Cause is a mix of laziness and mental traps. Aside from targeted missinformation (which uses other mental traps).
Pretty sure it’s a complex soup of dis/misinformation, conservative (not necessarily the political type) leadership, laziness, indifference, lead poisoning, and a kaleidoscope of logical fallacies.
We shall not confuse data and information. With internet we have access to a lot of data, but information is hard to find. Furthermore information are structured by the institution that made it : university, TV, newspaper, and social network Those dominant institution are not very interested in homelessness or other class struggle in your neighborhood. So relevant information for your social and geographical position is even more rare.
A beautiful mind! Well put mate! Thank you!
Calculators didn’t make math obsolete, it just made getting the wrong answer that much quicker
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
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.
Ain’t hard. Bullshit has a smell
But most people don’t know how bullshit smells in the first place… Check the downvotes…
i think actual information is way too difficult to suss out these days with the misinformation campaigns and the paywalls and the trolling, etc.
Sure, it’s awful. Yet a good amount of folks still seem to be able to figure things out. Well, mostly. At least position themselves in a way to think critically and make decisions best they can.
Best case example I know of these days: try to shop for a mattress
The signal to noise ratio is getting worse by the day, unfortunately.
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.
Definitely doesn’t help, and modern machine learning models are only going to make this problem worse.
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!
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.
Turns out, people are just stupid and the more information access you give them the more they can reinforce their stupidity with other idiots’ opinions
Ex-fucking-actly. Like I said in another recent comment, the problem with the internet is that it allows the worst people you can imagine to form communities, and instead of them essentially dying alone and shunned by anyone who isn’t a complete psychopath they start to think that their fuckwittery is not only acceptable but common
Yeah it can even be less sinister. The dumbest people can all hear someone of perceived authority (like someone on Rogan for example) who says “there’s actually no proof the world is round” and the idiots can be like “I knew it! I was right all along!” And they’ll never accept anything else because they were “proven right” that one time
Oh yeah absolutely, although more often than not those people also tend to have hair-raisingly awful “political” opinions (ie. opinions which only qualify as politics for conservatives, but would usually land anybody else in jail)
Yeah it’s all bundled together. Before the internet, there were established authorities on certain matters. Now any idiot can go on twitter and claim to be a MD and fool a bunch of other idiots into thinking vaccines are deadly and used for brainwashing.
Like I said before, it’s the complete erosion of actual Truth
The human brain doesn’t seek logic, it seeks validation and a storyline to explain how you feel. It will whip up stories very easily, but even easier if they’re supplied.
So this system has been exploited to the extreme. It’s our largest vulnerability as a species, that someone can make us feel an emotion and then attach a story to it, and our brains will adhere to that story without question.
dumb people still had access to bullshit information prior to the internet. remember grocery store tabloids? papers with “Bat Boy” on them or how Jesus was constantly coming back, etc? I knew a couple adults that firmly believed and bought that shit.
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.
Stupidity has never been because of lack of access to information. That’s ignorance.
They do seem to be positivelly correlated, though.
Stupid people don’t care if they’re ignorant and non-stupid people endeavor not to be.
Certainly ignorance and stupidity are two different things.
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That’s not how IQ works.
Which part? By definition IQ follows a normal distribution and 100 is set as the mean/median – meaning that 100 is always the average result
Edit: nevermind I did a stupid, you’re correct that it’s literally impossible for everybody to have IQ over 100
I feel you my friend! Have a great day!
I don’t think this is about IQ dumb.
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Huh. IQ is normalized. 100 is always the mean no matter if the entire population got smarter. It’s impossible for everyone to have an IQ of at least 100.
We’ve had libraries since long before the Internet. I don’t think lack of access to information is as much to blame as lack of time and/or willingness to make an effort.
Also, we live in a culture that celebrates, glorifies and rewards stupidity to an insane degree. There is simply very little incentive for people to try and improve themselves.
As with any TOOL it is all about HOW YOU use it…
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.
Plus the access to misinformation. Now where even more stupiderer,