Can you read? Can you do basic math? Is that enough?
The critical thinking required to make sense of the world today is ever increasing. We have a world leader using magical math to make a trade deficit calculation into a reciprocal tariff calculation, and claiming that this is, “Kind reciprocal, not full reciprocal.”
What? Help me make it make sense?
Meanwhile, I saw a video that someone created using AI. He uploaded a pdf article for two AI‘s to discuss, one of the AI’s was a version of himself, with his voice, and the other was a female at a desk. The only thing that suggested to me that the conversation was between two AI’s was some awkward hand gestures. Take those movements away, or make them a bit more natural/realistic and I would have no idea that I was watching an AI conversation.
Meanwhile, in Egypt, there are some wild claims about structures under the great pyramids, and while the evidence is unclear, I’ve seen many videos explaining these not-yet-proven structures. These claims include that they are a network of power sources connected to other structures around the world, and another theory claiming that aliens created them.
And speaking of aliens, wasn’t it just a few short months ago that we ‘discovered’ aliens living in our oceans? What ever happened to that story?
It’s becoming almost impossible to be informationally literate today. By the time you have time to seriously fact check something the story is already old, and there are new crazy claims that require your skeptical attention. What’s the source of this information? Where did they get their data from? What’s the bias of the news source? How is this data being manipulated? Who paid for the study? Is this a real quote? Is this video real, or CGI, or AI?
Who is fact checking the fact checkers? Meanwhile, here in Canada, a fact checker hired by one of our news stations was let go because trolls that don’t like their favourite political party being fact checked brought so much negative attention to her that the news station let her go.
What? Help me make it make sense?
The reality is that reading and writing and doing basic math is not enough to be functionally and informationally literate today. The critical thinking required to simply consume the information being thrown at us is overly demanding. I think the way forward for the short term is to find trusted sources and rely on them… and yet that’s the very thing that has seemed to get us into trouble. How many people get their news from just one or two biased sources? I’m literally now suggesting to find an echo chamber to sit in… hopefully you can find one that echoes facts, common sense, and some semblance of the truth.
