is the internet making us more ignorant?

Nicholas Carr is famous for trying to convince us that spending too much time online is making us dumber. I'm not won over by his arguments, but I have different concern: web surfing may make us more ignorant.

Okay, I'm probably not going to make any converts on this one. On the surface this seems like an absurd proposition. The internet has no doubt opened the floodgates of knowledge to anyone with a dial-up connection. Just being able to access Wikipedia makes the average high schooler as potentially erudite as a professor two decades ago.

But a study from the early 90s suggests that the combination of access to information and distractibility could make us more misinformed. That is if you accept there is misinformation on the web. (Ah, you do?) Daniel Gilbert, the Harvard prof known for his writings on happiness, was interested in edifying a centuries old philosophical debate about belief and doubt, with Descartes and Spinoza as its main spokespeople.

As Gilbert synopsizes: "Can people comprehend assertions without believing them? Descartes suggested that people can and should, whereas Spinoza suggested that people should but cannot." The idea is that before doubting - or disproving - information, you first have to believe it.

Gilbert was able to show that Spinoza was on to something by setting up a few tests that simultaneously gave people false information while distracting them with another task (clicking on a clicker when they saw a number 5). The subjects didn't have to do anything clever to figure out if the information was false - they were told any sentences they saw shaded red were untrue. Yet, when tested later they acted as if the red-shaded information was accurate. A control group of subjects, who were not distracted by the clicking task, however, were not affected by the misleading information.

So disbelieving first requires believing. That's a bit of a troubling concept in itself, but when you add in our ADD, hyper-distractible information consuming culture, one wonders how much information we're "believing" simply because we see it - and don't have time to process that it's false?

George Lakoff was probably aware of this phenomenon when he wrote "Don't Think of an Elephant." The moment we read a sentence online that "Claims that President Obama was not born in the US and so isn't legally our president are false, the idea that Obama was not born in the US is partially implanted in our brain. If the next moment we notice someone responded to our latest Facebook post or a re-surfaced viral video of Trump kissing Giuliani in drag catches our eye, our brain may not have the time to also register "Oh, and that birther idea about Obama is also false."