This is an example of what I've been thinking about/warning about for several years now: we are entering a post-truth era, where there is increasingly no way to know what is real and what is not.
When I've thought about it, this scenario never occurred to me, but it's a perfect example: we're going to be increasingly unable to know what is "true" in a million different ways, and people are going to exploit that in every way possible.
We're headed for bad times, and I don't know what the answer is, if there is one.
Underlying this is a belief that scamming people is the only way to achieve financial stability, that you need to always be hustling. Teenagers went from idolising actors and musicians (who had agents dealing with the money behind closed doors) to idolising social media creators and influencers who are quite transparent about how the algorithm determines their income. On IndieHackers and MicroConf, it's standard advice that you need to sell your SaaS to businesses because ordinary consumers have no money.
I'm not saying this specific problem isn't solvable, just that it is an example of the problem I'm thinking of.
That said, there are tremendous advantages to supporting remote learning. Simply requiring in person has far greater costs than are being described in the source article.
We've been in a post-truth era for all of human history, since the first hunter-gatherer told a lie to take advantage of someone else.
Which is why we evolved to have exquisite bullshit detectors. They're not perfect, but they're pretty decent.
The answer around what is real and not is the same as it ever was -- does information come from a respected, generally trustworthy source or not? Does it come from a source that might have an agenda, or not? Is it written in a way that seems to gather a lot of evidence in all directions and then explain its conclusion in a plausible way, or is it clearly one-sided?
Bullshit detection, fraud detection, scam detection -- these have always been necessary skills in the world. Sure the scale of misinformation grows, but so do the tools we have to combat it. Email spam was a huge problem, then Gmail filtered it out.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
When I've thought about it, this scenario never occurred to me, but it's a perfect example: we're going to be increasingly unable to know what is "true" in a million different ways, and people are going to exploit that in every way possible.
We're headed for bad times, and I don't know what the answer is, if there is one.