The EU is to change the law to make social media owners and company executives personally liable with fines, or potential jail sentences, for failing to deal with misinformation that promotes violence. That’s good, but teaching critical thinking is even more important.
AI is about to make the threat of misinformation orders of magnitude greater. It is now possible to fake images, video, and audio indistinguishable from reality. We need new ways to combat this, and relying on top-down approaches isn’t enough. There’s another likely consequence - expect lots of social media misinformation telling you how bad critical thinking is. The people who use misinformation don’t want smart, informed people who can spot them lying.
How long until some dumbfuck waste of carbon conservative declares this to be woke?
Or has it happened already?
Woke is an adjective derived from African-American Vernacular English originally meaning alertness to racial prejudice and discrimination.
Yes it’s woke. Yes that’s good. I’ll never shy away from calling out the right’s ridiculous demonisation of anti-racism…
Edit: Also yea, I bet Nigel Farage or some other Reform fool is already yelling into the void about this.
Canada here. I feel like I wasn’t taught critical thinking, either directly (eg, how valid is an argument) or indirectly (eg, evaluating research), until undergraduate. High school didn’t really tap critical thinking. Science and math were about learning skills, history was just memorizing a narrative, English was reading comprehension, writing ability, and literary theory.
Also, in the last 15-20 years, we’ve went from widely thinking that online sources are untrustworthy and that using Wikipedia was lazy to the mainstream never talking about being a critical user of the online world and people from students to politicians using chatgpt to write their assignments.
On another note, I wonder if susceptibility to far-right misinformation is purely a critical thinking issue and not also about a lack of cultural/intersectional self-reflection and awareness. I spoke to a family member recently (we’re White), and he caught me completely off-guard by ranting about how White people are being erased (eg, no White people in a group of people in an ad he saw). I didn’t know how to respond - I think that’s an absurd concern - and I still don’t, but his perspective seemed informed by a lack of more than just critical thinking
On another note, I wonder if susceptibility to far-right misinformation is purely a critical thinking issue and not also about a lack of cultural/intersectional self-reflection and awareness.
So I read a lot of psychology by researchers looking at things like decision making and bias, and I’ve seen several of them acknowledge falling prey to the same things they research. Additionally, being better at logic makes you better at motivated reasoning.
Knowledge is absolutely valuable (and gives you tools to identify the failures after the fact, which has its own value), but your belief that self evaluation and a consistent effort to improve your process is also critically important is accurate. If you don’t make the effort, the knowledge doesn’t do a lot.
Edit: A source for the motivated reasoning, though it’s something I’ve seen referenced by a lot of sources with a variety of different original research behind it.
I feel like I was half-taught critical thinking, but mostly, I was taught to value it. I remember adults kept telling us to use our critical thinking skills and I knew it was important but I had no idea what they meant. I look back and see traces of being taught those skills here and there but it wasn’t until later that I got a clearer picture. I think the closest was a media literacy class in HS where we were asked to sort news articles as either fact or opinion and that’s where things began to click for me that got the ball rolling.
For all the shit people like to talk about public school, I think they did a good job overall. I had great teachers who were passionate about their jobs, had big hearts, and knew what we needed to learn.
It must be nice to have a government that takes reasonable action when the social contract goes wrong instead of “Thoughts and prayers. Here. Have more poorly trained cops.”
