Thought for the Day Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you ...

[Paul Whybrow]

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

Yuval Noah Harari

 

[RK Wallis]

Censorship no longer works by hiding information from you; censorship works by flooding you with immense amounts of misinformation, of irrelevant information, of funny cat videos, until you're just unable to focus.

Yuval Noah Harari

so true. It's a war zone out there!

 

[Pamela Jo]

Umm. It's both. Aristotle devised a system of symbolic logic to try and save Athenian democracy from misinformation, Sophists. Claques of misinformationists that went around whispering rumours and upping the candidate of their choice. It's an old problem which just emphasises how important having facts and a source you can rely on, is. Don't blame cat videos, we still have to learn and exercise logic if we are going to be able to govern ourselves.

Aristotelian logic is a system of deductive reasoning centered on the syllogism, which uses a major premise, a minor premise, and a necessary conclusion. A classic example is: all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. [1, 2]

Structure of the Syllogism

• • Major Premise: A universal statement establishing a broad category rule (e.g., All humans are mortal).
  • Minor Premise: A specific statement connecting an individual or subgroup to that category (e.g., Socrates is a human).
  • Conclusion: The logical outcome that necessarily follows from the two premises (e.g., Therefore, Socrates is mortal). [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Core Rules

• • Middle Term: A shared connecting link between the two premises that does not appear in the final conclusion.
  • Validity vs. Truth: An argument is valid if its structure forces the conclusion, but the conclusion is only true if the starting premises are also factual.