[zorpner]

The lesson of the past ten years should be that most people are incapable of looking at the content and context and deciding on their own if it is true, and additionally are being subjected to a constant barrage of paid-for (whether by advertisers, corporate interests, or state actors) psychologically manipulative content.

I'm unsure about this and I don't know the answer -- but it's definitely not Present All Things As If They Were Equally Valid.

[vorpalhex]

Ah yes we should make sure we tell people The Truth, with warnings on Not Truth, such that they don't make Wrong Decisions.

The next step will be to "sanitize" Wrong Think from the archive, lest some poor easily convinced soul be led to it.

[csnover]

Your first sentence could be a literal description of the concept of education: telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions.

Your second sentence is a bad faith slippery slope fallacy designed to trigger emotional reactions that reaffirm group-think in other people. This seems ironic to me since you seem to be expressing a lot of worry about other people causing group-think.

[vorpalhex]

I do not have to trust my teachers on what the answer is to a math problem: I can check it. Likewise for history - I can refer back to the sources they are quoting from. One lesson we've learned in the West is that often times our understanding of an event evolves - much of what I learned in history class we consider to be incorrect today.

Education is not telling someone what is true or not true, it is to train the methods of discovering truth and disproving lies. It is critical thought.

A fact check, and more egregiously censorship directly is against critical thought. It tells us that most humans are not fit for handling complicated problems or balancing sources - that instead we must trust some other authority to do that. It does not require a long search through the history book to find egregious mistakes by every journalistic outlet running today - including those purporting to be fact checkers.

If humans are unfit to engage critically with diverse information than so are the fact checkers. There is no human who is so trained and intelligent as to be unerring in their judgements and fact findings.

History doesn't repeat, but it has it's tropes. The well-intentioned erosion of freedom of speech and the subsequent censorship is not new. It will get worse before it gets better.

[pessimizer]

> telling people the truth and warning them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions.

That's also what Scientologists claim to be doing.

[csnover]

Why do you feel like the appropriate way to respond to a comment pointing out a bad faith argument is to reply with another bad faith argument?

[pessimizer]

Because its not a bad faith argument to point out that even people who are obviously wrong think of themselves as the sources of truth. I actually thought it would be a little aggressive to point out that "telling people the truth and warning them about false truths" is not what education is. Education is a lot more complicated than that. What that is is a literal description of propaganda from the perspective of the true-believer propagandist.

[csnover]

No, the bad faith part was using an infamous pseudo-religion as a thought-terminating cliché instead of just saying what you said much more clearly and eloquently in this reply. :-)

Propaganda isn’t “telling people the truth and warning them about false truths”. Propaganda is spreading a message, even if it’s known to be false, in order to induce a desired behaviour. It does not care about the truth, it does not care about the wrong decision, it cares only for a specific outcome and uses any message possible to achieve that outcome.

If the point of education is not to tell people the truth and warn them about false truths so they don’t make wrong decisions, what is the point of education?

[pessimizer]

I suspect the next step will be to license journalists, with a background check searching for Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, Cuban and Iranian connections.