It's hard to come up with good policy around this outside of educating people.
The current political climate has no shortage of well-educated people on both sides who have been doing more damage than good the last 40 years.
It’s hubris to think any group can be the objective gatekeeper of truth unless they’re just reporting demonstrable facts like ball scores or weather.
In my experience, it's about something else. Something more fundamental.
That's the point though. You can't escape these things.
It goes something like this: take a large human population doing something, like working at Division X. Take a multivariate problem. Abstract out an aggregate statistic along one variable. Report that one data point, generalize, then assume some correlation-causation magic. Manage to make that number better.
This causes a lot of the pain and suffering we see in large companies. People are working and managing to a number that's supposed to mean one thing, but it doesn't. (Whatever metric you manage, they'll game). And it happens over and over again.
Worst thing about it? The smarter you are, generally, the more difficult it is to see yourself engaging in this anti-pattern. Sure, it's easy to spot others. But for some reason, it's nothing you'd ever fall for.
It's the way our brains are supposed to work. Guess the "right enough" answer from lots of noisy, inconsistent input.
Intelligence and education are not magic fairy dust that prevent us from being human. They may make it easier to describe what's happening in general terms, but they don't upgrade us to Human 2.0 or anything.
There’s evidence that awareness of biases makes one more susceptible to them, and that intelligence is also correlated with a higher susceptibility to bias. Intelligence and education give us tools to strengthen the form of our argument, and that enables us to better hang on to bias.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/frontal-cortex/why-smart-peop...
Also, giving people evidence that disproves their core beliefs tends to strengthen those beliefs, until a certain tipping point, so incomplete education may actually be worse than no education.
https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/06/10/the-backfire-effect/
Fixing misinformation is a hard problem. It’s not just a matter of getting people into contact with facts.
We should make Manufacturing Consent and The People's History of The United States mandatory reading for high school students, but that would probably change too many minds against our own system as kids would know how things really work, and how history really happened instead of the wishy-washy 'everything wasn't that bad!' crap they teach in grade school.