"The more powerful or the more well-known you are, the higher the tendency for the crowds to believe in the information you said."

It's has been a really long break. Six weeks have passed since I wrote the last post. A lot of things happened and I just simply could not keep up with everything. I needed that break, but now I am more ready than ever to be back and discuss with you about amazing topics that are about to come. Let's tackle the third season, where we are going to discuss one of the most requested topics of all-time: education!

Discussing education is never-ending. Everyone has their own opinion, about what should and what should not we learn. However, this season will be more than that. 8 to 10 episode will be too many when we were just discussing formal education since formal education is merely a part of the bigger reality that shape our evolution as humankind.

What are we going to talk about, then? A lot. We will start with the smallest part of education, which is about how we filter information. Welcome to the era of information.


The Information Age

The shift from the traditional industry established by the Industrial Revolution to an economy mainly based upon information technology that happened a couple decades ago really transform how we process information. Petabytes of information are transferred every second and it is up to us which ones we want to receive and process. 

How many words have you read today? More than ever. How many new informations did you get? Where did you get them from? You could even learn some physics from TikTok videos (or just watching some cringe videos). What a time to be alive. However, do we actually receive more information per day compared to people in the past? Or do we just have new kind of information sources?

The answer is pretty clear. Indeed we have a lot of new kind of sources, such as the Internet, but that also come with the increasing amount of information we got. What does it have to do with education, then? It's all about time. The amount of time we were exposed to information remains the same. However, the amount of it may increase with a factor of fifty. The cost of this phenomena is our brain has a relatively short time to process all of this information.

Then, what? Our brain could handle all of this, right? I could not give you a definitive answer, since our brain does not work as simple as how a computer works. You change a 'bit' in your computer's memory, it will receive it and could be used for further processing. Our brain does not work the same way. If there is one thing that differentiates our brain to a hard-disk, it is our brain is allergic to contradicting information.

What Makes An Information True?

If you write a sentence in your word processing application such as, "Berlin is the capital of Germany," your computer will receive it well. On the next day you write another sentence, "Munich is the capital of Germany," your computer will also get it. You can save both documents and use them for anything you want. What happens to our brain when this thing occurred?

First, you want to know what the capital of Germany is. Then you ask someone, maybe a friend beside you, and he told you that it is Berlin. Then you might say, "ah, okay." The next day you are scrolling your twitter feed and read, "Munich, the capital of Germany, has an increase of coronavirus cases." Your brain will definitely stop for a second. Stop may not be the proper word, since I actually think your brain works harder during that time. You are trying to convince yourself that Berlin is actually the capital of Germany, but why this tweet says the other way?

Then you go to Wikipedia to prove which one is right, your friend or the tweet you read. Oh, it's Berlin. Your friend is right. You read more articles that include Berlin as the capital. You are now sure that Berlin is the capital of Germany. If some time in the future there is another tweet that says, "Hamburg, the capital of Germany...", you will not be confused. You instantly know that that tweet is wrong. The more you deal with the similar kind of information, the less prone you are to information fallacy.

However, what if it does not run as well as our first example? Your first friend says that Munich is the capital of Germany. Then you read the tweet. There is no contradiction. You discuss with lots of friends and they also say that Munich is the capital of Germany. Life goes on, until one day you read the news on the national television that says Berlin is the capital of Germany. You cannot believe it. You have been exposed to false information for too long, and it will take time for your brain to convert to reality.

This is what happens when the scientific revolution happened a couple hundred years ago. We believed that the earth is the centre of the solar system for a really long time. We were exposed to that false information and it made that information is actually the 'truth'. Yea, the sun also circles the earth. No one denies it until new experiments prove the other way. It took a couple decades until this truth is accepted across the society. This shows that our brain does not naturally accept contradiction. When a contradiction appears, the first thing we do is being sceptical, and this is the key to every learning process.

What Does It Mean to be Skeptical?

We tend to question everything and this is the normal trait of our brain. Our brain could not adapt to changes quickly. "Experience is the best teacher" is actually a statement that makes a lot of sense. The more we are exposed to a different kind of information, the better we could pick the right ones among the false ones. We learn gradually since we were a kid. The process of learning is actually similar to playing "Tower Block" game. (You know the game right? The one in the old phone that we have to build a tower one by one straight, otherwise it is going to fall down? Nevermind, you got the idea)

At first, it was nothing. Then the first information came; it became the foundation or the ground floor. You learn more by putting new blocks upon the foundations. Higher and higher. However, there will be a time when you got a contradicting block. It could contradict exactly the block below it or it could also contradict the block five-floor below. What could you do? You compare to the similar block and make sure you get the right one. If it is right, you have to remove the false block, and sometimes you have to remove every single block on top of it. You insert the correct block, then you go on. If the block is wrong, just throw it away.

This is the core of every single learning process. It does not matter if it is about discovering the origin of the universe or about learning simple math, it works the same way. Being sceptical is making sure that the block is the correct one. It could happen in a short time, but could also a long time after we learned about something. Sometimes our old block is not totally wrong, but just imperfect. Then we could add some missing pieces and make our building stronger.

Is The Amount of Repetition The Only Key?

Previously I said that the more we are exposed to a different kind of information, the better we could pick the right ones among the false ones. However, the truth may not be the majority of the information, such as what happened at the beginning of the scientific revolution. Almost every single one of us except the scientists denies new theories regarding how our universe work. This shows that the amount of information could change the truth, or we often express it as "the truth of consensus", which means the majority decides which one is the truth. We have seen that there are a couple things that could change the "truth", such as consensus and real proofs. Is there anything else? Yes, it is "the author of the information".

The more powerful or the more well-known you are, the higher the tendency for the crowds to believe in the information you said, and we have definitely seen this. Some public figures deny the existence of the novel coronavirus. How many people believe it? A lot. Compare it to if a guy shouting in front of a station that the virus isn't real. How many people will believe it?

This is why they are called "public figures". A lot of people look up into them and they have the power to spread information, does not matter if the information is accurate or not. It does not surprise me at all that these things happen and there is nothing we could do to change this. Everyone has the same right to express their opinion, and being a public figure just makes it easier for everyone to hear your opinion. In other words, the accessibility of your opinion will increase. This will continue to happen. The only thing we could act is to filter this information better and make us less prone to hoaxes.

Being Skeptic

Being sceptic is not bad at all. In fact, it is naturally how our brain works. The problem is there is actually a weird phenomenon in our society that tends to suppress, make scepticism kind of taboo. Have you ever feel that you are being pressured by questioning something? You feel guilty by being different. There is actually a viral video on twitter that shows a girl questioning if "math was real". She believed that algebra is a fallacy since she does not get how we come to the point of inventing algebra. I don't have any problem with that, and I would love to discuss how algebra was discovered, or invented. 

What irritates me is the amount of comment that bullies this girl by asking these kinds of questions. Most of you did not even ask about this, and when someone asks about it, they are being bullied. This is what I mean about being pressured by questioning something different. It indeed has to do with peer pressure, but there is actually another cause, which is our bad education system, which we are going to discuss on the next one.

This will be the end of our first episode, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. Until then, keep learning and stay safe.

Title image credit: John Hopkins