Forbes columns
A compilation of Helen Lee Bouygues’s regular column in Forbes on critical thinking research and education.
Just because most young people are not using Facebook does not mean their parents should breathe easy. In fact, many platforms popular with teens are rife with their own dangers that require close parental monitoring.
Whether it be doom-scrolling on Twitter, listening to podcast after podcast, or checking in on every last CNN.com alert, what researchers call “information overload” has become a widespread problem, especially for young people whose habits have developed in the smartphone era.
Writing created by artificial intelligence has dramatically improved over the last few years. Such robot-generated text is now used in newsrooms as well as by companies looking to generate content quickly and cheaply. Worse, these tools are being used by those creating fake news as well.
Most of the time jumping to conclusions is harmless, but it is a problem when jumping to conclusions becomes the default, especially in relation to decisions made about complex social and political issues, where more fine-grained reasoning is typically required.
Decision-making on a board can be harder than it looks from the outside, especially during times of upheaval or crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic.
Where do conspiracy theories come from and what’s to be done about them?