People don’t imagine what it was like then. It was wild. Wild in a sort of you’re all alone all the time, except when you physically is hanging out or at home, and no one knows what’s going on. At all. Some people have theories but they are insane. School teaches you things that are compley useless for living right now.
Now its just some 14 year old from a reddit thread
Glad AI is finally taking us back to an era of disinformation
Back?
Yeah, I haven’t really seen a huge shift in the volume of misinformation. Sure, the topics and delivery methods have changed, but it has been a firehose this entire time.
The volume has increased exponentially. With generative AI, there are thousands of “news” sites with landing pages that look better than many real local news organizations.
These sites have agendas and are able to post the same story across the web, written differently each time, to look like events are taking place across the country/world and all being reported on by local news orgs. It’s all astroturf, as far as the eye can see.
This list from Wikipedia just barely scratches the surface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites
And this doesn’t even touch on the amount of bullshit real news orgs publish without proper investigation thanks to the 24 hour news cycle and the rush to be the first to cover a story.
Yeah, there used to be misinformation published by news organizations and people with agendas. But that used to take significant effort. Now, I can set up a fake news website and fill it with stories in an afternoon.
There were tons of misinformation sites in place the moment the web existed. I was there, 6,000 years ago…
Seriously though, Fox News and all the other Murdoch owned media has been a firehouse for decades. Magazines and print media like the Weekly World News as well. On the internet the misinformation spreader set up shop early, and it was mainly the search engines that directed people to the better sources.
The main change is that the people are choosing to consume the firehose of social media.
Now instead of your aunt coming at you with misinfo she learned from her aunt, it’s your aunt coming at you with misinformation she learned from a russian bot farm.
Did you spray for Russians under your bed before going to sleep? You really should, and check behind the sofa and in the dryer too. Russians can disguise themselves as Bounce dryer sheets, and the latest Russians can send themselves over Ethernet using the RoE protocol: Russian over Ethernet.
Russia! Quite an imaginary world you live in! Aunts and Russians and bots and misinformation and all these people targeting you! How exciting!
Can I send you my Moral Rearmament and John Birch Society fliers?
I’m oddly honored that I got a 3 paragraph troll with pictures in response to a comment that was barely even about russia.
“I don’t like what you say therefore you are a troll.” Classic shitlib behaviour.
Yep. The mark of a stupid Westerner is how much they blame Russia for their country’s problems (the exception being Ukraine obviously). Meanwhile the US literally has a billion+ dollar anti-China propaganda budget (taxpayer funded) and a decentralized, private network of pro-Israel propagandists backed by the richest people in the country, buying up entire media companies for that purpose.
GOOD point.
The well documented Russian troll networks simply do not exist.
I have the opposite problem. My mother doesn’t believe anything I tell her and thinks it is misinformation that I’ve been fed.
Have you ever tried to out crazy the crazy and force them to try to take the reasonable stance? It’s cathartic.
Yes and to make it even worse, your aunt back in the day would tell 10 people some BS and maybe 3 would believe her. Not some Russian bot factory spits out BS to 10 million people and a lot more believe it.
But at least you can counter it with misinformation from an AI bot :D
You went to a library and read a couple of encyclopedias.
I had a fantastic working class education at the local library and our home encyclopedia. I definitely carry around 40 year old random factoids and such just like everybody else, but I still love researching things to this day.
I remember that one time when I was around eight, a neighbor put the entire 1976 World Book encyclopedia at the end of his driveway. I ran home, grabbed a wheelbarrow and carted that knowledge back to my house. It was about twenty years out of date at the time but still the basic concepts were valid enough that I kept referring to it until I left for university.
My 4th grade science teacher genuinely taught us that “blood is blue before it leaves your body and turns red due to oxidation from contacting the air”
Even as a kid I thought that was stupid. If blood is blue in the body and only turns red when it touches oxygen, then why is it red in the water?
I was told that’s only in the movies. In real life it would be blue.
But then again I got a detention for arguing that the moon is visible during the day. The detention was because I pointed out to the window and said look, and she was embarrassed.
Because there’s oxygen in water. That’s what fish breathe!
The answer is obvious, dissolved oxygen in the water–duh!
The detention was because … she was embarrassed.
Ohh yes, classic detention for proving the teacher wrong. There’s a depressing amount of teachers who rule by their ego instead of by science. It’s why I now consider my school discipline record as a source of pride instead of shame.
One if my brothers teachers sent over half of her class to detention one day and the vice principal brought them all back like “you cant just send your whole class, get a grip”
That’s wild to me cos like… We didn’t need internet to tell us this was incorrect.
We had the internet and a handful of us tried to contest it. She said “look at your textbooks, they clearly drew that blood from your arteries”
It’s not like it doesn’t have some logic to it. Blood is to carries oxygen throughout the body and then cycles back through the lungs to get more oxygen. So when you look at your arms and see the blue veins we just thought that was obviously the deoxygenated blood returning to the heart.
It made basic sense, so no one was running down to the library to check out a medical textbook to disprove it.
My first thought was how ears and noses look red when sunlight shines through them. If blood was blue, wouldn’t they be blue or purple?
Ever see a blood draw? Blood comes out of a vein, into a non-O2 environment.
I think we just don’t do as much critical introspection as we like to think. Its easier to imagine maybe there was a tiny amount of O2 or something than that the thing we were taught was entirely false.
I think we just don’t do as much critical introspection as we like to think.
It’s definitely true, and it shows that the stuff you learn as kids is even more ingrained than we even notice most of the time. Kids don’t normally have blood drawn, so it’s not like elementary schools were filled with a bunch of kids saying “wait a minute, that didn’t happen with my last blood draw.”
There were actually about 5 of us that contested it and she tried to say “they drew that blood from your arteries”
You look when they draw blood?
Yes. Its neat. You dont?
Develop extreme philosophy that resembles Stoicism, but is actually a really disfunctional version of it, apparently.
This is why encyclopedia salesmen was even a thing.
If you didn’t have that, go to a library.
Eventually there was encyclopedia britannica which was basically one of the coolest things you could have for free on your computer in that era.
Funnily even the usage was pretty similar to doom-browsing Wikipedia:
- pick a volume
- open random page
- read about medieval remedies for mental illnesses
- open another random page
- read about some rare tropical bird
- repeat and rinse
- maybe brag about your tidbit knowledge to your friends later (if you had any)
And there was a friend’s older brother or cousin, who said some unbelievable horseshit, you thought was true for many years. And you didn’t even ask.
That still holds true even with the internet around
Joe Rogan
Actually fucking Joe Rogan is the perfect analogy, he just has random people on that say some stuff to him and he is like damn that’s crazy and doesn’t even fact check it, and then what he likes he carries forward with him and what he doesn’t like hearing just ignores
red blood is a myth. all the homies have neon purple blood
According to my color-blind friend, purple isn’t a real color - our blood is actually green.
sounds like your color-blind friend ain’t one of the homies. i’m sorry for your loss
Thank all the medical and educational texts that chose blue to identify veins returning to the heart with a blue color and arteries away from the heart as red. A simple color choice to differentiate and somehow someone decided that this was the color of blood.
It doesn’t help that some blood vessels close enough to the surface of the skin can appear blue.
Fair point.
I remember looking up “dirty” words in the dictionary as a real young one with a gaggle of friends
Most people in my life still don’t fact check. I’m constantly chasing the truth while the convo runs away full of misinfo
I honestly have no idea how people can live like that. Yet I see it so often that I’m convinced it’s the norm.
People like to live within their comfort zones. I remember a study being referenced that claimed to show introducing facts contrary to a person’s existing viewpoint don’t get them to change, it just made them double-down and be more defensive.
Oh look, misinformation, lol. The study was about how science communication is based on outdated ideas and that simply presenting facts is not as effective as whole-person education. The media seems to have just read the title and maybe abstract, and ran with “you can’t change minds, stop trying”, when that’s not what it concluded.
To quote from the conclusion of the study itself:
Facts will not always change minds, but there is promise that other things will, including creating spaces for group dialogue and debate, targeting emotions and embodied knowledge, embracing multiple perspectives, altering environments to create new behaviors, and being strategic about whom we seek to target with our message. We need to provide training for our students in cognitive and behavioral science, as human attitudes and actions are both the primary cause of and the solution to the current conservation crisis (Nielsen et al., 2021).
I remember a study being referenced that claimed to show introducing facts contrary to a person’s existing viewpoint don’t get them to change, it just made them double-down and be more defensive.
To be fair, this is exactly what they said. Facts alone are not enough - you need rhetoric. So, not misinformation.
That is not what the study said though. OP said that introducing facts causes people to double down and doesn’t get them to change, when the study says that introducing facts only works a percentage of the time.
Facts alone sometimes works, but it’s more effective when combined with other strategies. Saying facts alone doesn’t work, is misinfo.
Edit: clarifying pronouns
Fair enough. However, I was under the interpretation that evidence remains the same either way; it is the way it is presented that affects the likelihood of someone changing their mind. Presenting the evidence by itself may have a small chance at a positive effect, while including proper rhetoric lowers the negative and increases positive chance.
Therefore evidence should always be presented “correctly” to avoid setbacks, and the takeaways are thus functionally identical.
I mean I get your point, and I’m sure it’s more nuanced than this and depends on a whole host of other factors like whether it’s a politically charged topic (deoxygenated blood being blue vs HRT actually working), emotional state, connection to other core beliefs (like religious ones), etc. some or all of which are mentioned in the study.
Like I’m sure for topics that aren’t really important, just presenting the correct fact is enough to adjust most people’s view, unless they are particularly stubborn. Like saying “peeing on a jellyfish sting doesn’t really help actually” will usually be met with “oh, huh, I didn’t know that”. But even something as simple as saying “the earth isn’t flat” will make some people very angry. Start listing facts for a more complex topic like climate change, economics, or sociology and people will absolutely double down on whatever black-and-white viewpoint they already hold.
But yeah sure enough, they shouldn’t have used an absolute qualifier I guess.
Therefore evidence should always be presented “correctly” to avoid setbacks, and the takeaways are thus functionally identical.
The problem that you’re running into here, is that there is no “correct” method to avoid setbacks. It is not possible to have a 100% rate of efficacy when dealing with such a diverse group as the entirety of the human race. Even the study mentions that methods will need to vary depending on who you’re talking to, and it’s likely that methods will need to be changed or adapted as demographics change or new knowledge is reached.
Fun fact: You can still order a current print volume of World Book Encyclopedia for the low price of $1,349.00
My parents got me this set of the Childcraft children’s encyclopaedias when I was like 6? I inhaled those things for knowledge back in the pre-internet days!
Am considering getting one for my own kiddo when they get old enough, but like most things from my childhood - they look to have been discontinued.
Just print all of Wikipedia
Honestly surprisingly inexpensive given that about what a set of encyclopedias would cost you 35+ years ago. Not sure about World Book specifically but I know Britannicas were over $1k in 1990 because I remember a door-to-door salesmen trying to sell them to me. Can’t imagine anyone other than a library buying these now, and even there they’re probably all collecting dust.
I’m willing to bet it’s cheaper than ever, (inflation adjusted)
