People are often misinformed about things. Sometimes they obtain that bad information from false or misleading media coverage; sometimes that media coverage is deliberately false. And there’s a fine line between media coverage that seeks to frame issues appropriately and coverage that’s ...

Accusing other people of being misinformed is easy since the stupidity of others will always be more evident than our own blind spots.

Thanks to the internet, now we can:

• Read many abstracts of new academic research, read some actual papers, and maintain a vast storehouse of link...

 A survey from the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that in 2006, only 33 percent of people could correctly identify the three branches of government. By 2021, that was up to 56 percent....

If you give people a cash incentive to turn off their Facebook account, they spend more time watching TV but also more time socializing with friends and family. This leads to an increase in their subjective well-being (i.e., they’re happier) and ge...

A normal person can tell you lots of factual information about his life, his work, his neighborhood, and his hobbies but very little about the FDA clinical trial process or the moon landing. But do you know who knows a ton about the moon landing? Crazy people who think it’s fake. They don’t have ...

A lot of people know that the licensing of the polio vaccine in the 1950s was widely greeted with celebratory headlines and the ringing of church bells. A lot of people also know that as part of a pro-vaccination effort led by the March of Dimes, Elvis Presley got vaccinated on camera for...

There is fundamentally no way anyone could be unaware that the bulk of public health and medical professionals say the vaccines are safe and effective. The anti-vax stance isn’t misinformed about this reality; it simply asserts that public health and medical professionals are bad and you ...

Discerning the truth is hard, and it requires debate and dissent. Functional expert communities and well-run journalism institutions are open to new information, to changing their minds, and to correcting the record.

Our overall level of public health knowledge is improvin...

The thing that really has increased is polarization and the accompanying “everything is about everything” totalizing political conflict.

Polarization seems more likely a consequence of good information than bad. This creates a lot of very real problems for a political syste...