“Don’t Go Down The Rabbit Hole!” — NY Times Decries Critical Thinking Tells Us to Trust Google Instead

A new article from the New York Times claims that instead of engaging with someone who challenges your worldview, you should “resist the lure of Rabbit Holes” and go to more authoritative sources such as Google and Wikipedia.

The New York Times appears to have declared war on traditional critical thinking, which they say “isn’t helping in the fight against misinformation”.

Sharing the insights of “a digital literacy expert” named Michael Caulfield, the article reads as follows:

“We’re taught that, in order to protect ourselves from bad information, we need to deeply engage with the stuff that washes up in front of us,” Mr. Caulfield told me recently. He suggested that the dominant mode of media literacy (if kids get taught any at all) is that “you’ll get imperfect information and then use reasoning to fix that somehow. But in reality, that strategy can completely backfire.”

In other words: Resist the lure of rabbit holes, in part, by reimagining media literacy for the internet hellscape we occupy.

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