Why Does “Fake News” Work So Well?
A New York Times article on December 15, 2016, “Bots at War For Your Soul,” explains that some of the arguments on twitter are actually generated by, and carried out by, robots!
We never ask “What kind of jobs?” Will we fall for anything and everything?
How could anybody fall for such an outlandish scam? A lot of us do, according to the article. I’d be a little more sanctimonious about it if I hadn’t also fallen into a stupid “flame war” on email just yesterday.
We’re being told in yesterday’s newspaper that Russians actually guided the 2016 elections into the Trump win column. People fell for that. We’re told, all the time, that “fake news” stories, especially on social media, confused the electorate and the general political scene?
Why?
Some of the answers are obvious. For example, we tend to believe things that we see over and over, and, since almost all of our Facebook and Twitter friends believe the same things we do, over and over is how information is presented to us. But that’s not the fundamental problem.
The fundamental problem with belief in America is that we have given up our objectivity. We’ve ditched the scientific approach. We’ve become addicts for information that suits us and fits into the frameworks we’ve already established. We’re suckers. We don’t believe our own senses, and we don’t check facts.
Just to prove my point, I offer you the 2016 election results. Snake oil consumption on a mass scale!
If we ever sober up, I am hoping that we re-evaluate the fundamental difference between all philosophies: some of them are materialistic and the rest are idealistic. The idealistic people can believe almost anything. Their only test for truth is whether or not it “feels right.” The materialistic ones favor facts and science. The idealistic ones believe that “truth is in the eye of the beholder.” The materialistic ones believe that truth is truth — it may be hard to discover, but it’s still truth.
Scientists, when they’re being scientists, are materialists because it’s the only way they can make progress. At home watching TV, they may become romanticists and superstitious fools, but that’s just for recreation. All of us are materialists when it really matters, when it comes to getting our cars to run or our computers to work, but we are constantly subjected to the boss’s philosophy, idealism, in all our movies, all our TV, nearly all our books, etc. Idealism is the philosophy used by Voodoo religionists, crooked politicians and our employers.
–Gene Lantz
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