Wading through native plant gardening resources and trying to inform other people, both through posts and in real life, has shifted my point of view on what misinformation is and does.
I don't really know what to do with it yet. But I've realized that it's often impossible to be accurate when teaching people who know very little about a subject. You have to simplify incredibly complex, nuanced things to the point where it feels like a total hack job. If you specify every complexity of the thing you're explaining, the people you're talking to don't absorb the core principle.
Various posts i've made about ecology and gardening stuff have been called "misinformation" and I'm just like. Think of it as a highschool textbook. Half of what it says is wrong but you must understand the "wrong" model to move beyond it.
This problem is. everywhere. in communities focused on rewilding, ecology, nature, native plant gardening, and permaculture
It's like
Person 1: [presents a simplified model of how something works that demonstrates an important principle that most people are ignorant to]
Person 2: No, this is WRONG and MISINFORMATION, because [list of nuances and caveats to the model person 1 presented]. By teaching people this, you are promoting [the most simplistic possible understanding of the thing].
Person 3: [reads what both Person 1 and Person 2 have to say] Well, it seems like the model is not really completely true. There are some useful points, but for the most part, [almost completely wrong idea]
This happens over and over and over again.
We've created a society where, relative to other knowledge, nearly everyone has an elementary-school-child-level understanding of ecology and gardening.
The first step here is to accept that we fucked up and that there's no quick or easy way to unfuck.
It's like. I'm sorry but the general public wasn't told what atoms were, and we're stuck with the pictures of little clusters of marbles with little electron marbles orbiting around them until something clicks.
an example
Level 1: "Weeds" aren't real, they are just plants growing in a place people don't want them. Some plants considered to be "weeds" are beneficial.
Level 2: "Weeds" are plants that readily spring up in areas of disturbed soil like fields, lawns, or gardens. They are typically tough, fast growing, and short lived, spreading quickly in the disturbed areas they prefer. This is because they are typically pioneer species that, in the natural process of succession, form the first phase of restoration for damaged areas.
Level 3: "Weeds" are a group of plants defined by various cultural and ecological means. In agriculture, weeds are unwanted plants that can have harmful effects upon crop yields. In more general usage, weeds are quickly and aggressively growing and spreading plants known for their capability to colonize disturbed or heavily managed environments. The ecological role of weeds tends to be pioneer or early successional stage species. Outside its native range, a species can become invasive and "weedy" even if it is not "weedy" where it is native. Land management practices can affect a plant's tendency to become "weedy." Under poor land management practices a plant can negatively impact overall biodiversity even if the plant is native.
[there are like 7 more levels]
Don't even get me started on "native species"
Never mind, I'm getting started on "native species."
You would think that "native species" would be straightforward to define, but actually a plant can be any of the following:
This plant is native to your continent and region, but it has only been found growing wild in a handful of specific locations, which is weird, since it seems to do fine outside of that range. Was there a disease that devastated it in the recent past? Wait, actually, we found archaeological evidence of this plant growing waaaay far away from where we thought it was originally native to. Who knows.
This plant is supposed to be in a specific biome. No, we don't actually know how far that biome stretched before colonization.
This plant is fine within this specific area but it's become wildly invasive outside it. No, we're not sure where the strict boundary of the area is.
This plant is...native? Maybe? Or it might have been introduced relatively early? We're not sure.
This plant is native but there are too many of them because our shit land management practices have made them overpopulate.
This plant is native but it's not supposed to be acting like that.
The internet doesn't know if this plant is native or not.
This plant isn't native but it's not hurting anything (?)
This plant is supposed to be invasive, but it doesn't actually colonize areas outside of heavily managed land like lawns, which arguably are better with it than without it.
This plant is non-native but it's fulfilling a role that was fulfilled by a now disappeared or heavily reduced native species. 
This plant is native but it's on your state's invasive species list because people hate it or something.
This plant is non-native but it's been here for a really long time now, and we're not sure if it's hurting anything or not.
This plant is non-native—wait we found evidence of it being native—?????????
If you are in the USA, it may not be possible to restore your back yard to prairie or to learn if it was originally prairie in the first place, and it's even less clear how much that matters.
Oak savannas and prairie once stretched well into Central Kentucky, but there's no clear agreement on where exactly the transition into forest began, or if it was ever a clear, stable dividing line, or if "forest" and "prairie" themselves are divided like that.
The Bluegrass was once some sort of lush, fertile, open savanna-like woodland, iirc. But I also live very near to the steep hilly environments of the Appalachian foothills which are hard to imagine untree'd.
This region would have been full of open limestone glades and barrens, as well as wetlands in the floodplains and sinkholes. Some areas of Kentucky would not really turn to forest if left to themselves, because the bedrock is so near to the surface. Eroded slopes in pastures quickly turn to gravel and loose stones.
But is it "supposed" to be like this, or did this happen because of extreme erosion as a result of poor land management? The more I think about it, the more lost I become.
What is clear is that wild bison aren't coming back to the state for some time now, and periodic fires aren't going to be super possible in residential areas, so what does that leave us with?
time to….make a new ecology?
every time I’ve gone down this rabbit hole I learn more and more about how severely fucked americas ecosystem has become and part of me is like “oh we can fix that, no problem!” Despite the fact that stepping in with sub-par knowledge of how the fucking world works and a shut load of confidence is how we got into this mess.
I mean, how we got into this mess was deliberate destruction of ecosystems Native Americans depended on, and adherence to an ideology that said Europe was inherently superior and that America should be made as similar to Europe as possible.
To respond to the misinformation thing in the OP, I had a teacher who used to say something along the lines of: Teaching is the process of telling people something that is wrong, and then later telling them things that are less wrong, until eventually you can tell them things that are correct.
