There is a huge difference between these two maladies. A 2000 study on public knowledge conducted by the University of Illinois, as the political scientist Anne Pluta later noted, found that “uninformed citizens don’t have any information at all, while those who are misinformed have information that conflicts with the best evidence and expert opinion.” Not only do these people “fill the gaps in their knowledge base by using their existing belief systems,” but over time those beliefs become “indistinguishable from hard data.” And, of course, the most misinformed citizens “tend to be the most
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