Though I do wonder how well the memetics analogy works?
Disinformation seems to be more “fit” in that analogy sense. Always has been; nothing new. “A lie travels round the world before truth can put on its shoes.” How old is that saying? Disinformation reproduces quickly. And adapts quickly as well.
Human minds in social structures are the environment that memes compete within and changing that environment to be otherwise seems unlikely. Or at least extremely challenging.
Lies travel better than truth for the same reason that potato chips sell better than brussels sprouts.
Lies, like potato chips, can be tailored by power centers with the goal of tickling the generic person’s desire centers. The truth, like brussels sprouts, simply is what it is, and tastes like it does. Pour enough sugar, salt, and fat on a shoe and people will happily eat it. Add enough outrage, salaciousness, and Othering, and people will buy that hook, line, and sinker.
When the powerful control the info, it’ll mostly be disinfo working on favor of those in power. Raising selfishness to the highest social ideal is most beneficial to the psychopaths, who are massively, insanely better at selfish than even the most selfish of mere ordinary people.
That is bit more optimistic than my take was! I see occasional positive changes in overall nutrition choices. No more juiceboxes in every preschooler’s hands at all times. More adults making better conscious choices about foods. To be sure worse in rural areas than elsewhere, but I don’t see the battle against poor nutrition as hopeless. Maybe then by analogy there is is hope against harmful foods of thought?
Yeah, a stretch.
People who aren’t tooo dysfunctional in their eating can be retrieved towards better foods in better quantities by new knowledge and peer pressure.
Conversely, people on a moderately poor diet can give in to living on all pizza & all soda all the time. And certainly aided that way by peer pressure from the wrong sorts of peers.
It’s easy enough to identify individuals going in each direction. I’d be hard pressed to know which migration is larger. But I know how to bet.
Ermm, I think I basically said that in my post.
ETA: It’s an old problem though. Google “mincopert” for a good example. Our educational system not only doesn’t teach students to think, it actively teaches them that doing so is a risky endeavor they should avoid.
I’d like to hear from the teachers on the Board: are you guys out there actively discouraging your students from thinking?
Not a teacher but I experienced both forms of education.
Most of my elementary education was great with questioning and critical evaluation encouraged and even celebrated. Not all but most.
College full of that.
First two years of med school just memorize and regurgitate. No chance to question.
Clinical rotations back to problem solving.
For kids mostly good critical thinking encouragement with a few duds of teachers.
I suspect our Board’s teachers are good at encouraging questions. But I am sure not all teachers are. It is easier to not be.
In my experience (some teacher training in California, but over 10 years ago), the curriculum is very good with critical thinking, as well as developing the imagination and incorporating the arts, in primary school. In high school, on the other hand, the arts are much more marginal and the critical thinking ball gets dropped.
In universities, we are under immense pressure to satisfy the customers. Most student are best pleased with fun courses where it is easy to get an “A.” Adjunct instructors, who are generally overworked and underpaid with negligible job security, sometimes have to cave in order to keep a roof over their heads. I have also personally received pressure from athletics staff (and also from parents) to inflate the grades of student athletes.
For all of these reasons, plus teaching to the test (outside of my experience), teachers and professors have forces pushing them away from rigorous skills. That most of them (I find) do it anyway, or do their level best to, is kind of wonderful.
I would say that, all else being equal, a meme being true will help it spread. However, it is absolutely swamped in importance behind “makes you angry”, “fits with what you already want to believe”, “makes you laugh” etc.
And you’re right: disinformation can mutate freely to more successful forms. Whereas the truth can only be rephrased slightly and still be true.
Essentially there is a meme pandemic at this point. The Internet has provided several new vectors for information to spread, and most people seem to have little to no defence for it.
(I know some people roll their eyes at this analogy being taken this far. But I dunno, it seems to work so well in my opinion)
Unfortunately the pandemic analogy breaks down as exposure does not result in protection from repeat infections or reduce future disease severity! 
Still the hope is that teaching and training “habits of mind” can reduce spread. If only there weren’t so many who were the equivalent of vaccine refusers …
It might, if one has “recovered from” those earlier exposures.
California gets it right:
Deleted as snark
All this talk about critical thinking doesn’t answer the obvious question: What is critical thinking? Why is there no generally agreed-upon list of elements or skills or tools (not a rigid path)? And most importantly, why haven’t critical thinkers already done this?
It’s definitely a slippery concept.
In the primary-secondary education context, “critical thinking” is often used as a bludgeon against the strawman of “rote memorization” to discourage any factual learning at all. The classic example of this is something like “a class of students who don’t know what Pearl Harbor, Adolf Hitler, or the Treaty of Versailles are, discussing why they think World War II started.”
In the general context, it might mean something more akin to “media literacy” or “avoiding bias,” though it’s pretty difficult to find a lot of people who want that applied universally as opposed to against one side or another.
I often take “critical thinking” to mean “thinking.” That is, you’re not really learning a subject or a procedure, but an approach and a skillset. This includes skepticism, creativity, logic, rhetoric (to be able to deconstruct the rhetoric of others), receptivity to new ideas, and also knowledge. Otherwise, it’s to easy to let your thoughts be led down familiar paths. It’s not a thing I really learned, myself, until graduate school, though I had a lot of the skills. The “critical” part is really the habit of criticizing others: what do they really mean? Why (or why else) are they saying / doing that?
Now that I’ve developed the skill, I find it amazing that other people just… take things at face value, or don’t think about them at all.
To paraphrase John McWhorter, a big part of critical thinking is learning not to start sentences with “Well, all I know is…”.
Lazy is the big Easy button for life.
For many people thinking seems as difficult and unpleasant as carrying a 50# sack of cement. So at any and every opportunity they’ll decline to pick up the sack. Sooo much easier not to.
Since a great of education is about training people to do what they’re told and not make waves, “critical thinking” is bound to be limited. I do not suggest for a moment all teachers and schools are the same, and I know many great ones, but there is often a premium put on conformity, from “everyone come in when the bell rings” to “sit up straight in rows” to reciting pledges and singing anthems to uniform standard testing, assigned textbooks (there’s a reason kids are still being made to read Lord of the Flies and 1984), and more. So “critical thinking” will be taught as something removed from pupils’ reality, not something they can apply in their daily lives. If they started singing “All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall,” many teachers, principals, school board members, and parents would sing back, “All in all, you’re just another prick in the hall.”