On: Elon Musk to join Twitter’s board of directors

[epolanski]

It's not a downside.

The downside is that we don't teach critical thinking to children in school.

So you end up with adults that believe whatever tv tells them or will buy any compelling argument without trying to debunk it first.

[MrMan → epolanski]

I wish HN had bots, I would write one to debunk this critical thinking fallacy with respect to social media.

Better powers of discrimination, higher IQ, are illusory when it comes to inoculating yourself against propaganda.

[cudgy → epolanski]

And with more opinions available to people, there is less likelihood of a large mass galvanized around one crazy theory (the one that the overlords deem not crazy).

[formerkrogeremp → cudgy]

I don't think that's necessarily true. Is QAnon not an issue? The church of scientology? There are a lot of large groups of people "galvanized around one crazy theory." But, maybe you're right that if they're exposed to more, non crazy views that they'll be better off and less galvanized. How would we test the hypothesis? I wonder if you took some fox news viewers and showed them CNN for a month or so if that would change their worldview?