normally when people talk about conspiracism and disinfo they say they want better critical thinking, media literacy, etc. but then lament that people refuse to trust experts, believe science, etc

they're not used to thinking about an actual tradeoff between people merely taking for granted what they are told by authorities and having the ability to independently assess and verify information

as much as this article is beneath contempt, it at least stated the quiet part out loud https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/11/opinion/international-world/coronavirus-fear.html

"[T]he solution isn’t to try to think more carefully about the situation....the solution is to trust data-driven expertise." It asserts that most people don't have the background to evaluate specialized info, so just accept what authorities say and go on with life

Now, I think this is totally wrong. And the article itself is now self-refuting because of what has happened with COVID since it was published. But it at least bluntly illustrates the kind of conflict I am talking about.

We say that we normatively want people who do not passively receive information, who aren't just sponges that soak up whatever they are told. But in practice, we also expect people to accept on faith large amounts of specialized information because reputable sources say so.

So there is, here, several failures. The first is chiding people for their supposed lack of rationality in doubting official sources of information (and naively accepting crackpot non-official ones) when it is never clear that they were encouraged to actually use rational

assessment of evidence to *believe* official sources of information, and generally this practice is continued by things like platforms outsourcing 'ground truth' validation to reputable third parties (if it contradicts CDC, we shadowban it!)

the second issue is the failure to see conspiracism as partly an perverse intensification of normal 'good' ways of thinking about epistemology, namely "do your own research" and primary source validation.

its "perverse" because it lacks any of what we would consider the "common sense" necessary to sift through large amounts of detailed information, but then again common sense isn't common!

one begins to get frustrated by this emphasis on thinking and start to wonder about other things. such as, for example, the replacement of family doctors by impersonal medical bureaucracies undermining a very non-intellectual way of validating authoritative messaging

or the way in which local newspapers might have had a similar function in giving people the idea that they could trust someone "from their community" as opposed to an all or nothing bet in distant large-scale conglomerates.

its not that these are panaceas, but that if you recognize that the problem really is one of an imbalance between what we say we want and what we really want, they're at least starting points https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1306608181934727168