Also, as I have mentioned before, the quality of citizen scientists’ work. (I hate that term, by the way, looking for a new one.) The transfer of knowledge can be quite delightful.

You could use education to combat indoctrination but you’d have to push educators to include critical thinking, skepticism and healthy mistrust in their curriculum.

To me, the most powerful aspect of the internet is the ability to rapidly and easily contact the author.

The revolution from the internet does the same, but now the spread of information is at the speed of light.

The Gutenberg Press allowed the mass production of books… but books were not dirt cheap- they were valuable, they took considerable effort to produce and distribute even with the Gutenberg press. So… as a result the information selected for printing and distribution had to be generally considered ‘fit to print’. I doubt there were many times the Gutenberg press was used to print the equivalent of the latest fashion scandal involving the Khardashians…

Of course the Gutenberg press was used to print dangerous misinformation, and allowed it to spread faster than it would have otherwise.

Between 1487 and 1520, twenty editions of the Malleus Maleficarum were published, and another sixteen between 1574 and 1669.[120] The Malleus Maleficarum was able to spread throughout Europe rapidly in the late 15th and at the beginning of the 16th century due to the innovation of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century by Johannes Gutenberg. The invention of printing some thirty years before the first publication of the Malleus Maleficarum instigated the fervor of witch hunting, and, in the words of Russell, “the swift propagation of the witch hysteria by the press was the first evidence that Gutenberg had not liberated man from original sin.”[121]

With the internet the cost to distribute information is negligible- This is good in many ways… I cannot count the number of times the ability to search all the scientific journals for keywords has helped me solve a technical problem at work… When I started as a grad student I had to spend hours looking up journal articles in a library, often to only find that despite a promising title, they had none of the information I needed. By the end of my Graduate work many Journals were online and searchable.

My first job out of grad school was on a project to do work out how to use extreme ultraviolet light to make microchips… we had a serious problem that mysteriously contaminated our vacuum chamber- it was a serious mystery we needed to resolve- I found the answer in a paper written in the 1980′s simulating the atmosphere of Titan- there is NO way I would have found that going to a library and digging through paper journals… the ability to search all journals for keywords and phrases is revolutionary.

I think we have only begun to see the scientific revolution the internet is bringing…

But… the dark side of this is ANYONE with ANY agenda can spread whatever nonsense they want with virtually no cost. And platforms like twitter and Facebook HELP people do this and spread their nonsense quickly and widely. So we have conspiracy theories, antivaxxers, Q-Anon and white supremacists all given the tools to spread their dangerous lies at the speed of light. For example see any post by Johannes on this board…

If we had a citizenry that was educated and able to critically think about the information they are exposed to, it might not be a big deal… but we instead have a citizenry primed for conspiracy theory, trained to accept the easy answers that make them feel good… Now add to that the pandemic, causing countless anxious people to stay at home in front of their computers more than usual… and you have a pandemic of misinformation spreading like wildfire.

What is the solution? I am not sure there is one… a better educated populace would help, better vetting of information on platforms like facebook would help…. but its unlikely this would be sufficient.

We could try to go back to the old model- and make it somewhat costly to produce and distribute information- that would establish a cost of entry into the marketplace of ideas- and reduce the number of cranks, but that would do plenty of harm as well…

The internet is the ultimate democratization of information- and ironically it may result in the downfall of democracy… and there is no easy answer to the threat… maybe I will try to look on Google for the solution…

Its just the same process, different in degree but the same in kind. There will be a time of confusion and adjustment, and people like us who mastered the old ways will complain about hoi polloi putting on airs and ripping the brush/pen/microphone from our hands.

Remember, Galileo didn’t get in trouble for the heliocentic universe, it was for writing in Italian instead of Latin.