Ben Casnocha Quotes

Our whole educational and cultural system is not designed to provide those intellectual tools, so people are often lost and the internet often becomes kind of a cult generator.

The people are not stupid, but they are totally misinformed.

If we are not serious about facts and what's true and what's not. And particularly in an age of social media where so many people are getting their information in sound bites and snippets off their phones, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, then we have problems.

Smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.

Ten percent of the American population thinks that Barack Obama is a Muslim. Those are the people that have not learned the skill of filtering information from the vast barrage of inaccurate information that we're all faced with everyday. I think that's a very 21st century skill.

The public's not stupid.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

Facts are incidental if not accidental, and the problem that we have as a society is that there is a significant number of people who have grown up in a different information environment ... surrounded by much more information, but whose provenance is not clear.... The rumors will be believed; the fiction will be thought of as fact; and the political agendas, among other agendas, will be influenced by interest groups who are coming from some quite strange trajectory to issues based on collective understanding that is founded on falsity.

The Internet has done a wonderful thing for us. But democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time.

The child has no way of knowing what's good information.

We don't have a public that really understands the world anymore, and in the age of complexity, that problem becomes much more difficult.

It's not as if Trump is addicted to the best-researched, most in-depth, meticulously sourced material in the world. If he were, we'd all be better off, right?

I'm kind of fascinated by this idea that we can surround ourselves with information: we can just pile up data after data after data and arm ourselves with facts and yet still not be able to answer the questions that we have.

I do not read newspapers. I do not take any information which I don't want to take. I make sure I keep my composure.

I guess what's happened is that I've a little bit let go of the idea that we can reach everybody. Certain people... the informational world they live in, it's so distorted that it's hard to get through.

I think there is a danger when it comes to fake news because there is some fake news out there, but there's also a danger when you only hear back to you the beliefs you already have.

I don't really believe that people read just the stuff they agree with.

With regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them.

I think if you use Twitter and social media as your main source of information you are an idiot, but I think most people who use it know better, so I kind of enjoy it.

I feel quite sure that what the American people lack is knowledge.

One of the marks of an educated man today is to know what not to read--what not to see or what not to listen to.

The people who are the worst at news, who kind of engage in what I call the World Wrestling of news, have kind of set the bar for where news is.

Too many of us take great pains with what we ingest through our mouths, and far less with what we partake of through our ears and eyes.

Most people, in fact, will not take the trouble in finding out the truth, but are much more inclined to accept the first story they hear.

Most people early achieve and later intensify a tendency to process new and disconfirming information so that any original conclusion remains intact. They become people of whom Philip Wylie observed: "You couldn't 't squeeze a dime between what they already know and what they will never learn."