Technology

I like that it's a critical thinking subject, but it would be much better if you taught generic critical thinking, and used "recognising fake news" as one of the applications for critical thinking.

Been advocating this forever. Teach a boy how to avoid bullshit, he'll avoid bullshit forever

I’d really like to see the curriculum. And examples.

I feel like this is not an easy task. I suspect if someone thinks it’s not that difficult, then they are not willing to actually use political examples.

But maybe I’m wrong. I just don’t know. When I was in school NOTHING touched actual politics. Maybe that’s why I can’t conceive of how this will work when focused on that topic.

What am I missing?

Edit: When I say politics was never covered, I can give a weird anecdote:

Shortly after high school I was with some friends and asked them about the conservative/liberal thing. And they asked me a few questions and then said I was liberal, I think.

The kicker: one of the two friends went on to be a false elector who signed the documents in my home state on Jan 6th. I saw their name during the hearings.

The GOP would fight this so hard in red states

It's a required subject in Finland

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/10/world/europe/finland-misinformation-classes.html https://www.nordicpolicycentre.org.au/media_literacy_education_in_finland https://finland.fi/life-society/educated-decisions-finnish-media-literacy-deters-disinformation/

If Finland didn't educate its children to spot media bullshit, it would be overrun by Russian media bullshit, which devotes no small amount of energy to the task of convincing Finns that they'd be better off as a Russian vassal state.

For that matter, if the US did educate its children to spot media bullshit, our voters wouldn't fall for such stupid nonsense on the regular

cool, now do fake people

They need to expand on it and include propaganda, thats a larger threat to society than fake news.

I took a media studies elective in high school (Canada) and it dealt with a lot of critical approaches to media, we had to consume different media and break down target audience, purpose, identify weasel words, etc. We even had a few media people come in like a film director and marketing consultants. Led to me taking further courses about related subjects like media theory and journalism.

Was definitely very worth it, just to get these concepts in people's minds and the different angles you can consume and analyze media from. It's not even just for the educational or critical benefits either, but also for the enjoyment. I used to have an elitist attitude about making sure I only consume "good" media and sort of judged people for liking shitty things, but after learning more I could appreciate a lot more of media for what it is, and criticize it on a more meaningful less individualized level than that. So I've found learning about media has also extended to not judging people as much, and more enjoying how things can be shitty. Obviously with journalism and politics this is a lot more significant than a bad movie or tv series though.

I have a friend in Seattle who’s doing his PhD thesis on this. We talked about it for awhile last time I visited and it was really interesting stuff.

This was a thing back when I was in highschool, it was part of computer literacy class.

Recognizing bias in news (because tabloid news was too silly to be taken seriously) was a large segment of critical thinking. Maybe we're getting back to recognizing an obedient, credulous population is not necessarily a good thing.

Feels like simply teaching media literacy would do this job. Is that what they mean? I thought that was a given in any English curriculum.

how many times is this going to be posted

I dunno if that's really a possible thing to teach. I think most fake news takes advantage of distrust in institutions and primary sources, I dunno if you're ever going to really be able to fix that. Short of seeing something yourself, which is pretty hard to come by, and also not a solution because evidence may not be immediately obvious, and is subject to the same sorts of post-hoc rationalizations as reading the news. You could try to teach logical and argumentative fallacies, and that might help, but I think you'd probably get a good proportion of students which would totally misunderstand what you're saying and just apply it to everything they don't like, and then you'd just get a bunch of annoying kids succumbing to the fallacy fallacy, and treating comment sections and conversations with other people like debate pervert encounters, where the only formal win they can get is the one they give themselves when they get an epic own.

It's also not like real news is much better, as you can tell from almost any war reporting, a subject where evidence is thin and technical phrasing and abstraction tends to be high. Deaths are referred to as casualties, people are referred to as potential threat vectors, any violence done against us is terrorism and any violence we do to anyone else is self-defense, pre-emptive or otherwise. A bullet leaves a gun and happens to strike an unarmed black man, in liberal media, and in conservative media, who cares, actually, because we're gonna dig up all of the previous run-ins this guy had with the police and do some character assassination so we can help justify a narrative of contextually blind self-defense. It's more complicated than "fake news", it's more nuanced than that, sometimes the evidence is real, but is just getting twisted to fit a narrative.

Ultimately I think misinformation is subject to inhabiting an alternative information landscape, false, twisted, or just alternative in vocabulary, and then, subject to death by a thousand fallacies. You make the decision to discount this piece of evidence here, this news story there, and pretty soon you've built yourself an entire alternative information landscape where maybe a couple times a week you're faced with some alternative piece of evidence, in a vacuum, and you are faced with the choice of, do I abandon literally everything I've ever known and believed, and scrap most of it, and instead believe in this random factoid, or do I just easily handwave the factoid and maybe get a little bit frustrated and that's about it? I think lots of high-schoolers are probably already in those boats, because of everything else about their environment.

It's a much better position to be in, to where you can try to find a way to absorb every piece of information and rationally put it into it's own self-contained perspective, and construct your own perspective from the many internally consistent ones that exist, but I think that's asking a lot of empathy and thought out of most people, who are already totally overburdened with things like schoolwork, work, and poverty. I think the approach, constantly, that education is the way out, education is the way forward, the way of the future, if only we educate the next generation enough, somehow, they'll save us, they'll save themselves, that's bullshit, at face. You can only put through so many students to college before someone else falls victim to the zero-sum game, you can only get so many students good, well-paying jobs, some of them have to remain unemployed and homeless and poor for the system to work. Someone has to be a fry cook. I think that's part of why teacher turnover is so high, and wages are proportionally so low to the psychic damage you take, cause the system as a whole is kind of irreconcilable, and you know that a certain percentage of the kids in your class are gonna get shot, die in some horrible way, go to prison, get cancer and not be able to pay the bills, despite whatever you might try to do to improve their chances, and it's hard to dehumanize these kids as not trying hard enough when you know that their parents aren't in a great place and you have to see those kids every day.