I.e. what this is referring to as "combating disinformation" is just within yourself, by means of adopting humility.
If you have humility (accepting the possibility that you are fallible and wrong), you are less susceptible to be fooled by disinformation that is based on appealing to the naive individual's sense of infallibility.
It does not speak to "combating disinformation" as in actually duking it out against disinformants, and winning, so that the objective quantity of disinformation in the world is diminished.
There, humility won't help you very much. The bad actors can simulate humility. In fact that is one common strategy. Spreaders of misinformation typically claim that they are rational, unbiased and willing to be wrong---in contrast of whatever they speak against.
A common pattern argument used by disiformants, for instance in this recent area of Covid-19 vaccines, is that science is arrogant and self-assured of its own infallibility (in effect, that science lacks humility). A good proportion of the masses is taken in by this, because, why, in fact, the way that the public officials have been behaving does in fact exhibit a lack of humility: they just assert they are right based on what the science is telling them this week, and then tell people what they can and cannot do, or must do.
("Science is arrogant and self-assured, lacking humility" is nothing new; for instance, it's a staple of the creationist argument against evolution.)
If you have humility (accepting the possibility that you are fallible and wrong), you are less susceptible to be fooled by disinformation that is based on appealing to the naive individual's sense of infallibility.
It does not speak to "combating disinformation" as in actually duking it out against disinformants, and winning, so that the objective quantity of disinformation in the world is diminished.
There, humility won't help you very much. The bad actors can simulate humility. In fact that is one common strategy. Spreaders of misinformation typically claim that they are rational, unbiased and willing to be wrong---in contrast of whatever they speak against.
A common pattern argument used by disiformants, for instance in this recent area of Covid-19 vaccines, is that science is arrogant and self-assured of its own infallibility (in effect, that science lacks humility). A good proportion of the masses is taken in by this, because, why, in fact, the way that the public officials have been behaving does in fact exhibit a lack of humility: they just assert they are right based on what the science is telling them this week, and then tell people what they can and cannot do, or must do.
("Science is arrogant and self-assured, lacking humility" is nothing new; for instance, it's a staple of the creationist argument against evolution.)