A collection of 7 posts
Humankind’s propensity to believe convenient fiction is as old and strong as our propensity for war. The United States needs to adopt a pragmatic deterrence strategy.
“Believe those who seek the truth,” André Gide once wrote, “doubt those who find it.” The same can be said of falsehoods.
A proposed Australian law aimed at blocking false content would likely be applied selectively—and thereby further erode public trust in mainstream information sources.
By going to war against "misinformation" governments are merely diverting finite resources from addressing real harm to people and property, which purportedly justifies the panic in the first place.
Misinformation results from the toxic combination of these two defining features, a lack of proximity to the Territory, and viewing the world through the lens of oppression.
Obviously, greater intellectual diversity among researchers would be a key corrective, but adversarial collaboration is also critical.
Now if a single moral judgment depends on a unit of analysis, then surely a political philosophy that imagines some sort of societal structure that maximizes some moral values (whatever they may be), must also depend on a unit of analysis.