Thread by @normative

I’m not sure “media literacy” training, at least of the traditional sort, is helpful here. My recollection is that they typically encourage people to be skeptical & do their own research, which is great if the person is competent to do that, but otherwise makes things worse.

https://twitter.com/dangillmor/status/1328483697411047425

The people whose brains are the most utterly crammed with absolute nonsense are, in my experience, the folks most likely to proudly tell you they always “do their own research.”

The always insightful @zephoria has written a bunch about this: points.datasociety.net/did-media-lite…

Also, realistically, if by “media literacy” we mean something that’s going to be part of a public school curriculum, that itself becomes a political football. “They want to indoctrinate kids to only trust liberal media!”

An actually-useful media literacy curriculum for our current information ecosystem might be fundamentally at odds with the regnant pedagogical ethos of empowerment. “Lesson 1: Your capacity to make ad hoc judgments about comparative credibility is probably very limited. “

Worse, what if the right advice ends up being offensively inegalitarian? “Look, about 20% of you are probably smart enough to second-guess the New York Times & come out better informed; the rest of you are better off taking the MSM at face value.”

My sense is that there’s a generally healthy optimism about human potential & capabilities shared by educators, which is mostly beneficial but may yield perverse consequences in... let’s say “Straussian” domains, where truths appropriate for the smartest kids backfire for others.

I’d like it to be the case that reality is minimally Straussian—that there’s some general set of heuristics that can be reliably employed by the large majority with good results. But I’m not confident reality is so nicely tailored to fit my moral and aesthetic preferences.