What is the role of the most disadvantaged in relation to the public interest?

Even the Greeks, despite their glorious yet truncated democratic experiment, would only apply the tragic to the elite

The recovery of a tradition always begins at the existential level, with the experience of what it is to be human under a specific set of circumstances and conditions. It is very difficult to engage in a candid and frank critical discussion about race by assuming it is going to be a rational exchange. Race must be addressed in a form that can deal with its complexity and irrationality.

Those who spread misinformation—false content shared by a person who does not realize it is false or misleading—are driven by sociopsychological factors. People are performing their identities on social platforms to feel connected to others, whether the “others” are a political party, parents who do not vaccinate their children, activists who are concerned about climate change, or those who belong to a certain religion, race or ethnic group. Crucially, disinformation can turn into misinformation when people share disinformation without realizing it is false.

Much of this content does not even masquerade as news—it appears as memes, videos and social posts on Facebook and Instagram.dfp.loadAds("right2","MPU3","dfp-right2-article-2")

They failed to see how technology would not change who we are fundamentally—it could only map onto existing human characteristics.

When there is nothing reputable to show users, it’s better to show nothing at all.

In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, there just isn’t a lot of content to serve up for the search “Devin Patrick Kelley,” so Google reaches to less authoritative users so that it can show something, anything.

Congress appears to have missed a key point in its questioning last week. It’s clear that fake news and outright lies are, in fact, a small portion of the total content on any of the big tech platforms. But what matters are the routes that these companies provide to unreliable sources of information. You don’t have to silence Julian Assange or some random Twitter account that’s set up to look like a real news outfit, but you also don’t have to inject them into a legitimate news discussion.

After a horrifying mass shooting, searching for the shooter’s name on Google surfaced an editor of the conspiracy site InfoWars, a parody Julian Assange account claiming the shooter had converted to Islam, and a “news” Twitter feed that’s tweeted a few dozen times since it was created last month. (The account using Assange’s likeness was an impersonator account, not actually Assange, as we previously reported.)*

All of these links appeared high up in the search results, just below the “Top Stories” modules in the “Trending on Twitter” box.

“serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).

“I live by base rates. I don’t read a book or see a movie unless it’s highly recommended by people I trust.

be confirmation bias. That’s the effect that leads us to look for evidence confirming what we already think or suspect, to view facts and ideas we encounter as further confirmation,

he found that the students who regularly did research online—in other words, the ones who expected Web pages to yield up useful facts—were better at this task (and at ignoring irrelevant information) than students who used the Internet mostly to send email, chat, and blog.

One of the greatest dangers we face,” he writes, “as we automate the work of our minds, as we cede control over the flow of our thoughts and memories to a powerful electronic system, is ... a slow erosion of our humanness and our humanity.”

. When Augustine (the future St. Augustine) went to see his teacher, Ambrose, in Milan, in 384 A.D., he was stunned to see him looking at a book and not saying anything. With the advent of silent reading, Manguel writes,

But maybe voting is neither commons nor market. Perhaps, instead, it’s combat. Relatively gentle, of course. Rather than rifles and bayonets, essentially there’s just a show of hands.

Voters may also rely on the simple heuristic of throwing out incumbents who have made them unhappy, a technique that in political science goes by the polite name of “retrospective voting.” Brennan argues that voters don’t know enough to do this, either.

A more practical suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs.