Plato,
Trump and fake news Wednesday March 29th 10 am
What
we are now calling fake news—misinformation that people fall for—is
nothing new. Thousands of years ago, in the Republic, Plato offered
up a hellish vision of people who mistake shadows cast on a wall for
reality. In the Iliad, the Trojans fell for a fake horse. Shakespeare
loved misinformation: in “Twelfth Night,” Viola disguises herself
as a man and wins the love of another woman; in “The Tempest,”
Caliban mistakes Stephano for a god. And, in recent years, the Nobel
committee has awarded several economics prizes to work on
“information asymmetry,” “cognitive bias,” and other ways in
which the human propensity toward misperception distorts the workings
of the world.
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