The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’ • Hacker News Board

Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#61

Post by alexbecker » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:19 PM UTC

louithethrid wrote: post #28

kuschku wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily most of the people here, if they wanted, could easily get an entry-level education in any field, because they know how to study from books, can get access to the material, etc.

Oh, yes, its so easy, thats why every programmer aquiring domain specific knowledge never makes any mistake and the software - once feature complete, always guarantees satisfied customers. We are instant experts, just add hot water and stire for five minutes.

I don't see the need for this much snark in response to a relatively innocuous comment.

Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#62

Post by sofal » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:26 PM UTC

danso wrote: post #41

iamacynic wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

40s, huh? i'm in my 30s and i learned about 5 years ago that changing peoples' minds is an impossible, pointless task. people come to their own conclusions based on the bullshit they choose to surround themselves with. you could think the moon is square, doesn't bother me one bit. i'm living my life, not yours. it's far better to focus on your own knowledge and self improvement. it yields a higher return on investmen…

As someone who has changed his mind, I've found that it is wrong to think that minds can't be changed. When people complain about how minds aren't changed, they are typically complaining about minds not changing now , i.e. At the point of debate. But minds can change over time, it's just that you don't get that immediate feedback that you want.

Exactly. I'm tired of self-proclaimed internet veterans witnessing people digging in on individual online conversations and then concluding that nobody ever changes their mind and all debate/discussion is pointless. I have done a 180 on so many positions I used to have thanks in no small part to people online who did not take this asinine defeatist perspective and went ahead and engaged in debate while the other side (including me) just dug their heels in during the actual conversation.

I think a lot of people need to be educated about what the benefits of debate are and how they manifest slowly over time.

Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#63

Post by CountSessine » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:27 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #26

The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even. If you haven't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won't. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I've run into so many people who are misinformed, and let's just say "misinformed" means they don't know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field, but th…

If you have some opinion about just about anything, you can find support for it, in fact a web of support, which will really test your reasoning skills.

Maybe this is a technological problem with a technological solution?

This strikes me as being a sort of blindness to the epistemic web-of-supporting-knowledge. What we claim to know is ultimately supported and reinforced by other propositions that are consistent with it. There is a view of reality defined by the proposition that vaccines do more harm than good, and there is a small web of propositions that stand in support of this; but its a very small web and it stands in opposition to far more propositions than are in its web.

What if there was some kind of page-rank for ideas we see on the internet? What if it was made obvious, in your web browser or something, that you were viewing information that had a very low epistemic probability based on the amount of supporting information on the web? Maybe we're 10 or 20 years out from whatever technological solution could accomplish this (AI, clever algorithms, ... ?) but I really think that sometimes people just have a hard time seeing or understanding the sheer scale of evidence that is opposed to their flawed beliefs.

Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#64

Post by cookiecaper » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:28 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #54

boomboomsubban wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of your examples are things that have been common forever. There were germ theory skeptics, still are, that ignored the science showing how many deaths doctor hand washing prevented. And radiation healers were massive in the early twentieth century.

But before the internet you had to go out of your way to find a second snakeoil salesman. In the internet age, they can be your whole village.

Nah, this stuff was rife and widespread any time you had a sufficient population of people. Please note that it's just as easy for an empiricist to be misled as it is for a religionist. You simply tailor the argument to their respective dogmas.

The internet has changed things in that it allows one to obtain information that appeals to their biases in a totally isolated and exclusionary manner.

Like it or not, if you're sharing space with someone in meatspace, their actions, choices, and reactions are going to be observed and processed by everyone else in the same space, having some type of influence, and the only way around that is for one of the parties to leave the physical area, which is usually not a trivial thing to make happen.

On the internet, if someone exerts an influence that causes discomfort for you, you just press "Mute"/"Hide"/"Block"/"Close" and it's gone forever. Our platforms learn that your biases oppose that type of influence and of course, tailor your experience to better appeal so you don't choose to use a competitor's platform.

The same kind of thing happens with search; someone who wants to reinforce their anti-vax bias will search for "reasons vaccines are bad" and find just what they've asked for. Someone pro-vax will do the same. The truth is that very few people in either camp are legitimately qualified to seriously critique either side's position, since you'd have to be a drug chemist yourself to know if the claims are valid, so as long as it looks like some semi-credible mumbo-jumbo at the surface level, it's good to go and the user will run with the one that works in favor of their bias. They never have to go through the discomfort of hearing from the other side. It's much harder to get this type of isolation in the real world for several obvious reasons.

The net effect is increasingly isolated social bubbles, which means increasingly diminished tolerance, which means increased hostility and polarization. Others can speculate on what comes after that, but it's probably not good.

Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#65

Post by Ben2Wilson » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:51 PM UTC

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Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#66

Post by worldsayshi » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:52 PM UTC

sandworm101 wrote: post #44

oxide wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That truly is admirable. These examples of ignorance remind me of my own similar anecdote: I attended a dinner, out of politeness, with my grandparents and their friends. A man staying with them saw me puffing on my personal vaporizer, cornered me, and proceeded to tell me that he was diagnosed with lung cancer after trying to switch to a PV himself. "I smoked cigarettes for 30 years, never had a problem. Those elect…

Lung cancer is a strange one. As smoking levels drop, in some populations one can say that "most" lung cancer has nothing to do with smoking. So the doc has 10 patients with lung cancer, but only one of them is a smoker. With such numbers is gets hard to say that smoking was the cause. It was easy when the same doc had 30 patients and 21 were smokers, but times change. Statistics are hard and need to be revisited reg…

Well that kind of reasoning doesn't seem factual at all... You would need to see that smokers have a higher prevalence of lung cancer than the general population to prove anything. Not "the other way around".

Edit: hmm, unsure of that grammar. (Non native)

Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#67

Post by astrodust » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:52 PM UTC

canadian_voter wrote: post #34

lordnacho wrote: post #26

The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even. If you haven't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won't. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I've run into so many people who are misinformed, and let's just say "misinformed" means they don't know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field, but th…

The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even. When I was young, lonely and isolated, the internet was a godsend: it connected me to like minded individuals and expanded my horizons. It exposed me to a world of ideas about science, technology, history, politics, music, etc. at a time when everyone around me was mentally stagnant…

It's not just gullibility, it's being taken in by the siren song of some compelling hypothesis and then being slow-boiled by these increasingly ridiculous "facts" that are used to sustain that trance.

Normal, grounded people don't wake up one morning and go "I get it, the Jews and Soros are conspiring to suppress the truth about the Flat Earth", they get there by baby steps, each one veering more and more into the illogical.

Maybe it was when they were unemployed or in medical trouble and stressed out beyond their ability to cope, then wanted explanations, however implausible, that gave them at least an idea of what was wrong with their world. From there it took root and by degrees they slip into this other world of nonsense and batshittery.

Crystal therapy and detox can lead to healing rituals can lead to cults can lead to suddenly selling everything and donating it all to some fraudulent healer.

Like you observe, I think we're all in need of a best friend, family member, or spouse who can say "You've got a problem, this has to stop now."

The problem with the internet is it delivers. If you want to know more about quantum physics or molecular biology or cancer research you can dig and dig and keep on digging, you will never run out of material. Likewise if you're looking for harmful material, it will unquestioningly keep going all the way.

If Google started to detect the pattern of someone slipping into madness and did what they could to start to refute things, to sprinkle in some helpful counter-points with their diet of pure nonsense, maybe we can save people who'd otherwise be lost.

Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#68

Post by GhotiFish » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:53 PM UTC

pavlov wrote: post #37

lordnacho wrote: post #26

The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even. If you haven't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won't. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I've run into so many people who are misinformed, and let's just say "misinformed" means they don't know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field, but th…

I personally know a man in his late thirties who nearly died of AIDS a few years ago because he had read "credible sources" on the Internet and convinced himself that HIV is harmless. This happened already in the early 2000s. For over a decade, he ignored his HIV status (not knowing either way) thanks to the "advice" from contrarian experts on the Internet. One day he finally had a flu that didn't seem to go away. A…

whew. First result for me on this one: https://www.google.ca/search?num=20&safe=off&q=how+harmful+i...

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread73547/pg1

yikes.

Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#69

Post by Xeoncross » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:54 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #26

The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even. If you haven't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won't. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I've run into so many people who are misinformed, and let's just say "misinformed" means they don't know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field, but th…

> they don't know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field

Academic orthodoxy is sometimes wrong (re: history); But even it is isn't, we all ignore academic orthodoxy in some field of life: diet, travel, wars, entertainment choices, etc...

So who decides which academic orthodoxy we need to force people to conform too? If you leave room for free-thought, you have to expect bad thoughts.

Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’

#70

Post by H4CK3RM4N » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:56 PM UTC

canadian_voter wrote: post #34

lordnacho wrote: post #26

The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even. If you haven't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won't. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I've run into so many people who are misinformed, and let's just say "misinformed" means they don't know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field, but th…

The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even. When I was young, lonely and isolated, the internet was a godsend: it connected me to like minded individuals and expanded my horizons. It exposed me to a world of ideas about science, technology, history, politics, music, etc. at a time when everyone around me was mentally stagnant…

The most terrifying part of the flat earth movement is that most people don't have the basic knowledge necessary to argue against them.