The principle of using skepticism is a sound one, but what do you do when the majority of your users don't employ that practice? Just let misinformation spread and just be okay with the ramifications on society because "it's not my problem my users are gullible"?
This is a good take. Skepticism is one of the most important aspects of thinking critically, and building a library of skeptical techniques so as to be able to sniff out things that aren't true is crucial to being able to navigate through a sea of information.
It's sort of like the Godel incompleteness theorem of social networking: you can either be incomplete or inconsistent; any system which tries to be perfectly consistent will find itself excluding massive amounts of potential dialogue. This in turn will result in a user exodus.
Skepticism requires critical thinking and engagement. You can't be a proper skeptic about something without taking the time to understand the domain you're being skeptical of, approach it in good faith from first principles as much as possible, and accept criticism in kind.
Most people just won't bother, because cynicism and snark provide a better endorphin hit, and the internet has trained people to associate that feeling with likelihood of correctness (what Stephen Colbert called "truthiness" back in the day.)
Being skeptical is all well and good but pragmatically speaking, people do not have enough time in the day to verify all the information coming their way, so they must be selective about what they are skeptical about and figure out how to establish trust with authorities to remove some of that burden from themself.
The important point IMHO isn't about being skeptical, but having the ability to verify the claims, or if not, at least having a good heuristic to detect bullshit (eg. by checking whether it contradicts with something you already know).
Just being skeptical without some way to allow good information to flow through the filter makes one close-minded.
You should have your skepticism filter on by default at the same filter rate, regardless of the source of the information. The moment you start micro-managing your filter rate, it defeats the purpose of being skeptic.
Be skeptic of everyone. Just because someone/organization has a positive reputation doesn't mean they won't intentionally (or unintentionally) screw things up.
When I was growing up and the web was new I was told to treat anything I read on the internet with skepticism. I believed some things as a young teenager, from the outlandish John Titor hoax to the reasonable but alarmist Peak Oil theories. I made some predictions to my friends and family that never came to pass. I learned to think skeptically the hard way.
This is a phase that society has to go through that will teach the cultural lesson that we can't trust too much what we read on the internet. Not that we could trust the media institutions that came before that (in a different way). We need to learn to think for ourselves and also embrace living in the world we have always lived in, where certainty of knowledge is a rare thing.
Everything should have some form of skepticism. The more ridiculous thing being presented, the more skepticism you should apply. Skepticism does not mean disbelief, but rather that you shouldn't just take things at face value and put on your critical thinking and analyst hat. Or as someone much wiser than me put it
It's impossible for someone to be skeptical of everything. People pick and choose what to trust based off of available superficial information.
This superficial information is becoming harder and harder to interpret. If you follow the trendline we will approach a world where will skeptical of every single thing you see on the internet with no way of verifying the truth.
For example, I told an AI to write this for me. And I also told the AI to insert some common spelling mistakes and grammatical mistakes to make it look real. Then I told the AI to lie to the best of it's ability and say something untrue and manipulative.
you are reading the output of what that AI wrote right now.
I see a lot of upsides to the widespread recognition among the general public that not everything you read should be blindly trusted - just extend that skepticism to the leading approved media outlets and the pronouncements of governments, not just to what people write in their blogs and on social media platforms. Of course, blind faith in the pronouncements of ChatGPT is no better.
With ChatGPT, however, you can immediately ask for clarification of a claim, which is often very useful for getting more detailed information. ChatGPT is probably not deliberately trying to misinform you, at least not on questions about programming techniques and other simple informational matters, unlike many human actors with vested interests in spinning information to improve their own personal agenda (*though I haven't yet asked it for a full exposition of Flat Earth Theory, so who knows?). If it seems a bit iffy, run what seem to be the main keywords in the response through a search engine to see what comes up.
The fundamental issue is that all humans need to learn how to curate and test their information flows, at least for self-consistency if nothing else. The loss of trust on the Internet, from this perspective, is something we all should be cheering for - healthy skepticism is not something to worry about, unless your business is peddling propaganda for some interest or other, and your success relies on the audience being gullible and incapable of rational thought and critical analysis of claims.
Blind trust in everything on the internet is equally as bad as assuming that everything from the greatest collection of human knowledge is a lie. Skepticism and critical evaluation are the skills that should be encouraged.
In a community where skepticism is valued there will exist the lazy quota who will look at popular opinion, assume the antithesis must be true and in turn, begin looking for supporting 'facts'. Don't be so surprised. :P
I think the biggest lesson to learn from all this is that just because things sound convincing doesn't mean it is accurate. We should probably incorporate this same skepticism when talking to people as we have when talking to machines (but that doesn't mean we should abandon good faith).
The problem is that it's always true. If you're open to changing your mind in response to evidence and arguments, then your current beliefs will depend on which information you've seen, and thus you will have been influenced by organizations who chose to promote information supporting their own beliefs. We're affected by the machinations of tech, but also the machinations of retailers and unions and political parties and editors and...
I can imagine someone presenting this as an argument for being open-minded, and that might make sense. But in every instance I've seen, including this one, it was deployed as an argument that some specific belief should be disregarded because the people who hold it have been tricked. That kind of selective skepticism doesn't make sense.
What happened to the wisdom of "don't believe what you read on the internet"? There used to be a general skepticism that existed alongside the internet when I was a kid. I think people still remember this for the most part and the war on 'misinformation' is essentially a battle of opinions and ideas, no facts.
I think a wonderful example of the phenomenon of people expressing skepticism that goes against their tribe is the recent Carrier IQ senstation.
There is, as far as I know, no clear evidence of what exactly is being recorded, and what exactly is being sent. Several people on HN yesterday pointed this out, and then pointed out that it's possible what's being recorded and sent are benign stats that most of us agree to in other places, such as with a web browser. This skepticism was not met well by our tribe.
I think skepticism can go to the same kinds of extremes as believing. While a significant percentage of reports is surely a mixture of crackpots / people with unknown agendas, I find it hard to discard just about everything on one of these basis.
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