The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. – Wikipedia
Above, Bill Maher gives more evidence that he was a casualty of the Hurricane of Bullshit that accompanied the Covid pandemic. In the conversation, he evokes all the standard tropes that we see climate deniers use, only applied to epidemiology. Seth Macfarlane pushes back fairly effectively.
Meanwhile, new research illustrates a key Dunning Krueger mechanism.
Search algorithms, as we know, serve up a lot of nonsense. Moreover, if your search engine algorithm has profiled you as an idiot, it will dutifully serve your bias with ever more idiotic bullshit.
The personalization method makes it very easy to understand how the filter bubble is created. As certain results are bumped up and viewed more by individuals, other results not favored by them are relegated to obscurity. As this happens on a community-wide level, it results in the community, consciously or not, sharing a skewed perspective of events.[17] Filter bubbles have become more frequent in search results and are envisaged as disruptions to information flow in online more specifically social media.
Conventional wisdom suggests that searching online to evaluate the veracity of misinformation would reduce belief in it. But a new study by a team of researchers shows the opposite occurs: Searching to evaluate the truthfulness of false news articles actually increases the probability of believing misinformation.
The findings, which appear in the journal Nature, offer insights into the impact of search engines’ output on their users — a relatively under-studied area.
“Our study shows that the act of searching online to evaluate news increases belief in highly popular misinformation — and by notable amounts,” says Zeve Sanderson, founding executive director of New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics (CSMaP) and one of the paper’s authors.
The reason for this outcome may be explained by search-engine outputs — in the study, the researchers found that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.
“This points to the danger that ‘data voids’ — areas of the information ecosystem that are dominated by low quality, or even outright false, news and information — may be playing a consequential role in the online search process, leading to low return of credible information or, more alarming, the appearance of non-credible information at the top of search results,” observes lead author Kevin Aslett, an assistant professor at the University of Central Florida and a faculty research affiliate at CSMaP.
In the newly published Nature study, Aslett, Sanderson, and their colleagues studied the impact of using online search engines to evaluate false or misleading views — an approach encouraged by technology companies and government agencies, among others.
To do so, they recruited participants through both Qualtrics and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk — tools frequently used in running behavioral science studies — for a series of five experiments and with the aim of gauging the impact of a common behavior: searching online to evaluate news (SOTEN).
The first four studies tested the following aspects of online search behavior and impact:
- The effect of SOTEN on belief in both false or misleading and true news directly within two days an article’s publication (false popular articles included stories on COVID-19 vaccines, the Trump impeachment proceedings, and climate events)
- Whether the effect of SOTEN can change an individual’s evaluation after they had already assessed the veracity of a news story
- The effect of SOTEN months after publication
- The effect of SOTEN on recent news about a salient topic with significant news coverage — in the case of this study, news about the Covid-19 pandemic
A fifth study combined a survey with web-tracking data in order to identify the effect of exposure to both low- and high-quality search-engine results on belief in misinformation.
By collecting search results using a custom web browser plug-in, the researchers could identify how the quality of these search results may affect users’ belief in the misinformation being evaluated.
The study’s source credibility ratings were determined by NewsGuard, a browser extension that rates news and other information sites in order to guide users in assessing the trustworthiness of the content they come across online.
Across the five studies, the authors found that the act of searching online to evaluate news led to a statistically significant increase in belief in misinformation.
This occurred whether it was shortly after the publication of misinformation or months later.
This finding suggests that the passage of time — and ostensibly opportunities for fact checks to enter the information ecosystem — does not lessen the impact of SOTEN on increasing the likelihood of believing false news stories to be true.
Moreover, the fifth study showed that this phenomenon is concentrated among individuals for whom search engines return lower-quality information.
“The findings highlight the need for media literacy programs to ground recommendations in empirically tested interventions and search engines to invest in solutions to the challenges identified by this research,” concludes Joshua A. Tucker, professor of politics and co-director of CSMaP, another of the paper’s authors.
One no-no when writing about mis- or disinformation is to avoid repeating the wrong bit. An article “7 Myths About Flerzgamits” can actually introduce or reinforce the myth to the casual reader.
Similarly, when telling someone to get a specific item, don’t tell them what not to get.
“Get the Ezekiel bread with the orange label, not the green label” leaves the person with extra confusing information (“green”). That may be good for comedy, but in real life just stick with “Get the Ezekiel bread with the orange label.”
McKibben, who I used to think was funny but who now disgusts me more every time I see him, looks here like an angry but smug graceless George Burns as he melted into the furniture the last 600 years of his life.
I think you mean Maher? But yes, for a liberal, he’s getting very conservative. If Trump emerges from the swamp again, Maher will again be in his element. McKibben is a great guy. Doesn’t have an arrogant bone in his body.
Yes, that’s who I meant. Thanks.
On the children rarely die from COVID BS. Yes they do. Bigger is the R number where one infected child exposes a large number in confined classrooms etc, who expose large numbers of parents who all send the R number and associated deaths exponential. Primary reason for closing schools. Criminal cherry picked research.
“Much of the published medical research is apparently flawed, cannot be replicated and/or has limited or no utility.”
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29617882/