This is why I never took notes as a child. If I took notes I forgot everything I learned. If I didn't, I remembered it.
The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
101–110 of 155 posts
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#102The 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…
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.
> There were germ theory skeptics, still are, that ignored the science showing how many deaths doctor hand washing prevented
Don't forget to mention that one of the early proponents was involuntarily committed and killed as a result of social exclusion by his colleagues.
Later history was rewritten and a diagnosis of syphilis was used as justification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis#Breakdown_and...
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#103Earlier 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.
Please don't link that shit here. It increases it's pagerank. Or at least put a space in the url or something.
It's completely infuriating. I mean if I didn't know anything about HIV or medical research, that would sound completely plausible. I went in expecting to read batshit insane conspiracy theories. And I'm surprised how sane it sounds. That's scary.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#104The 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…
Are you sure that traditional sources of knowledge, and traditional ways of making people believe things, result in greater accuracy? Consider that over half of the papers in many fields, including medicine, are statistically bogus: http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jou... http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/08/25/071530 On average the results in science papers are probably more accurate than…
While it may be true that 50% of papers are wrong in some fields, the papers that are wrong are probably not the most highly publicized ones or the ones in the most prestigious journals (and when those papers are wrong the incentive to publish corrective papers is high), so this probably isn't quite as big a problem as it's made out to be.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#105The 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…
Pretty sophisticated people can fall victim to this sort of thing, like Steve Jobs refusing cancer treatment in favor of vegan diet and exercise.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>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.
Sure, that's possible and common. But it's still just as easy to mislead secular persons as it is to mislead religious people.
>one can make a moderately successful effort to reduce these weaknesses somewhat through disciplined practice in critical thinking
Yes, I agree and I think that's important, but it should be acknowledged that wherever you're dedicating energy to this effort, it's coming out of something else, and that when you're not aware, you are basically falling back to default decision-making and credibility determination mechanisms. One should not make the mistake of believing that because they are good analysts, their decisions automatically qualify as more deliberate.
>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.
This is where you're starting to lose me.
Academia is just as vulnerable to bias and groupthink as anything else. It is laughably naive to say that the principles of the scientific method keeps academia more objective than any other field.
In fact, the opacity and density of academic papers will frequently be used to obscure what is otherwise plainly false information, allowing it to be weaponized into propaganda (with varying degrees of subtlety) that common sense and/or decency would not allow people to accept any other way. "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics", as the saying goes.
"The diocese says..." and "the university says..." are identical lines of thought, applied to a different authority. In both cases, the technical background behind the proclamations from either institution is serious and well outside the grasp of the average devotee or proselyte.
You may be operating under the belief that religious proclamations occur based on the whims of religious leaders, but this is no more true than the claim that academic proclamations occur based on the whims of academic leaders. Both groups have significant influence and control, but people do not just follow these things without an apparent technical/rational justification, and credible religious edicts are works of real and serious scholarship.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
I appreciate your intent, but to me the concept of google operating as an arbiter of truth is unsettling.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#108Since we are playing with words. Startup idea: the meta-internet to restore humanity to its previous intellectual glory.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 i…
> 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.
To which the response is who are Google to influence how or what people think?
It's easy to make up pure-nonsense examples that nobody believes - like Soros suppressing the truth about the flat Earth - and say believers should be saved.
What if someone questions the official version of 9/11? What if they believe/d the NSA taps internet, social networks and world leaders? What if they think an omnipotent sky fairy watches over us all and blesses America?
Google's "did you mean" is irritating enough when applied to assumed typos; its purpose should be to give people what they're looking for, not tell people what they should be looking for instead.
Re: The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
#110The 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…
"Spotting Bullshit" should be a mandatory elementary school class. First lesson is assume every statement spoken, written or thought by anyone, including yourself, no matter how charismatic, smart or authoritative they seem, is false until at least some small amount of first-hand evidence is presented. Second lesson is the definition of "evidence".