According to public intellectual Arthur Brooks, the internet has created “an explosion of nonsense.” He’s right.
Let’s take my discipline of American history for example. If you read this blog, you know that there is a lot of bad history out there. I am calling attention to it all the time. The challenge of history education today–both in schools and among the general reading public–is to teach people that the study of history is not just about knowing facts and then marshalling those facts toward this or that political or cultural end. Rather, history is a way thinking, a sensibility, an “intellectual orientation,” a unique way of seeing the world that is different than other disciplines. Why learn history when its already on your phone? Because historical thinking is essential to the cultivation of a healthy democracy.
One does not learn how to think historically–to go beyong mere rote or what Bernard Bailyn liked to call “indoctriation by historical example”–without proper training.
Here is Brooks at The Atlantic:
Some of what people see is straight-up fake news—predatory attempts to swindle consumers. But much of the bad advice on the web actually originates in a psychological phenomenon called “the illusion of explanatory depth.” Understanding this illusion can make you a better consumer of knowledge, as well as less likely to promote bad information yourself.
In 2002, two psychologists noticed in experiments that when people are first exposed to technical information, they usually overestimate how deeply they understand it. The researchers asked graduate students to read basic descriptions of how eight common mechanical items worked: a speedometer, a zipper, a piano key, a flush toilet, a cylinder lock, a helicopter, a quartz watch, and a sewing machine. Then they asked the students to rate their understanding on a 1–7 scale. The average self-rating was about 4.
Next, the researchers asked the participants to re-rate their knowledge after being prompted to explain clearly how the items worked in their own words (without simply parroting what they had heard). The students were also quizzed on the information and had to compare their own understanding with a true expert’s. Nearly every participant’s self-rating dropped at these stages, with the average falling to as low as about 3 at one point. In other words, the participants initially felt as if they had more expertise than they really did.
The phrase illusion of explanatory depth was what researchers dubbed their finding. The phenomenon is similar to the famous Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people with low levels of skill in an activity tend to overrate their competence. One explanation for this is “hypocognition,” that people don’t know what they don’t know.
We all exhibit this tendency. When you first hear an explanation intended for a layperson of string theory, you aren’t aware of the immense quantity of technical scholarship behind the physics; you just feel that you “get it” and experience a surge of intellectual power. But when you yourself have to explain something as complex as the structure of a Bach fugue, or hear an expert in the field actually go deep on such a subject, you realize that you have barely skimmed the surface.
The overconfidence of people laboring under the illusion of explanatory depth can lead to the spread of misinformation. As researchers have shown, when a person’s confidence is highest though their actual knowledge is low, they become very believable to others—despite not being reliable. And the more inaccurate people are—or perhaps the more they want to believe the validity of their perception—the more they tend to be swayed by their own underinformed overconfidence.
This explains the problem of internet experts and those who rely on them: Practically everywhere you look on the web, you can find technical information of dubious accuracy. This is not necessarily because we are being deliberately lied to—although plenty of that is going on there too—but because the internet is a free, democratic platform. This very freedom and accessibility causes many people to succumb to the illusion of explanatory depth, confidently sharing their newly acquired expertise in some technical information gleaned from reading a single article or watching a couple of videos.
Read the entire piece here. Brooks goes on to offer some suggestions for how to be a better reader of internet information, but his project is going to be a tough sell in a nation that devalues most forms of expertise.
It’s similar to the critical thinking paradox: at the end of the day, most people don’t want to think critically (they’re often in denial about that though). If they did, they’d have to put in a lot of work, they’d have to abandon a whole lot of assumptions about the world that are quite important to them, and they’d be constantly generating a slew of problems in their social circles. This is true whether you’re on the left or right: try dissecting an example of someone’s bad thinking about, say, Donald Trump, at a dinner party of high-powered liberal academics enjoying making fun of him. They won’t care if you’re right, what matters is Trump is bad, and they’ll wonder what’s wrong with you for apparently “defending him.” Explain that you’re not defending him, you just don’t like stupid arguments, and see how that goes! Same with history. Only historians care about good historical thinking. What’s important to regular people is their social lives, and the best ideas are the ones that win you approval from the people whose approval you want.