Skip Navigation
Clown Population @lemm.ee
RoundSparrow @ .ee @lemm.ee

"Our Problem is Gullibility, Not Disinformation. When it comes to bad information, we need to work on the vulnerability rather than the threat"- September 13, 2020, Daniel Miessler

danielmiessler.com

Our Problem is Gullibility, Not Disinformation

September 13, 2020, Daniel Miessler

I think we’ve lost the plot on disinformation. It’s not the attacks that are the problem. It’s the fact that too many Americans are willing to believe almost anything.

Ideally we’d reduce both the attacks and the vulnerability.

Of course it would be nice to have fewer attacks. Of course it would be nice to keep attacks from being used against higher numbers of vulnerable people. But ultimately the problem is the vulnerability itself.

Bad ideas are worse than bad code because they’re naturally contagious.

This is easier to see in the information security world. If you have a target that will run any code that it’s given, you cannot spend all of your energy making sure it doesn’t receive any code. Part of your plan has to be making sure it’s not so eager to do so. We call that patching.

It’s the same with people. We need to do more than control bad ideas; we need to patch our population against them.

Trade school doesn’t immunize against specious ideas.

For people, patching means education. And not the worker-prep kind of education where you learn how to be an obedient and productive office worker, but the kind that teaches the fundamentals of how things work—from physics to psychology, and from physiology to philosophy.

MORE: https://danielmiessler.com/blog/our-real-weakness-is-gullibility-not-disinformation

9 comments

  • The problem being that education is slow, inconsistent and not terribly effective when you cant drop the people who dont/wont pass.

    • The problem being that education is slow, inconsistent and not terribly effective when you cant drop the people who dont/wont pass.

      Drop from what, school? People don't learn from schools in USA, they learn from HDTV Fox News, they learn from Reddit, Twitter, Bluesky, Alex Jones, podcasts, Joe Rogan, cinema, sports stars, TikTok, TV entertainment, video games, etc.

      Adults over age 24 do all their learning and study on social media and junk news networks.

      • Thats what I mean. If you put 100 people in a classroom, teach them something, and then filter out all the people who didnt learn anything youll be left with a pool of people who have been effectively educated. That works great if you are trying to create an educated class of professionals with specific skills and knowledge. However, if you are trying to improve the education level of society as a whole you are still stuck with all the people who cant or wont learn. You end up with training thats about as effective as a mandatory slide show, which is maybe better than nothing, but also not very good.

    • The problem is that schools no longer teach Critical Thinking Skills, which help people recognize and reject propaganda. Republicans have even openly disparaged Critical Thinking Skills, and their gullible followers go aling with it, and parrot it.

      • If schools used to teach critical thinking skills effectively then older people should be more resistant to disinformation, not less. Since that is not the case we must conclude what they were teaching before was not effective against this threat.

9 comments