While better understanding of logic and reason are certainly not harmful, they are not the solution to the problems the article describes, because it is not the lack thereof that is causing these problems in the first place:
Fighting conspiracy theories and disinformation, educating the next generation to vote more thoughtfully and independently, etc. "responsible citizenship" as the article puts it.
What I observe over and over again is that people are quick to draw the conclusion that everybody who arrived at a different worldview than them must be lacking logical reasoning abilities, thus be stupid. Because, how else would you not arrive at the only "logical" worldview? And the article makes the same mistake.
(For the record, I am not saying that there are multiple subjective truths, no, there is only one objective truth. However, nobody can truly claim to know knowing it.)
Furthermore, this misunderstanding about the problem perpetuates the problem. It is like treating an infectious disease by draining blood from the patient.
In a functional society everybody only verifies a small part of the truth, which they have expertise in. These parts then overlap and form the whole. No single individual has to be able to reason through its entirety and prove everything, as that is impossible. Instead, the system relies on trusting the partial results of others. And that is exactly the attack surface is.
Conspiracy theories, disinformation and populism are nourished by completely different mechanisms independent of thought and reasoning. Attacking them on that level is futile. Even if they superficially look like manipulation of the though process, they are instead emotional manipulation. Typically the erosion of trust with fear as replacement.
Fighting conspiracy theories and disinformation, educating the next generation to vote more thoughtfully and independently, etc. "responsible citizenship" as the article puts it.
What I observe over and over again is that people are quick to draw the conclusion that everybody who arrived at a different worldview than them must be lacking logical reasoning abilities, thus be stupid. Because, how else would you not arrive at the only "logical" worldview? And the article makes the same mistake.
(For the record, I am not saying that there are multiple subjective truths, no, there is only one objective truth. However, nobody can truly claim to know knowing it.)
Furthermore, this misunderstanding about the problem perpetuates the problem. It is like treating an infectious disease by draining blood from the patient.
In a functional society everybody only verifies a small part of the truth, which they have expertise in. These parts then overlap and form the whole. No single individual has to be able to reason through its entirety and prove everything, as that is impossible. Instead, the system relies on trusting the partial results of others. And that is exactly the attack surface is.
Conspiracy theories, disinformation and populism are nourished by completely different mechanisms independent of thought and reasoning. Attacking them on that level is futile. Even if they superficially look like manipulation of the though process, they are instead emotional manipulation. Typically the erosion of trust with fear as replacement.