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by jandrese 756 days ago
Even so, you still have to do it. The only alternative is unchecked bullshit, and that is highly corrosive to polite society.

It's basically information guerilla warfare. Lies are cheap and easy to produce, while the facts require investigation and analysis. Lies lead to conspiracy theories which lead to radicalization which lead to destruction of society.

2 comments

I guess what I'm getting at is that checking bullshit is far less effective than choking it out with the truth. Nobody believes the moon landing happened because they read a fact-checker's piece on the hoax, they believe it because there's so much positive evidence just floating out there that the conspiracy theory can't take hold except in teeny tiny little pockets.
And how do you do that when the bullshit is in some new direction where there is no truth?
> checking bullshit is far less effective than choking it out with the truth.

Maybe so, but one of the problems is that the bullshit is more often drowning out the truth - so why not do both? Get the truth out there, and push back on bullshit.

The best antidote is speech and information flow. The Covington kid story changed drastically when an unclipped video of what happened came out, for example.