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Some experts displayed a top-down style of reasoning: politics as a deductive art. They started with a big-idea premise about human nature, society, or economics and applied it to the specifics of the case. They tended to reach more confident conclusions about the future. And the positions they reached were easier to classify ideologically: that is the Keynesian prediction and that is the free-market fundamentalist prediction and that is the worst-case environmentalist prediction and that is the best case technology-driven growth prediction etc. Other experts displayed a bottom-up style of reasoning: politics as a much messier inductive art. They reached less confident conclusions and they are more likely to draw on a seemingly contradictory mix of ideas in reaching those conclusions (sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right). We called the big-idea experts “hedgehogs” (they know one big thing) and the more eclectic experts “foxes” (they know many, not so big things).

The most consistent predictor of consistently more accurate forecasts was “style of reasoning”: experts with the more eclectic, self-critical, and modest cognitive styles tended to outperform the big-idea people (foxes tended to outperform hedgehogs).

Lehrer: Can non-experts do anything to encourage a more effective punditocracy?

Tetlock: Yes, non-experts can encourage more accountability in the punditocracy. Pundits are remarkably skillful at appearing to go out on a limb in their claims about the future, without actually going out on one. For instance, they often “predict” continued instability and turmoil in the Middle East (predicting the present) but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations. They are essentially impossible to pin down. If pundits felt that their public credibility hinged on participating in level playing field forecasting exercises in which they must pit their wits against an extremely difficult-to-predict world, I suspect they would be learn, quite quickly, to be more flexible and foxlike in their policy pronouncements.

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Both studies suggest that “weight of evidence” reporting is an imperfect remedy. It turns out that hearing from experts on both sides of an issue distorts our perception of consensus — even when we have all the information we need to correct that misperception.

In one study, all the participants were presented with a numerical summary, drawn from a panel of experts convened by the University of Chicago, of the range of expert opinion on certain economic issues.

One group of participants, however, was presented not only with the numerical summary of expert opinion but also with an excerpted comment from one expert on either side of an issue.

Then, all the participants were asked to rate their perception of the extent to which the experts agreed with one another on each issue. Even though both had a precise count of the number of experts on either side, the participants who also read the comments of the opposing experts gave ratings that did not distinguish as sharply between the high-consensus and the low-consensus issues. In other words, being exposed to the conflicting comments made it more difficult for participants to distinguish the issues most experts agreed on (such as carbon tax) from those for which there was substantial disagreement (such as minimum wage).

This distorting influence affected not only the participants’ perception of the degree of consensus, but also their judgments of whether there was sufficient consensus to use it to guide public policy.

What explains this cognitive glitch? One possibility is that when we are presented with comments from experts on either side of an issue, we produce a mental representation of the disagreement that takes the form of one person on either side, which somehow contaminates our impression of the distribution of opinions in the larger population of experts.

Another possibility is that we may just have difficulty discounting the weight of a plausible argument, even when we know it comes from an expert whose opinion is held by only a small fraction of his or her peers.

It’s also possible that the mere presence of conflict (in the form of contradictory expert comments) triggers a general sense of uncertainty in our minds, which in turn colors our perceptions of the accuracy of current expert understanding of an issue.

the implications are worrisome. Government action is guided in part by public opinion. Public opinion is guided in part by perceptions of what experts think. But public opinion may — and often does — deviate from expert opinion, not simply, it seems, because the public refuses to acknowledge the legitimacy of experts, but also because the public may not be able to tell where the majority of expert opinion lies.

A new study out of Germany has found that people are much more confident in the claims of a popular science article then they are in the claims of an academic article written for experts

It was also found that the subjects were more confident in their own judgments after reading a popular article, and that this was tied to a lessened desire to seek out more information from expert sources.

"easiness effect”

the issue arises from the manner in which popular science is presented; as opposed to how scientists themselves present data to each other and to the public.

This emboldens people to reject the ideas of experts who they see as superfluous to their understanding of an idea (which they have already grasped).

notably health

each of these is valuable in its own way.

The cult of randomized controlled trials also neglects a rich body of potential hypotheses.

up until then I hadn’t thought much about the process of decision making. So in between M.R.I.’s, CT scans and spinal taps, I dove into the academic literature on decision making. Not just in my field but also in neuroscience, psychology, sociology, information science, political science and history.

Physicians do get things wrong, remarkably often. Studies have shown that up to one in five patients are misdiagnosed. In the United States and Canada it is estimated that 50,000 hospital deaths each year could have been prevented if the real cause of illness had been correctly identified.

Yet people are loath to challenge experts.

when confronted with the expert, it was as if the independent decision-making parts of many subjects’ brains pretty much switched off. They simply ceded their power to decide to the expert.

If we are to control our own destinies, we have to switch our brains back on and come to our medical consultations with plenty of research done, able to use the relevant jargon. If we can’t do this ourselves we need to identify someone in our social or family network who can do so on our behalf.

Anxiety, stress and fear — emotions that are part and parcel of serious illness — can distort our choices. Stress makes us prone to tunnel vision, less likely to take in the information we need. Anxiety makes us more risk-averse than we would be regularly and more deferential.

It’s not that we can’t be anxious, it’s that we need to acknowledge to ourselves that we are.

It is also crucial to ask probing questions not only of the experts but of ourselves.

we bring into our decision-making process flaws and errors of our own. All of us show bias when it comes to what information we take in. We typically focus on anything that agrees with the outcome we want.

We need to be aware of our natural born optimism, for that harms good decision making, too.

We need to acknowledge our tendency to incorrectly process challenging news and actively push ourselves to hear the bad as well as the good. It felt great when I stumbled across information that implied I didn’t need any serious treatment at all. When we find data that supports our hopes we appear to get a dopamine rush similar to the one we get if we eat chocolate, have sex or fall in love

But it’s often information that challenges our existing opinions or wishful desires that yields the greatest insights

One of the first things I ask myself when I read a headline or find a claim about a product is if the phrase is emotionally neutral. Some headlines generate outrage or fear, indicating that there is a clear bias. When we read something that exploits are emotions, we must be careful.

misinformation tends to play on our emotions a lot better than factual reporting or news.

When I’m trying to figure out whether a claim is factual, there are a few questions I always ask myself.Does the headline, article, or information evoke fear, anger, or other strong negative emotions?Where did you hear about the information? Does it cite any direct evidence?What is the expert consensus on this information?

Step 2. Evidence Synthesis and EvaluationSometimes I’m still feeling uncertain if there’s any truth to a claim. Even after taking into account the emotions it evokes, I need to find the evidence of a claim and evaluate its quality

Often, the information that I want to check is either political or scientific. There are different questions I ask myself, depending on the nature of these claims.

Political claims

Looking at multiple different outlets, each with its own unique biases, helps us get a picture of the issue.

I use multiple websites specializing in fact-checking. They provide primary sources of evidence for different types of claims. Here is a list of websites where I do my fact-checking:

SnopesPolitifactFactCheckMedia Bias/Fact Check (a bias assessor for fact-checking websites)Simply type in some keywords from the claim to find out if it’s verified with primary sources, misleading, false, or unproven.

Science claims

Often we tout science as the process by which we uncover absolute truths about the universe. Once many scientists agree on something, it gets disseminated in the news. Confusion arises once this science changes or evolves, as is what happened throughout the coronavirus pandemic. In addition to fear and misinformation, we have to address a fundamental misunderstanding of the way science works when practicing critical thinking.

It is confusing to hear about certain drugs found to cure the coronavirus one moment, followed by many other scientists and researchers saying that they don’t. How do we collect and assess these scientific claims when there are discrepancies?

A big part of these scientific findings is difficult to access for the public

Sometimes the distinction between scientific coverage and scientific articles isn’t clear. When this difference is clear, we might still find findings in different academic journals that disagree with each other. Sometimes, research that isn’t peer-reviewed receives plenty of coverage in the media

Correlation and causation: Sometimes a claim might present two factors that appear correlated. Consider recent misinformation about 5G Towers and the spread of coronavirus. While there might appear to be associations, it doesn’t necessarily mean that there is a causative relationship

To practice critical thinking with these kinds of claims, we must ask the following questions:Does this claim emerge from a peer-reviewed scientific article? Has this paper been retracted?Does this article appear in a reputable journal?What is the expert consensus on this article?

The next examples I want to bring up refer to retracted articles from peer-reviewed journals. Since science is a self-correcting process, rather than a decree of absolutes, mistakes and fraud are corrected.

Briefly, I will show you exactly how to tell if the resource you are reading is an actual, peer-reviewed scientific article.

How does science go from experiments to the news?

researchers outline exactly how they conducted their experiments so other researchers can replicate them, build upon them, or provide quality assurance for them. This scientific report does not go straight to the nearest science journalist. Websites and news outlets like Scientific American or The Atlantic do not publish scientific articles.

Here is a quick checklist that will help you figure out if you’re viewing a scientific paper.

Once it’s written up, researchers send this manuscript to a journal. Other experts in the field then provide comments, feedback, and critiques. These peer reviewers ask researchers for clarification or even more experiments to strengthen their results. Peer review often takes months or sometimes years.

Some peer-reviewed scientific journals are Science and Nature; other scientific articles are searchable through the PubMed database. If you’re curious about a topic, search for scientific papers.

Peer-review is crucial! If you’re assessing the quality of evidence for claims, peer-reviewed research is a strong indicator

Finally, there are platforms for scientists to review research even after publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Although most scientists conduct experiments and interpret their data objectively, they may still make errors. Many scientists use Twitter and PubPeer to perform a post-publication review

Step 3. Are You Practicing Objectivity?

To finish off, I want to discuss common cognitive errors that we tend to make. Finally, there are some framing questions to ask at the end of our research to help us with assessing any information that we find.

Dunning-Kruger effect: Why do we rely on experts? In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger published “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.” They found that the less a person understands about a topic, the more confident of their abilities or knowledge they will be

How does this relate to critical thinking? If you’re reading a claim sourced or written by somebody who lacks expertise in a field, they are underestimating its complexity. Whenever possible, look for an authoritative source when synthesizing and evaluating evidence for a claim.

Survivorship bias: Ever heard someone argue that we don’t need vaccines or seatbelts? After all, they grew up without either of them and are still alive and healthy!These arguments are appealing at first, but they don’t account for any cases of failures. They are attributing a misplaced sense of optimism and safety by ignoring the deaths that occurred resultant from a lack of vaccinations and seatbelts

When you’re still unsure, follow the consensus of the experts within the field. Scientists pointed out flaws within this pre-print article leading to its retraction. The pre-print was removed from the server because it did not hold up to proper scientific standards or scrutiny.

Now with all the evidence we’ve gathered, we ask ourselves some final questions. There are plenty more questions you will come up with yourself, case-by-case.Who is making the original claim?Who supports these claims? What are their qualifications?What is the evidence used for these claims?Where is this evidence published?How was the evidence gathered?Why is it important?

“even if some data is supporting a claim, does it make sense?” Some claims are deceptively true but fall apart when accounting for this bias.

The results were similarly disturbing when students were tested to determine understanding of basic concepts. More instruction wasn't helping students advance from novice to expert. In fact, the data indicated the opposite: students had more novice-like beliefs after they completed a course than they had when they started.

But in addition, experts have a mental organizational structure that facilitates the retrieval and effective application of their knowledge.

experts have an ability to monitor their own thinking ("metacognition"), at least in their discipline of expertise. They are able to ask themselves, "Do I understand this? How can I check my understanding?"

But that is not what cognitive science tells us. It tells us instead that students need to develop these different ways of thinking by means of extended, focused mental effort.

new ways of thinking are always built on the prior thinking of the individual, so if the educational process is to be successful, it is essential to take that prior thinking into account.

. Everything that constitutes "understanding" science and "thinking scientifically" resides in the long-term memory, which is developed via the construction and assembly of component proteins.

What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can't really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang 'em back. If the facts don't hang together on a latticework of theory, you don't have them in a usable form.

"So it makes perfect sense," Wieman writes, "that they are not learning to think like experts, even though they are passing science courses by memorizing facts and problem-solving recipes."

Anything one can do to reduce cognitive load improves learning.

A second way teachers can improve instruction is by recognizing the importance of student beliefs about science

My third example of how teaching and learning can be improved is by implementing the principle that effective teaching consists of engaging students, monitoring their thinking, and providing feedback.

I assign students to groups the first day of class (typically three to four students in adjacent seats) and design each lecture around a series of seven to 10 clicker questions that cover the key learning goals for that day.

The process of critiquing each other's ideas in order to arrive at a consensus also enormously improves both their ability to carry on scientific discourse and to test their own understanding. [Change]

A small percentage of the public believes that vaccines are truly dangerous. People who hold this view — which is incorrect — also believe that they know more than experts about this topic.

the study was also conducted in France and Germany, with similar results.

those with the least understanding of science had the most science-opposed views, but thought they knew the most

the Dunning-Kruger effect, named for the two psychologists who wrote a seminal paper in 1999 entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It.”

Most of them say they are unaffected by claims from experts contradicting the claims of manufacturers. Only a quarter said they would stop using supplements if experts said they were ineffective. They must think they know better.

Many Americans take supplements, but the reasons are varied and are not linked to any hard evidence

A lack of knowledge leaves some without the contextual information necessary to recognize mistakes, they wrote, and their “incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”

communication strategies on G.M.O.s — intended to help the public see that their beliefs did not align with experts — wound up backfiring

attempting to provide corrective information to voters about death panels wound up increasing their belief in them among politically knowledgeable supporters of Sarah Palin.

A 2015 study published in Vaccine showed that giving corrective information about the flu vaccine led patients most concerned about side effects to be less likely to get the vaccine.

“knowledge deficit model,” an idea that the lack of support for good policies, and good science, merely reflects a lack of scientific information.

Scientists need to be formally trained in communication skills, they said, and they also need to realize that the knowledge deficit model makes for easy policy, but not necessarily good results.

It seems important to engage the public more, and earn their trust through continued, more personal interaction, using many different platforms and technologies

Bombarding people with more information about studies isn’t helping. How the information contained in them is disseminated and discussed may be much more important.

Taste does not simply equal your taste buds. It draws on information from all our senses as well as context. As a result, food is susceptible to the same trickery as wine. Adding yellow food dye to vanilla pudding leads people to experience a lemony taste. Diners eating in the dark at a chic concept restaurant confuse veal for tuna. Branding, packaging, and price tags are equally important to enjoyment. Cheap fish is routinely passed off as its pricier cousins at seafood and sushi restaurants. 

Just like with wine and classical music, we often judge food based on very different criteria than what we claim. The result is that our perceptions are easily skewed in ways we don’t anticipate. 

What does it mean for wine that presentation so easily trumps the quality imbued by being grown on premium Napa land or years of fruitful aging? Is it comforting that the same phenomenon is found in food and classical music, or is it a strike against the authenticity of our enjoyment of them as well? How common must these manipulations be until we concede that the influence of the price tag of a bottle of wine or the visual appearance of a pianist is not a trick but actually part of the quality?

To answer these questions, we need to investigate the underlying mechanism that leads us to judge wine, food, and music by criteria other than what we claim to value. And that mechanism seems to be the quick, intuitive judgments our minds unconsciously make

this unknowability also makes it easy to be led astray when our intuition makes a mistake. We may often be able to count on the price tag or packaging of food and wine for accurate information about quality. But as we believe that we’re judging based on just the product, we fail to recognize when presentation manipulates our snap judgments.

Participants were just as effective when watching 6 second video clips and when comparing their ratings to ratings of teacher effectiveness as measured by actual student test performance. 

The power of intuitive first impressions has been demonstrated in a variety of other contexts. One experiment found that people predicted the outcome of political elections remarkably well based on silent 10 second video clips of debates - significantly outperforming political pundits and predictions made based on economic indicators.

In a real world case, a number of art experts successfully identified a 6th century Greek statue as a fraud. Although the statue had survived a 14 month investigation by a respected museum that included the probings of a geologist, they instantly recognized something was off. They just couldn’t explain how they knew.

Cases like this represent the canon behind the idea of the “adaptive unconscious,” a concept made famous by journalist Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink. The basic idea is that we constantly, quickly, and unconsciously do the equivalent of judging a book by its cover. After all, a cover provides a lot of relevant information in a world in which we don’t have time to read every page.

Gladwell describes the adaptive unconscious as “a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.”

In a famous experiment, psychologist Nalini Ambady provided participants in an academic study with 30 second silent video clips of a college professor teaching a class and asked them to rate the effectiveness of the professor.

In follow up experiments, Chia-Jung Tsay found that those judging musicians’ auditions based on visual cues were not giving preference to attractive performers. Rather, they seemed to look for visual signs of relevant characteristics like passion, creativity, and uniqueness. Seeing signs of passion is valuable information. But in differentiating between elite performers, it gives an edge to someone who looks passionate over someone whose play is passionate

Outside of these more eccentric examples, it’s our reliance on quick judgments, and ignorance of their workings, that cause people to act on ugly, unconscious biases

It’s also why - from a business perspective - packaging and presentation is just as important as the good or service on offer. Why marketing is just as important as product. 

Gladwell ends Blink optimistically. By paying closer attention to our powers of rapid cognition, he argues, we can avoid its pitfalls and harness its powers. We can blindly audition musicians behind a screen, look at a piece of art devoid of other context, and pay particular attention to possible unconscious bias in our performance reports.

But Gladwell’s success in demonstrating how the many calculations our adaptive unconscious performs without our awareness undermines his hopeful message of consciously harnessing its power.

As a former world-class tennis player and coach of over 50 years, Braden is a perfect example of the ideas behind thin slicing. But if he can’t figure out what his unconscious is up to when he recognizes double faults, why should anyone else expect to be up to the task?

flawed judgment in fields like medicine and investing has more serious consequences. The fact that expertise is so tricky leads psychologist Daniel Kahneman to assert that most experts should seek the assistance of statistics and algorithms in making decisions.

In his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, he describes our two modes of thought: System 1, like the adaptive unconscious, is our “fast, instinctive, and emotional” intuition. System 2 is our “slower, more deliberative, and more logical” conscious thought. Kahneman believes that we often leave decisions up to System 1 and generally place far “too much confidence in human judgment” due to the pitfalls of our intuition described above.

Not every judgment will be made in a field that is stable and regular enough for an algorithm to help us make judgments or predictions. But in those cases, he notes, “Hundreds of studies have shown that wherever we have sufficient information to build a model, it will perform better than most people.”

Experts can avoid the pitfalls of intuition more easily than laypeople. But they need help too, especially as our collective confidence in expertise leads us to overconfidence in their judgments. 

This article has referred to the influence of price tags and context on products and experiences like wine and classical music concerts as tricks that skew our perception. But maybe we should consider them a real, actual part of the quality.

Losing ourselves in a universe of relativism, however, will lead us to miss out on anything new or unique. Take the example of the song “Hey Ya!” by Outkast. When the music industry heard it, they felt sure it would be a hit. When it premiered on the radio, however, listeners changed the channel. The song sounded too dissimilar from songs people liked, so they responded negatively. 

It took time for people to get familiar with the song and realize that they enjoyed it. Eventually “Hey Ya!” became the hit of the summer.

Many boorish people talking about the ethereal qualities of great wine probably can't even identify cork taint because their impressions are dominated by the price tag and the wine label. But the classic defense of wine - that you need to study it to appreciate it - is also vindicated. The open question - which is both editorial and empiric - is what it means for the industry that constant vigilance and substantial study is needed to dependably appreciate wine for the product quality alone. But the questions is relevant to the enjoyment of many other products and experiences that we enjoy in life.

Maybe the most important conclusion is to not only recognize the fallibility of our judgments and impressions, but to recognize when it matters, and when it doesn’t

Abbott’s new blood test may serve as an objective tool to help doctors triage TBI patients, because it relies on molecular signatures in the blood rather than on murkier clues, such as patient interviews.

often use a series of screening questionnaires, physical examinations and CT scans to take pictures of the brain in order to evaluate TBI. However, experts agree these techniques aren’t perfect and there is no objective way to reliably evaluate TBI.

Aside from reducing health care costs, it can save people from unnecessary radiation that has been shown to increase the risk of cancer.

Despite the benefits, experts agree that physicians cannot rely entirely on this diagnostic test, stating it will only serve to supplement clinical judgment.

"The game-changing innovation of having a tool like this is that, as it becomes more widely used, I believe we will identify more people with TBI that’s more subtle, that could be life-altering."

One, it’s a story about how democracy itself is always based on uncertain notions of truth, in moral terms and in epistemological terms. The other is a story about a continual conflict between a kind of expert truth and a more populist, everyday, common-sense truth that supposedly stems not from experts but the wisdom of the crowd.

Democracy insists on the idea that truth both matters and that nobody gets to say definitively what it is. That’s a tension that’s built into democracy from the beginning, and it’s not solvable but is, in fact, intrinsic to democracy.

We don’t want to have one definitive source of truth. Part of the reason ideas evolve and culture changes is that we’re constantly debating what is an accurate rendition of reality in some form.

Can we accept evolution as a set truth or not? They have not exploded to the point where they’ve destabilized our political or social life, but they’ve been a controversial question for over a hundred years. That’s a public contest that, actually, democracy’s pretty good for. You know, you contest things in court, you contest things in universities, you contest things in the public sphere.

I think it’s important that there be a contest about what is true and also about, How do you know what’s true? Where does your information come from? I would say, largely, science has won. That is, that the mainstream educational institutions, the National Institutes of Health, et cetera, all accept that evolution is as close as we’re going to get to truth.

One says that experts often make [bad] decisions because there’s been no popular input on them—not just because they don’t know enough but because they haven’t actually taken account of popular knowledge.

The most common example involves things like the World Bank coming up with a plan about water use in some part of the world without studying how people actually think and use water, simply imagining a kind of technocratic solution with no local input, and it turns out to be totally ineffective because it runs contrary to cultural norms and everyday life. There’s every chance that experts alone get things wrong.

Social media and the Internet more broadly have clearly had a rather revolutionary effect on not just what we take to be true but how truths circulate, what we believe, how we know anything.

new technology causes certain kinds of panics about truth. The Internet is particularly important because of its reach and because of the algorithmic way in which it promotes what’s popular rather than what’s true. It creates a culture of untruth, probably, that other forms of publishing can’t easily.

I actually approve of fact-checking, even if I think it’s often not very effective, because it doesn’t persuade people who aren’t already inclined to want to look at fact-checking. And I don’t think it’s much of a substitute for real politics

I don’t think facts are pure in any sense. You know, if I give you something like an unemployment rate, it implies all kinds of interpretative work already about what is work and who should be looking for it and how old you should be when you’re working.

It’s important that that’s part of democracy, too—questioning received wisdom. If somebody says that’s how it is, it’s correct to think, Is that really how it is? Do I have enough information to be sure that’s how it is?

Conspiracy theories, the complex ones that arise from the bottom, tend to involve seeing through official truths and often seeing how the rich and powerful have pulled the wool over people’s eyes, that what looked like this turned out to be that because there was a kind of subterfuge going on from above.

Whereas, the climate-change one, which we know has been sort of promoted by the Koch brothers and others in business interest groups, as you say, didn’t start really organically as much as it became a kind of position of industry that then took on a life of its own because it got mixed in with a whole bunch of other assumptions, whether it was about political norms, government overreach, guns.

“Diets are an extreme case of accepting evidence we want to believe,”

That includes doctors, he added, who overlook that the evidence for the low-fat diets they often recommend is the sort “we would never accept in the practice of medicine.”

Doctors are in a bind, said Dr. Daniel J. Rader, a heart disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania. When patients ask what to eat, he said, “you have to give them something.”

the best they have are studies that look at intermediate markers of risk, like cholesterol levels. In the end, he said, “most doctors just give dietary platitudes.”

“Counterterrorism tries to do two things,” explained Professor Max Abrahms, a political scientist at Northeastern University who studies terrorism. “You try to neutralize existing terrorists and you try to not breed new ones. The surest way to breed new ones is if you’re indiscriminate—for instance, punishing non-violent, moderate Muslims.” 

It also offers its experts' predictions about what the most-desired life skills (for young people, but ostensibly for everyone else, too) will be in the year 2020. Among the skills they highlighted: public problem-solving through cooperative work -- crowdsourcing and the like; the ability to search effectively for information online; the ability to distinguish the quality and veracity of online discoveries; the ability to synthesize, or combine facts and details from different sources into coherent narratives; the ability to concentrate; and the ability to distinguish between the signal and the noise as the information we're exposed to gets bigger, and broader, and more plentiful.

All these skills can be taught. The question is whether kids will learn them in school, or outside of it.