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
You’re not wrong. Never before in human history has there been a megaphone available to anyone and everyone that is loud enough to be heard around the world – and it’s available to evil people.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
People here seem to be mistaking stupidity as a measure of intelligence. Stupidity is a measure of wisdom.
An abundance of information doesn’t fix stupidity in the same way that shoveling water out of a boat with a leak won’t stop it from sinking.
You have to address the leak before shoveling water becomes productive. Or to circle back around, you have to address how someone learns, parses, and applies information before feeding them more information becomes productive.
To the people saying that this is because of “laziness” or “lack of curiosity”:
I’m bombarded with so much information every day that it’s not feasible to fact-check it all. I have to pick my battles and take things I care less about at face value until I have a reason not to.
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.
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 good^1^ 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”
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.
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