Misinformation: The Inevitability of Ignorance

You know, there's a long history of people giving spreading bad advice and misinformation. I can think of several times in my lifetime where I've been told things that are patently false. Things that you have heard a thousand times and probably hold some of them to be true still to this day. In my opinion, misinformation actually became LESS prevalent with the advent of the internet, but it's easy to focus on the negatives rather than the positives (it's how we're wired as humans).

A few examples of bad information you knew before the internet existed:
Starve a fever, feed a cold. - wrong.
Wait an hour after eating to swim - Might not be fun, but won't hurt ya
Coffee stunts growth - Nope.avi
Carrots improve your eyesight - HA! nah.
TV hurts your eyes - Citation needed.
If you cross your eyes they'll get stuck - Never happened.
Cracking knuckles causes arthritis - still not true.
Peeing on jellyfish stings - gross and dumb
Humans only use 10% of their brains - Yeah, that's extremely wrong.
Smoking is good for you - ... (No explanation needed)
Shoot, there's stuff like this going back to the bronze age - breeding animals while they're looking at a certain color or pattern for example... Or maybe that's the misinformation. Maybe they didn't do that. Are you second guessing it now?

I've probably got a hundred more examples buried in the back of my mind somewhere. I'm sure you could come up tons of examples of misinformation predating the internet. I avoided political examples from the past, but they are too numerous to count.

LOTS of this stuff was spread before the internet. Misinformation is not new, and I would say it's probably less common now than it was before. It's pretty easy to call misinformation out now, compared to how it used to be. When something doesn't seem correct, you generally have the resources to check the veracity of the statement.

Though honestly, it's also easy to get lost in the sheer amount of information now.

^{Information Overload...}

I like how we, as people, tend to think of the time that we live in as having all of these unique problems. Honestly, we as individuals think this way too. No one could ever understand what you've been through right? Well, sure. Not exactly but most people have been through something that they wouldn't wish upon their worst enemy.

Of course there are degrees, someone living in the USA in general has nothing to complain about relative to someone living in Uganda. Funny thing is the typical Ugandan is probably happier and more sensible in general than the person from the USA. Bit of a tangent, but the point is that we're calling out how bad misinformation is using a faulty set of assumptions.

It's pretty difficult to actually prove one way or another that people are more ignorant, or less ignorant, than they were in the past.

If you do a google search about misinformation in any context, you will find thousands of written articles about how bad it is. Everyone is saying something along the lines of "This problem is so much worse now than it's ever been, and it's continuing to get worse over time".

I don't personally feel there is any actual data to justify this viewpoint. Sure, there's a ton of misinformation out there. I'm not denying that. It's everywhere.

I'm saying it was always everywhere - this is basically indisputable if you look into it.

My hypothesis on the subject is that misinformation has actually gotten less prevalent. The people parroting that misinformation is worse than it ever has been is just another example of... well, misinformation.

Look, people are always going to have a large degree of confirmation bias. If you hear that misinformation is a huge problem, you'll see the misinformation that is out there and it'll confirm what you've heard. The problem is that you don't really have a frame of reference.

^{"You have no frame of reference here, Donny. You're like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie..."}

What do you compare the current state of the world to? Unless you've lived through several eras you really have no way to compare things - AND EVEN THEN you'd have a hard time finding someone who actually would analytically compare the two.

Here are at least a few reasons:

• People tend to get set in their ways
• People are focused on what is going in their lives more than what is going on in society
• The impression you get from the present is far greater than the impression you get from a distant memory.

The overarching theme is that we, as a species, are prone to all sorts of biases which are easily exploited. Until we can somehow overcome that inherent flaw, we will be mired by misinformation. The internet has done a good job of allowing us to bypass our own biases and get to the truth more often, but it's far from perfect.

Wikipedia is, in concept, something which should be able to do this. We have a place online which is supposed to be a repository of all human knowledge - to be curated - to have the misinformation sorted out.

Sadly the curators are just as biased as the rest of society, since they are just a part of the whole of society. There's plenty of politically motivated information on Wikipedia, as well as quite a bit of things which are simply wrong.

Probably one of the better resources that exist though, even with its' faults.

I'm absolutely certain that we have more access to verifiably correct information than we ever had at any point in history. So overall, if you take a ratio of good information vs misinformation, I would say we live in the most enlightened time in all of human history.

It just seems odd that we're constantly hearing about how bad things have gotten, when paradoxically they're the best that they've ever been.

Anyways, I think I've reached the natural conclusion of my topic - I keep wanting to go on tangents if I continue writing.

Thanks for dropping by

• Guurg.

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