The Harvard Gazette introduces the new book by Professor Thomas Patterson, co-founder of the Boston Global Forum and AIWS Innovation:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/01/excerpt-thomas-pattersons-how-america-lost-its-mind/
Since then, there has been a revolution in mass communication and a leap in the number of people with college educations. Americans have never had so much information available or been better trained to handle it. Yet they are no better informed today than they were decades ago. The high-school-educated public of the 1950s knew as much about the structure of America’s government as does the media-saturated, college-educated public of today. When asked in a recent national survey to name the three branches of government, only a third of respondents could do so. Another third could name one or two. The final third couldn’t name a single one. Those ratios are nearly the same as when Americans were asked the question in 1952.
“Some conspiracy theories are harmful. A few are downright dangerous. Most are merely bizarre. More harmful to our democracy is a cousin of conspiracy theories — misinformation. It also involves fanciful ideas about the actual state of the world, but it is far more widespread and a far greater threat.”
“The Internet is an extraordinary advance. It has changed our lives in positive ways, giving us a level of access to information that was unimaginable a few decades ago. Yet mixed in with the Internet’s reliable content is misinformation, so many shades of it that it would put a lipstick counter to shame.”
“Aside from the delusional comfort it offers, misinformation doesn’t have much to recommend it. But there’s arguably something worse: people who know they are being fed false information and embrace it.”
In the problems professor Patterson raised in his book, AIWS young leaders, and distinguished thinkers of AIWS Innovation Network (AIWS-IN) at AIWS.world contribute solutions, initiatives, concepts, and practice. The AIWS-IN connect around 100,000 distinguished professors, thinkers, innovators from top universities in the world such as Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Yale, Berkeley, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon, Cambridge, Oxford, University of Tokyo etc.