i think actual information is way too difficult to suss out these days with the misinformation campaigns and the paywalls and the trolling, etc.
shit try to do some comparison shopping today and try to figure out which reviews are real and if the thing you’re buying is really the thing you think you’re buying.
That’s kind of the point.
We now have access to the information, and we’ve discovered that all along it was our inability to distinguish between misinformation and real information that was causing the stupidity.
Definitely doesn’t help, and modern machine learning models are only going to make this problem worse.
The signal to noise ratio is getting worse by the day, unfortunately.
deleted by creator
Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don’t bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.
I question whether or not this is true. People will remember things if they find them interesting, so incurious people didn’t know much in the past, either.
People don’t do their own research past the most cursory google searches at best of times, and now google is absolute garbage and the links that are relevant mostly go to massive SEO whale sites written by AI.
That’s all before you get to the actual mainstream media sites that spout the same commercial news cycle stories, or spread sensationalized headlines and absolute nonsense. I have managed teams of people and on daily calls people talk about news stories they read like “Did you hear they found another spaceship on mars?” and “They found proof that covid was a Chinese bio-weapon!” and similar statements from working, middle-class people who just browse the websites and social media before work. Most people have very little time to dig into things they see, and now once-reputable sites are just cashing in on clickbait and lies.
This is how most people get their news and information, and it’s absolute garbage now. Browse a major news site like MSN and it’s worse than grocery store tabloids from the 1980’s. And don’t even get started about social media like twitter and facebook.
Something happened in the last couple decades that has made people literally just stop caring what’s real or not. I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it’s now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything.
Agreed: “I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it’s now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything.”
That is the “feature” and the dead end… The full compliance on anything! No thoughts, no free speech!
Ain’t hard. Bullshit has a smell
But most people don’t know how bullshit smells in the first place… Check the downvotes…
Best case example I know of these days: try to shop for a mattress
I truly believe it’s a lack of curiosity, people simply are not interested in learning more than they have to.
That’s why I see curiosity as a gift. Friends think I am intelligent, but I’m simply curious enough to learn things.
Agreed. Smart people aren’t smart because they simply are. They’re smart because they learn how to learn. They learn the recognize that the steps to success involve failure. Being smart is about being willing to feel stupid, since anything new you learn/try you’re going to feel overwhelmed.
100%
Not being afraid of failure is key, and the tenacity to drive through it.
Plus the access to misinformation. Now where even more stupiderer,
IIRC there are around 51Million americans thats have low IQ (~80 and less). I imagine its worse in developing countries. Not much you can do about them.
Lack of applicable or pertinent information is still rampant.
Excess information of the stupifying type is everywhere.
How can we access applicable or relevant information?
As with any TOOL it is all about HOW YOU use it…
The net is more an amplifier than an elucidator
deleted by creator
Sure but it often isn’t a megaphone where the speaker controls the volume and where it’s pointed, which I think is important to consider.
It’s still the problem. Information is widely available but misinformation is easier to find and the ones that need information are the ones that find the misinformation
Not only that, but the good quality information is often blocked behind paywalls
…nah. we didn’t think that. You’d meet motherfuckers with a grade 3 education that were on it, ignorant somewhat, not dumb
Nah. We knew the difference between ignorance and stupidity before then.
I have to admit, even while finding the crooked corners of the internet with rotten and CJ, I did hold onto the belief that access to information was going to lift the masses up out of ignorance. I knew about flamewars since the BBS days. I knew about trolls since rm -rf advice was given. I, in my naivete, seriously underestimated the effects of these phenomenon on society writ large.
As with many things, I think the point where it all started to go down hill was once facebook became a thing.
We did not, or at least not universally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model
Kinda? I figured that there’s some portion of the population that’s not smart - bell-curve statistical distribution and all that. But I always thought that the problem was education, or rather, access to a good1 education and all the socio-economic and political boundaries around that.
To be blunt: modest to insanely powerful people have something invested in keeping such barriers high, and it’s worrysome.
- Good = a program that teaches critical thinking and has access to liberal arts, trades, traditional arts, libraries, and information technology.
To be blunt: modest to insanely powerful people have something invested in keeping such barriers high, and it’s worrysome.
cheaper workers tend to be less intelligent, ergo: prevent children from being expensive by preventing them becoming intelligent see:“a brave new world”
this post vs tankies
deleted by creator
Sure, but before the internet somebody had to actually print a magazine or a book etc. to spread it wider than word-of-mouth
Stupid, ignorant, misinformed, and gullible are all different things.
Access to information helps with ignorance, and even then only if the ignorant person isn’t too dumb to understand or hear had their mind poisoned with falsehood.
Sure, but let’s not remove our libraries please.
