My Web - Ellison

I think it's primarily the difference between shallow thinking and deep thinking. If you spend 30 minutes reading a 100 different topics on a news feed, you aren't going to have time to give much critical thought on any single subject. However, if you use those 30 minutes to read 3 or 4 in-depth articles, you may gain a better understanding of those issues and have the time to give it some analysis yourself (and have a better chance of retaining useful information from those articles). Scientists face the same problem. The demand for publishing is enormous so there's an enormous amount of papers needing to be written as well as reviewed. This results in them not having time to give much attention to any particular paper (or even to their own papers), resulting in reviews that can easily miss mistakes and not having the time to verify the results of experiments. It doesn't matter that they have access to every article referenced in the paper, they simply don't have the time to follow every reference to its source (or even a significant fraction of them). The problem, in general, is people don't have the time or will to verify the short news bits they are receiving. They aren't given enough information from this abbreviated information to support any arguments without needing to look things up online. Or worse, they will choose the sources they want to believe. Thanks to the Internet, it's never been easier to spread false information rapidly and widely. If it's repeated enough from enough sources, most people won't bother to verify. For one simple example, there's a common claim that scientists believed in the 70s that global cooling was a problem. I spent the time to research this claim. I could only find a single scientific paper reporting that global cooling may be happening. It was rapidly (less than 1 year) proven to be incorrect and that their methodology was wrong. It was also not widely reported at the time. I could only find 2 or 3 articles mentioning it around the time of its publication in the New York Times archives, with no further mention of it until decades later when global warming deniers brought it up again. In comparison, I could find articles suggesting that global warming was possible going back about 100 years in their archives. It took me about 30 minutes to an hour to do that research. Who has time to do this on every single claim they hear? Who's going to bother to do this research if the claims correspond to their preexisting beliefs? And it's much faster to make a false claim than to prove its falsehood. This can easily result in an argument where one person could spend hours disproving one falsehood, then be presented with the next one of a list of dozens (that could have each been made in a few minutes). Without some grounding in fact, it's almost hopeless to find the truth among the rubbish in the enormous content that's available.