Is Stupidity Expanding? Some Hypotheses

I didn't say they were. I didn't say all societies of that time had the same wrong mainstream beliefs as the Puritans. I just said they all had some wrong mainstream beliefs.

> the situation is certainly dire. I don't think it's far fetched to think that if we continue in business as usual, modern industrial civilization could be at risk.

I disagree (to be clear, I disagree about the "civilization could be at risk" part, I'm not saying I'm in favor of just continuing business as usual--I think there are certainly things we could and should do better). But I don't want to hijack the discussion into a debate about climate change and what we should do about it. My only point here is that there is significant disagreement on this point, and the various sides (there are more than two) can't all be right since they hold beliefs that are inconsistent with each other, so clearly some widely held belief in this area is wrong, we just have no consensus on which belief it is, so society as a whole can't make a correction.

It is easy to fall into misunderstood or outdated ideas. Sharing those ideas with others prompts them to correct any errors in thought as a service to you. In turn, they will receive similar corrections for their misunderstood and outdated ideas as they share them. Collectively, this improves the shared understanding of everyone. The foundation of education.

Spelling and grammar corrections come part and parcel in that. They are given because they equally want to be received. There is really no greater feeling than being able to learn something new, and realizing that you were spelling something wrong, to be able to spell it correctly in the future, fulfills that as much as realizing your understanding of some complex subject was off.

On that note, those of us involved in the software industry know that software testing is greatly benefitted from testing invalid inputs as much as valid inputs. When challenging your ideas, it can be equally useful to try and take an alternative perspective – invalid input, if you will – and see what kind of correction data is returned. If the correction data is poor, what was seemingly incorrect input may be closer to being correct than you originally thought. This can be just as useful in correcting your understanding as simply posting what you hold as being true.

The old adage about asking "How do I do X in Linux?" will yield no response, but stating that "Linux sucks! It cannot do X." will solve your problem nicely captures what online message boards serve. To try and apply a human element to who sits behind the "Linux sucks" statement misses the point.

Communicating via conference and paper, not via popular media. (As DEK says, their task is to get to the bottom of things, not keep on top of them.) IOW, where they've always been.

The Glass Bead Game (1943) calls the twentieth century the Age of the Feuilleton as snark on that genre (the dead tree equivalent of blogging) as expression of idiocracy.

Now, set aside the actual proposition and read the comments. Most of them are trivially wrong about:

* What a California Ballot Proposition is

* What the role of the legislator is wrt ballot props

* The text of the proposition

Now, this would be a problem if the text was particularly hard, but it really isn't. Someone in the comments there pointed out that this was the same as the infamous Prop J and K pair where one raised taxes to provide funding for a thing and the other provided the thing but only if the funding was there. The funding failed, the thing passed. The thing never came to exist. Afterwards, on Reddit, I read commenters describing how they didn't know the two things were linked.

This is a pretty common pattern on forums like this. Even HN suffers from it where people avoid primary sources only to intentionally play telephone and get bad information which they then convincingly repeat. I've definitely seen folks confidently bullshit something they just learned from another comment instead of reading the primary source. As an amusing coincidence, one of these was about the ridesharing min wage law that Seattle passed. The primary source was very clear, but most comments argued about a thing that wasn't a failure mode of the actual law - but was a failure mode of a non-existent law that they had manufactured from thin air.

¹ https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/j6c4lv/im_a_softwa... it's deleted now but the same text as https://techcrunch.com/2020/10/06/im-a-software-engineer-at-...