This interesting insight by Paul Thagard Ph.D. is published by Psychology Today. Here is an excerpt:
Democracy depends on real information that people need to make good decisions about their governments and society. For example, voting for political candidates requires evaluating their claims about how they will deal with economic problems, where evaluation requires information about both the candidates and the economy. Fascism opposes democracy in demanding autocratic government by charismatic leaders assisted by violence. Fascists use misinformation about history, identity, leaders, conspiracies, and destiny to gain and retain power. Replacing misinformation with real information is therefore crucial for retaining democracy and fighting fascism.
Real Information Differs from Misinformation
Real information is true, accurate, and valuable, whereas misinformation is false, inaccurate, and misleading. Information results from four general processes: acquisition from the world, inference that extends knowledge beyond the world to identify causal relations, memory that stores and retrieves information, and spread of information among people.
When these processes are done well, the result is real information that represents facts about the world, derived by reliable acquisition methods such as perception, systematic observations, and controlled experiments. Evidence so acquired can be extended by inference methods such as careful causal reasoning that identifies the best explanation of observed correlations. Real information can be retained by reliable storage and retrieval, and spread by careful communications practices in which people evaluate the credibility of messages before sending them to others and evaluate messages sent by others before believing them. Unfortunately, misinformation abounds because these practices are violated.
Read the full article here.
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