The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

The algorithms feed people stuff that confirms their beliefs because that's what they like.

It's all about preferences and choices, not ability.

> "They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks"

Having a section about how conspiracy theorists are very knowledgeable about their subjects and then immediately saying that a right wing economist is really well informed about arguments against minimum wage regulations seemed a little on the nose, but I think it was just a coincidence.

Basically, people are allowed to be wrong about stuff but only if they are right-wing, because right-wing people have traditionally been wrong. Is that what we are saying?

> "So people vote Republican, I think, not because of “misinformation” but because they perceive that the GOP position on many policy topics has moderated while the Democratic Party’s has gotten more left-wing"

So they aren't misinformed, they just realised 10 years late that what the "left-wing" opinion 10 years ago was, was what they wanted after all? So how do we know they won't do the same in ten more years, which in fact he pretty openly states they will.

I hope people will look more and more for information about topic as vaccination. Because right know we come to era that we are really able to get access to information that was hidden for decades.

I recommend book from German medical doctor "Gerhard Buchwald - Vaccination - A Business Based on Fear". Book was released in 1994 and observe the development of diseases and vaccination in Germany.

Yes, it is easy to say that someone is anti-vax, but if you really inform yourself in this topic, you'll start ask questions that are valid and should be debated more.

"Some kind" is doing a lot of work there, but I think there's some truth to what you're saying. My father-in-law will pop out with some bizarro story about how global warming was invented to cover up government collaboration with aliens, or Covid-19 was created in a lab using Vince Foster's stem cells, and when my wife asks where he heard it, it'll be from some guy he met last week and talked to for a total of half an hour while he was buying a motorcycle from him. Or maybe he didn't buy the motorcycle because he didn't totally trust the guy, but he believed him about the aliens. If you or me repeated information from a source like that, we'd be doing it in bad faith, but my father-in-law does it with a kind of innocent sincerity.

There are a lot of people like my father-in-law, but there are also a lot of people who are aware that what they're saying isn't literally true, but it's a way of supporting a system that they believe is wholesome for society, or at wholesome to their own interests. So there's a spectrum much like religion, with true believers on one end, and complete unbelievers on the other end who outwardly speak and behave as if they believe, because they think it's a good story for little kids to grow up with and because they think it's an effective shared fiction to structure society around.

In a sense you could say that both my father-in-law and the college-educated conspiracy theorists are willfully ignorant. My father-in-law sincerely believes a lot of sketchy things about politics and the government, but his lack of skepticism is not completely symmetrical. He is nominally in the "they're all crooks" camp, but he is not as quick to believe really crazy stuff about Republicans as about Democrats. Against Republicans, he'll believe that they invent reasons to use military hardware because they have a cozy relationship with defense contractors. Against Democrats, he'll believe that the military invented and perfect flying saucers in the 1950s, and then Barbara Bush and Anton Levay opened a portal to hell by having butt sex in a church and we gave the flying saucers to the demons so if they crash people will just think they're aliens. (Barbara Bush was a secret Demoncrat, of course -- she was pro-abortion!)

There's a lot about my father-in-law's internal mental state that I can't figure out from the outside. When he "believes" something crazy about Democrats, he's aware that he enjoys believing and repeating it, he seems to be aware that there's a certain kind of scrutiny that it won't hold up under, but he also regards it as actionable information in the sense that he votes based on his distaste for the Democrats and he cites crazy conspiracy stuff as supporting his distaste for the Democrats.

tl;dr Most people's conclusions are based on "some kind of logical deduction" in the sense that almost any cognitive process can be described as "some kind of logical deduction."