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Comment by eivarv | Hacker News Reader

I agree media literacy (and critical thinking, for that matter) is a difficult problem, which is why we should get going already.

We've had some of the tools needed to distinguish good from bad thinking for millennia, so I find it kind of weird there hasn't been more focus on this in basic education earlier.

Digital signature and timestamped fingerprinting will also have errors, and they don't solve the social side of this issue. It still leads us to a faulty thought-process; We cannot inherently trust content on the basis of its medium.

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It is in fact weird that there isn't more focus on logic and critical thinking in basic education. I wonder how much of that has to do with government control of education: that is, the people who run the schools are beholden to those who benefit most from a population that doesn't think too critically about what they're told.

I keep hearing this, but it's also a simple and convenient logical fallacy ;). If something doesn't go well, just find a perpetrator who you can blame. I'd stick with Hanlon's razor as usual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor .

The society is a complex system, politics is complex (you have to calculate what all those pesky voters say they want, think they want and actually want) and there are a lot of issues. No one in their right mind can be serious about trying to manipulate future elections through carefully crafting education for that purpose. Dictators do that, for sure. They can stay around long enough to benefit, but they rarely participate in fair elections.

What you're arguing against is the straw-man form of my point, but I didn't express it with much detail, so you can't be blamed for that. I'm not saying that leaving out critical thinking from elementary education is an intentional act by specific people; I'm saying it results from the internal culture of government, which is power-hungry, self-preserving, and long-term, like your dictator. If it controls education, the culture of government will ensure people are being educated in what reinforces the government: what increases revenue, ensures that we have a strong economy, a powerful and unified defense, and a law-abiding and biddable population. Critical thinking has not historically benefited government, so encouragement of it has not become a prominent part of the culture of government.

There is an obvious bias in teaching a version of history that casts our own country in a good light but the impetus against science and logic comes not from a perverse desire of government to maintain control over the population but from a perverse desire for religion to maintain control over society.

Tell me more about how the public schools are biased toward religion.

It might not be systematically biased toward religion as such, but I know of few other developed countries where creationism is taken seriously and taught as an "alternative" in school [0].

Or where books are stricken from reading lists or curriculums for fear they make kids question authority [1] – where or Harry Potter's inclusion in school libraries is challenged for their focus on magic (often based on claims that the novels contain occult or Satanic subtexts) [2].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creation_and_evolution_in_publ...

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/10/cory-doctorow-...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20071230201312/http://www.ala.or...

We don't completely disagree, I'm just saying that cryptography can help quicker and can solve much of the problem for authenticity where authenticity is can be expected.

And we're talking about a very specific issue here, not simply whether we trust information in general based solely on the medium. Were talking about deep fakes. Whether politician X Y said a specific thing on TV or not. (And not e.g. whether a specific general claim is true or not because that person said it.)

Yes with adequate literacy you can sometimes deduct that you are seeing a deep fake because e.g. Barack Obama or Tom Cruise could have not said it in front of the cameras, but it can be solved with technology and sometimes you will be wrong anyway. (And lets not forget that all of the information you can acquire comes through some media source and in the end you do trust some of them. This includes your teachers. It's just that if you have solid foundations then you are harder to attack. E.g. because no one can go back in time and hack your teachers and school books. But in theory it's still possible. Just think hod dictators do it over the long run.)

In this case, authenticity cannot necessarily be expected, though (hackable vendors, supply chain, implementation errors, inevitable vulnerabilities, corruption, ...) – not to mention the ever-fluctuating assessment accuracy because of the arms race.

I'd rather not teach people to trust AUTHENTIC VIDEO™ (that can't guarantee authenticity), but to learn to deal with the fact that there's Photoshop for video now.

It all boils down to efficiency and probabilities. It's like saying the different platform security solutions (where you can only deploy signed apps) doesn't make sense because of the same reasons you have listed. Yep, sometimes companies will be hacked, and the ones that get hacked frequently will be deemed less reliable (the browser may even display a warning), but it solves 99+% of the issue.

Besides this, you people should be aware that technically any video could be faked. But you only have so much time and attention during a single day and if you can offload some of the checks to machines, which can do it reasonably well, then why don't? (Esp. taking into account that however I'd like too, you can't educate everyone. It will just not stick with a lot of them.)

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