Wednesday Morning Rant

As a child, a common refrain I heard from both parents and teachers was, "go look it up." This was a favorite of my dad's. If I went to him with a question about something I could look up, he'd give me a pointer or two about how to look it up and then send me on my way. If I still had questions, we'd go into it in greater detail. The first step, though, was always to go look it up. This was the norm. If I wanted to know it, I had to go find it out.

But what happens when trying to find out at all is framed as a social ill? Fellow Moron Anonosaurus Wrecks turned me on to an article published in Forbes last week as part of an effort to make "go look it up" an act of subversion. It's about a new paper written by a man called Kevin Aslett and published in Nature - a journal that long ago entered the skin suit phase of its existence - that asserts that the phenomenon of "doing your own research" is bad for Our Democracy(tm) because you might encounter "misinformation" and believe "fake news."

Following a series of experiments, a team of U.S. researchers found that study participants were consistently 19% more likely to believe "fake news" after they had performed an online search to figure out the truth.

That's important, the experts say, because the prevalence and success of such misinformation poses a direct threat to democracy.

But what of the dangers? It's dangerous right? That is the basis of the argument, of course:

"In terms of political consequences, increased belief in misinformation has the potential to increase political cynicism and apathy towards politics, lower trust in reliable media sources, increase polarization [and] motivate political violence," Aslett tells me. He references the events of January 6, 2021, in which a mob attacked the United States Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., saying "these consequences weaken democracy."

Misinformed beliefs can also threaten public health, such as in the case of vaccine misinformation, or be used by powerful interest groups to manipulate public sentiment against climate action measures, such as the development of renewable energy projects.

It's also, of course, due to bad actors and unsophisticated search methods with search engines that aren't adequately tuned to prevent the spread of misinformation:

But search algorithms are not designed to prioritize accurate information - rather, they prioritize information designed to appeal to or exploit those algorithms. The authors of the study note that the right-wing conspiracist QAnon movement "recommends that people 'do the research' themselves, which seems like a counter-intuitive strategy for a conspiracy-theory-oriented movement. However, our findings suggest that the strategy of pushing people to verify low-quality information online might paradoxically be even more effective at misinforming them."

You can see where this is going. This is more battlespace preparation for the next round in the censorship war. Until the government can ride to the rescue through censorship, though, Forbes has some advice for you: you should trust your betters in academia.

For the time being, then, the best option for people interested in staying informed might be to check out out a digital literacy course, such as Stanford's Civic Online Reasoning program.

This sounds a lot like the paper MIT published in 2021 on the "anti-maskers" and the dangers they pose - not because they are incompetent or unsophisticated, but because they don't believe the narrative and reject their betters:

While academic science is traditionally a system for producing knowledge within a laboratory, validating it through peer review, and sharing results within subsidiary communities, anti-maskers reject this hierarchical social model. They espouse a vision of science that is radically egalitarian and individualist. This study forces us to see that coronavirus skeptics champion science as a personal practice that prizes rationality and autonomy; for them, it is not a body of knowledge certified by an institution of experts. Calls for data or scientific literacy therefore risk recapitulating narratives that anti-mask views are the product of individual ignorance rather than coordinated information campaigns that rely heavily on networked participation.

This is the same argument, even if it doesn't look like it. Both MIT and this Aslett character have arrived at the same conclusion: to maintain the narrative, the powers that be need to forbid alternatives. "Misinformation" is so risky that it's best to never leave the reservation. The risks of getting bad information are simply too great, so we must censor. If you "go look it up," you must see only "approved" sources.

But it's best if you don't look it up at all.

posted by Joe Mannix at 11:00 AM

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