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 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…
