"The best response to manipulative and persuasive choice architecture might therefore be to empower users to become choice architects of their own proximate digital environment (self-nudging) or self-restrict engagement with certain information sources (deliberate ignorance) rather than attempt to exercise a superhuman ability to detect and resist all attempts at influence. By contrast, false information and AI-powered persuasive techniques such as targeted political advertisement can best be met by people exercising existing competencies (e.g., reasoning and judgment of information reliability) or learning new ones (e.g., lateral reading).

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The idea that deliberate ignorance can be an ecologically rational strategy does not align with classical ideals of epistemic virtue and rationality (see Kozyreva & Hertwig, 2019), which presume that information and knowledge have intrinsic value for decision makers because they allow them to accumulate more evidence (e.g., Carnap, 1947), acquire better understanding, and ultimately make more informed and rational choices (e.g., Blackwell, 1953; Good, 1967). However, deliberate ignorance is a reasonable strategy in many situations—for instance, in the interest of impartiality and to shield oneself from biases (e.g., see MacCoun, 2020)."

"Even if he had the most diverse network of friends and the largest group of friends, we still might fail to understand the broader social environment if we are using inadequate rules to make decisions. If we are very focused on the advice of a particular friend, or if you're following a particular leader… I mean, in today's world where we have access to all kinds of information, we can be everyone's friend and learn from anyone. We do tend to still use rules to integrate social information that exclude other parts of this social network.

We follow our leaders. We follow people with trust. We follow our spouse. And so we don't profit from all the diversity around us.

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When the problem is actually much more complex, then this 'following the one who has the currently best solution' can backfire because the whole group, the whole society, can get stuck in what we call a local optimum, or in a solution that seems all right, but actually in the long run it could have been much more improved if we were more open to other ideas.

So there is an interaction between the rule that we are using to make decisions and the networks, like how many different diverse opinions are in our network, and the problem we are solving."

"We use the Internet every day and most of us take it for granted that you click on a link and your computer displays the new page for you to read. But how does that work? What happens to get a web page from wherever they are stored to your eyes?

The short answer that you have probably read before is that the page is transferred from a web server to your browser over the internet. This is true but what does it mean?

It would be a lifetime's work to explain every facet of the process but what follows is broadly speaking the series of steps taken for you to see this page."