> Reframing the question at hand around this metaphor: What would an effective vaccine look like for these thought viruses?
Well, if stopping disinformation is too hard for various reasons, maybe we can
focus on the problem from the other direction: we need to find ways for accurate information to be easier to find and to verify.
If you think of misinformation more like a bacteria, then one of the common causes of bacterial infections is that the regular good bacteria have been wiped out for one reason or another. Antibiotics might help, or they might make the problem worse.
I do think we have some serious institutional problems that are preventing the usual sources of accurate information from operating effectively. News that's become overtly partisan, and an economic model that selects for the most sensational headlines. Scientific research findings that aren't reproducible. Universities becoming increasingly run like profit-focused corporations, and too expensive for many to attend due to lack of public funding. Misinformation is always a problem even in the best of times, but it can also fill the void when there's a lack of accurate information.
I don't know what the solution is. I tend towards more distributed models of information sharing that have fewer institutional gatekeepers declaring who the experts are, but I don't know exactly what that looks like, or how to do that in a way that tends towards more credibility rather than less.
Well, if stopping disinformation is too hard for various reasons, maybe we can focus on the problem from the other direction: we need to find ways for accurate information to be easier to find and to verify.
If you think of misinformation more like a bacteria, then one of the common causes of bacterial infections is that the regular good bacteria have been wiped out for one reason or another. Antibiotics might help, or they might make the problem worse.
I do think we have some serious institutional problems that are preventing the usual sources of accurate information from operating effectively. News that's become overtly partisan, and an economic model that selects for the most sensational headlines. Scientific research findings that aren't reproducible. Universities becoming increasingly run like profit-focused corporations, and too expensive for many to attend due to lack of public funding. Misinformation is always a problem even in the best of times, but it can also fill the void when there's a lack of accurate information.
I don't know what the solution is. I tend towards more distributed models of information sharing that have fewer institutional gatekeepers declaring who the experts are, but I don't know exactly what that looks like, or how to do that in a way that tends towards more credibility rather than less.