Myself wrote:
...
Is this all symptomatic of the internet era? We have available a wealth of free information, which is good! But also a barrage of nonsense! We are just overwhelmed, and the truth is that almost anyone can claim to be...
There is a quote I like -
If this is the information age, how come no one knows anything?
Interesting you say that about the Internet "Myself". I suspect you are right. I have just read a one page article by Lawrence M Krauss (theoretical physicist Arizona State University) called "War is Peace" on page 19 of the December issue of Scientific American.
In it he talks about "the increasingly blatant nature of the nonsense uttered with impunity in public discourse" being chilling. With regard to the Internet, he talks about how there is no traditional [BS] filtering. "Nonsense claims had more difficulty gaining traction in the days when print journalism held sway and newspaper editors had the final word on what made its way into homes and when television news consisted of a half hour summary of what a trained producer thought were the most essential stories of the day."
He goes on to say "Fair and ballanced, however doesn't mean putting all view-points, regardless of their underlying logic or validity, on an equal footing. Discerning the merits of competing claims is where the empirical basis of science should play a role. I cannot stress often enough that what science ia all about is not proving things to be true, but proving them to be false. What fails the test of empirical reality, as determined by observation and experiment, gets thrown out like yesterday's newspaper."
Some great comments there.
Paul