How to Communicate and Deal With the Uninformed, the Misguided, and the Certain

You have had the conversation. You laid out the facts. You pointed to the data. You stayed calm and reasonable. The person across from you nodded, waited for you to finish, and then repeated the exact thing they walked in believing, except louder.

You walked away thinking something is wrong with that person.

Something is wrong, but it is not what you think, and it is not really about that one person. It is about a country that has quietly lost its grip on the basic skills a free society runs on. I am going to show you the numbers, I am going to show you why this is getting worse, and then I am going to show you how to actually reach these people without losing your mind or your relationships. And just so you know, every week, in court and across the mediation table, I put these same techniques to work, and after four decades of doing it I can tell you they work, and they work well.

When reading, also please keep in mind that this is not a piece about who is good and who is bad. Instead, approach this as a problem we have to deal with, and you are going to deal with it better by the end of this.

The Problem Is Real, And The Numbers Prove It

Start with adults, because adults vote, parent, manage, and post.

The OECD runs a study called the Survey of Adult Skills, known as PIAAC. It measures whether working-age adults can read, do basic math, and solve everyday problems. The 2023 results landed in December 2024, and they are bad. The share of American adults scoring at or below Level 1 in literacy, the second-lowest of the test’s proficiency tiers, now stands at 28 percent, or 58.9 million people, up from 19 percent in 2017. For numeracy, 34 percent, or 72 million adults, score at or below Level 1, up from 29 percent in 2017.

Read that again. Adults at that tier struggle to compare and contrast information, paraphrase a passage, or make low-level inferences. At the very bottom band, below Level 1, adults could not compare the dates printed on grocery tags to tell which item was packed first. That is not an insult. That is a measurement. Overall, adult literacy scores fell 12 points and numeracy fell 7 points in just six years.

It gets sharper. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the gap in numeracy between the highest and lowest skilled adults in America is the widest of any country measured. More Americans are clustering at the bottom levels of proficiency while a thinning middle gets pulled apart. We are not one nation reading the same page. We are splitting into two populations who process information in completely different ways.

Now look at the kids coming up behind them. The OECD runs a parallel test for 15-year-olds called PISA. In 2022, U.S. students dropped 13 points in math from 2018, a score that ranked among the lowest ever measured by PISA for the United States. Twenty-five education systems posted higher math scores than ours. American teenagers hold their own in reading and science, where scores stayed roughly stable, and they fall behind in math, and the math gap is the one that controls whether a person can evaluate a statistic, weigh a risk, or smell a number that does not add up.

Here is the honest part most takes leave out. A serious chunk of America’s weak average traces to poverty, not to bad classrooms. The OECD’s own data shows that disadvantaged American students actually perform relatively well for their socioeconomic level. Some analysts go further. The National Education Association calculated that if you measured only U.S. schools with childhood poverty rates under 10 percent, the average reading score would place the United States first in the world. Read that figure as the advocacy estimate it is, not as an official OECD ranking, and the point still stands. The talent is here. The conditions are not. That distinction matters for how you treat people, and I will come back to it.

So put the picture together. Tens of millions of adults cannot reliably tell a sound argument from a slick one. The pipeline behind them is sliding in the one subject that builds number sense. And the country is separating into a high-skill group and a low-skill group that no longer share a common floor.

This is the soil. Now look at what grows in it.

Why This Turns Dangerous, Not Just Sad

A person who lacks information is workable. You can hand them information. The harder case is the person who lacks information and does not know it. That person walks around feeling certain.

Psychologists have a name for this. In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger published the study that named the effect that carries their names. Their finding was blunt: people with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden, because they reach mistaken conclusions and their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. The root cause is a lack of metacognition, which is the ability to reflect on your own thinking. You need a certain amount of knowledge just to judge how much you know.

Sit with the mechanism, because it explains your whole frustrating week. If a person does not know what correct spelling looks like, they cannot judge whether their own spelling is wrong. The same blind spot applies to history, medicine, statistics, law, and economics. The very gap that produces the wrong answer also hides the wrongness from the person who holds it. They are not lying to you. From the inside, they feel informed.

I owe you a caveat, because I write under evidentiary standards and I am not going to hand you a half-truth. The Dunning-Kruger effect is contested. Some researchers argue a chunk of it is a statistical artifact of regression to the mean, where people at every ability level drift their self-estimates toward average. Fair. The clean takeaway survives the fight anyway. People with the lowest scores on a test consistently show the highest overestimations of their own performance, while the best performers tend to slightly underestimate themselves. The least equipped feel the most sure. That pattern holds, and it is the one that wrecks conversations.

Stack that human bias on top of the modern information machine. A cleverly worded headline, a confident influencer, a cable segment engineered for outrage. Repetition alone reliably increases belief in a false claim. Psychologists call it the illusory truth effect. A person already short on the tools to evaluate a claim now gets that claim repeated a hundred times across a feed built to repeat it. Certainty hardens into identity. The belief stops being a thought they are holding and becomes a flag they are waving.

This is why it gets worse if we do nothing. The skills are declining, the confidence is not, and the machine that exploits the gap is getting faster every year. A democracy is a decision-making engine, and you cannot run a decision-making engine on a population that cannot reliably tell truth from performance. The bill for that comes due in elections, in public health, in courtrooms, in the safety of your own family. The cost is not abstract. It lands on you.

So we have to deal with it. Here is the part nobody tells you.

The Solution Starts By Throwing Out What You Think Works

You have been taught that the way to fix a wrong belief is to deliver the right facts harder. Win the argument, present the evidence, and the truth will do the work.

The research says that is wrong, and it says so twice.

First, the good news that should change how you operate. For years people warned about the “backfire effect,” the idea that correcting a false belief makes the person believe the falsehood even more. That fear is mostly a myth. A rigorous longitudinal study concluded that corrections reduce belief in misinformation, and that fact-checkers should never avoid giving a correction out of backfire concerns. An emerging research consensus finds that corrective information is typically at least somewhat effective at increasing belief accuracy. So do not give up on facts. Facts help.

Now the catch, and it is the whole game. Facts alone are usually not enough. They often have no effect at all, not a negative one, just a neutral one, because facts require an emotional and relational context to land. The truth needs a runway. If you fire a fact at a person who feels attacked, the fact has nowhere to touch down.

Researchers proved this with a technique called deep canvassing. It involves listening and sharing personal stories in a short, non-judgmental encounter, and it produces durable shifts in attitude on some of the most contentious issues we have. When social scientists tested the ingredients, the result was clean: remove the non-judgmental listening and the story-sharing, and the effect disappears. Put them back in, and the effect returns.

So here is the solution in one line. Stop trying to win the argument. Start trying to lower the defenses so the truth has somewhere to land.

That breaks into a few concrete moves you can use today.

Lead with a question, not a verdict. Ask the person how they came to their view. Open-ended questions invite reflection and let people process their own beliefs through honest dialogue rather than being told what to think. A person rarely argues with a conclusion they reached themselves.

Drop the contempt before you open your mouth. If you hold scorn for the person you are trying to persuade, persuasion fails, and your attitude hardens the disagreement rather than eroding it. They can feel it. Contempt is the thing that turns a fixable conversation into a war.

Tell a story instead of citing a study. The data convinced you. A story will convince them. Deep canvassing works by engaging the person in active mental processing and self-persuasion, helping them work through their own contradictions. Your job is not to deliver the conclusion. Your job is to walk them to the edge of it and let them step.

Stay curious longer than feels comfortable. Research suggests that deep, non-judgmental listening fosters openness and humility and even reduces prejudice, while aggressive persuasion often backfires. The goal of the first conversation is not the win. The goal is the second conversation.

Applying This Like A Human Being, Not A Fact-Checker

Technique without humanity is just a smarter way to be condescending. So let me ground all of this in something true.

The numbers I opened with are not a verdict on anyone’s worth. A huge share of the skills gap traces to poverty and inequality, not to character or curriculum. The person you are frustrated with may have gotten a school system you would not wish on anyone, in a town the country wrote off, while working two jobs and raising kids. They are not a failed version of you. They are a person who got handed a worse map.

That reframe is not soft. It is accurate, and accuracy is what makes the empathy real instead of performed. When you stop seeing a fool and start seeing a person doing their best with a thinner toolkit, your tone changes on its own, and tone is the thing they actually hear.

So in practice, here is how you show up.

Acknowledge the person before you address the claim. “I get why that lands. A lot of people feel that way, and I have felt versions of it.” You are not agreeing with the falsehood. You are recognizing the human, and recognition is what unlocks the door.

Find the real concern under the wrong fact. People rarely fight over data for its own sake. They fight because they are scared for their job, their kids, their standing, their country. Address the fear and the fact becomes negotiable. Ignore the fear and the fact bounces off.

Go slow and expect to plant, not harvest. You are unlikely to change a mind in one sitting, and that is fine. Durable change in this research takes a real conversation and time to settle. You are leaving a seed, not winning a trophy.

Protect the relationship over the point. The friendship, the family tie, the working relationship outlasts any single dispute, and it is the only thing that buys you a hearing next time. The reason this whole approach works is that it answers a fundamental human need to be heard and affirmed, and that affirmation of dignity is what opens the door to persuasion. Burn the relationship and you have nothing left to persuade with.

Know when to stop. Some conversations are not happening today, and pushing only digs the trench deeper. Walking away with the relationship intact is a win, because it keeps the door open for the day the person is actually ready.

None of this asks you to pretend false things are true. It asks you to be smart about how truth travels. Facts are the cargo. The relationship is the road. Build the road first.

The Call

You did not break the country’s education numbers, and you cannot fix them alone. What you can do is decide that the next hard conversation in your life goes differently. Pick one person. The relative who repeats the headline, the friend who shares the nonsense, the coworker who is sure. Before the next exchange, drop the contempt, lead with a question, listen longer than is comfortable, and tell a story instead of throwing a stat. Watch what happens when the defenses come down.

This is the work, and it is the work I keep coming back to here. We are not going to win this country back with better insults. We are going to win it one patient, human, evidence-respecting conversation at a time, and those conversations start with you.

If this resonated, share it with the one person in your life who needs to read it, then come back and tell me how your next hard conversation went. I read every reply, and your story might be the one that helps someone else hold the line with grace.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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