Annalee Newitz 🍜Ever since playing with ChatGPT, I've become sensitized to the way false rationality sounds ... there's a particular vibe to what is basically coherent nonsense. And now I've started to notice when people do it too. I get this crawly ChatGPT feeling when somebody is obviously making up an "authoritative" answer to a question they know nothing about. #AI #chatgpt #psychology
Eleanor Saitta@annaleen Honestly, if a generation of people learns to spot irrational arguments at 20 meters, that's not the worst thing to happen, especially in an age of rising fascism.
King BeauregardIt would be nice if one generation or another would get it right. IMHO, there are three things people need to master:
1) People need to be willing to put the truth first. That means being willing to say of one's favorite public figures, "Wait a second, that was a load of crap". That means being willing to say of one's pet philosophies, "oh damn, that pretty much exposes the whole thing as a lie or at least severely compromised". People who are willing to do that are, unfortunately, rare; it requires putting truth first, and very few people do that. (If you're of any particular political stripe, you're probably thinking, "yeah those guys on the other side are terrible at that". They may well be; but a lot of people on your side are terrible at it too. Don't be one of those people or you are already damned.)
2) There are any number of guides to propaganda techniques online. Study them so you can recognize them in practice.
3) Logically rigorous arguments matter: statements need to be supported by facts that are applied in a non-fallacious manner. Fortunately, Mr. Spock is here to help, like here when he's explaining Bulverism to a couple of crewmembers:
STAR TREK Logical Thinking #37 - Bulverism (Identity Fallacy)
This is a pretty good page on disinformation techniques:
https://skepticalscience.com/history-FLICC-5-techniques-science-denial.html
A history of FLICC: the 5 techniques of science denial
In 2007, Mark Hoofnagle suggested on his Science Blog Denialism that denialists across a range of topics such as climate change, evolution, & HIV/AIDS all employed the same rhetorical tactics to sow confusion. The five general tactics were conspiracy, selectivity (cherry-picking), fake experts, impossible expectations (also known as moving goalposts), and general fallacies of logic.