Llistening to rumours and old wives tales

From this article: The internet needs a way to help people separate rumour from real science.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee: "The web has been used to spread disinformation"

That's how it works. Sometime people lie, sometimes people misunderstand, sometimes people have different views (neither of which are right or wrong). The medium in which these ideas and thoughts are transmitted is irrelevant - it could be face to face, on the web, or in a newspaper.

Global Warming is a fantastic example. We all got completely stuffed up by the IPCC who "inadvertently mislead" everyone with the Hockey Stick. If you don't know the full story: the basic piece of information which forms the argument for all man-made global warming arguments turned out to be based on a piece of software which produced the same "warming" graph regardless of what was fed into it.

That disinformation spread across the internet and across the whole world. Even now that the truth is starting to come out, there's is still a lot of disinformation - hundreds of tree-hugging-sandle-wearing-trots-loving-astro-turfing trolls trying to stop the truth from getting out in any way they can.

But that aside, we've always had old wives tales and part of the process of being a stable, adjusted adult is knowing how to rate information. You have to learn what to trust and what not to trust.

If you attempt to protect people from bad info, then you get into a situation where people trust things by default, and that will put us in a very bad place.