what it looks like when a government prioritizes educating its population. I think this is the most successful way to tackle such a structural problem. People at large aren't equipped with the skills to deal with misinformation, both targetting them, and self-inflicted. The change needs to happen from the bottom up, at a young age, through the education system.

"The initiative is just one layer of a multi-pronged, cross-sector approach the country is taking to prepare citizens of all ages for the complex digital landscape of today – and tomorrow... combining fact-checking with the critical thinking and voter literacy"

“It’s not just a government problem, the whole society has been targeted. We are doing our part, but it’s everyone’s task to protect the Finnish democracy,” Toivanen said, before adding: “The first line of defense is the kindergarten teacher.”

engaging with bad faith actors is letting them win.

"It was the first time that an EU country had convicted those responsible for disinformation campaigns, drawing a line in the sand between extreme hate speech and the pretense of free speech."

“Just like any polluting companies or factories should be and are already regulated, for polluting the air and the forests, the waters, these companies are polluting the minds of people. So, they also have to pay for it and take responsibility for it.”

Tolkien accurately describes how I feel about science fiction (and I guess to a lesser extent, fantasy). I'm looking for an internally consistent rational universe, which behaves differently and follows a different set of rules than my own. The most satisfying part is the lead-up, slowly piecing together an understanding of this universe, and what rules it contains.

"Not all authors believe that suspension of the disbelief adequately characterizes the audience's relationship to imaginative works of art. J. R. R. Tolkien challenges this concept in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", choosing instead the paradigm of secondary belief based on inner consistency of reality. Tolkien says that, in order for the narrative to work, the reader must believe that what he reads is true within the secondary reality of the fictional world. By focusing on creating an internally consistent fictional world, the author makes secondary belief possible. Tolkien argues that suspension of disbelief is only necessary when the work has failed to create secondary belief. From that point the spell is broken, and the reader ceases to be immersed in the story and must make a conscious effort to suspend disbelief or else give up on it entirely."

remember when Star Wars had internally consistent rules?

"...these successfully imagined realities do have an underlying logic to them. They are internally self-consistent. That’s part of the reason we can happily suspend disbelief, because in these fictional worlds things do make sense; because of A, then B happens, and that means C will occur in another context.

Most of us have an innate feel for that kind of self-consistency. It’s part of the physical logic that operates around us on a daily basis. We don’t expect random outcomes for phenomena that have shown themselves to be repeatable time and time again.

In that sense, a tale like Star Wars, with its own rules..."