When anonymous prophecies fail

[Gadianton]

Huh: yeah, maybe what I thought of as strong need for stupidity was really a need for low education. There's some correlation; I think that some kinds of education need more intelligence to attain, and on the other hand education can sharpen intelligence a lot. But maybe education is really the main active ingredient here.

I have certain kinds of education in mind, actually.

Did you ever watch Mr. Robot? The protagonist is a brilliant young computer hacker, but he really prides himself as social theorist and he provides running commentary on the show's events as they unfold, and it's not unintelligent, but it's naïve. Ted Kaczynski must had thought about politics at least as much as he did about math, and he couldn't get past a college sophomore understanding of the world if that, despite his outrageous intellect.

I've just worked with so many bright technical people who live in tiny worlds.

Solving technical problems is a pretty superficial endeavor. You can scrape information from anywhere, a lot comes down to your hunches, and the skill of piecing together information in a way that requires any kind of vetting of sources isn't developed. I suppose my theory could be falsified if Reverend Kishkumen chimes in, admitting that a few of his Roman History colleagues have been led into QAnon. History kills two birds with one stone: you've got source critical skills, but also a deep understanding of how societies, civilizations, and governments actually work. And then, any kind of deep study I'd imagine has the tendency -- the tendency only -- to lower one's own importance to grand mechanisms of the world.

One other right up there in importance would be literature or mythology. People are really attracted to the storylines, which just wouldn't be nearly as interesting or ensnaring if their entertainment sources expanded beyond Hollywood blockbusters. If only they knew how predictable and bland their story is. Understanding something about tropes or narrative techniques should make it difficult not to recognize when somebody is telling stories and building up a plot, or if nothing else, raise the bar substantially when somebody is trying to rope you in with a good story.

[Physics Guy]

I'm of two minds about the transferability of technical skills like solving equations.

Some people who are highly qualified in science or engineering seem to me to be rote manipulators of rules and formulas that they don't actually understand. In their narrow fields their results may be consistently right but they are oblivious to all the conditions required for their procedures to work. Like fish in small ponds who imagine that they can swim to the stars, they are wildly overconfident.

This kind of education is not a hedge against disinformation: it's an added risk factor. It makes people quick to accept any new assumption that they happen to like, because their education has trained them to believe that they have some kind of innate gift for recognising the valid assumptions, when of course the truth is that the working assumptions of their fields were hammered out with enormous effort, and then they just accepted the results they were taught by authorities. Getting this kind of education, and even professional experience, can be like growing up rich. Rich kids can easily think they're entitled to wealth, even though they have no idea how to make money. Engineers and scientists can think they're entitled to be right about the world, even though they have no idea how to establish a theory.

On the other hand I still like to think that that kind of technical education is not the same as really figuring out scientific things from the ground up. First of all this is a humbling experience that's hard to forget even if you do it just once. It takes so long and it makes you feel so stupid, recognising time after time that the explanation you had happily accepted before doesn't actually even make sense. You can learn first-hand about how easy it is to get taken in by glib nonsense just by thinking hard about levers. Once you've worked out how a lever slightly bends under load, and ends up bending more on the short side from the fulcrum than on the long side, you just feel ashamed of how you used to parrot stuff about moments of force that in retrospect contained no understanding at all but just rote repetition of empirical fact dressed up in high-sounding words.

It's exhausting to try to understand everything down to that detail. In practice we all accept some stuff on faith just to get on with our lives. But if you go through the wringer a few times, digging into all the models until you find out why they work when they do, and why they don't always work ... then I think you can't help but be somewhat inoculated against disinformation. You learn to recognise the smell of ignorance posing as knowledge, from smelling it in your own sweat.

Besides that, though, I'm also inclined to suspect that good education in humanities and social sciences probably offers defences against disinformation that natural science does not. I can imagine, for example, that a good training in literature would give one a nose for stories that are too good to be real. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was actually plagiarised from an old novel, for instance, and an English major might be able to guess that just from its style.

What exactly are the active ingredients, though, in the anti-disinformation drugs from social science and the humanities? I'd like to see this pinned down. Maybe we could learn to deliver those active ingredients in more concentrated form somehow.