Deliberate Ignorance

October 14, 2023 7:52 AM

Traditionally, the search for knowledge has involved paying close attention to information—finding it and considering it from multiple angles. Reading a text from beginning to end to critically evaluate it is a sensible approach to vetted school texts approved by competent overseers. On the unvetted Internet, however, this approach often ends up being a colossal waste of time and energy. In an era in which attention is the new currency, the admonition to “pay careful attention” is precisely what attention merchants and malicious agents exploit. It is time to revisit and expand the concept of critical thinking, often seen as the bedrock of an informed citizenry. As long as students are led to believe that critical thinking requires above all the effortful processing of text, they will continue to fall prey to informational traps and manipulated signals of epistemic quality. At the same time that students learn critical thinking, they should learn the core competence of thoughtfully and strategically allocating their attentional resources online. from Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens
posted by chavenet (21 comments total)

la la la, i can't hear you!
posted by y2karl at 8:22 AM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

The message of "critical ignoring" and the three cognitive strategies outlined in the introduction are all kind of... well, duh!... aren't they? I mean there was never a time when one didn't have to consider the source as well as the content.

Applying these honed skills, I skipped the rest of the paper.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:30 AM on October 14, 2023 [20 favorites]

Yeah I’m struggling to find anything new here. These practices are all still part of critical thinking and source evaluation.
posted by Miko at 9:01 AM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've never heard of Critical Ignoring, but I guess I independently "invented" something like it a few weeks ago. I'd never seen Oliver Stone's JFK, so I figured I'd catch up. About half an hour in, though, I stopped: I didn't want to overlay my existing knowledge, however sparse, with known falsehoods. Memory is weird, but it's like any other system: Garbage in, garbage out.
posted by phrits at 9:20 AM on October 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm not a fast reader. I doubt I've increased my words-per-minute speed since my mid-teens. But somewhere along the line (way before the interwebs), I definitely picked up a facility for scanning/skimming, for blazing through a document and somehow catching certain words, which hook me for long enough to slow down and figure out why they're in the document. Obviously, this doesn't always work in my favour. Obviously, I miss important stuff. But it also kind of works. I can often plow through big chunks of text without completely confusing myself. I don't know what this adds up to but it does feel like a useful skill
posted by philip-random at 10:22 AM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

Self-nudging - keep your distance from sources you don't trust.

Lateral reading - do you own research!

Do not feed the trolls - don't engage with anyone that contradicts you.

It's a QAnon trifecta! All these strategies have their dark-side corollary. Deliberate ignorance is how people become enbubbled and starting chilling in Vegas for JFK jr to show up.

You know what I like? Knowledge Fight, QAnonAnonymous, and I Don't Speak German. That's podcasts covering Alex Jones, the Q weirdos, and the white supremacists. Just about enough to cover all the misinformation going around, critically evaluated by trustworthy people. And perhaps most important for me, a slice of comedy where appropriate.

I guess that's one answer? Debunking as a genre of entertainment.

The “infodemic” of misinformation and calculated disinformation about COVID-19 not only pollutes the Web with false and dubious information, but also undermines citizens’ health literacy, fosters vaccine hesitancy, and cultivates detrimental outcomes for individuals and society. This infodemic is nontrivial because exposure to misinformation has been shown to reduce people’s intention to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

!!! THIS !!!

Covid disinfo has cost a Hiroshima of lives. It's that serious, yet our reaction is truly lacking the scope equal to the disaster.
posted by adept256 at 10:43 AM on October 14, 2023 [11 favorites]

Lateral reading - do you own research!

there is nothing wrong with doing your own research assuming you know how to do research*, which unfortunately very many don't. That's the flaw QAnon etc exploit.

* of course, some people who know better fall for stupid shit anyway, but that's more of a mental health thing**, I would submit -- being so desperate to find stuff that conforms with what we want to hear that we dive recklessly in.

** or certainly, overachieving foolishness
posted by philip-random at 10:55 AM on October 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

The ancient Greeks were no dummies at self-moderating. The three inscriptions at Delphi were, reputably: Know Thyself, Nothing in Excess, Certainty is Madness. People get confused about knowing oneself (or self-measure), but it is the deficiency where we are most conned through our insecurities, usually by shortcuts to make us more proud and appear less ignorant.
posted by Brian B. at 11:12 AM on October 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

This is great IMHO. While it may seem intuitive, I think validating these practices can help improve our online hygiene.
posted by latkes at 11:15 AM on October 14, 2023 [6 favorites]

Lateral reading is distinct from “do your own research” and is, in fact, dependent on trusting some mainstream sources; the idea is that before investing in studying a text in depth you see what other sources have to say. Do your own research means avoiding anything mainstream or based on institutional expertise in favor of stuff you seek out on YouTube or other newish channels.
posted by zenzenobia at 11:24 AM on October 14, 2023 [4 favorites]

Mike Caulfield, who is one of the people who popularized lateral reading, made an interesting observation in this article (it's in the third section): Students who learned to use the SIFT method of quickly making decisions about sources they encounter online (stop before you share, investigate the source, find better sources, trace claims) did pretty well, until they had more time to analyze sources. Then they began to "overfit" by reading too much into things. They pay too much attention, something they've always been encouraged to do in school.

In classroom information literacy sessions over the past few years, I noticed that given a bit of time on a question — “Did this thing happen?” “Is this source reliable?” — students do well. They apply the SIFT method we’ve taught them and make decent judgments about claims and sources.

Given a lot of time, however, students often do worse... There is a belief from the students that every fact discovered will play some part in their analysis, and, in practice, the later a fact is discovered in a search, the more weight they seem to give it. This, of course, is opposed to how facts often present themselves, with the most important facts emerging early in a search, and the least relevant facts emerging later.

I find this fascinating.
posted by zenzenobia at 11:43 AM on October 14, 2023 [15 favorites]

and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention.

"Thomas Jefferson once shot a man on the White House lawn for treason."

-Would you like to read more.
posted by clavdivs at 4:01 PM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

The idea of schools teaching people how to ignore information that's irrelevant to them is very funny. Yes, and McDonald's can teach people how to eat right and casinos can teach personal finance.
posted by officer_fred at 5:05 PM on October 14, 2023 [2 favorites]

The If Books Could Kill podcast had a lot to say about "nudging" and "choice architecture":
Part 1
Part 2

spoiler they don't buy it
posted by Grimp0teuthis at 9:00 PM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

"Thomas Jefferson once shot a man on the White House lawn for treason."

-Would you like to read more.

Rodney Cox? I dunno. But Ronny Cox?
maybe...
posted by y2karl at 11:28 PM on October 14, 2023 [1 favorite]

I now believe that Thomas Jefferson shot a man on the White House lawn, but that it was over a personal dispute, not execution for treason.
posted by Faint of Butt at 3:25 AM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

The last three years have demonstrated that a lot of people define “critical thinking” as “automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t fit comfortable preconceived biases.”
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:56 AM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

The "Do your own research" and its pushback is fascinating to me having just been through the three year height of the pandemic where many of the experts were spectacularly and dangerously wrong at the start in many different ways (minimizing masking, downplaying aerosol transmission, CDC fucking up testing and many continue to hold obviously wrong beliefs). Top scientists in bio-sciences early spent a decade or more actively blocking research in mRNA almost leaving us without rapidly developed vaccines! Most western governments actively and very quickly betrayed the interests of their citizenry in the favor capitalist interests.

It's no wonder people have gone a bit crazy with conspiracy theories and expert distrust because what we just experienced was really extremely fucked up. Millions died and there has been no reckoning. Just Orwellian memory rewriting or holing. BYGONES! as Richard Fish would declare every time he screwed up.
posted by srboisvert at 8:53 AM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

The three inscriptions at Delphi were, reputably: Know Thyself, Nothing in Excess, Certainty is Madness.

Diodotos has kindly pointed out to me that there are better translations for the last mention. Surety Brings Ruin is usually offered by ancient Roman interpreters, and it has an anti-pledging aspect as well.
posted by Brian B. at 12:39 PM on October 15, 2023 [3 favorites]

The forgetting rule is a good principle, but it has the same weakness as other similar critical thinking rules. All these rules ultimately come back to the exercise of judgment. You can diligently apply all the rules of critical thinking, but that effort can thwarted by an instance of bad judgment. I appreciate the idea of distilling these rules for didactic purposes. A distilled rule of thinking can only take you so far. You need lots of varied experiences to judge how to apply critical thinking rules to any given situation. But schools are in the business of cramming facts and rules into students' heads, and not in the business of providing lots of varied experiences.
posted by SnowRottie at 4:46 PM on October 15, 2023 [2 favorites]

The If Books Could Kill podcast had a lot to say about "nudging" and "choice architecture"

worth noting that they actually kind of liked the idea of choice architecture as a descriptive rather than prescriptive term, but most 'nudging' is not actually choice architecture, and choice architecture doesn't appear to be particularly powerful. This is not surprising because "nudging" is, it turns out, a libertarian project to make the case that big interventions are unnecessary and bad and that "small" "nudges" are all that's necessary to do anything worth doing, and thus larger changes are unnecessary and therefore libertarians were right all along.

Please enjoy the failures of Nudge Units worldwide in the light that they're a demonstration that libertarianism is wrong.
posted by Merus at 4:56 AM on October 16, 2023 [2 favorites]