The Paradox of More Access, Less Knowledge

I was born in 1968. That means I grew up in a world where if you wanted to know something, you had to work for it. You opened an encyclopedia. You went to the library. You asked someone who had been doing the job longer than you had. You wrote things down in a notebook and carried that notebook with you because there was no other way to keep the information (BTW I still do this). If you wanted a phone number, you memorized it. If you wanted to understand how a piece of equipment worked, you read the technical manual cover to cover, and then you put your hands on the gear and figured out what the manual could not tell you.

Today, every one of us walks around with a device that contains more information than every library that ever existed. You can look up anything in seconds. You can pull up the text of the Constitution, the specifications for a radar system, the weather in Bahrain, the history of the Civilian Conservation Corps, or the latest research from any university on the planet, all before your coffee gets cold. The access is total. The speed is instantaneous. The cost is zero.

And yet, by every measure I can find, we know less than the generations that came before us. Not just less in volume, though that is part of it. Less in discernment. Less in the ability to tell what is true from what is false. Less in the habit of checking something before we believe it. We have never had more information available to us, and we have never been less equipped to do anything useful with it.

That is the paradox. And the more I sat with it, the more I realized it is not a technology problem. It is a discipline problem. It is a human problem. And it is one I recognize from a very different world.

The Numbers That Stopped Me

Let me lay out what the research shows, because the data is what changed this from a feeling I had into something I knew was real.

The US Chamber of Commerce Foundation ran a basic civic literacy quiz in 2024. Seventy percent of Americans failed it. One in three could not name the three branches of government. More than half did not know how many members serve in the House of Representatives. Only a quarter said they were very confident they could explain how their own government works. US Chamber of Commerce Foundation

The Annenberg Public Policy Center does a Constitution Day survey every year. In 2025, they found that eighteen percent of Americans cannot name a single right protected by the First Amendment. Not one. Another twenty-one percent think the First Amendment protects the right to bear arms, which is the Second Amendment. Thirty-nine percent said the president has the power to declare war, which is not how that works. To be fair, the numbers have improved in some categories over the years. The fact that seventy percent can now name all three branches is an improvement over 2016, when only twenty-six percent could. But I keep coming back to the same thought. Every one of those people has a phone in their pocket with the answer to every one of those questions. They could look it up in ten seconds. They do not. Annenberg Public Policy Center

Pew Research found something even more fundamental in July 2025. Eighty percent of Americans say that Republican and Democratic voters cannot agree on basic facts. Not opinions. Not interpretations. Facts. Two-thirds of them said a major reason is that people interpret the same information differently. Over half said people are not even getting the same information to begin with. Think about what that means. Four out of five Americans look at the country and conclude that we no longer share a common reality. We share a common internet connection, and that is about it. Pew Research Center

The Finding I Did Not Expect

Here is where the research surprised me. I went into this expecting to find that older Americans, people my age, were the ones struggling. We are the ones who did not grow up with this technology. We are the ones who still print out directions. We are the ones who call our kids to ask how to do something on the phone. The assumption would be that younger people, who have been swimming in digital information their entire lives, would be sharper at sorting truth from fiction.

The opposite is true.

A meta-analysis was published in November 2024 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which is one of the most rigorous scientific journals in the world. The researchers pooled data from thirty-one separate experiments involving 11,561 participants who made a total of 256,337 individual judgments about whether news headlines were true or false. That is a quarter of a million data points. This was not a small survey. This was not a poll of a few hundred college students. This was the kind of study that carries real weight.

The finding was unambiguous. Older adults have higher discrimination ability than younger adults. They are better at telling true news from false news. Younger adults are not only less adept at the distinction, they are also more naive, meaning they are more likely to judge a headline as true whether it is or not. The researchers wrote something that has stuck with me: "These findings raise alarms that younger adults may be more vulnerable, not more resistant, to misinformation." They also found that higher digital literacy did not help. The generation that grew up online, that has been navigating social media since middle school, that can work a phone faster than I can work a multimeter, is not better at spotting false information. They are worse at it. And higher education did not improve the picture either. More educated people actually had a slight tendency to judge news as true, which means the degrees on the wall do not protect you from being fooled. The one thing that did help was analytical thinking, the habit of actually reasoning through what you are reading instead of reacting to it. PNAS

I sat with that for a while. The generation with the most access to information and the most experience with digital platforms is the least able to tell when someone is lying to them. That is not what I expected. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense, because the problem was never about access. It was about what we do with what we access. And that is where the next piece of research opened the door.

Why We Believe What Is Not True

If the problem were simply a lack of information, the solution would be easy. Give people more information. But we have more information than any humans in history, and the problem is getting worse, not better. So the problem is not about what people have. It is about what people need.

A study published in December 2025 out of Georgia State University, with researchers from Kennesaw State and the University of Tennessee, analyzed over 10,000 COVID-19 tweets to understand why people believe and share false information. What they found reframed the whole question for me. People do not fall for fake news because they think it is true. They fall for it because it gives them something they need emotionally. Georgia State University

The researchers called it the COP model, and the short version is this. People are highly sensitive to the emotional tone of what they read, especially negative emotions like fear, anger, and disgust. When a piece of false information hits the right emotional chord and feels personally relevant, people will like it, share it, and believe it even when they sense it is not entirely accurate. They are more forgiving of falsehood when the story feels emotionally satisfying. Fake news does not succeed by being convincing. It succeeds by being comforting. It scratches an emotional itch that the truth, with all its complications and caveats, does not reach.

One of the researchers said something that I have not been able to stop thinking about. "We're not just talking about what people believe. We're talking about what becomes acceptable to believe. And that's a much bigger deal." That is the line that captures the real danger. It is not just that individuals believe false things. It is that false things become normalized. They become part of what a community accepts as true, not because anyone checked, but because everyone in the group feels the same way about it. The Overton window shifts, and nobody notices it moving because they are all standing inside it together.

That is an echo chamber. And the research says we have all built one, whether we know it or not.

The Political Dimension, Honestly

I want to be straight about something, because I do not think an article like this is worth writing if it is not honest. I see this problem running more rampant on the liberal side of the cultural divide. My read on that is partly about environment. The institutions where liberal opinion is most concentrated, academia, mainstream media, social media platforms, tend to reinforce each other. If you are in a space where everyone around you believes the same things, and where disagreement is treated as a moral failing rather than a difference of opinion, you do not have much pressure to verify anything. The group has already decided what is true. You just absorb it. I also think there is something to the fact that a lot of the conservative people I know spend their days doing hands-on work, running businesses, building things, fixing things, where reality does not care about your feelings. A pipe either holds pressure or it does not. A wiring diagram is either right or it is wrong. That kind of work builds a verification instinct that desk work and classroom work do not.

But I am not going to pretend this is a one-sided problem, because the data will not let me. The PNAS study found that both political parties show equal ideological congruency bias, which is a fancy way of saying that people on both sides judge news as true when it agrees with what they already believe. Republicans and Democrats were equally willing to believe false headlines as long as those headlines lined up with their worldview. The study did find that Democrats had slightly higher discrimination ability overall, meaning they were a bit better at the true-versus-false distinction in general. But when it came to believing false information that flattered their own side, both parties were right there at the same level. Nobody had clean hands on that one. PNAS

The Pew data tells the same story from a different angle. That eighty percent who said the two parties cannot agree on basic facts was not a number from one side. It was from both. Republicans see it. Democrats see it. Independents see it. Everyone looks around and concludes that the other side is living in a different reality, and they are right, but the thing they miss is that they are living in one too. Pew Research Center

So here is where I land on this. The problem is not liberal or conservative. The problem is human. We are emotional creatures who want to feel right more than we want to be right, and we have built technology that feeds us a constant stream of information designed to make us feel something rather than make us think something. Both sides have retreated into echo chambers where feeling validated matters more than being accurate. My side does it. Their side does it. The difference is in the flavor, not in the fundamental dynamic. And if I am going to call this out, I have to call it out on everyone, including the people I agree with. A Chief who only disciplines the Sailors he does not like is not a Chief. He is a partisan with an anchor on his collar.

What We Lost, and Why It Matters

There is one more piece of research that connects all of this to something I feel in my bones. A meta-analysis published in January 2024 in Frontiers in Public Health looked at twenty-two studies involving nearly 31,000 participants, ages twelve to eighty-nine. It confirmed what psychologists have been calling the Google effect. People rely on the internet as an external memory bank. They remember where to find information, not the information itself. And the people who are least susceptible to this effect are the ones who already have a large base of knowledge stored in their own heads. In other words, the more you know, the less you depend on the machine to know for you. The less you know, the more you outsource your thinking, and the less you know, and the cycle compounds. Frontiers in Public Health

The researchers found that North Americans are more susceptible to this effect than people in other regions, which tracks with what I see. They also found that the effect is stronger on mobile phones than on computers, which also tracks, because a phone is designed for scrolling, not for studying. Memory is a muscle. You use it or you lose it. And we are losing it.

I think about what that means in practical terms. When I was coming up as an ET, I had to know things. Not because I enjoyed memorizing, but because the information was not always available when I needed it. You might be in a space with no connectivity, trouble on a piece of gear, and the only thing between you and a solved problem was what you carried in your own head. So you studied. You rehearsed. You committed frequencies and voltages and procedures to memory because your life, or someone else's, might depend on it. You built an internal knowledge base through repetition and use, and the research says that is exactly what protects you from depending on the machine.

The younger generation has never had to do that. They have always had the answer available. So they never built the muscle. And the research says the result is not just a weaker memory. It is a weaker ability to evaluate the information they do find, because they have no internal standard to compare it against. If you do not already know what a correct answer looks like, you cannot tell when someone hands you a wrong one. That is the connection between the Google effect and the PNAS finding. The generation that outsourced its memory also outsourced its judgment, and the machine they outsourced it to does not care whether the answers it serves up are true.

Now there is a new layer. Artificial intelligence does not just store information. It generates it. It produces answers with confidence and fluency, and some of those answers are wrong. The people who already struggle to evaluate information are now being served AI-generated content that sounds authoritative whether it is or not. If you do not have the internal knowledge base to check it, you take it on faith. The dependence gets deeper, not shallower. The cycle accelerates.

What It Looked Like on the Deckplates

I keep coming back to the Navy because that is where I learned the thing I think we have lost. In the Navy, you did not take information at face value. Ever. You verified. If a gauge said the system was nominal, you did not report that up the chain without checking it against a second source. You walked the line. You put your eyes on the equipment. You cross-checked the reading against the technical manual, against the maintenance history, against what your gut told you based on a thousand times you had seen this system run before. You verified before you trusted, and you trusted before you reported, and you reported only what you had confirmed.

That was not paranoia. That was discipline. It was the understanding that information without verification is just noise, and noise gets people hurt. A Sailor who came to me and said "I feel like the system is fine" would get sent back to actually check it. Feelings are not facts. A meter reading is a fact. A verified cross-check is a fact. A post on a social media feed that happens to align with what you already believe is not a fact. It is a feeling dressed up in the language of certainty.

The PNAS study said the one thing that improved people's ability to spot false information was analytical thinking. Not education. Not digital literacy. Analytical thinking. The habit of reasoning through what you are reading instead of reacting to it. That is exactly what the Navy trained into us, not in a classroom, but in the spaces and on the equipment, day after day, watch after watch. You learn to question what you are told because the cost of not questioning it is too high. You learn to verify because the system does not care about your confidence. It either works or it does not.

That instinct, the verify-before-you-trust instinct, is what I see disappearing. Not because people are stupid. The research is clear on that. People are not falling for false information because they lack intelligence. They are falling for it because it gives them something they need emotionally, and because they have never been trained to separate what they feel from what they know. The civilian world does not teach that skill. The Navy did. And I think that is a loss that extends far beyond the deckplates.

What I Wonder About

I do not have a policy proposal here. I am not sure one exists that could fix this from the top down. What I have is an observation, and a worry, and maybe a small hope.

The observation is that we have built the most powerful information tool in human history and then failed to teach anyone how to use it responsibly. We gave a generation access to everything and taught them nothing about how to evaluate what they find. We treated access as equivalent to understanding, and it is not. Access is the prerequisite. Understanding is the work. And we skipped the work.

The worry is that this compounds. The Google effect research says people who know less depend more on the machine, which means they know less, which means they depend more. The emotional comfort research says people believe what makes them feel good, which means they seek out more of what makes them feel good, which means they encounter less that challenges them, which means they grow more certain of things they have never checked. The PNAS research says the generation most immersed in digital information is the least equipped to evaluate it. These are not separate problems. They are the same problem, feeding itself, getting worse with every scroll.

The hope is this. The research also said the thing that helps is analytical thinking. And analytical thinking is a skill. It can be taught. It can be practiced. Finland teaches media literacy starting in kindergarten, and they have some of the best misinformation resistance in the world. We do not have to accept this as the permanent state of things. But changing it requires admitting that access is not enough, that feelings are not facts, and that the discipline of verification is not some old-fashioned habit we have outgrown. It is a survival skill we forgot we needed.

I learned it on the deckplates. I learned it because the alternative was unacceptable. The system does not care that you felt confident. The report does not hold up because you felt sure. Reality has a way of asserting itself regardless of what you believe about it, and the people who do well in this world are the ones who learned to check the gauge before they trusted the reading.

We have more information than any humans who have ever lived. We have less of the discipline required to use it well. That is the paradox. And from where I stand, the answer is not more information. It is more verification. More thinking. More willingness to sit with the discomfort of not knowing long enough to actually find out. More resistance to the emotional pull of a story that feels right but has not been checked.

That is the deckplate view. And I think it applies to a lot more than radar systems.

Fair winds,
Don Sawyer