The thing I always think about when someone says misinformation is who decides. The ministry of truth?
Critical thinking means that you have the right tools to decide yourself if something is misinformation or not
Use your words, mate – what exactly do you think is wrong with teaching critical thinking skills? Do you understand that they’re not going to just “say something is misinformation” but teach kids to be able to evaluate whether something is likely going to be bullshit or not, among other skills?
I’m highly skeptical of teaching critical thinking, personally. Isn’t that an oxymoron?
It would be hypocritical if you forced them to accept what you were teaching without questioning it. No good education institution behaves that way.
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.
Twenty years too late.
To be fair every school I ever went to in the US said they were teaching critical thinking skills but never directly tackled it. And I think that’s a big problem. We need to teach people a specific set of skills.
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.
