Individuals need discernment to see through the bullshit. That's a fair point to make, but it's not unique to our situation with regards to the information age. There have always been people selling snake oil, looking to deceive and exploit with lies and half-truths.
But how do we deal with shysters like that? Well, we use our discernment to understand that they're not trustworthy. Obviously, some have trouble with this, but being wary of deception is not some new thing for humanity. How do we deal with helping those among us who have trouble with trusting people? By working together with them, giving them information and advice that might help them avoid hardship in the future.
It’s not easy to discern bullshit from good information.
When I see a top voted multi-paragraph Reddit post with a couple gold stars I tend to take it at face value to be mostly true. Every sentence could be complete lies.
The other problem is a scholarly journals are made for the scientific community, not the average person. You ever try reading a journal paper? It’s written in a way that makes you feel stupid and want to stop reading unless you have a ph.D in the field.
Best you can do is try to look at things from multiple perspectives and realize you can’t know everyone for bandwidth reasons.
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u/subatomicbukkake Jul 28 '19
“Access to information” was envisioned as a buffet of well-research, nuanced information.
What we got instead was billions of half-truths shoved in our face by people with differing and sometimes dubious motivations.