Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal chronicles the activities of a Russian influence activities on the Internet before attempting to influence the election in 2016:

While it is impossible to be sure what was in the minds of Russians tweeting false stories in 2014 and 2015—which also included tales of contaminated water, terrorist attacks and a chemical-plant explosion—these experts say it is as if the Russians were testing to see how much they could get Americans to believe.

Americans seem pretty gullible, willingly believing Internet hoaxes spread via social media.  Part of the problem is technology itself.  Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, et al. do not encourage thoughtful reflection.  But what truly accounts for the gullibility?

For decades, public education curricula have been built around the concept of ‘critical thinking’ skills.  Universities, since the 1980s in the liberal arts curriculum, have emphasized radical skepticism.  Is it possible that these education interventions have actually made Americans more gullible?  I contend they have.

First, the critical thinking skills taught are for evaluating arguments.  For example, my ten-year-old is being taught how to separate opinion from fact in non-fiction writing and how to argue from evidence this year.  They are not taught, however, how to recognize coordinated media manipulation.

Second, skepticism takes two forms, radical and methodological.  Radical skepticism cuts to the heart of how we know what we know.  Going back to David Hume, if the senses are not a diaphanous veil, then we have reason to distrust experience and certainly to distrust hearsay.  Radical skepticism presents a problem because it leads to many paradoxes.  Like in The Matrix, is reality real, or are we all plugged into a machine producing our experience of reality? The common sense philosophical tradition stresses that we must live as if reality is real.  To do otherwise, we would be forever walking into lamp posts.  Methodological skepticism is the core of the scientific method.  In order to establish positive knowledge, the research must doubt his beliefs, posit a hypothesis that is falsifiable with which to challenge those beliefs, and construct an experiment to test the hypothesis.  The great challenge in the scientific method is that there is no absolute certainty since any theory (a hypothesis established as contingently true based on experiment) is subject to falsification.  Confirmed enough times, theories become laws.  There are very few scientific laws.

Radical skepticism actually disarms people from being able to tell fact from fiction.  Once all claims to knowledge are merely competing narratives, only those that confirm one’s own biases are likely to be accepted.

Skepticism is destructive when cynical.  The political influence operation run by the Russians leverages cynicism regarding political institutions.  Democracy relies on a belief that the individual citizen is sovereign.  Trust in public institutions has been on the decline since the 1960s.  When radical skepticism combines with distrust of political institutions, the average Americans become ripe for conspiratorial thinking, denial of narratives that don’t confirm their own beliefs, and to believe the worst of institutions.  Now add the amplifying effects of social media shaped by trolls and you’ve got a highly effective way to destabilize an open society.

What we need is not more training in critical thinking, but three things: more methodological skepticism applied to one’s own beliefs, less radical skepticism, i.e., philosophically bypass it because it leads to absurdities and therefore invalid, and less cynicism.  While psychology research has shown that negative affect improves the ability of a person to detect falsehood, it doesn’t mean that a person needs to believe every negative narrative. Instead interrogate those narratives.  Does the tweet use inflammatory language?  Does the tweet impugn motives without denying accuracy of claims?  Does the same language appear over and over again in multiple sources?  These are all indicators of media manipulation.

You may think you have a good BS detector, but how is your Astroturf detector?