsters and fools who blindly believe them for a laugh.

growlist• 6 years ago

Can't we all just trust Snopes though? /s

jl2718• 6 years ago

Education? A non-gullible student would not graduate high school. What most people, seemingly author included, consider to be 'knowledge' is no better than rote. Consider that one person can have the exact same experience, and come out of it with exact opposite beliefs. The difference is whether they are told to believe it, movie versus news, novel versus history book. Just try to verify you kids' history lessons with observable non-narrative evidence. If you do have evidence, does it actually prove the entire narrative, or does it simply bolster a tiny piece within a mosaic of myth? In science and law, the standard of proof is massively greater than the standard of disproof. Any 'knowledge' tested by a different standard is at best a guess, most likely dogma, and at worst, propaganda, intentional disinformation. High school teachers assign Orwell, "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past.", and somehow believe that this is a warning about somebody else, that they are not the primary agents of the second statement, and that they are themselves immune to such manipulation. Has a student ever been asked who controls and manipulates them and received a passing grade by pointing the finger right back at the teacher themselves? No; it's always some boogeyman that they have never met, but must girder themselves against with the dogma taught within these walls. And if you don't believe it, not only will the boogeyman get you, but we will fail you and destroy your life. It's for your own good; you'll understand someday.

I will choose the most basic fact on his list. I want to see the author prove that the earth is a sphere by his own observations. I can almost guarantee that no mandated high school curriculum teaches even how to do this, nonetheless asks students to do so. The standard of belief is 'rational' narrative, as in, a story that contains no major contradictions within itself, and for expediency, is not subject to cross-examination. Dogma. If I recall correctly, this question was asked in an astronomy PhD seminar at MIT, and nobody knew how to do it.

So smug is the author in his ignorance. 'Not believing' should be the default. Narratives should be understood as culture, good to know, possibly true, and likely imperfect, but ultimately just a story that may be learned from just like religion or myth, whether true or not. I have a sense that ancient people understood this better than we do today.

His criticism of others is nothing but tribalism. He's not educating in the sense of providing evidence toward a rational conclusion, or even bolstering his own narrative. He's simply labeling other people as lesser than himself. And, to head off any accusations of hypocrisy, to some extent, so am I with him. The point here is that so-called 'knowledge' is an ancient battleground rooted in disparate sets of values. People should know that they are being indoctrinated, and also that it's nearly impossible to survive among other humans without choosing some flavor of that. But it does have implications for your life, whether your own beliefs serve you, harm you, or shames you into serving someone else.

ZeroGravitas• 6 years ago

I disagree.

Taking the religion example. If you look around the world, most people follow their parents faith.

It seems likely that many have been exposed to other faiths. Do we think that those other faiths seem less credible and so people are seeing through them on some logical basis? Or has their parents/local community's faith simply spent a lot longer on convincing them it's true.

Similarly, the ideas that the author seems to consider dangerous didn't grow in vaccum. I dont think a russian agent could bet his colleagues that he'd get Americans to believe anything they named, like George Washington invented the grilled cheese sandwich.

Buy they don't need to convince people of anything specific, just amplify existing messages like:

Scientists are lying to you about covid.

Which feeds off extensive prep work from "scientists are lying to you about climate change" which is probably the best funded disinformation campaign in history.

And is further reinforced by authority positions in their communities, repeating the disinformation.

The GOP in it's current incarnation can't exist without disinformation, and so they'll fight any attempt to educate their base, and if they fail they'll just disenfranchise the ones that wise up.

scsilver• 6 years ago

Or has their parents/local community's faith simply spent a lot longer on convincing them it's true.

As I get older, I dont think its about people really thinking it's true, but more about the consequences of opposing the "truth" that your community, your friends, family, have merged into their identities. If you look it it through network effects, virtue signaling, social status, adopting the communal view of the world will have more benefit to their every day lives than taking a rational view of the world.

If the people around me were convinced the sky was orange, and they determine my status, my access to community, my job, my safety net, I would think maintaining their trust in me as more important than proving to them and myself the sky was actually blue. Our human needs are much more immediate than science and facts.

Even science faces these communal effects, needing new generations that arent tied into that network to push forward true revolutionary ideas.

thu21112• 6 years ago

Are you saying, "Scientists are lying to you about covid" is a false statement and has always been false?

Because I'm pretty sure that when "scientists" (not all of them but those in power) suddenly flipped from saying masks did nothing to masks are essential, the justification given was that they had previously been lying but now didn't need to anymore. So the statement is unambiguously true, if taken over the entire course of events.

Moreover, I think most people are too smart to believe that whether COVID-19 is spread at protests depends on the views of those who are protesting, but plenty of scientists have made exactly that claim too. They were quite clearly lying.

The idea that scientists never lie is the biggest lie of all. Of course they lie. They routinely write fraudulent papers and hope nobody tries to replicate them, but there's also the issue that lying isn't binary. There's a big spectrum between full honesty and lying, with a big area of murky intellectual practices in the middle, practices like woeful exaggeration, cherry picking, abusive citations (e.g. citing a document in support of a statement that doesn't actually support that statement) and all the other problems that meta-science writers complain about.

If society accepted that scientists don't actually have better souls than politicians, business owners or journalists then we'd already be a long way towards solving the gullibility problem.

As for climate change, well, the whole ClimateGate thing did involve destruction of emails by researchers and then lying about it: to the British Parliament, no less! Even the Guardian bailed out at that point. Again, the idea that scientists can and do lie isn't some disinformation campaign. It's obvious and true.

AtlasBarfed• 6 years ago

Unfortunately, if you have a subconscious, you have some degree of gullibility / susceptibility to propaganda.

Our Problem Is Gullibility, Not Disinformation

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