On 06/26/2015 02:55 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
Are there not more and less risky sources? If you have source that provides you with high-quality, predictive information, over and over and they are right, should not that individual be allowed less scrutiny than a person that has no track record, or a bad track record? Given finite attention, doesn't a person have to decide what to scrutinize, and what to let slide?
Yes. But you're not talking about the same thing, I think. When someone says something like "People normally trust online content", they're not talking about a continuum or spectrum of trust. They're talking about a binary predicate. That person could have made a more refined statement like "People tend to trust online content from sources they find mostly trustworthy." But they would not have said that, I think, because the generalization being made is more like "People are not skeptical enough of online content." It's the _enough_ that addresses your point. A similar problem adheres to the word "skeptical". I wear that word as a badge. But the recent synonymizing of skepticism with denialism has me worried. I can no longer say "I'm an AGW skeptic" because people hear "I'm an AGW denier", which I'm not. So, skeptical() has also become boolean, like trust(). If those words weren't being [re]defined in that way, then you'd be right. I could say, for example, "I trust Fox News to a given extent" ... and I could say it with a straight face. That person also could have said something like "People have diverse methods for deciding what online content to trust", which would also been more useful. It would imply that some of us are gullible and some of us are skeptical. But I think what they really meant was "People are not very diverse in deciding what online content to trust. They simply believe what they see without any scrutiny." And, worse, the article's and project's very existence is implying that it's OK to be gullible, we'll just clamp down on these evil sources of [dm]isinformation for you. You just go on believing whatever you see without any scrutiny. -- ⇔ glen ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
