This is exactly the premise of Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise. Basically the internet has created an explosion of information, but it's become increasingly harder to actually find the right information. So the general premise that "we should be smarter because we have the world's info at our fingertips" is counterbalanced by "there's equally, if not more, disinformation we need to wade through to get to that info"
I don't think it's hard to find the right information. It's right up front. It's just very easy to walk past the right information in favor of attractive lies. Most of the time people aren't ignorant of the truth. They just dismiss it as a conspiracy.
Oh really? Example - just google "COVID hospitalization rates". You'll find hundreds of different sites/sources all varying degrees of accuracy. This is mentally taxing.
Because it's too simplified of a question. That's highly dependent on things like age, sex, and pre-existing conditions. Population wide numbers are in turn dependent on population structure and in turn who gets it.
You see similar problems in places like /r/covid19 on reddit where people argue about IFR with few accepting the meaninglessness of the question.
Complexity is hard, but I don't think the world is better if we oversimplify things.
Because the question is hard, and there are so many answers, you can twist those answers and that data to support pretty much any viewpoint, and ultimately this is the problem with having too much data at our fingertips.
It’s a complex subject. On the one hand you have someone normally healthy who contracts covid, tests positive, and goes in for breathing difficulties. On the other hand you have someone who has tested positive but gets in a car crash.
We used to pay people to take the raw facts and distil useful information. It was called journalism.
Clickbait and conspiracy pays more than actual journalism though.
