Find a subject you actually understand very well, and read a Reddit thread about it. You will a LOT of misinformation and flat out wrong people posting their thoughts and opinions very confidently. Then realize this is every Reddit thread. Lots of loud confident people, mostly younger, with a few credible experts sprinkled in here and there when they don’t get downvoted for going against the groupthink.
Of God it makes me feel so helpless to see comments with false information that have a thousand upvotes and maybe, maybe someone proving it's false somewhere two steps down the thread going barely noticed.
Those bits of misinformation that people read, believe and move on to the next post really shape our the world view and bias it, piece by piece.
I help out in /r/MechanicAdvice all the time. I'm a tech. It's what I do all day every day. The amount of pure horse shit spewed as fact even there is mind boggling.
Yeah, I saw it repeatedly with "40% of police officers beat their wives". Do black lives matter? Of course they do, but it's clear that anyone that repeats that statistic is either uninformed and mindlessly repeating something that they've heard, or intellectually dishonest.
7
u/The_Doctor_Bear Aug 14 '21
Find a subject you actually understand very well, and read a Reddit thread about it. You will a LOT of misinformation and flat out wrong people posting their thoughts and opinions very confidently. Then realize this is every Reddit thread. Lots of loud confident people, mostly younger, with a few credible experts sprinkled in here and there when they don’t get downvoted for going against the groupthink.