[ghthor]

It's always been that way. Seriously, the most valuable skill the internet has helped me foster is my bullshit o-meter. The actual problem that I see first hand is most people dont have that skill exercised at all. They've been living in small enough groups that they have high levels of trust between the members. That has been projected onto the rest of the internet, they are far to trusting and perform zero research before they start repeating what they've read or heard. And were not punishing that action, your reputation for information quality should go down if you repeat clearly false information.

[amelius]

> Seriously, the most valuable skill the internet has helped me foster is my bullshit o-meter.

How do you know how accurate it is? How many false positives or false negatives does it generate?

[ghthor]

Absolutely tons of false positives, but the bar is set very very high for me to actively voice my support or share information. That might even be the more important skill because of shear volume of information being generated and shared across the world. Very rarely do I voice my disagreement with stories or ideas, not supporting or sharing them seems to be good enough. Very few things are true/false, most knowledge is drifting around on an infinite scale between [0,1.0].

[lurcio]

"BS-o-meter"

You mean critical faculty, perhaps?

[ghthor]

Yes. It's a nice balance around being open to new ideas, researching controversial ideas and taking my tine to register myself as supporting or disagreeing with an idea. Its critical thinking with healthy skepticism, but being unafraid to entertain my imagination concerning very controversial hypotheses. But the real butter might just be how slowly I let ideas sink into the agree/disagree, or perhaps that my middle ground is far larger as in I entertain a wide variety of conflicting ideas while only sharing and voicing my support for a small set of ideas that I'd truly stake my reputation on.