Whoppers
Jaqueline Nesi, PhD’s Substack, Techno Sapiens, is one of my absolute favorites. Her approach to the problems she writes about has been diametrically opposed to mine in every article on her ‘stack I’ve read; I’m against technological solutions to social problems on principle. On the other hand, she picks really interesting problems to solve.
I’m reproducing and updating the comment I posted in response to the article she posted this morning, because I think it has broad applicability to issues to do with language particular to Red Team, a faction in the culture war into which most of my readers almost certainly fall.
I think the video is an excellent way of approaching the problem. Thank you for posting it.
Having said that, I think the language surrounding the problem is a tire fire in a dumpster full of dirty diapers.
"Misinformation" and "disinformation" and all their linguistic cousins are so routinely used by both sides in the culture war (I think the Left does it more than the Right, because the Left runs most media, but I'm a conservative, and I freely admit to bias in this regard) to refer to things that are mysteriously acknowledged to be uncontroversial fact a year or two later.
As an alternative to using this kind of politicized speech, may I propose slightly more traditional descriptors for social media posts (which should be assumed to be unreliable until proven otherwise in any case, the same as any exciting, emotionally charged information shared by any of us flawed humans)?
How about "whoppers?" "Tall tales?" "Fish stories?" Those descriptors clearly indicate two things: That there is not necessarily malice in the spreading of them, and that the presumption that they are true because they appear in print is wrongheaded. "Misinformation" and "disinformation" can thus be saved for deliberate misrepresentations spread by official outlets, which are obviously more troubling due to the harm caused by the subversion of authority and authority figures.
I put my head in my hands more often than not when faced with the way the Right approaches cultural issues, because those issues almost always have linguistic solutions that are eschewed in favor of a tendency to fire for effect. The underlying attitudinal problem with the Left is that it has what it believes to be the moral high ground. But the solution to a culture of people who think they’re better and purer than you are is not to get upset with them. It’s gentle, gentle mockery. The way you do that is to change the specific language you use to describe their wrongheaded attitudes.
I’m not saying the Left as a movement is harmless, to be clear. Misuse of administrative knowledge and access to institutional power has resulted in a shift in the culture that does no one who wants a well-run society any favors. Nor am I saying they’re stupid. They’re often on drugs that make them crazy, but they aren’t idiots. But on an individual level, why be aggressive toward people who, for the most part, can’t change a tire? What’s the point of that? If we were to instead consistently point out their underlying lack of competence in areas where they’re weak using helpful, encouraging language that highlights flaws in their approach rather than their characters, perhaps they would notice and Do Better.
And that’d be good for everyone. :-)
I can't help but notice a certain bias in her selection of examples of the kind of topics that constitute misinformation.
With a very lazy 3-minute search I could find far more examples of "emotional reasoning" and "false dichotomy" in pro-climate change cultism content.
I also notice she (probably very consciously) did not include "appeal to authority" in her Five Most Wanted list, because technocrats love appeals to authority, and have really taught us how to put the "authority" in "authoritarianism" these days. Nevertheless, this has been one of the flimsiest go-to's of the modern authoritarian left, as handfuls of autistic Internet researchers find errors in conclusions made by scientists with million-dollar degrees in a matter of minutes.
I think normal people would be better off downplaying words, other than poetry, and go to art school. Learn about beauty and how ugly the modern world really is. Learn to understand that form is more important than content, and beautiful things are harder to create than ugly things. Study the use of images, gestures and sounds in time.