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Developing a Taste for Truth
How can we deal with misinformation in a post-truth society?
I recently watched a TedEd presentation by Joseph Isaac entitled “Why people fall for misinformation.” Still feeling shell-shocked at the violent spectacle of the storming of the Capitol on January 6th, I was drawn in immediately by Isaac’s title.
We’re all still talking about it, aren’t we? The hypnotic trance that a segment of our populace seems to be under, convinced as they are against all reason, evidence, and common sense that the recent presidential election was fraudulent, is, for most of us, deeply puzzling and disturbing. Some chalk it up to the president’s incomprehensible charisma, others to historical factors that help to explain the deep roots of systemic racism in the U.S., and still others to unethical political expediency that has encouraged all of the president’s enablers, helping to create an aura of factualness around falsehoods that any fifth grader of average intelligence should be able to sort out.
All of these avenues of speculation and deduction are useful to follow, depending on your personal levels of energy and mental resilience, not to mention time. In my case, I already had an inkling of what was going on within me earlier when I found myself caught in full-blown news addiction (uncommon for me) in the days…
