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’

#71

Post by H4CK3RM4N » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 10:58 PM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #63

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…

Google is trying that with their 'single answer' box(I forgot the name). Sadly, that tends to lead to worse misconceptions then before.

There are a few examples in: https://youtu.be/hgEPHIaScck

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

#72

Post by worldsayshi » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:00 PM UTC

sofal wrote: post #62

danso wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This needs to be said. I just which there was a better way to retroactively deliver that feedback. That could diminish defeatism.

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

#73

Post by nabla9 » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:02 PM UTC

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #9

I see this sort of thing on Hacker News all the time. Programmers that are, I'm sure, the top of their field comment in threads about biology or something out of their field with the most silly and wrong answers. A thread about nutrition or something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain. That doesn't stop them from speaking authoritatively about it.…

Nutrition, science news and economics are the worst subjects for discussion in HN.

I'm cautiously optimistic because I see multiple levels ignorance that was me 5,10,15,20,25 years ago. I'm sure someone sees my comments the same way. Even if the the average quality of discussion stays at the same low level in HN as it was in Usenet long time ago, it's not the same people making the same stupid comments over and over again. There may be personal development.

I don't believe that one person keeps posting "correlation is not causality" comment to every science news discussion for 10 years without good reason. It's just a phase after learning statistics, I hope.

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

#74

Post by louithethrid » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:02 PM UTC

alexbecker wrote: post #61

louithethrid wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, i was over-shooting, because i had that attitude myself - and this is not innocuous . This hybris ruins lifes. Better snarky here, then Snarky out there, at the end of project, when it really hurts.

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

#75

Post by nabla9 » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:08 PM UTC

sotojuan wrote: post #20

JohnJamesRambo wrote: post #9

I see this sort of thing on Hacker News all the time. Programmers that are, I'm sure, the top of their field comment in threads about biology or something out of their field with the most silly and wrong answers. A thread about nutrition or something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain. That doesn't stop them from speaking authoritatively about it.…

For some reason, computer nerds think they know it all :-)

  Because they are autodidacts.  The main purpose of higher education
  and making all the smartest kids from one school come together with
  all the smartest kids from other schools, recursively, is to show every
  smart kid everywhere that they are not the smartest kid around, that
  no matter how smart they are, they are not equally smart at everything
  even though they were just that to begin with, and there will therefore
  always be smarter kids, if nothing else, than at something other than
  they are smart at.  If you take a smart kid out of this system, reward
  him with lots of money that he could never make otherwise, reward him
  with control over machines that journalists are morbidly afraid of and
  make the entire population fear second-hand, and prevent him from ever
  meeting smarter people than himself, he will have no recourse but to
  believe that he /is/ smarter than everybody else.  Educate him properly
  and force him to reach the point of intellectual exhaustion and failure
  where there is no other route to success than to ask for help, and he
  will gain a profound respect for other people.  Many programmers act
  like they are morbidly afraid of being discovered to be less smart than
  they think they are, and many of them respond with extreme hostility on
  Usenet precisely because they get a glimpse of their own limitations.
  To people whose entire life has been about being in control, loss of
  control is actually a very good reason to panic.

–– Erik Naggum, 2004

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

#76

Post by bsder » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:08 PM UTC

EliRivers wrote: post #24

wernercd wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good ones don't... just like any field... "Intelligent" people know how much they don't know... "Stupid" or "ignorant" know everything and want you to know it. Doctors, Mechanics, ... nerds... no one group is immune to this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect "The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing…

With warning of anecdote rather than evidence, Doctors are the worst [1] for this! So many of them seem to think they're scientists, when the majority of them are far from it. [1] In the hyperbolic sense; I wouldn't like to suggest a literal truth here

Doctors are at a bad intersection of customer service and science.

On the one hand, doctors need to sound authoritative to 99.9% of all people since they are almost always delivering news the patient doesn't want to hear (exercise, eat less junk, take these pills 3 times equally spaced not 2 with lunch, etc.)

On the other hand, many doctors just aren't that smart. Being a doctor today isn't an automatic sign to me that you are in the top 1% of brainpower. Some of my doctors are, most aren't. In addition, many doctors don't continue to learn over time. If you do that, you eventually become dumb.

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

#77

Post by pavlov » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:09 PM UTC

GhotiFish wrote: post #68

pavlov wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm deeply disturbed by the parallels between AIDS denialism and climate change denialism.

Take this article:

http://edition.cnn.com/2017/04/20/us/louisiana-climate-chang...

These fishermen seem just like my acquaintance who didn't want to know that his immune system was collapsing, until finally the signs were evident as bright red cancerous lesions on his face.

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

#78

Post by deathhand » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:24 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #36

shouldbworking wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens on HN within our field too :) . I see stuff hit the front page all the time, only to be ripped to pieces a few hours later when someone that knows what they're doing appears. Do you remember the "super fast hash algorithm" from a few weeks ago that turned out to be rubbish? What about the "high performance TCP proxy" on the front page right now that's not proxying correctly or with unusual speed? People…

>Do you remember the "super fast hash algorithm" from a few weeks ago that turned out to be rubbish? What about the "high performance TCP proxy" on the front page right now that's not proxying correctly or with unusual speed? Seems like debunking Hacker News stories might make for a fun project.

Double points if it can be automated!

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

#79

Post by krapp » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:26 PM UTC

CountSessine wrote: post #63

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…

> 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.

No, they would discount the credibility of that evidence before entertaining the possibility that they might be wrong.

If you created a page rank for ideas, to prove to them how unlikely their beliefs were to be true, such people would dismiss the attempt as propaganda. Just look at how often various points of view on HN (which one would expect to self-select for rational, scientifically minded thinkers) are derided as fabrications, "fake news", the work of shills, disinformation, or something similar.

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

#80

Post by sofal » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 11:28 PM UTC

cookiecaper wrote: post #64

lordnacho wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

I think it is entirely possible for people on one side of a particular discussion to be on more epistemologically solid ground than people on another side of a discussion in a general sense. If I'm reading you right (which I may not be) it seems that you're saying this is not the case. It's not a controversial or particularly interesting fact that everyone is human and therefore prone to weaknesses in reasoning that they will never be 100% free of, but it is also true that one can make a moderately successful effort to reduce these weaknesses somewhat through disciplined practice in critical thinking, and that there are people who can therefore reason better than others. Additionally, the scientific method itself is engineered to reduce the effect of these natural human biases that will always plague the scientists themselves. Religions, on the other hand, consistently enhance and exploit these biases to promote their narrative.