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Book: Virtual Unreality: Just Because the Internet Told You, How Do You Know It's True?
Quotes of Book: Virtual Unreality: Just
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  1. Charles Seife _ Virtual Unreality: Just

    Digital information has an unbelievably high R0 {basic reproductive rate}, and this means that it's hard to stop once it emerges. It spreads from person to person - even those at a great distance - incredibly quickly, thanks to its high transmissibility and the high interconnectedness of digital society. Once it escapes into the wild, it's all but impossible to stop its spread. This is wonderful, so long as the information is correct and useful. But if it's wrong, if it alters our brains for the worse, if it makes us make mistakes and think incorrect things, it's a scourge.
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  2. Charles Seife _ Virtual Unreality: Just

    Skinnerian conditioning, crossed with social pressure, is now an ever-present invisible hand that tries to manipulate all of your actions on the internet. This is the hand that is making you act against your own self-interest. Once you recognize it, you see it everywhere, hovering over you, trying to make you click your mouse or press buttons on your smartphone, giving up your valuable time, money, or information in return for little or nothing at all.
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  3. Charles Seife _ Virtual Unreality: Just

    Skinnerian conditioning, crossed with social pressure, is now an ever-present invisibly hand that tries to manipulate all of your actions on the internet. This is the hand that is making you act against your own self-interest. Once you recognize it, you see it everywhere, hovering over you, trying to make you click your mouse or press buttons on your smartphone, giving up your valuable time, money, or information in return for little or nothing at all.
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  4. Charles Seife _ Virtual Unreality: Just

    A bad idea, a wrong piece of information, a digital brain-altering virus can spread at the speed of light through the internet and quickly find a home among a dispersed but digitally interconnected group of true believers. This group acts as a reservoir for the bad idea, allowing it to gather strength and reinfect people; as the group grows, the belief, no matter how crazy, becomes more and more solidly established among the faithful.
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  5. Charles Seife _ Virtual Unreality: Just

    Not only does the media fail to challenge our preconceptions - instead reinforcing them as media outlets try to cater to smaller audiences - but we all are able to find small groups of people who share and fortify the beliefs we have, no matter how quirky or outright wrong they might be. Ironically, all this interconnection is isolating us. We are becoming solipsists, trapped in worlds of our own creation.
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  6. Charles Seife _ Virtual Unreality: Just

    With news and data that is tailored to our prejudices, we deprive ourselves of true information. We wind up wallowing in our own false ideas, reflected back at us by the media. The news is ceasing to be a window unto the world; it is becoming a mirror that allows us to gaze only upon our own beliefs.
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  7. Charles Seife _ Virtual Unreality: Just

    Bad information is a disease that attacks the brain. It messes with your head, making you do things that you shouldn't, causing you to make wrong decisions. Just as a potent virus co-opts your cells' machinery, bad information can co-opt your behavior. It can alter the way you interact with the world and, as a result, it can change the world.
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  8. Charles Seife _ Virtual Unreality: Just

    We tend to shy away from data that challenges our assumptions, that erodes our preconceptions. Getting rid of our wrong ideas is a painful and difficult process, yet it's that very process that makes data truly useful. A fact becomes information when it challenges our assumptions. These challenges are the raw material that forces our ideas to evolve, our tastes to change, our minds to grow.
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