Yuval Noah Harari: If you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions.

Yuval Noah Harari: "The problem is not with our nature, it's with our information. If you give good people bad information, they make bad decisions. They make self-destructive decisions. And we are now seeing it all around us. You know, we have the most sophisticated information technology in history. And at the same time, we are losing the ability to talk with each other, to listen to each other.
You know, there is maybe one thing that Democrats and Republicans in the United States can agree on is that the democratic conversation is breaking down. Everybody accuses the other side, of course, but the basic fact is that this ability, which sustains democracy, to hold a reasonable conversation, it is breaking down at exactly the same moment that we have supposedly the best information technology in history. You say the flaws aren't in our nature, it's in our communications networks. What are the flaws in those communication networks? The basic misunderstanding is about what information does, what information is. Information isn't truth. This naive view, which dominates in places like Silicon Valley, that you just need to flood the world with more and more information. And as a result, we will have more knowledge and more wisdom. This is simply not true because most information is junk. The truth is a very rare and costly kind of information. The basic function of information in most cases is not to reveal the truth. The basic function is to connect large numbers of people into networks. And the easiest way to connect large numbers of people is not with the truth, it is with fictions and fantasies and mass delusions."