Time, attention, domain expertise, intelligence: these are all finite resources.
Most worthwhile questions require, at a minimum, a certain level of expert domain knowledge to resolve.
If someone wants to question whether the US
arrived to the Moon or not, let them, dont
discredit them Let them look for evidence and
present their case. What are we afraid of?
Let competing ideas battle it out in the marketplace of ideas, right?
This actually works really well in a lot of instances.
The catch is that it requires the "consumers" in the "marketplace" to have the domain expertise to correctly judge which idea is best.
And this is very often not the case. Particularly when we are talking about the general public. When the public can't accurately judge the merits of competing ideas on merit alone they will (of course) naturally gravitate to the ideas that are more slickly presented, the ideas that simply make them feel better, the ideas that don't challenge their existing beliefs, etc.
There is also the issue of asymmetric information warfare. If you are slick enough you can wage a lopsided war of attrition against your opponents. It takes little effort to spread falsehoods, and it typically takes multiple times as much effort to debunk them.
Same happened with the WMD story... society has
to learn to be more skeptic, and to value those
that question and look for answers.
This is an example of what I'm saying. The public initially largely supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan because they were not educated consumers: the public had no way of independently verifying the WMD claims. There was no marketplace of ideas, just a monopoly.
Most worthwhile questions require, at a minimum, a certain level of expert domain knowledge to resolve.
Let competing ideas battle it out in the marketplace of ideas, right?This actually works really well in a lot of instances.
The catch is that it requires the "consumers" in the "marketplace" to have the domain expertise to correctly judge which idea is best.
And this is very often not the case. Particularly when we are talking about the general public. When the public can't accurately judge the merits of competing ideas on merit alone they will (of course) naturally gravitate to the ideas that are more slickly presented, the ideas that simply make them feel better, the ideas that don't challenge their existing beliefs, etc.
There is also the issue of asymmetric information warfare. If you are slick enough you can wage a lopsided war of attrition against your opponents. It takes little effort to spread falsehoods, and it typically takes multiple times as much effort to debunk them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
This is an example of what I'm saying. The public initially largely supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan because they were not educated consumers: the public had no way of independently verifying the WMD claims. There was no marketplace of ideas, just a monopoly.