[fartcannon]

I want to agree with you, deeply, but the number of people who fall for simple PR/advertising in today's world suggests otherwise.

I think we'd have a chance if they taught PR tricks in schools starting at a young age. Or at minimum, if websites that aggregate news would identify sources that financially benefit from you believing what they're saying.

[corrral]

I've long thought that high school should require at least one course that I like to call "defense against the dark arts" (kids still dig Harry Potter, right? Hahaha).

The curriculum would mostly be reasoning, how to spot people lying with graphs and statistics, some rhetoric, and extensive coverage of Cialdini's Influence. The entire focus would be studying, and then learning to spot and resist, tricks, liars, and scam artists.

[weaksauce]

That's a good thing to teach but I do think that there are a large number of people out there that just don't have the capacity to do that. By virtue of being on this forum you are likely in the top quartile or near it of the population in terms of intelligence for whatever good that metric is. There is a cognitive bias that everyone frames most people as more or less the same as the person sees themselves and for me, a pretty skeptical person, it's tough to view the world through the lens of someone less skeptical. (I think it's the false consensus bias)

> In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy, and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.

Maybe teaching those skills would increase that 13% but I am not sure by how much.

[creakingstairs]

> > In the US, 14% of the adult population is at the "below basic" level for prose literacy; 12% are at the "below basic" level for document literacy, and 22% are at that level for quantitative literacy. Only 13% of the population is proficient in each of these three areas—able to compare viewpoints in two editorials; interpret a table about blood pressure, age, and physical activity; or compute and compare the cost per ounce of food items.

> Maybe teaching those skills would increase that 13% but I am not sure by how much.

It's a hard battle against status quo and bureaucratic institutions but I still think it's possible to reduce that by a lot. I'm willing to bet that a lot of those people are below basic because they weren't given chance to succeed due to child poverty, schools playing numbers game[1] and various other factors. We don't even have to add new curriculums. Just by getting the "basics" right, we can lift those numbers up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Uonc7BEZ4g

[fartcannon]

A lot of the messages that are valuable exist as regular idioms that are pretty simple. 'Don't believe everything you read.' for example is only a few ideas away from 'the government, media and corporations are manipulating you for their benefit.'

One is probably generally considered good advice, the other is likely dismissed as conspiracy theory nonsense.

We probably need a few more simple ideas like for modern times. "Facebook profits most when they make you depressed" "Tiktok is exploiting your sexdrive to influence your personal politics" "Google is telling people what you masterbate too for money"

They'd have to be less direct of course. I guess one modern one is, "if it's free, you're the product". But that tragically overlooks the generosity of the FOSS community so I'm not a fan.