> There is a cost to this, of course - the citizenry is required to have a level of sophistication and erudition and they will be forced to make nuanced and complicated judgements about the state of their world.
If we take a book from the 80s titled "How to Win at Chess" and try to update it for the 2010s, we have three choices:
1. Add the caveat: "Don't ever play against a computer."
2. Add an enormous chapter about how to use computers to play computer-aided chess which, if serious, would probably double the size of the book.
3. Assume that people smarter and more dedicated than the reader devote entire careers to making sure humans can play chess in an environment where it is difficult to cheat by using a computer.
In laymen's terms: sophistication and erudition just won't cut it. You have three choices:
1. give people a well-lit place to read news that cannot be attacked through the internet.
2. at least double the amount of education people need in order for them to make judgments in a digital world.
3. Assume this is a problem that dedicated career people must solve to keep the population from being trivially manipulated in 100 different ways by 100 different actors when they attempt to read the news.
In the '80s you would still meet better chess players than you. The techniques for playing against computers are much the same as those for playing against smarter humans. There are specific anti-computer strategies just as there were specific anti-Russian strategies, but they're equally minor.
> In the '80s you would still meet better chess players than you.
Sure. But in the 80s you'd never meet a player who is several orders of magnitude better than anyone who has ever lived. That's important.
Similarly, in the 80s you'd never meet a group of political operatives who could read dossiers on tens or hundreds of thousands of people and tailor propaganda for them to read while in a doctor's waiting room, or wherever they happen to be. That's important.
We can't beat supercomputers at chess by practicing chess really hard. And we can't beat digital propagandists by thinking harder about what they publish.
Computers aren't orders of magnitude better, at chess or propagandising. Yes previous propaganda wasn't individually tailored, but it was still produced by manipulation experts with vastly more resources than the individual reader. The same techniques for living in a world where propaganda exists still work.
If we take a book from the 80s titled "How to Win at Chess" and try to update it for the 2010s, we have three choices:
1. Add the caveat: "Don't ever play against a computer."
2. Add an enormous chapter about how to use computers to play computer-aided chess which, if serious, would probably double the size of the book.
3. Assume that people smarter and more dedicated than the reader devote entire careers to making sure humans can play chess in an environment where it is difficult to cheat by using a computer.
In laymen's terms: sophistication and erudition just won't cut it. You have three choices:
1. give people a well-lit place to read news that cannot be attacked through the internet.
2. at least double the amount of education people need in order for them to make judgments in a digital world.
3. Assume this is a problem that dedicated career people must solve to keep the population from being trivially manipulated in 100 different ways by 100 different actors when they attempt to read the news.
Which are you advocating here?