I read recently (maybe here on the bbs) that English needs a verb for when I do this:
Well, look who finally showed up!
So, let’s see the results:
Congratulations!
You’re more resilient to misinformation than 96% of the US population!
Your MIST-20 results: 20/20
Veracity Discernment: 100% (ability to accurately distinguish real news from fake news)
Real News Detection: 100% (ability to correctly identify real news)
Fake News Detection: 100% (ability to correctly identify fake news)
Distrust/Naïvité: 0 (ranges from -10 to +10, overly skeptical to overly gullible)
Your ability to recognize real and fake news is great! You are neither too skeptical nor too gullible when it comes to the news.
Veracity Discernment: 87.5% (ability to accurately distinguish real news from fake news)
Real News Detection: 87.5% (ability to correctly identify real news)
Fake News Detection: 100.0% (ability to correctly identify fake news)
Distrust/Naïvité: -1 (ranges from -8 to +8, overly skeptical to overly gullible)
After the last decade on TERF Island, I’m surprised my distrust is that low.
It’s a phenomenon known as Gell-Mann amnesia.
And there’s this great old-school style youtube video about Gell-Mann amnesia and it’s inverse (you know, “I’m competent at physics, so I can now opine on economics/medicine/art!”)
Me: Hey cool, there’s a name for it. [looks it up]. And the term was coined by … Michael Crichton? [sad trombone]
Oh well.
Also: Yay, another Angela Collier vid!
ETA: I really can’t get over how Michael Crichton coined the term, while building a career on its inverse: assuming that his competence in one area meant a similar level of competence in others. He used his extensive background in [checks notes] biological anthropology to write a critique of climate and atmospheric science, called “State of Fear”. It was slammed by actual climate scientists, but according to Wikipedia, Dubya loved it.
And seriously: a room full of professional biologists who all forgot that reptiles can change their sex? That’s one of the most mind-blowing things they would’ve learned in first or second year.
Well I had to wait over two hours, and restart my chromebook once. But the results were worth it!!
You’re WAY more resilient to misinformation than 127% of the US population!
Veracity Discernment: 110.3% (ability to accurately distinguish only the realest news from all that fake news)
Real News Detection: 100.004% (ability to correctly identify real news, even when impaired)
Fake News Detection: 103.3333% (ability to correctly identify fake news, even by the smell)
Distrust/Naïvité: -3 (ranges from -10 to +10, overly skeptical to overly gullible (yet somehow charming))
Sadly, the app stopped working as soon as I finished. I got no splanations!
Yeah, which makes me wonder: is the test too easy, or is the state of civic engagement and media literacy so eroded that a large number of people can’t identify obviously fake headlines? I can believe the latter after Faux’s 40 year campaign to create a fact-free conservative echo chamber.
True, but “Fake News”, misinformation, and disinformation have been openly discussed issues for at least two election cycles now, if not more. Being told it’s a test to identify fake news, given to people told they are swimming in a sea of fake news, is in itself an interesting test of whether test takers can identify it when it is served to them on a platter.
Trying to think of a clever analogy about testing whether fish can identify water…
Nice job! I only got 18/20 (and 15/16). I’m slightly gullible when I’m forced to pick between fake vs real.
In reality I tend to have my own confidence gauge and I go and look up things that smell a bit suspect or are surprising to me. I tend to follow science more closely than current events or politics. Besides politics is hard to reason about because humans can be pretty random.
The MIST-16 seems slanted to the left but that probably helped me with this score: 16/16, neither too skeptical NOR too gullible! (Maybe it’s just me, but it’s odd that some of the conspiracy theories that seemed left-tilting when I first heard them now seem right-tilting. Who knows, it might have something to do with which party was in charge.) I’ve traveled a considerable distance in my short life because I recall being more gullible back then.
I think the real problem isn’t whether people are good at recognizing misinformation so much as the social epistemology of parties has been eroding. People want to believe, and will actively seek out, information that establishes their view.
Everything is politicized, thus a threat to oneself. It’s more important to demonstrate loyalty than to see reality. If Wil E Coyote doesn’t look down, gravity doesn’t exist.
Right now, it’s rude to mention that people attacked Congress, that we played keep-away with an ally’s support right before they were invaded, that we had a real pandemic that killed over a million people, or that the hurricanes we’re observing are consistently larger and larger. They want to pull the NOAA funding because reporting how the temperature changes outside is too political.
The classics never die! I’ve been seeing that meme at least 20 years, and it was not all that new then.
I deserve double points because I had a medical procedure this afternoon and I’m still high as a kite
If you wanted to spread fake news to people, then this seems like the very first thing you’d do. Give examples of people falling for really obvious fakes, then say “of course, you wouldn’t fall for that. You’re far too clever and enlightened to fall for those sorts of tricks. It’s funny, what nonsense those dumb $outgroup_members believe, isn’t it? In fact, I heard that one of them…”
And continue with the lies from there. The easiest way to get taken by fake news is to start off thinking that you’re invulnerable to it.
I missed one and will spend two minutes in the penalty box for high sticking. I wish they indicated which one I beefed. Ah, the fact that I’m stoned on weed ought not let me off the hook: two more minutes for hooking?
Congratulations!
You’re more resilient to misinformation than 89% of the US population!
Your MIST-20 results: 19/20
Veracity Discernment: 90% (ability to accurately distinguish real news from fake news)
Real News Detection: 90% (ability to correctly identify real news)
Fake News Detection: 100% (ability to correctly identify fake news)
Distrust/Naïvité: -1 (ranges from -10 to +10, overly skeptical to overly gullible)
Your ability to recognize real and fake news is great! You might be a bit skeptical when it comes to the news.
That last sentence: “You might be a bit skeptical when it comes to the news”? I may have missed one, but the fact that a rapist and fascist man-child who’s never read a book and lies nonstop might win the next election…again? And the three SCOTUS members he appointed were part of the 6 in the 6-3 decision to end all checks and balances? (Trump v. United States, 7/1/24) I’m profoundly skeptical about how “news” is produced and consumed. And a growing number of the electorate seem almost entirely unmoored from reality. Maybe my score would’ve been worse - i.e, I’d be even stupider - if I actually had the guts to read the WA Po every day, like I used to; now it’s like non-stop rolling fascist horror and I “can’t even,” as the kids say (or do they not say that anymore?
Imagine you woke from a ten year coma a month ago and took this test:
-Republican party VP nominee refuses to admit Trump lost the 2020 election for POTUS.
My gawd: easy! Is this Donald Trump we’re talking about? The blowhard loser who took out a full page ad demanding the Central Park Five be executed, though there was no real evidence? Absurd that his name and “POTUS” would even be in the same sentence! Next!
I got the same result:
It was extremely irksome that it offered no feedback as to what was wrong or why.
ETA it was the eye color one that I got wrong which was an oops because I remember actually seeing that story recently
I got one wrong in the “identified real story as fake” category and I think I know which one. I blame it on over-interpreting the task. 9/10 people say I tend to do that (or do they?)
Maybe a better way to view the test is “is this a headline you could expect to see on FOX news? If so, pick FAKE”
Yeah, after the test I felt like I wasn’t necessarily good at picking out fake news rather than at figuring out the rules of that particular test.
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