Strongly endorse everything in this @OsitaNwanevu piece. One of the key mistakes I see among Dems, both online & in the real world, is thinking that people believe right-wing nonsense because they are unintelligent or uneducated. newrepublic.com/article/161266…
In the area I know best, climate change, it's been found repeatedly that climate denialists & skeptics have, on average, MORE higher education than those who accept the science. They know MORE about climate science. They have, on average, HIGHER verbal intelligence.
What they do is adopt the conclusion that best serves their social tribe and then use their intelligence & education to build a case for it. It's called "motivated reasoning" & everyone is subject to it, very much including the smartest people.
The same thing goes for trickle-down economics, or belligerence in foreign policy, or abstinence-based sex ed, or, ultimately, Qanon -- they start with the conclusion & use their smarts to construct elaborate & internally convincing justifications.
If you want to do something about the unhealthy flourishing of nonsense, making people smarter -- educating them more, doing "media literacy" -- is the wrong approach. Something's gone wrong at the *social*, not individual, level.
The only way we've ever developed to guard against motivated reasoning is at the institutional level -- institutions like science, governed by rules which mandate peer evaluation & criticism, replication, etc. And even then our success is limited!
If you want nonsense to flourish less, you need trusted institutions devoted to valid knowledge formation. What's happening in the US, as in many developed democracies, is a degradation of, & loss of trust in, those institutions.
Until we find some way of improving institutions & restoring social trust/solidarity, all the individual education & en-smartening in the world isn't going to help. The problem is social & institutional, not individual. </fin>
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
