• 3 Posts
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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: November 30th, 2023

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  • Yeah, everything I’ve been hearing in the last couple of years has talked about how traditional fact checking methods do not sway beliefs. The few things I’ve heard work are innoculation and ridicule.

    Inoculation (telling someone about conspiracies before they’re encountered) seems like it could be used in favor of whatever ideology, not just the truth.

    And ridicule (couch sex memes and “weird”), seems to work because it specifically targets the “follow the strong man” approach that many fools take to belief building. Like that can’t be applicable generally, can it?

    I am yet to learn of a solid framework + practical methods which work to guide people toward belief based in reality.

    Perhaps it’s multi-faceted. First make them feel like part of a community, which grounds them in experience and removes the most insane conspiracies/fear, then they’ll be grounded enough to accept some media & scientific literacy education?















  • Beside the point, but this data visualization is misleadingly bad.

    Eyes first draw to the heading, which primes us to think temperature. Then we see the graph, where the unlabeled Y axis is assumed to be average night temperature. Finally, we read the subheading and it says that the Y axis is not temperature, but counts of days over a certain temperature.

    I think that this metric is more useful than “avg. overnight temp.”, but please label axes.

    Also, it would help to rephrase the subheading to use “80” since that’s obviously the cutoff. I spent a moment wondering what was special about 79F.

    And now I see that this was made by the NYT. I guess they’re pumping out charts (maybe automatically) and thinking more about making them pretty than legible.