Every second, we’re flooded by information, much of it false, misleading or incomplete in ways that really matter. The sheer volume and pace mean we struggle to distinguish what’s valuable, reliable or true.
Add a collapse of trust in media and authority, and you have yourself what philosophers call “a wicked problem”: one that resists resolution because it’s difficult to formulate definitively, involves complex, interdependent and fluctuating elements, and evolves in real time even as you attempt to understand and address it.
We generally rush to solve problems before we’ve framed them – before we understand what we’re dealing with. Dan Williams, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex and author of the Substack Conspicuous Cognition, is someone who can help us to understand a wicked problem such as this one.
Williams writes about the problem of misinformation, asking what it means to know something and how we determine truth when we encounter it. We should understand what misinformation is, he suggests, before we can galvanise ourselves against its potentially harmful effects.
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Misinformation is a weaponised term, often cited by both poles of the political or ideological spectrum to dismiss the views of the other. In such a polarised environment, Williams argues, we should engage critically with a broad range of research. Some “think when they come across a finding that you can just take that as it’s framed, plug it into your worldview and go from there”. However, he argues that there are issues with doing this “when it comes to studying things like how people form beliefs, what constitutes disinformation or misinformation, or fake news”.
When we encounter claims, for example, that a percentage of online content is misinformation, or that conservatives are more vulnerable to it than liberals, or that misinformation spreads like a virus and causes people to commit bad actions, we should remember that values and ideology can inform such research. We shouldn’t assume these are “robust, scientific findings we don’t need to scrutinise”, Williams warns.
“If you look into that literature, the most basic questions often don’t get asked, like, ‘what is misinformation?’. On the one hand you need to engage with the research because there’s lots of valuable stuff there”, he says, “but if you don’t engage with it critically in many cases, I think it’s almost worse than not engaging at all.”
Williams’s Substack writing complements his academic research and demonstrates the value of philosophers venturing into the public square. His interests counter the stereotype of philosophers as cloistered old lads engaged in esoteric debates.
The problem of misinformation is a high-stakes one. “False information, misleading bias, selective communication” and the like are important, says Williams. “Whether in legacy media, social media or what you’re hearing down the pub, that can be really damaging. It can lead people to distorted beliefs about the world. So it’s important to try to understand what’s going on there.”
It’s also important on a broader cultural and political stage, the philosopher argues, because it can have large-scale, lasting impact. “There is this really intense panic” about misinformation within our establishment institutions and how it is conceptualised within them, Williams argues. “This then feeds back on things like policy”, he says, which is why understanding the misinformation problem is crucial to addressing it.
“I think much of what is thought of as the misinformation problem is really a mistrust problem,” Williams suggests, reframing both how we understand the issue and the kinds of solutions we might imagine. If we think misinformation is a corrupting mind virus, he says, we’re likely to think the answer is eliminating misinformation insofar as that’s possible. If we think the real issue is declining trust in established institutions of knowledge, the solution lies largely in them working to rebuild that trust.
Williams believes those on the right “often think about this in terms of people on the left being infected with a woke mind virus ... people on the mainstream, like centre-left liberals, often think about this in terms of right-wing populists. That they’re just stupid, crazy, they’ve been duped by misinformation. Underpinning that in many cases ... is this real naivety about how obvious or self-evident the truth is concerning complex states of affairs.”
The truth is itself complex and often uncertain, according to Williams. Our access to it “runs through chains of trust and testimony”. We compress complexity to maximise comprehension, and we can take ideological shortcuts just as frequently as the people we disagree with. When we’re aware of this uncertainty, and can accept it, Williams suggests, we can engage with others more compassionately, make room for the possibility of flaws in our own view as well as other people’s, and interpret information presented to us more critically. This kind of self-awareness is the best defence we have against both misinformation and the noise surrounding it.
