Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Daria Cybulska (Poland/UK), who is the Director of Programmes and Evaluation at Wikimedia UK, leading programmes and advocacy for knowledge equity and information literacy. Daria is a trustee at Global Dialogue, a platform for human rights philanthropy, and in 2023/24 was awarded a Churchill Fellowship, investigating Central Asia’s online civil society and its resilience responses to a shrinking civic space. She was also a fellow at the AKO Storytelling Institute, based at the University Arts London.   Daria Cybulska Wikimedia UK demystifies and drives engagement in open knowledge, as the national charity for Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects . We have been delivering education activities for over ten years, with an explicit focus on the use of Wikimedia as a tool to develop information and media literacy skills . Our programme takes place online and in schools, universities, museums, libraries and community settings. Our research shows that learning t...

On 26th and 27th September in Berlin, the Human Abilities Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities organised a workshop on conspiracy beliefs and delusions. This is a report of the workshop. Logo of the Human Abilities centre The first speaker was Romy Jaster (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) presented a talk on self-immunization in conspiracy theories. Romy thinks about conspiracy theories from an epistemological and philosophy of science perspective and she started her presentation with the conceptual distinction between "conspiracy theories" as a neutral term (an explanation that involves a conspiracy) and "conspiracy theories" as a negatively-valued term (an explanation that is epistemically deficient). What the epistemic deficit is is open to debate and controversy.  Romy focused on the idea that conspiracy theories and delusions are both deficient because they are not responsive to counter-evidence. The idea is that conspiracy theories are built in such a...