The New York Times has come out with an article, which is basically against critical free thinking, widely researching a topic and formulating one’s own take on the subject, and instead proposes going to the new gods of Google and Wikipedia, and swallowing whole their bs, pardon the metaphor which just occurred to me. First a summary, then my critical demolition.
“A new article from the New York Times claims that instead of engaging with someone that challenges your worldview, you should “resist the lure of Rabbit Holes” and go to more authoritative sources such as Google and Wikipedia.
The New York Times appears to have declared war on traditional critical thinking, which they say “isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation”.
Sharing the insights of “a digital literacy expert” named Michael Caulfield, the article reads as follows:
“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”
In other words: Resist the lure of rabbit holes, in part, by reimagining media literacy for the internet hellscape we occupy.
What Does The New York Times Suggest We Do Instead?”
The answer is to consult Google and/or Wikipedia. Yes, as if internet censorship does not exist, and the FBI and CIA have not edited Wikipedia entries. There is a good reason why universities do not permit students to use Wikipedia as an authoritative source. It is not. As for Google, I find that the searches fail when I am looking for Dissent Right sites, and usually the title is not enough to find the article. Sometimes it is, but I note substantial failures, indicating something funny, or not so funny, is going on. Just ask Mike Adams over at Natural News, what he thinks about this.