Abstract:
Everyday we see information about the world - but all this information is filtered, shaped, and curated through a myriad of processes. Journalists decide what is interesting or important enough to report on. Industry propagandists and politicians try to influence our understandings of the world by picking just some events to talk about. Social media algorithms extend the reach of some facts, while deflating others. How do these processes shape what we end up believing? In this talk, I show how curation - the sharing of real, accurate, but incomplete information - can be just as potent a form of misinformation as lying or fraud. Regulation of misinformation has tended to focus on suppressing actively false claims, with relatively little attention to how true claims can mislead. I argue that this is shortsighted, and show why we need to spend just as much time thinking about curation as we do about lies.
About the Speakers:
Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is a Chancellor’s Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine. Cailin has written four books, and published widely in both philosophy and the social sciences. Her book The Misinformation Age, co-authored with James Owen Weatherall, was published in 2019 with Yale Press, and considers how false beliefs spread in human social networks. And her book The Origins of Unfairness was also published in 2019 with Oxford University Press, and looks at how human groups culturally evolve unfair rules. Her work has been praised widely, including in the New York Times and Scientific American, and Cailin regularly appears on podcasts and radio to talk about misinformation, democracy, and fairness.
James Owen Weatherall is Chancellor's Professor in the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at UC Irvine. He is the author of three books and more than 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in philosophy of science, social epistemology, and mathematical physics. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Philosophy of Science and Editor of the book series Cambridge Elements in Philosophy of Physics.