51–60 of 307 posts
The Reserve Banks of the world are making people dumber by aiming for full employment... This means stimulating the economy and giving companies an incentive to create jobs which don't need to exist... Because the jobs are useless, people start to focus on increasingly menial and tedious tasks and lose their sense of pragmatism. We've all seen meetings going around in circles for hours, people arguing about tedium, c…
I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments and show them my own evidence that it's real (locating amateur radio satellites using data shared by people around the globe and demonstrating the doppler effect on them). The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And somethi…
If you get totally and irrefutably proven wrong by someone you are having a heated argument with, that is doubly hard. In order to respond correctly you need to, within a very short time-span: - Realize the argument makes sense - Accept your entire world-view, with a great many other related things, is wrong - Admit that you were wrong to someone who just a minute ago you were angry at, who you thought was making bad arguments, and someone you felt was attacking you.
Doing that in the span of 10 seconds is really hard. I could easily understand how someone would fail, and instead get even angrier at the person making the argument. This certainly is irrational, but it is not a sign of mental illness. It is a form of irrationality that I am ashamed to admit I also have sometimes.
I think a big deal in the on-line space. Is that there is barely a way to re-engage after a cool-down period. You can't come back to a discussion a few days later, having had more time to process.
Especially with conspiracy theories, the shift in worldview that is required to accept that it is wrong is massive, that isn't going to happen over the span of a minute. Heck, it seems unlikely to happen over the span of a day.
The only thing that's made it appear worse than before is an increase in political polarization. That has made people less likely to believe that people with differing opinions are simply people with different views to them, and more likely to believe that people with differing opinions are simply wrong/stupid/malevolent. For every person out there wondering why people are so stupid, there are other people making equally valid observations about them.
It is a fun read. But what we really need (to convert this to science) is to measure the objective metrics. For example, measure the number of articles in [insert social network name] for claims that contradict established scientific laws (let's say, physics). I know it'll be more difficult to do for economy or sociology, but at least with physics we might have a large body of well established and experimentally conf…
I've seen comparisons of how popular songs nowadays use simpler and less diverse words than they used to.
"Lack of judgment"?
"Lack of knowledge"?
"Unintelligent"?
"Mental slowness in speech or action"?
Perhaps, "Lack of education"?
In a lot of the points, the author uses "smart" as the opposite of "stupid". Smart is also a vague word that comes up with multiple definitions such as "having or showing a high degree of mental ability", "stylish or elegant in dress or appearance" and "appealing to sophisticated tastes".
I have read the article multiple times, and it seems to me that it fires in all directions. It addresses environmental cognitive issues (air quality, etc.), education, political polarization, etc. In short, it lumps multiple issues under a personal interpretation of a vague (and rude) word.
I avoid the word "stupid". Not only is it vague but it is ableist because it creates and enforces systemic and institutional bias.
Is a lack of education the same as having temporary cognitive issues? Is it comparable to having a condition which decreases someone's cognitive ability permanently? What about people who are unable to grasp social intelligence? What about people who take beneficial drugs that happen to have mental fog as a side effect? Where is the line? To me, the answer is no. Those are all unrelated social issues that need to be addressed separately.
People have gotten stupider because the world is too complex (and fundamentally impossible) to understand in a completely rational way. Historically we have relied upon intuition, heuristics, and a network of trusted authority figures (usually a network of trusted institutions). The modern condition (post Enlightenment) can be understood as the elevation of rationality over all else and hostility towards heuristics a…
So your world view is that Harvard professors are eveil and stupid, NY Times reporters are evil and stupid, most modern people are stupid, software engineers are stupid, PhDs are stupid, doctors are stupid, lawyers are stupid, no one has taken advice from their grandmother since 1785, and no one reads the Bible anymore. Is it possible that becoming an MD might require a base level of mental capabilities and hard work…
> Is it possible that becoming an MD might require a base level of mental capabilities and hard work?
As an example of what I'm talking about, back in March/February all of the nurses and doctors I know were saying that Covid-19 was just the flu and that only medical professionals should wear a mask. I even reached out to one or two of them to try to give them more of a heads up. This was at the same time that videos were coming out of China with vast stadiums filled with sick people and where people were committing suicide rather than infect their family. Now all of those same medical professionals I know are saying that Covid-19 is extremely serious and that everyone should stay home when possible and wear a mask despite the fact that clearly the risk level is a lot lower now. Here where I live Covid-19 primarily attacks the GI like a typical stomach bug rather than as a serious respiratory illness.
> Feeling like everyone around you is evil and stupid isn't healthy.
Again you are imputing a black and white meaning to what I am saying when it was never said or implied. Certainly if one were living in Nazi Germany in the 1930s or the Soviet Union in the 1920s it would be reasonable for one to feel like generally speaking, "everyone around" was evil and/or stupid. Are things that bad here? Absolutely not however we are much closer to living in that kind of environment in the US than we were at the beginning of the 20th century.
You have a very typical midwit view on this. I do genuinely feel bad for people that are so naive.
I've engaged a few flat earthers to actually listen to their arguments and show them my own evidence that it's real (locating amateur radio satellites using data shared by people around the globe and demonstrating the doppler effect on them). The response strikes me as being indicative of mental illness. And I don't mean that as an insult - I mean that when confronted with that they're clearly irrational. And somethi…
I think there is too much information around for the average person to filter and process and digest. All three are important parts of living in a society and it looks to me like even with e.g. economic issues alone, it's just very hard for (to be fair) anybody to keep up. In turn, people reach out to conspiracy theories to simplify the world around them with obvious answers and explanations. My theory, sort of.
In one case though I had someone say that I wasn't hitting satellites, I was hitting a solar-powered high altitude plane. When I pointed out that it would have to be going at 23 times the speed of sound at sea level and flying at 120,000 km, they said of course: technology is amazing. While in the same conversation claiming that satellites were impossible. At that point I stopped believing they even had basic common sense.
Elsewhere in the article the reader would learn that 75% of the people caught up in NRC were non-Muslims, and that NRC had been started before Modi became PM, by the previous government, under orders from the Supreme Court of India.
I honestly believe I became stupider by reading that article, and realized that the NYT is basically functioning as a tool to confuse people at this point.
> I am acquiring greater wisdom with age as I ought, but the average age of the typical person I encounter stays the same so they cannot keep up. I’m noticing the contrast increasing but misattributing it. My money is on this. You wouldn't typically argue with a kid, but on the internet you probably are.
That is one thing that frustrates me on discussion boards. You have no idea who is behind the nickname. Is this an adult with a college degree, corporate job, kids, mortgage, etc.? Or is this a 12 year old masquerading as someone older? Sometimes people argue against things that seem so obvious as an adult that I really really want to know who is on the other side.