2021, Facebook was in the news several times.
Doesn’t the facebook crisis reveal a deeper crisis? We are poor in the worst way to be poor: mentally.
Scientists are trained to identify logical fallacies, inconsistencies, and contradictions. In ambiguous cases, they can describe their uncertainty quite precisely.
The population at large has no such mental tools. Such training does not take place in public schools. In fact, schools train students the opposite: the unquestioned consumption and recitation of presented information. There can be no question; tax dollars have subsidized Facebook’s success.
Now, it seems we have two choices:
(1) cultivating mental wealth in the population
(2) requiring tech nobility to suppress undesirable information
How is (2) not seen as unspeakably radical?
Action Steps
Public Education
We must demand that students be taught how to think, not just what to think. Without this concession, the public school system is merely a threat to democracy, and perhaps its greatest. There are three areas which are uncontroversial and necessary to evaluate truth.
- Empiricism
hypothesis testing
- Logic
Most heroin addicts have used in marijuana, therefore, marijuana is a gateway drug. Most criminals have used pants, therefore pants should be made illegal. The ‘gateway’ argument is repeated so often and so shamelessly, it is a testament to the utter failure of public schools to teach logic.
- Statistics
Average wealth in Germany is greater than in peer countries, yet the median wealth is lower than in some. Obviously, terms like ‘mean’ and ‘median’ are not interchangeable and can be used to manipulate public perception.
Public Writing
Linking
Always link technical terms to their definitions. For example, “correlation” ought to point to a page that describes, at least within the length of a tweet, what correlation is, or how it applies to the anchor. Readers may not be left to guess the meanings of technical terms.
If you don’t have time to research and link, fine. See below.
Integration
Google already uses metrics to rate web pages based on how much they are referenced by other pages, and how much weight those other pages have, based on how much they, in turn, are referenced. Every page is therefore a descendant of multiple ancestors. Web browsers should show this ancestry. It is possible to visually depict where in the blogosphere a particular post is situated. Posts that link heavily to wikipedia are in one part of the genealogy tree, posts that link heavily to foreign-manipulated adversary websites appear in another. Every post can have an ‘internet gene’ : 27% foreign adversary, 10% anti-science, and so forth. Some posts are 100% Rupert Murdoch, and should be prominently displayed as such. Posts whose key words are unlinked, or whose generic words are linked, appear among the debris of the internet.
It is important to note that this already happens, but for the profit of private companies, not the health of the internet. Academic books and journal articles self-document their intellectual ancestry in the form of citations. Individual’s credit worthiness is evaluated by private companies, and no-fly lists are basically government-written minority reports. If determining a post’s intellectual ancestry is radical, it is radical somewhere among the debris of the internet.