Six on Geography and Science: Equinox sun is over Earth's equator Tonight; Trump Coal Industry is Back – Back to the 1930s; Why do people believe the Earth is flat?; Fox & Friends Go From Mocking Climate Strike to Covering Effects of Climate Change;
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Teaching Learning Technology
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"A funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century: Even as old conspiracy theories were growing more implausible, they also became more popular.
Take the Flat Earth: Never before in human history have more people seen the Earth’s curvature with their own eyes.
From climate denial to anti-vax to a resurgent eugenics movement, we are in a golden age of terrible conspiratorial thinking, with real consequences for our species’ continued survival on our (decidedly round) planet.
Ideas spread because of some mix of ideology and material circumstances. Either ideas are convincingly argued and/or they are delivered to people whose circumstances make them susceptible to those ideas.
Conspiracies aren’t on the rise because the arguments for them got better. The arguments for “alternative medicine” or against accepted climate science are no better than those that have lurked in the fringes for generations. Look up the 19th-century skeptics who decried the smallpox vaccine and you’ll find that anti-vax arguments have progressed very little in more than a century.
The people panicking over these developments have an explanation for the newfound vigour of conspiracy theories: They say the Big Tech platforms have developed the equivalent of mind-control rays that beam even mediocre ideas past our rational defences.
They say that ad-driven companies such as Google and Facebook threw so much R&D at using data-mining to persuade people to buy refrigerators, subprime loans and fidget-spinners that they accidentally figured out how to rob us of our free will. These systems put our online history through a battery of psychological tests, automatically pick an approach that will convince us, then bombard us with an increasingly extreme, increasingly tailored series of pitches until we’re convinced that creeping sharia and George Soros are coming for our children."
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