That is what you get when you stop funding general education because you think people should pay for it themselves. People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
I benefit when others around me get better education, that's why I'm happy when my taxes are used to fund schools and universities and other ways of educating people. And it also benefits the economy, so every tax dollar/euro spend on education has a huge ROI.
No it isn't. There people are not clueless ignoramuses, they're paranoid assholes who have chosen to weaponize their dislike of anything 'official' for political ends. There is a market for propaganda and it is thriving, because many people want their biases reinforced.
Thinking the issue is a lack of education is a kind of procrastination, as if we can just fix this over a 20 year span. Ignorance is not the problem here, malice is. There are plenty of ignorant people who are uninformed or believe silly things without being assholes about it.
There's an unwillingness on HN to engage with the fact that the amplification effect of the broadcast/internet/social media selects for liars and propagandists and fraudsters absent countering mechanisms. That's why spamming and scamming are ubiquitous in our super high tech civilization.
While I agree with this, I will say that people most susceptible to propaganda and confirmation bias are people who lack critical thinking skills IMO.
Critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, as taught in your average language arts and social studies courses, specifically calls out bias and teaches kids how to be skeptical. When I was in school, we read passages and books and got to make whatever conclusion we wanted. But the essay we wrote had to be evidence-based. The teacher didn't care so much what we said, but rather that we could form a logical string to say it.
All this is to say, I think yes - if public education is further destroyed this will only get worse.
It's difficult for people employed by the same platforms built (by the same people) with the aim to precisely amplify and trap, to recognize that their work is a major factor - if not biggest - in the erosion of whatever we hold dear. Nevertheless, education is suffering as well.
America spends $15k per child for education. That is a ridiculous amount of funding. I think most teachers are of the opinion that the educational decline is due to NCLB, Common Core, and other top-down initiatives that give them less power yet more responsibilities. Many teachers complain that 1-2 students disrupt a class of 25-30 students, but they can't do anything about it.
The amount of money we spend "for education" isn't reflective of the money that goes to educating children. We have waste, corruption, and people stuffing their pockets everywhere. Schools spend more of that money on sports than actual teaching. In the end, criminally unpaid teachers have to buy even the most basic school supplies with their own money or beg parents to provide them for the over-crowded classrooms in buildings that are falling apart.
Teachers are simply overloaded and parents have given up responsibility for keeping their kids in check. Little Tommy can do no wrong and is just misunderstood. I personally feel if a child is disrupting class and the experience for others, out they go, back to the parents. Public education should be free, but it has to have conditions that your little Tommy isn’t messing it up for those who are there to learn. We’ve grown too lenient and expect teachers to be cops, therapists, babysitters instead of teachers and instructors. It should be more like college.
I found slightly different numbers, but the exact details don't matter.
If $12.5k is spent per child per year, and there are 20 children per classroom, that's $250k.
Combining random sources (which use widely different divisions), I see numbers like:
60-90% instruction salary/benefit and related (higher numbers likely include non-teacher staff)
55-60% salaries
20-25% employee benefits (probably health insurance, which is really expensive in America no matter who pays for it)
5-20% capital/operations/contractors
10% administration
8% supplies
5-35% support (likely varies depending on what counts as "support")
0-5% debt
4% other
Can confirm classrooms are hazardous environments. (I have a son that teaches, and my wife substitute teaches.)
Classroom discipline is hard to enforce. For women especially, the threat of violence is real.
I wish it weren't true, but many long-time teachers say they do not recommend it as a career choice.
I don't think it's (entirely) that. Did you see the recent story about how college entrants at even highly selective schools, entrants coming from highly regarded private prep schools, are struggling to read books? That seems to me to be indicative of a problem different from what you're pointing out.
Education does not automatically make the person getting it wiser, nor less prone to manipulation or cognitive errors. And remember that one of the effects of propaganda bombardment is to destroy judgement.
I've hired students who graduated with a low "C" average in their area of study, who were D- at the parts of their job that required that study, and had no personal interest or accurate knowledge to share about their study.
I don't think this is about education, but I suspect rather something more akin to "intellectual revenge". Let me explain : In my experience, people who are into conspiracy theories are usually people who have been intellectually marginalised or disparaged during their life. It's not about being stupid - I think that's besides the point - but it's about being called and made feel stupid, literally or metaphorically.
People don't want to believe they are stupid, and they especially don't want to believe the people (or institutions) who call them stupid are superior to them. So they find a way out, by believing something that not only makes them feel important (they know but other people don't), but also superior to those who ostracised them in the first place.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but somehow never came across any similar ideas anywhere, anybody got references (or comments) ?
There is also a component of this which is (some) people needing a simple explanation for problems and injustices and preferably one where _someone else_ (individual or group) is to blame.
Yeah, that psychoanalysis makes sense, but why would there suddenly be so many people that supposedly had traumatic experiences in being judged stupid?
It's just political polarization. Conservatives (of a certain variety) in the US are polarized against the establishment (the media, science, colleges, etc), and this is the result. Better education might save some of them, but not many. The smarter ones retain the same core beliefs without the abject silliness.
This is purely the result of "too much news". Breathless coverage of every little detail means every little mis-step blows up to infinity, quickly eroding trust.
The 24hr + internet news cycle is basically a reaction maximization optimization machine with a dt ~ 0. Fox News walked so Facebook could run and now Twitter is sprinting. Insert long form podcasts in the mix for a constant hum of algorithmic misinformation and this result is inevitable.
tl;dr: more people need to go out and touch some grass.
I'd argue that it is intentional nitpicking of science/institutions because they were a threat to concentrated business interests (tobacco, lead, fossil fuels, factory farming etc.)
Anecdotally you can spend some time on facebook and see exactly that they are not consuming news at all. The seem impervious to any link or discussion that doesn't automatically feed back into their trusted sources - which of course are not trustworthy
I think I'd move the quotes - the problem is too much "news", but I think you're right. It's 24/7 misinformation factories that push people to the point where they can assume that somehow the US government both has a hurricane machine and that it would use it on its own citizens, even though that doesn't stand up to any sort of rational introspection.
Another factor is that lies or misrepresentations have been thoroughly normalized. Almost all media products have a spin in some way, objectivity even became a bad word in modern "journalism". I think this is an example of education not working correctly.
Readers only have superficial means to reward or punish journalism, which is much more focused on getting attention and clicks these days. Advertising always has been their main income, but the economy thoroughly changed in recent years.
All these issues undermine trust and in the end more arcane conspiracy theories serve as an explanation, why we read so much shit left and right.
conspiracy isn't arrived at via some logical process. the outcome is decided and the steps to get there are hallucinated. it's all post-hoc rationalization.
Can I point out that “the outcome” here that conspiracy theorists start with isn’t “space lasers control the weather” but “the government is to blame”.
> That is what you get when you stop funding general education because you think people should pay for it themselves. People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
On the other hand, this sounds like something you just made up and decided to connect to the current topic. Is this fact or fiction?
This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.
This also happens whenever there is an apparent "win" even if it isn't quite so. For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. Same for the Iraq war, with "weapons of mass destruction" - imagine if your child died from that lie. Repeat this every year, in multiple institutions, for 20+ years straight; and yes, observant people might well think that everything the government has ever said is a hoax. It's not about the science, or their ability to track truth from falsehood, but their reactionary hate of anything the institutions say.
Observant people learn to evaluate the words of government officials as critically and analytically as they would treat any source. Credulous people switch from uncritical trust in government officials to uncritical trust in talk radio hosts, podcasters, and social media.
This isn't just distrust of the government and other public institutions. It's also distrust of:
- first-hand reports from other people
- private news networks
- the governments of other countries
The scale and degree of this distrust of other people is new. Arguably the US government was far, far less trustworthy in the past, such as when it was massacring people in Vietnam or secretly conducting experiments on Black people. These revelations did not lead to meteorologists getting death threats.
Isn't the joke here that for most of modern history the flat earth discussions were a debate contest by people who didn't actually believe the earth was flat but enjoyed trying to prove it was? And then it leaked out and found a welcome home amongst people gullible enough to believe all of the "evidence" that had been concocted.
Staff government with people that hate government and got elected on the principle that government is the problem. Those people sabotage government at every opportunity, thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Use the chaos and dysfunction you created to sell public assets on the cheap to private companies.
I've seen this trajectory far too often to think what is happening is accidental.
I don't know, I think the biggest difference is that the view we have of government isn't heavily curated by a few major papers and news broadcasts. The dirty laundry is on display 24/7 and thanks to social media The Washington Post, The Flat Earth Society, and Dave the guy with "THE END IS NEAR" signs on the corner of main street are on the same newsstand.
And I don't think it's intelligence, smart people get sucked into cults all the time, being smart makes you
better at convincing yourself of the nonsense. It's self-administered cult indoctrination. I don't think anyone has defenses for this kind of stuff outside of being primed to believe it's nonsense.
> For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged.
This is such a weird way of looking at it.
Imagine, for simplicity, there's an optimal amount of fluoride to add, which is X. Also imagine science can guess the number but, obviously, it's not perfect.
What will happen is that we will start at some number, and gradually change it as we get more knowledge. Sometimes we'll be below X, sometimes we'll be above X. When we're above X, and we find it out, we'll say "Oops it was too much fluoride, let's reduce it a bit."
And obviously policymakers need to work on imperfect information, so sometimes we have to add Y amount of fluoride even though we know it's not optimal - because, the alternative, adding zero fluoride, would be actually worse.
This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.
When you defund science and education, these institutions have to turn elsewhere for funding, and now you're at the mercy of the one providing the funds...
People going to flat earth and believing in flat earth are two separate things. As OP said -
> People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.
> People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.
It doesn't matter "why" someone chooses to believe a conspiracy theory. What matters is how they came to be an adult that still believes in conspiracy theories - and the failure lies somewhere between bad parenting and the education system, and definitely not with meteorologists, even IF the public agency that employs meteorologists was involved in a scandal.
the lack of integrity and accountability really has eroded trust in critical institutions society depends on. I can't blame people for being skeptical in science when anyone can see that scientists are routinely paid by corporations to to produce whatever results they want, and that you can pay to get even obvious garbage published in peer reviewed journals. The flat-earthers are wrong about the shape of the planet, the creationists are still wrong about evolution, but they're right that what passes for science these days is full of lies and can't be trusted.
I feel a degree of sympathy for antivaxxers for the same reason. Pharmaceutical companies get away with literal murder, the makers of medical devices are serial killers, and doctors are taking kickbacks to overprescribe dangerous medications. Even the CDC cares more about politics than the truth. The antivaxxers are still wrong about vaccines, but they're right that the medical industry can't be trusted.
When government waste and corruption goes unchecked people lose faith in the government. When the police are criminals, judges take kickbacks to send children into private prisons, and corrupt prosecutors go unpunished people lose faith in the justice system.
Resentment, distrust, fear, and uncertainty are just natural and appropriate responses to what's going on around us. Even if drastic action was taken today to increase accountability and transparency to fight the corruption and greed undermining people's faith in these institutions it would still take decades to restore the trust that's been lost and realistically, I don't see any kind of drastic action being taken to fix the problem any time soon, so I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.
There have always been scandals. What changes is that nearly half of America has given up its brain and free thought and allowed the right wing media machine and various messiahs (one in particular) to fill their brains with mush about conspiracies and fear of the other. It’s ridiculous that people don’t want to think for themselves.
I want to shout out a specific man quoted in the article.
> “I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann.
I grew up in Alabama, and I am positive James Spann has saved my life more than once with his tornado outbreak coverage. I can still hear him saying, "get to shelter now". He was a comforting voice at 2am when you and your family are huddled in the most central room of your house because mother nature is actively trying to kill you.
"He asserts that climate change is naturally caused, as part of the climate's cyclical nature."
So you are, like many people, misunderstand him, and many other people like him, that they don't deny climate change, but just aren't convinced that it is primarily caused by humans.
There is actually no scientific data that proofs the idea that humans are the primary cause of climate change, so it is still an open question, and therefore different beliefs about it should be respected.
But it's such a controversial and sensitive topic, that many people don't even want to be open to another perspective, which is sad.
Yes! James Spann was and is an excellent source of meteorological information. I remember him coming to our school and talking to kids about his job and encouraging us to take an interest in science and the world around us. Alabama needs more people like him and fewer people who are likely to encourage conspiratorial thinking for political points at the potential cost of human life.
Maybe people are getting dumber because of COVID.[1] Even after recovery, having mild COVID seems to cost 3 IQ points.[1] Reinfection, 2 more IQ points.[2] This is for people who have recovered, and does not include "long COVID".
This is actually the result of Facebook, youtube the hyper focus on surfacing a topic a post you see share or like to keep you engaged. You see a post share it with your friends Facebook algo see your interest shows your a hundred and keeps taking deeper down the rabbit whole. So the main reason for this is social media. A few years ago I used to argue with family and friends over such stupid topics to tell them it is wrong but mostly keep quite or ignore as my mental health is more important to me.
This clicked for me back in 2015. A friend shared something on Facebook that sounded plausible but felt off. I looked into it, and added a polite comment pointing out that it was a hoax. With a link to the Snopes article. I expected a reaction like "haha, oops". Instead, she deleted my comment.
That's when I realized that Facebook was a platform for spreading digital viruses that use human minds as their host. I deleted my account shortly after and never returned.
That seems unlikely, but if we accept it's true, that's only 5% dumber for someone with an average IQ, and that doesn't seem like nearly enough to account for believing something obviously implausible like controlling hurricanes. If people had basic scientific literacy they should be able to see the amounts of energy needed would be staggering.
Did you leave out the /s? Or are you seriously implying the crazy conspiracy garbage we're seeing recently is a result of COVID? Because that sounds just as deranged as <waves hands at all the other dumb shit on the internet>.
It's not a joke. "A three-point downward shift in IQ would increase the number of U.S. adults with an IQ less than 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million – an increase of 2.8 million adults with a level of cognitive impairment that requires significant societal support."
Then there's long COVID. A detailed overview of that.[1] As of late 2023, about 5% of US adults report having long COVID. It appears that, if it lasts a year, there's usually no further recovery.
Some new results indicate that at least some long COVID sufferers still have a reservoir of the active virus.[2] That's encouraging, because antivirals may help them. It indicates where to look.
This is very real. Most people are tired of hearing about COVID, but the virus isn't tired.
Between covid brain, ipad kids, heavy metal poisoning, and decades of attacks on the education system the US is dropping IQ points while mental illness is on the rise.
I already take the IQ test with a big grain of salt. Now there were some small studies done on IQ in relation to COVID? And it supposedly decreases IQ by a few points? Yeah, right, I believe it right away man.
These kinds of articles reinforce my idea that we're witnessing our society collapse before our very eyes. I tend to blame it on Republican idiocracy and Russian trolling, but I suspect the problem is larger than that.
It's just depressing.
Is the US the only country suffering from this lunacy, or is this a more global phenomenon?
Its crazy elsewhere too like in the UK, Hungary, Russia, most of eastern and southern europe, India, Brasil, etc. same MO just nationalist/racist/anti intellectual/conspiracy junk shared on social media.
I read an Atlantic article the other day where a lit professor from Columbia University said that he has students nowadays who admit to having never read a book cover to cover. Ones that have tend to say their favorite book is something like Percy Jackson. They also can't focus on a small poem. This confirms what a teacher I know has been saying for a long time: highschool kids since around the class of 2010 are getting very noticably stupider.
I'm beginning to wonder if social media really has caused kids to miss key developmental stages. Parents being on their phones has led to kids hearing a substantially reduced vocabulary, these kids also receive less interaction from their parents and interact less with their environments and other kids. This stuff is really important for brain development, and we've replaced it with an iPhone.
I don't think social media started this, just accelerated the trend. I do think commercialized media for decades now has really been a driver of insipid banality.
Befriend any professor at any school who teaches reading, writing, or anything adjacent.
I have a friend who teaches journalism at a small, private liberal arts school in the midwest. He's been teaching for over 40 years. He says that, beggining in the late 2010s he noticed incoming students began to really struggle. Then, pre-pandemic he would recommend that they use the on-campus reading and writing labs to get help, lean on TAs, use office hours, etc. Post-pandemic, he says he now recommends that they drop his course because they aren't prepared at all, even with all of the help the campus provides. He says that this went from a small % of his course enrollment to being > 50% in the span of a decade.
Small N but I've gone into overdrive to teach my own (very young) children how to read and interpret literature.
There's always been nutcases (apologies to people with actual mental illness).
The problem is that politicians (worldwide) have figured out how to utilize them for their own benefit.
I agree that at times it does seem like a very bad premonition.
this implies that its just a few folks talking shit on a lark, when it is actually a concerted, aggressive, multi-billion dollar effort across all-channels, with the goal of degrading civil institutions and hopefully causing a civil war.
that the average American rube can't figure that out is also part of the problem
I think many other cultures are crippled by pervasive conspiracies that re-enforce views of having no agency. And their rulers like it that way.
In street drug circles today there are widespread complaints about the quality of fentanyl, withdrawal effects and treatment. OD's are apparently dropping. For those that live in some semblance of reality, I think many there's withdrawal going on. For those that don't get out and call in threats like this, they don't really believe anything persistently, they just believe whatever is the rage of the day. They'll OD someday, you just won't see it in the obits.
The lunacy is definitely worse in the Anglosphere. I moved to Eastern Europe a few years ago and it's way more sane (and yes, I speak the local languages here).
I can’t imagine this kind of stuff happens in the PRC.
The upside to a tightly-controlled “infosphere” is that people who are at the controls and have rational thought can jump right in and quench the idiocy fires right away.
And the downside of that upside is that they jump right in and quench things, not always on the basis of idiocy, but also on the basis of opposing the government's narrative. That doesn't actually lead to rationality.
It is significantly worse in the PRC, where they don't believe that the Uyghur genocide is happening. At least (for now) the West has no similar level of denial about something within their own borders.
It turns out that "The remedy for bad speech is more speech" doesn't actually scale globally.
You can blame this on Russian and/or Chinese disinformation ops and tik-tok, etc, but the problem is more general than that. One of the assumptions around free speech ideals is that the people who are speaking or publishing are citizens of the community in which they are speaking or publishing, and now a large part of the content on the internet is produced by people who are crossing national boundaries, or not even produced by people at all.
You used to be able to assume that the vast majority of the content you're exposed to is produced by people who live in your community or country and would not like to see it destroyed, and now, in fact, you should probably assume the opposite. You should assume that most content on the internet is produced by bad actors trying to rip the fabric of your society apart, particularly if you're reading something that enrages you.
The especially insidious part of this is that most of the rage bait stuff plays on widespread personal biases so it's self sustaining after a while. People start to hate each other, so then they do stuff to each other to make each other hate each other more and so on and so on until you've got Rwanda.
not really -- rather consider the ability of a very small minority of voices to amplify tremendously without sufficient dampening.. stability in public communication is never simple. A psychologist might say that social rage itself, or anger with blame itself, is the root of the behavior. Every language group on Earth has rational, constructive people in it.
It is global. I was just in Poland. Literally same thing as in the US just a bit different flavor. Mainstream media bad, covid fake just a little flu and used to control society, proud for not wearing masks, did not vaccinate because some crazy reasons.
Not everyone obviously, but I was visiting smaller cities where I grew up. I always thought I could go back one day but I don't think I would be able to deal with people there. The customer service is non existent and when you are shopping/getting services you are an inconvenience. Crazy.
My take is that this is a symptom of something else. Populism has existed for a long time, but it feels to me that the environment we created also created the perfect target audience for it on a scale that never existed before. Observing the alt-right and conspiracy bubbles collapse into one over the last five years, it feels like it's the result of a sort of mental defense mechanism for a group of people that is growing every day. As I see it, we have built a world around us that is very complex and abstract, and hostile to the mind in a way that enables this sort of ideology immensely.
In it, it is very hard to feel a sort of purpose, and it is very easy to be overwhelmed. On average, the work people do has little to no effect on themselves or their direct peers. All day, every day is spent shuffling around numbers on a spreadsheet, or doing work to aid someone who shuffles around numbers on a spreadsheet. Then you clock out having a net zero benefit on your life, or that of people that matter. Other than, of course, a number that goes up in a different spreadsheet. And while you do your shuffling about to scrape by another month, you get bombarded with a flood of information about this war or that catastrophe or those disasters.
It leaves people numb, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, helpless, purposeless, etc.
Keep that up long enough, and what happens is something like a narcissistic collapse, except that it's not narcissists it happens to, but normal, healthy but vulnerable minds whose mental health can no longer be reconciled with a toxic reality.
In comes an ideology that does three things: It simplifies. It gives purpose. It provides an outlet.
Once you subscribe to it, everything returns from countless shades of gray to black and white. If you're not one of the good guys, you're one of the bad guys. If a bad guy says a thing, it's a bad thing. If you say a bad thing, you're a bad guy. The simple prescriptive labels of what counts as good and bad are delivered to you, on the house. Takes away all the nuance, all the complexity and all the mental burden that came with it.
Then, it gives purpose. If you fall into this hole, you end up seeing yourself as two things: A victim, and a savior. You see what others don't, and you suffer for it. "They" - the bad guys - are out to get you, to destroy everything. Every confrontation is thus someone attacking you, the victim, or defying you, the savior. It provides a narrative in a chaotic world where bad things happen for no reason and without explanation.
Last, it creates a target for all your bottled up frustration and anger. The bad guys are responsible for all the bad things, and it is made clear how very okay it is to channel all your negative emotions into hate towards some group. Be it Jewish people, immigrants, scientists, democrats or some imaginary lizard people. Hate is fine.
The end result is a full abdication of responsibility, and a return of control at the low, low price of a divorce from reality. To the mind that slips into this rabbit hole it is not so much a choice as it is a lifeline. That is why it is so incredibly hard to get people out of it, as well.
This sounds like a discussion I'd love to have with you over a beer!
With that in mind, how serious are you? This is fascinating stuff and sounds like you've been thinking about it for a while. Is this your attempt to make sense of it all or is this reflective of something you've observed and studied?
Russian propaganda doesn't actually necessary need to collude with the people who's voices they amplify to meet their goals.
(it also doesn't necessarily need to spread false information, either. The general strategy is just 'find divisive statements and/or figures and amplify them'. Making up their own isn't usually necessary)
Just because no one acted doesn't mean that "they essentially found nothing".
The Muller report described Russian interference in the 2016 election as “sweeping and systemic.” The report spent a bunch of pages saying that there were “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.”
A few people say or do something completely nutty and the 'country is suffering this lunacy'. At what golden period in history were there no nutcases pitching some irrational extremes into the public sphere?
On the other hand maybe I'm quite wrong about all this. Someone has estimated (an open calculation) the payback time for the US debt burden at 90,000 years if it was paid back at the rate of $1,000,000 per day. Some might argue there's lunacy at work over many decades to achieve this result.
1. It's different because the internet feeds us every bit of lunacy that happens anywhere in the country, so it looks like everyone has gone insane. (Especially in politics, where the Ds will tell you about every single stupid thing an R says anywhere in the country, and the Rs will tell you about every single stupid thing a D says.)
2. The national debt is probably a result of long-term lack of wisdom, yes. But with an economy the size of the US, there is absolutely no reason to pay it back at only $1,000,000/day. A serious attempt would be more like $1,000,000,000/day.
$1m per day divided by ~400m population is essentially zero. Why even mention this? It's just using numbers with a lot of zeros to sound scary, but means nothing.
This is what happens when you coopt science as cover for political decisions - people stop trusting all "science" including real science. From what I've seen I more associate the issue with Democrats than Republicans, especially in the COVID lockdown days.
> From what I've seen I more associate the issue with Democrats than Republicans, especially in the COVID lockdown days.
Can you explain the chain of logic here? During the pandemic I "did my own research" which amounted to basically masking when other people did and getting the vaccines as they came out. At the time my SO was a nurse working on a hospital covid floor, so it seemed prudent. So, I'm not really sure how you see Democrats as being less science based? No snark intended, I'm truly curious.
we are mostly unable to process the fact that science lied to us
what's worse, it became an authoritative tool of (often foreign) powers; at least in most of America (as science came from Europe, ...they brought us "culture" when they colonized us in the south; the north did not get colonized but replaced)
but of course science lied, but it's not that it lied, it is that it changes. newer truth comes along and fights the old truth until it dies ("the pace of scientific funerals")
turns out, breaking people's trust is much easier than gaining it.
but my hill to die on, is the old truth of material scarcity and media (or licensing) content versus the new truth of digital abundance and freely sharing things without the license to do so. why do I need permission from some faceless corporate owner to copy cultural assets that I love and wish to share?
I have only anecdata for this, but I have a strong suspicion that people just don't think about things on social media the same way they do physical interactions.
If someone standing outside the grocery store hands you a flyer that claims the government can control the weather and they're sending you hurricanes on purpose, you'd dismiss them as insane and continue on your way. When your high school buddy Denise posts it on Facebook, though, you're more likely to believe it. Even if you'd think Denise would be crazy if she went out and handed out flyers at the grocery store.
It's like most of us have a built-in crazy filter that works fine for in-person interactions, but it breaks down when that exact same interactions happens online.
I'm not so sure about this explanation; people believed in conspiracy theories in the past. Witch-hunts for example are fundamentally not that different from Q-Anon and all of that bollocks: "mysterious dark forces do evil stuff when we're not looking".
The whole "they're abusing our children" is also a trope that goes back a long time, most recently during the 80s with the whole "Satanic Ritual Abuse" stuff. That was much worse, because innocent people's lives were complete wrecked over what was complete bollocks. Pizzagate is near-identical, with s/daycare/pizzahut/.
More examples can be found throughout history – they're typically not called "conspiracy theories", but often they're not that different at its core.
I think what social media has done is allowing people to reach a wider audience. That person outside the grocery store reaches what, maybe a few hundred people with several hours of work? On the internet you can reach about 1.5 billion English speaking people with a minute of work. And that person outside the grocery store has no real way to organise a meaningful community, even if they do manage to gain 2 or 3 acolytes. On the internet you just create a Facebook group, or reddit sub, or whatever.
And all of that is including only the "crazy people". Add bad faith actors to the mix spreading misinformation simply to cause chaos and things quickly become well fucked.
This is why I never believe a tweet that I can’t confirm myself. I only pay attention to sciencey/CS people on twitter. Talking heads and political sources there are always nearly extremely biased and most are flat out untruthful.
I’m beginning to understand the worldview of these people. For those who don’t understand science and technology, it is simply magic. And the government and scientists are magicians. So it’s not surprising when they blame the magicians for what is happening to them. From their point of view, their entire experience is dictated by powerful figures who create magical things such as “click a button to make stuff appear at my home with same day shipping” and “bring Napoleon alive on the screen”. I’m beginning to understand why they start to attribute everything to these entities who create such seemingly impossible things. It is a type of pagan idolatry.
MGT accused Democrats of colluding with other worldly forces and creating Milton.
She said "ask your government if the weather is being manipulated or controlled. Did you give them permission to do this? Are you paying for it? Of course you are paying for it."
She said the same thing about Helene. She is feeding the mental illness that grips MAGA. This is a sitting Representative and has the full support and admiration of the Republican Candidate for President.
Even Republicans are now coming out to try to explain that humans can't create or control Hurricanes all while their own and their Candidate for President is suggesting otherwise.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a Representative, not Senator. Even for the Republican party she’s a weirdo and she’s only able to win due to the “unique” demographics of her district. She’s unlikely to be able to win a statewide race anywhere, and Senators in general tend to be less radical.
> Even for the Republican party she’s a weirdo and she’s only able to win due to the “unique” demographics of her district
What are the unique demographics of her district? I know it is heavily gerrymandered to make it almost impossible for anyone other than a Republican to win the general election, but to get to be the Republican candidate in the general election they have to win the Republican primary.
In every Republican primary she has won there were several other conservative Republicans who were not batshit insane and were actually well qualified to be a Representative in Congress. So why is she winning?
I have to disagree with you here. Most of the Senators from the GOP have been happy to share the same drivel. Indeed, Senator JD Vance and Donald Trump — arguably the most powerful men in the GOP are as unhinged as MTG.
Readit News
I benefit when others around me get better education, that's why I'm happy when my taxes are used to fund schools and universities and other ways of educating people. And it also benefits the economy, so every tax dollar/euro spend on education has a huge ROI.
Thinking the issue is a lack of education is a kind of procrastination, as if we can just fix this over a 20 year span. Ignorance is not the problem here, malice is. There are plenty of ignorant people who are uninformed or believe silly things without being assholes about it.
There's an unwillingness on HN to engage with the fact that the amplification effect of the broadcast/internet/social media selects for liars and propagandists and fraudsters absent countering mechanisms. That's why spamming and scamming are ubiquitous in our super high tech civilization.
Critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, as taught in your average language arts and social studies courses, specifically calls out bias and teaches kids how to be skeptical. When I was in school, we read passages and books and got to make whatever conclusion we wanted. But the essay we wrote had to be evidence-based. The teacher didn't care so much what we said, but rather that we could form a logical string to say it.
All this is to say, I think yes - if public education is further destroyed this will only get worse.
If $12.5k is spent per child per year, and there are 20 children per classroom, that's $250k.
Combining random sources (which use widely different divisions), I see numbers like:
I've hired students who graduated with a low "C" average in their area of study, who were D- at the parts of their job that required that study, and had no personal interest or accurate knowledge to share about their study.
People don't want to believe they are stupid, and they especially don't want to believe the people (or institutions) who call them stupid are superior to them. So they find a way out, by believing something that not only makes them feel important (they know but other people don't), but also superior to those who ostracised them in the first place.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but somehow never came across any similar ideas anywhere, anybody got references (or comments) ?
It's just political polarization. Conservatives (of a certain variety) in the US are polarized against the establishment (the media, science, colleges, etc), and this is the result. Better education might save some of them, but not many. The smarter ones retain the same core beliefs without the abject silliness.
Alternate Theory:
This is purely the result of "too much news". Breathless coverage of every little detail means every little mis-step blows up to infinity, quickly eroding trust.
The 24hr + internet news cycle is basically a reaction maximization optimization machine with a dt ~ 0. Fox News walked so Facebook could run and now Twitter is sprinting. Insert long form podcasts in the mix for a constant hum of algorithmic misinformation and this result is inevitable.
tl;dr: more people need to go out and touch some grass.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7505057/#:~:tex....
Readers only have superficial means to reward or punish journalism, which is much more focused on getting attention and clicks these days. Advertising always has been their main income, but the economy thoroughly changed in recent years.
All these issues undermine trust and in the end more arcane conspiracy theories serve as an explanation, why we read so much shit left and right.
These people are likely predominantly over 50 and were in high school in the 60s/70s/80s.
They've just been deliberately choosing to stew themselves for the past decade or three in right wing and fringe media.
On the other hand, this sounds like something you just made up and decided to connect to the current topic. Is this fact or fiction?
This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.
This also happens whenever there is an apparent "win" even if it isn't quite so. For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. Same for the Iraq war, with "weapons of mass destruction" - imagine if your child died from that lie. Repeat this every year, in multiple institutions, for 20+ years straight; and yes, observant people might well think that everything the government has ever said is a hoax. It's not about the science, or their ability to track truth from falsehood, but their reactionary hate of anything the institutions say.
- first-hand reports from other people
- private news networks
- the governments of other countries
The scale and degree of this distrust of other people is new. Arguably the US government was far, far less trustworthy in the past, such as when it was massacring people in Vietnam or secretly conducting experiments on Black people. These revelations did not lead to meteorologists getting death threats.
Isn't the joke here that for most of modern history the flat earth discussions were a debate contest by people who didn't actually believe the earth was flat but enjoyed trying to prove it was? And then it leaked out and found a welcome home amongst people gullible enough to believe all of the "evidence" that had been concocted.
I've seen this trajectory far too often to think what is happening is accidental.
And I don't think it's intelligence, smart people get sucked into cults all the time, being smart makes you better at convincing yourself of the nonsense. It's self-administered cult indoctrination. I don't think anyone has defenses for this kind of stuff outside of being primed to believe it's nonsense.
This is such a weird way of looking at it.
Imagine, for simplicity, there's an optimal amount of fluoride to add, which is X. Also imagine science can guess the number but, obviously, it's not perfect.
What will happen is that we will start at some number, and gradually change it as we get more knowledge. Sometimes we'll be below X, sometimes we'll be above X. When we're above X, and we find it out, we'll say "Oops it was too much fluoride, let's reduce it a bit."
And obviously policymakers need to work on imperfect information, so sometimes we have to add Y amount of fluoride even though we know it's not optimal - because, the alternative, adding zero fluoride, would be actually worse.
This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.
> People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.
It doesn't matter "why" someone chooses to believe a conspiracy theory. What matters is how they came to be an adult that still believes in conspiracy theories - and the failure lies somewhere between bad parenting and the education system, and definitely not with meteorologists, even IF the public agency that employs meteorologists was involved in a scandal.
I feel a degree of sympathy for antivaxxers for the same reason. Pharmaceutical companies get away with literal murder, the makers of medical devices are serial killers, and doctors are taking kickbacks to overprescribe dangerous medications. Even the CDC cares more about politics than the truth. The antivaxxers are still wrong about vaccines, but they're right that the medical industry can't be trusted.
When government waste and corruption goes unchecked people lose faith in the government. When the police are criminals, judges take kickbacks to send children into private prisons, and corrupt prosecutors go unpunished people lose faith in the justice system.
Resentment, distrust, fear, and uncertainty are just natural and appropriate responses to what's going on around us. Even if drastic action was taken today to increase accountability and transparency to fight the corruption and greed undermining people's faith in these institutions it would still take decades to restore the trust that's been lost and realistically, I don't see any kind of drastic action being taken to fix the problem any time soon, so I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.
It’s likely both are causes, and some other things too.
> “I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann.
I grew up in Alabama, and I am positive James Spann has saved my life more than once with his tornado outbreak coverage. I can still hear him saying, "get to shelter now". He was a comforting voice at 2am when you and your family are huddled in the most central room of your house because mother nature is actively trying to kill you.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Spann#Global_warming
So a bit of a "first they came for the climate scientists and I did nothing" vibe.
"He asserts that climate change is naturally caused, as part of the climate's cyclical nature."
So you are, like many people, misunderstand him, and many other people like him, that they don't deny climate change, but just aren't convinced that it is primarily caused by humans.
There is actually no scientific data that proofs the idea that humans are the primary cause of climate change, so it is still an open question, and therefore different beliefs about it should be respected.
But it's such a controversial and sensitive topic, that many people don't even want to be open to another perspective, which is sad.
Also, appreciate the username - great game.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-iq-brain-age-cognitive...
[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2400189
That's when I realized that Facebook was a platform for spreading digital viruses that use human minds as their host. I deleted my account shortly after and never returned.
Then there's long COVID. A detailed overview of that.[1] As of late 2023, about 5% of US adults report having long COVID. It appears that, if it lasts a year, there's usually no further recovery.
Some new results indicate that at least some long COVID sufferers still have a reservoir of the active virus.[2] That's encouraging, because antivirals may help them. It indicates where to look.
This is very real. Most people are tired of hearing about COVID, but the virus isn't tired.
[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27756/chapter/8
[2] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/10/getting-to-th...
Dead Comment
- People have been dumb for decades, the modern internet + social media has just weaponized it.
- It didn't remotely start in 2020 unless COVID caused a time loop that caused Trump to get elected in 2016.
And the vaccine increases your IQ?
It's just depressing.
Is the US the only country suffering from this lunacy, or is this a more global phenomenon?
I'm beginning to wonder if social media really has caused kids to miss key developmental stages. Parents being on their phones has led to kids hearing a substantially reduced vocabulary, these kids also receive less interaction from their parents and interact less with their environments and other kids. This stuff is really important for brain development, and we've replaced it with an iPhone.
I don't think social media started this, just accelerated the trend. I do think commercialized media for decades now has really been a driver of insipid banality.
I have a friend who teaches journalism at a small, private liberal arts school in the midwest. He's been teaching for over 40 years. He says that, beggining in the late 2010s he noticed incoming students began to really struggle. Then, pre-pandemic he would recommend that they use the on-campus reading and writing labs to get help, lean on TAs, use office hours, etc. Post-pandemic, he says he now recommends that they drop his course because they aren't prepared at all, even with all of the help the campus provides. He says that this went from a small % of his course enrollment to being > 50% in the span of a decade.
Small N but I've gone into overdrive to teach my own (very young) children how to read and interpret literature.
I agree that at times it does seem like a very bad premonition.
this implies that its just a few folks talking shit on a lark, when it is actually a concerted, aggressive, multi-billion dollar effort across all-channels, with the goal of degrading civil institutions and hopefully causing a civil war.
that the average American rube can't figure that out is also part of the problem
In street drug circles today there are widespread complaints about the quality of fentanyl, withdrawal effects and treatment. OD's are apparently dropping. For those that live in some semblance of reality, I think many there's withdrawal going on. For those that don't get out and call in threats like this, they don't really believe anything persistently, they just believe whatever is the rage of the day. They'll OD someday, you just won't see it in the obits.
See this article about Emmanuel Todd forecasting the collapse of the West using the same methodology he used to successfully predict the collapse of the Soviet Union: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-dec...
The upside to a tightly-controlled “infosphere” is that people who are at the controls and have rational thought can jump right in and quench the idiocy fires right away.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracy_theories_i...
(From Category:Conspiracy theories by country)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracy_theories_b...
You can blame this on Russian and/or Chinese disinformation ops and tik-tok, etc, but the problem is more general than that. One of the assumptions around free speech ideals is that the people who are speaking or publishing are citizens of the community in which they are speaking or publishing, and now a large part of the content on the internet is produced by people who are crossing national boundaries, or not even produced by people at all.
You used to be able to assume that the vast majority of the content you're exposed to is produced by people who live in your community or country and would not like to see it destroyed, and now, in fact, you should probably assume the opposite. You should assume that most content on the internet is produced by bad actors trying to rip the fabric of your society apart, particularly if you're reading something that enrages you.
The especially insidious part of this is that most of the rage bait stuff plays on widespread personal biases so it's self sustaining after a while. People start to hate each other, so then they do stuff to each other to make each other hate each other more and so on and so on until you've got Rwanda.
Not everyone obviously, but I was visiting smaller cities where I grew up. I always thought I could go back one day but I don't think I would be able to deal with people there. The customer service is non existent and when you are shopping/getting services you are an inconvenience. Crazy.
My take is that this is a symptom of something else. Populism has existed for a long time, but it feels to me that the environment we created also created the perfect target audience for it on a scale that never existed before. Observing the alt-right and conspiracy bubbles collapse into one over the last five years, it feels like it's the result of a sort of mental defense mechanism for a group of people that is growing every day. As I see it, we have built a world around us that is very complex and abstract, and hostile to the mind in a way that enables this sort of ideology immensely.
In it, it is very hard to feel a sort of purpose, and it is very easy to be overwhelmed. On average, the work people do has little to no effect on themselves or their direct peers. All day, every day is spent shuffling around numbers on a spreadsheet, or doing work to aid someone who shuffles around numbers on a spreadsheet. Then you clock out having a net zero benefit on your life, or that of people that matter. Other than, of course, a number that goes up in a different spreadsheet. And while you do your shuffling about to scrape by another month, you get bombarded with a flood of information about this war or that catastrophe or those disasters.
It leaves people numb, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, helpless, purposeless, etc.
Keep that up long enough, and what happens is something like a narcissistic collapse, except that it's not narcissists it happens to, but normal, healthy but vulnerable minds whose mental health can no longer be reconciled with a toxic reality.
In comes an ideology that does three things: It simplifies. It gives purpose. It provides an outlet.
Once you subscribe to it, everything returns from countless shades of gray to black and white. If you're not one of the good guys, you're one of the bad guys. If a bad guy says a thing, it's a bad thing. If you say a bad thing, you're a bad guy. The simple prescriptive labels of what counts as good and bad are delivered to you, on the house. Takes away all the nuance, all the complexity and all the mental burden that came with it.
Then, it gives purpose. If you fall into this hole, you end up seeing yourself as two things: A victim, and a savior. You see what others don't, and you suffer for it. "They" - the bad guys - are out to get you, to destroy everything. Every confrontation is thus someone attacking you, the victim, or defying you, the savior. It provides a narrative in a chaotic world where bad things happen for no reason and without explanation.
Last, it creates a target for all your bottled up frustration and anger. The bad guys are responsible for all the bad things, and it is made clear how very okay it is to channel all your negative emotions into hate towards some group. Be it Jewish people, immigrants, scientists, democrats or some imaginary lizard people. Hate is fine.
The end result is a full abdication of responsibility, and a return of control at the low, low price of a divorce from reality. To the mind that slips into this rabbit hole it is not so much a choice as it is a lifeline. That is why it is so incredibly hard to get people out of it, as well.
With that in mind, how serious are you? This is fascinating stuff and sounds like you've been thinking about it for a while. Is this your attempt to make sense of it all or is this reflective of something you've observed and studied?
(it also doesn't necessarily need to spread false information, either. The general strategy is just 'find divisive statements and/or figures and amplify them'. Making up their own isn't usually necessary)
The Muller report described Russian interference in the 2016 election as “sweeping and systemic.” The report spent a bunch of pages saying that there were “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.”
On the other hand maybe I'm quite wrong about all this. Someone has estimated (an open calculation) the payback time for the US debt burden at 90,000 years if it was paid back at the rate of $1,000,000 per day. Some might argue there's lunacy at work over many decades to achieve this result.
(from a comment on this blog) - -https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/10/08/the-smartest-pe...
2. The national debt is probably a result of long-term lack of wisdom, yes. But with an economy the size of the US, there is absolutely no reason to pay it back at only $1,000,000/day. A serious attempt would be more like $1,000,000,000/day.
Can you explain the chain of logic here? During the pandemic I "did my own research" which amounted to basically masking when other people did and getting the vaccines as they came out. At the time my SO was a nurse working on a hospital covid floor, so it seemed prudent. So, I'm not really sure how you see Democrats as being less science based? No snark intended, I'm truly curious.
Dead Comment
what's worse, it became an authoritative tool of (often foreign) powers; at least in most of America (as science came from Europe, ...they brought us "culture" when they colonized us in the south; the north did not get colonized but replaced)
but of course science lied, but it's not that it lied, it is that it changes. newer truth comes along and fights the old truth until it dies ("the pace of scientific funerals")
turns out, breaking people's trust is much easier than gaining it.
but my hill to die on, is the old truth of material scarcity and media (or licensing) content versus the new truth of digital abundance and freely sharing things without the license to do so. why do I need permission from some faceless corporate owner to copy cultural assets that I love and wish to share?
But this is different, this is not science but simply BS that is spread.
those people get no voice around these parts.
also, nevermind the existence of higher order constructs like manifolds. that cannot be what "earth is flat" idiots could be referring to.
send me down another negative four, the invisibility threshold.
If someone standing outside the grocery store hands you a flyer that claims the government can control the weather and they're sending you hurricanes on purpose, you'd dismiss them as insane and continue on your way. When your high school buddy Denise posts it on Facebook, though, you're more likely to believe it. Even if you'd think Denise would be crazy if she went out and handed out flyers at the grocery store.
It's like most of us have a built-in crazy filter that works fine for in-person interactions, but it breaks down when that exact same interactions happens online.
The whole "they're abusing our children" is also a trope that goes back a long time, most recently during the 80s with the whole "Satanic Ritual Abuse" stuff. That was much worse, because innocent people's lives were complete wrecked over what was complete bollocks. Pizzagate is near-identical, with s/daycare/pizzahut/.
More examples can be found throughout history – they're typically not called "conspiracy theories", but often they're not that different at its core.
I think what social media has done is allowing people to reach a wider audience. That person outside the grocery store reaches what, maybe a few hundred people with several hours of work? On the internet you can reach about 1.5 billion English speaking people with a minute of work. And that person outside the grocery store has no real way to organise a meaningful community, even if they do manage to gain 2 or 3 acolytes. On the internet you just create a Facebook group, or reddit sub, or whatever.
And all of that is including only the "crazy people". Add bad faith actors to the mix spreading misinformation simply to cause chaos and things quickly become well fucked.
But even before the Speed: Horseback tech upgrade was discovered, "kill the messenger" was an all-too-common human reaction.
She said "ask your government if the weather is being manipulated or controlled. Did you give them permission to do this? Are you paying for it? Of course you are paying for it."
She said the same thing about Helene. She is feeding the mental illness that grips MAGA. This is a sitting Representative and has the full support and admiration of the Republican Candidate for President.
Even Republicans are now coming out to try to explain that humans can't create or control Hurricanes all while their own and their Candidate for President is suggesting otherwise.
Not that it makes her insanity any less insane…
What are the unique demographics of her district? I know it is heavily gerrymandered to make it almost impossible for anyone other than a Republican to win the general election, but to get to be the Republican candidate in the general election they have to win the Republican primary.
In every Republican primary she has won there were several other conservative Republicans who were not batshit insane and were actually well qualified to be a Representative in Congress. So why is she winning?
You can call her weird, I agree she is, but she's clearly representing a significant portion of republican voter sentiment.