Nah. We knew the difference between ignorance and stupidity before then.
I have to admit, even while finding the crooked corners of the internet with rotten and CJ, I did hold onto the belief that access to information was going to lift the masses up out of ignorance. I knew about flamewars since the BBS days. I knew about trolls since rm -rf advice was given. I, in my naivete, seriously underestimated the effects of these phenomenon on society writ large.
As with many things, I think the point where it all started to go down hill was once facebook became a thing.
We did not, or at least not universally: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_deficit_model
I think what we currently see is too much misinformation.
Turns out, people are just stupid and the more information access you give them the more they can reinforce their stupidity with other idiots’ opinions
Ex-fucking-actly. Like I said in another recent comment, the problem with the internet is that it allows the worst people you can imagine to form communities, and instead of them essentially dying alone and shunned by anyone who isn’t a complete psychopath they start to think that their fuckwittery is not only acceptable but common
Yeah it can even be less sinister. The dumbest people can all hear someone of perceived authority (like someone on Rogan for example) who says “there’s actually no proof the world is round” and the idiots can be like “I knew it! I was right all along!” And they’ll never accept anything else because they were “proven right” that one time
Oh yeah absolutely, although more often than not those people also tend to have hair-raisingly awful “political” opinions (ie. opinions which only qualify as politics for conservatives, but would usually land anybody else in jail)
Yeah it’s all bundled together. Before the internet, there were established authorities on certain matters. Now any idiot can go on twitter and claim to be a MD and fool a bunch of other idiots into thinking vaccines are deadly and used for brainwashing.
Like I said before, it’s the complete erosion of actual Truth
The human brain doesn’t seek logic, it seeks validation and a storyline to explain how you feel. It will whip up stories very easily, but even easier if they’re supplied.
So this system has been exploited to the extreme. It’s our largest vulnerability as a species, that someone can make us feel an emotion and then attach a story to it, and our brains will adhere to that story without question.
i think actual information is way too difficult to suss out these days with the misinformation campaigns and the paywalls and the trolling, etc.
shit try to do some comparison shopping today and try to figure out which reviews are real and if the thing you’re buying is really the thing you think you’re buying.
Best case example I know of these days: try to shop for a mattress
Definitely doesn’t help, and modern machine learning models are only going to make this problem worse.
The signal to noise ratio is getting worse by the day, unfortunately.
i think actual information is way too difficult to suss out these days with the misinformation campaigns and the paywalls and the trolling, etc.
Sure, it’s awful. Yet a good amount of folks still seem to be able to figure things out. Well, mostly. At least position themselves in a way to think critically and make decisions best they can.
That’s kind of the point.
We now have access to the information, and we’ve discovered that all along it was our inability to distinguish between misinformation and real information that was causing the stupidity.
Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don’t bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.
I question whether or not this is true. People will remember things if they find them interesting, so incurious people didn’t know much in the past, either.
People don’t do their own research past the most cursory google searches at best of times, and now google is absolute garbage and the links that are relevant mostly go to massive SEO whale sites written by AI.
That’s all before you get to the actual mainstream media sites that spout the same commercial news cycle stories, or spread sensationalized headlines and absolute nonsense. I have managed teams of people and on daily calls people talk about news stories they read like “Did you hear they found another spaceship on mars?” and “They found proof that covid was a Chinese bio-weapon!” and similar statements from working, middle-class people who just browse the websites and social media before work. Most people have very little time to dig into things they see, and now once-reputable sites are just cashing in on clickbait and lies.
This is how most people get their news and information, and it’s absolute garbage now. Browse a major news site like MSN and it’s worse than grocery store tabloids from the 1980’s. And don’t even get started about social media like twitter and facebook.
Something happened in the last couple decades that has made people literally just stop caring what’s real or not. I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it’s now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything.
Agreed: “I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it’s now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything.”
That is the “feature” and the dead end… The full compliance on anything! No thoughts, no free speech!
Ain’t hard. Bullshit has a smell
But most people don’t know how bullshit smells in the first place… Check the downvotes…
I remember seeing a lot of people expand their horizons on all kinds of topics when the internet first started catching on.
Now I think it was because they were actively looking for understanding something new, and did not represent the general population.
i think its more about deliberate disinformation than about it being just a subset of people.
i remember everyone was in awe that they could just type out a question an get the best information we had
Now I think it was because they were actively looking for understanding something new, and did not represent the general population.
Assuming that intelligence (and I don’t mean IQ or any other psychometric “proxy” for intelligence, but intelligence as an abstract trait) is normally distributed like most other traits, 50% of people are going to be dumber than average because in normal distributions the mean is the median.
And anyone trying to claim that intelligence as a concept is a completely socially constructed trait and that there is no difference in intelligence between people can shove it up their ass.
I wasn’t even commenting on IQ, just the general population’s interest in even trying to understand new things.
A lot of otherwise smart people I know just can’t get past the indoctrination of bigotry from their youth that is reinforced by conservative media.
Oh I know you weren’t, it was just a disclaimer because a lot of people seem to think that any references to intelligence specifically mean IQ and go into frankly incredibly tedious tirades on IQ’s faults
50% of people are going to be dumber than average because in normal distributions the mean is the median. The “general population” is not smart by any definition.
What if “smart” begins at the 35th percentile, rather than the 50th? What if “gifted” is anything above the 50th percentile?
What if “smart” begins at the 35th percentile, rather than the 50th?
I didn’t mean that the 50th is where “smart” begins, just that 50% are going to be below average in intelligence.
intelligence as an abstract trait
I read something about this two days ago, it’s called “g factor” or something. And yes, it follows a normal distribution.
Apparently, it’s very similar in animals than it is in humans.
The g factor is actually a psychometric construct to an extent, and its distribution isn’t known but it’s generally thought that it’s probably normally distributed. Basically the g factor just summarizes how results on a bunch of different cognitive tasks tend to correlate.
It’s called the Information Deficit Hypothesis.
And yes, it’s been proven wrong.
Ah I knew there had to be an actual term for it. Thanks!
Stupidity has never been because of lack of access to information. That’s ignorance.
They do seem to be positivelly correlated, though.
Stupid people don’t care if they’re ignorant and non-stupid people endeavor not to be.
Certainly ignorance and stupidity are two different things.
Calculators didn’t make math obsolete, it just made getting the wrong answer that much quicker
Cause is a mix of laziness and mental traps. Aside from targeted missinformation (which uses other mental traps).
As with any TOOL it is all about HOW YOU use it…
Remember: IQ is on a bell curve, not a straight horizontal line. If everyone had at least an IQ of 100, we’d be living in a totally different world than what we’re living in right now, guaranteed. All more access to information has done is give the dangerously stupid people mroe things to misinterpret and misuse. It’s also given malicious people a way to access the stupid and the gullible to use them as tools for whatever bullshit they want to perpetrate on the world.
That’s not how IQ works.
Which part? By definition IQ follows a normal distribution and 100 is set as the mean/median – meaning that 100 is always the average result
Edit: nevermind I did a stupid, you’re correct that it’s literally impossible for everybody to have IQ over 100
I feel you my friend! Have a great day!
I don’t think this is about IQ dumb.
More than you’d think it is, I think. There are far more sub-100 IQ people being stupid about important things than there are people with an IQ above 100. I’m not even saying that someone with a high IQ can’t be gullible or can’t be fooled, but it’s less likely.
Huh. IQ is normalized. 100 is always the mean no matter if the entire population got smarter. It’s impossible for everyone to have an IQ of at least 100.
IIRC there are around 51Million americans thats have low IQ (~80 and less). I imagine its worse in developing countries. Not much you can do about them.
Plus the access to misinformation. Now where even more stupiderer,
It was always culture
Lack of applicable or pertinent information is still rampant.
Excess information of the stupifying type is everywhere.
How can we access applicable or relevant information?
