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Roy Brander's avatar

I'll have to go back and read all of that again. I found myself skimming ahead to see if two rather major points would come up, and unless I skimmed too lightly, they didn't.

1) Opens with the infuriating tale of Wm. Casey (and thank-you; I'm learning how quickly such crimes are forgotten). But the rest skips the obvious point that there are real conspiracies. Casey and many others in the "Intelligence Community" conspired to sell those various lies and affect policy. The first Iraq War was sold with the fake babies-thrown-from-incubators story that the entire Bush I government conspired to sell. The second, they just invented a conspiracy theory about a dictator giving his worst enemies a nuke for laughs.

How are you going to debunk unless the government itself comes clean? In the USA, at least, they have a lot of admitting to do.

2) It should start in school. School has been remiss in teaching basic logic and logical fallacies; cowardly about teaching that MLMs and most herbal remedies are scams. If you can't equip kids to avoid Herbalife, you can't protect them from Steve Bannon.

It's just plain history, how Big Tobacco muddled the science on smoking, too, I think schools can get away with criticizing that. I think they could also teach about gambling addiction, the actual certainty of losing when you gamble, and look at the advertising of gambling - as a fun night out with attractive young people - versus the reality.

Broadly, they could teach that "advertising", "propaganda", and "public relations" all describe the same process, distinguished only by motive. Go over how advertising lies on many levels, study historical public relations statements versus the truth.

Remarkable how careful I have to be even suggesting that schools teach things that are inarguably true, but would harm the business model of a profitable business like Amway. Or any casino.

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Roy Brander's avatar

Very glad I came back to read it all again. This topic is SO covered, I tend to start skimming when I see a familiar intro.

The wikipedia matter is really crucial, I think. Radical transparency rather than a lot of control, transparency is clearly the winning strategy. As it was when science was getting invented!

The other example to look at, Justin, if you do a whole piece on it, is Slashdot. May have been the first "blog" before there was such a word, certainly the first big one. Still going, despite being sold off to owners who only think about money (lost some people then, isn't as good now, but it's still going).

Slashdot lets anybody post anything, but *randomly chosen* members rate stuff up or down. There's no banning, but every rater can "shadow ban" if you will, at least for people who only read stuff with thumbs-up ratings. (Any one rater can add +1 or -1, and ratings go from -1 to 5; lots of people only read "above 3" posts.) It works!

Slashdot tackled the original huge controversies, like PC vs Mac - the rhetoric is so vicious because the stakes are so small - and didn't fold up. It handled global warming, nuclear power.

All without top-down control! Slashdot's success has not been studied enough.

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