Page 17 - The 'X' Chronicles Newspaper - October / November 2018

Has ET Gone Home? 17

Has ET Gone Home trying to understand the problem and to be things that are easy to manipulate.
thoughtful about the research and therefore, in It makes sense that humans would glom
some cases, to move slower,” she says. on to just about anything when they’re so worn
The Department of Defense released three Part of the issue is that people are still out by the news. But when we resist snap
separate videos taken of the AAVs (anomalous
relying on outdated shortcuts, the kind we were judgments, we are harder to fool. “You just have
aerial vehicles) from the incident after a secret
taught to use in a library. Take the professor in to stop and think,” Rand says of the experiments
Pentagon program intended to find signs of
Wineburg’s study. A list of citations means one he has run on the subject. “All of the data we
alien life was revealed by the New York Times
thing when it appears in a book that has been have collected suggests that’s the real problem.
to have been defunct since 2012. However, the
vetted by a publisher, a fact-checker and a It’s not that people are being super-biased and
paper's sources said the program continues to
librarian. It means quite another on the Internet, using their reasoning ability to trick themselves
exist in some form, despite being stripped of its where everyone has access to a personal into believing crazy stuff. It’s just that people
explicit funding. printing press. Newspapers used to physically aren’t stopping. They’re rolling on.”
And why not? The American military - separate hard news and commentary, so our That is, of course, the way social-media
and the air force in particular - has been
minds could easily grasp what was what. But platforms have been designed. The endless feeds
investigating incidences of UFOS for decades.
today two-thirds of Americans get news from and intermittent rewards are engineered to keep
In 1947, the Air Fore started investigating more
social media, where posts from publishers get you reading. And there are other environmental
than 12,000 claimed UFO sightings before the
the same packaging as birthday greetings and factors at play, like people’s ability to easily seek
project ended in 1969. While the program
rants. Content that warrants an emotional out information that confirms their beliefs. But
concluded that most of the sightings involved
response is mixed with things that require Rand is not the only academic who believes that
conventional aircraft of spy planes, more than deeper consideration. “It all looks identical,” we can take a big bite out of errors if we slow
700 incidences remained explained. [] says Harvard researcher Claire Wardle, “so our down.
brain has to work harder to make sense of those Wineburg, an 18-year veteran of
How Your Brain Tricks different types of information.” Stanford, works out of a small office in the
Instead of working harder, we often try center of the palm-lined campus. His group’s
You Into Believing Fake to outsource the job. Studies have shown that specialty is developing curricula that teachers

News people assume that the higher something across the nation use to train kids in critical
appears in Google search results, the more thinking. Now they’re trying to update those
reliable it is. But Google’s algorithms are lessons for life in a digital age. With the help of
Continued from Page 13 surfacing content based on keywords, not truth. funding from Google, which has devoted $3
If you ask about using apricot seeds to cure million to the digital-literacy project they are
Academics are only beginning to grasp all the cancer, the tool will dutifully find pages part of, the researchers hope to deploy new rules
ways our brains are shaped by the Internet, a asserting that they work. “A search engine is a of the road by next year, outlining techniques
key reason that stopping the spread of search engine,” says Richard Gingras, vice that anyone can use to draw better conclusions
misinformation is so tricky. One attempt by president of news at Google. “I don’t think on the web.
Facebook shows how introducing new signals anyone really wants Google to be the arbiter of His group doesn’t just come up with
into this busy domain can backfire. With hopes what is or is not acceptable expression.” smart ideas; it tests them. But as they set out to
of curtailing junk news, the company started That’s just one example of how we need develop these lessons, they struggled to find
attaching warnings to posts that contained to retrain our brains. We’re also inclined to trust research about best practices. “Where are the
claims that fact-checkers had rated as false. But visuals, says Wardle. But some photos are studies about what superstars do, so that we
a study found that this can make users more doctored, and other legitimate ones are put in might learn from them?” Wineburg recalls
likely to believe any unflagged post. Tessa false contexts. On Twitter, people use the size of thinking, sitting in the team’s office beneath a
Lyons-Laing, a product manager who works on others’ followings as a proxy for reliability, yet print of the Tabula Rogeriana, a medieval map
Facebook’s News Feed, says the company toyed millions of followers have been paid for (and an that pictures the world in a way we now see as
with the idea of alerting users to hoaxes that estimated 10% of “users” may be bots). In his upside-down. Eventually, a cold email to an
were traveling around the web each day before studies, Wineburg found that people of all ages office in New York revealed a promising model:
realizing that an “immunization approach” were inclined to evaluate sources based on professional fact-checkers.
might be counterproductive. “We’re really features like the site’s URL and graphic design,
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