Do You Really Believe This?

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conspiracy theories can float all this stuff and get everyone else to chase it. They then use that focus to further amplify through the population, you get an upward spiral of disinformation. And what you do with these false beliefs is you marginalize them. You justt them die out. No one acquires them. No one cares about them. If you're not in office, you've lost. Whatever takes, in a kind ofa machiavellian way to get into office. Lie, whatever. This is how politics works. Kids grow up, get tough. Too bad. Thiss. I don't know. i think trump looks at it that way. He views anything that comes

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.