Democracy requires intellectual effort

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Disinformation erodes democracy.
Democracy requires intellectual effort.

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I see democracy as being this sort of metastable
point, if you think of it in some sort of

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a state space, a state space of
different social configurations.

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And the reason it's metastable is
because it takes a lot of effort.

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It requires an engaged population and it requires
an agreed-upon set of facts about what's real

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about the world.
Mark Bailey is a

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faculty member at the National Intelligence
University, where he is the department

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chair for Cyber Intelligence and Data Science,
as well as being the co-director of the Data

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Science Intelligence Center.
This talk was given at MindFest, put on by the

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Center for the Future Mind, which is spearheaded
by Professor of Philosophy, Susan Schneider.

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validate the knowledge that you have
about whatever you're asking it about

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and then of course democracy requires
an intellectually engaged population and

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then more critically this agreed-upon
set of facts upon which you can debate

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policy you know and then when this chain
of reasoning is broken that creates

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this this epistemic disintegration so
this has global security implications as

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well this erosion of truth so
the erosion of democracy creates

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opportunities for totalitarian
tendencies to take root so you know as

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the capacity of individuals to ascertain
truth and productively debate policies

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grounded in that true decay or degrades
humans are likely to relinquish their

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capacity for reasoning about policy to
charismatic leaders whose rhetoric may

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align with biases in the population