The 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 they think they know the facts, and they even have theories about why other people are wrong.
I've tried to explain to a friend why vaccinations are a good idea, and I get a bunch of crap about how modern medicine doesn't work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn't get ill. A half a dozen of her friends jump in with articles about how vaccines work, and she ends it with "sure but I'm skeptical".
I've been invited to a friends house to look at his "Time Waver" machine, which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of how it scans every single one of someone's organs. Remotely. In fact he showed me a woman in Italy that he was helping out. First he asked me if I knew anything about quantum theory, which I don't really beyond undergrad, and then he gets excited and and spouts something about how I'll appreciate a cleansing. Good thing I can stay polite. But someone in his 40s who thinks this is how the world works is not going to have the veil of ignorance lifted.
These are just a couple of recent examples. Common to them is there's a bunch of stuff you can readily access which supports it. If you have some opinion about just about anything, you can find support for it, in fact a web of support, which will really test your reasoning skills.
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.
That same power to connect can lead people down a dark or dangerous path. Approach the internet with an uncritical mind and you could emerge as a flat-earther, anti-vaccer, or worse.
I've tried to explain to a friend why vaccinations are a good idea, and I get a bunch of crap about how modern medicine doesn't work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn't get ill.
I once knew someone who bought an expensive electronic detoxification device. The idea was you held on to the handles and it sent purifying waves through your body, killing any parasites. She insisted on showing off her stool after the process was complete. She said she could see the little "bugs" that had been in her system. Then we discovered that she had forgotten to put in the batteries.
I knew someone else who wanted to invest in a $50,000 machine that made similarly dubious claims. The idea was to make the money back by selling treatments. Thankfully her daughter talked her out of it.
Gullibility is a dangerous thing, especially at the intersection of personal health and second party financial incentive.
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 doctor took one look at the lesions on his face and told him the bad news.
He survived, and now he wants to warn everyone about the dangers of hopeful biases when combined with the immense amount of misinformation on the Internet. He's even appeared on national media here in Finland to tell his story, and I admire his courage.
> they don't know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field
Academic orthodoxy is sometimes wrong (re: history); But even it is isn't, we all ignore academic orthodoxy in some field of life: diet, travel, wars, entertainment choices, etc...
So who decides which academic orthodoxy we need to force people to conform too? If you leave room for free-thought, you have to expect bad thoughts.
On average the results in science papers are probably more accurate than random stuff you read on the internet. But I suspect the difference in error rate is uncomfortably small, much smaller than those who are smug about science would like to believe.
If you have some opinion about just about anything, you can find support for it, in fact a web of support, which will really test your reasoning skills.
Maybe this is a technological problem with a technological solution?
This strikes me as being a sort of blindness to the epistemic web-of-supporting-knowledge. What we claim to know is ultimately supported and reinforced by other propositions that are consistent with it. There is a view of reality defined by the proposition that vaccines do more harm than good, and there is a small web of propositions that stand in support of this; but its a very small web and it stands in opposition to far more propositions than are in its web.
What if there was some kind of page-rank for ideas we see on the internet? What if it was made obvious, in your web browser or something, that you were viewing information that had a very low epistemic probability based on the amount of supporting information on the web? Maybe we're 10 or 20 years out from whatever technological solution could accomplish this (AI, clever algorithms, ... ?) but I really think that sometimes people just have a hard time seeing or understanding the sheer scale of evidence that is opposed to their flawed beliefs.
> which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of how it scans every single one of someone's organs.
This kind of things makes me feel sick.
I knew a family, their child got some minor infection, they didn't believe in antibiotics and tried to cure him with "alternative" methods. Suffices to say - that kid is no longer alive.
Edit: I wish they were convicted for manslaughter.
But that probably includes you. You are not immune to this. Actually the entire human specie is subject to it, and regularly discover it's been wrong about incredibly important topic, at the level of a small group, a community, a country or the entire planet.
As an individual, you have most probably a huge number of things you just believe and never try to challenge. And among that, many that, if challenged by someone else, you would still hold to.
All in all, you can't start to change the world unless you recognize your own failures in the other people. They may do stuff you know are perfectly dangerous. And you may know better for a lot of things. But in the end, you are like them, and need to see it instead to have a real influence instead of thinking you are above that.
> If you haven't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won't.
I find this a really scary thought. It's not that people can't because of their age, but intuitively we know that people just won't be bothered to put in the effort. Especially when they've spent their whole life in a certain frame of mind. What's the incentive to change after so much time? For the vast majority of people there will be none, and that's scary.
"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".
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.
It's not that people "haven't learned to think". It's that their perception of reality is driven by their ego.
It must be understood that this is the case with all mentally competent people. An ego's appetite can be trained and controlled, but generally speaking, everyone wants to see themselves in the same basic, overwhelmingly positive way.
When an "empiricist" comes into the fray, they've trained their ego's appetite to prefer circumstances that allow themselves to be on the side of "hard data", "scientific consensus", or, as you've put it, "academic orthodoxy". Thus, the empiricist will dismiss theories that seem to be "outside of the orthodoxy" and ridicule their purveyors/supporters/believers.
This is your ego operating to give you the room to feel superior and keep your self-image adequately positive. The same thing is happening in your friend who has the quantum healer machine. They see themselves as someone who is able to spot frauds even when many other people cannot and use this information to their advantage (something you have in common).
Most likely the key difference here is the amount of trust each party has learned to place in secular/technological/academic institutions. You believe you can see the fraud perpetrated on the public by exploitative marketers and snake oil salesmen. They believe they can see the fraud perpetrated on the public by exploitative elitists and the corporate upper class (that's currently suing them for an unpaid medical bill).
The truth is that both perspectives are sometimes valid. "Learning how to think" is learning how to recognize your biases and think about an issue from a neutral, dispassionate perspective, without discounting any potential argument without consideration.
It's never too late to learn that, but most people have internalized their emotional disdain for "the bad guy" that they believe is oppressing them, whomever they assume that is, such that they'd rather make up a justification to discredit the other side's arguments rather than admit that they're potentially, though not necessarily, reasonable. And while overriding this impulse is a great skill to practice, it must be understood that very few people will ever do so to an extent that makes it usable.
---
The key to understanding people, IMO, is recognizing that human decision-making does not operate on objectivity or observation, but rather on the unavoidable and undeviating need to see oneself as intelligent, aware, and discerning.
People must see themselves as important and significant to justify their existence. This is true of all people; it's part of human self-preservation. Do not believe there are exceptions. Most people don't like this explanation because it implies that their self-importance is illusory, which funnily enough, really only reinforces its correctness.
The way to control your ego is to train it to value the right things as signals of importance.
If you want to change someone's mind, you must not argue that their conclusion is incorrect; rather, you must discover what biases and emotional mechanisms are at play in shaping the perception that leads them to that conclusion.
Once you accept this, the world is much easier to understand, social situations are much simpler, sales and marketing become both much more practicable and much easier to notice, and a lot of bitterness and antipathy goes away.
Disclaimer: I have no research or supporting evidence, this is pure conjecture, and there is no reason at all why you should listen to me.
It's not just an internet thing. The entire profession of Chiropractic care has long been established to be a pseudo-scientific field. Research on the effectiveness of the treatment is at best conflicting and it's effectiveness is not scientifically established except to say that it may be as effective as Tylenol for certain types of lower back pains. That hasn't stopped people from rushing to them and governments from licensing and regulating them giving what is essentially snake oil salespeople the credibility of state backing.
There are many other examples of pre-internet mass gullibility, like homeopathy, Reiki and assorted foolishness. Maybe the internet has made it easier to market foolishness, but I doubt we can say it has made us more foolish or gullible.
It seems like it should be possible to at least quantity this phenomenon for each topic by doing some internet segmentation and classification. I assume telling someone that they are in a fringe bucket is not actually an effective way to reconsider their position, though.
Those people existed before the Internet was widely available. They just shared information via books, leaflets etc. Arguably I'd say the Internet makes it less sustainable as they can't help but be exposed to contradictory beliefs.
However it also makes it easier for them to organize and spread their ideas...
I'd love to see data on wether this is a net gain/negative.
40s, huh? i'm in my 30s and i learned about 5 years ago that changing peoples' minds is an impossible, pointless task. people come to their own conclusions based on the bullshit they choose to surround themselves with.
you could think the moon is square, doesn't bother me one bit. i'm living my life, not yours.
it's far better to focus on your own knowledge and self improvement. it yields a higher return on investment.
if you want to affect change, throw your time and money into actually influential things, not social media arguments.
Ignorance and scepticism are a double edge sword. The problem is absence of curated information. The fact that she believed in how homeopatic medicine worked, or that he believed in aura cleansing, has nothing to do with the capability of the method itself, but with the source of knowledge for the carrier of the method. There are alternative medicine that work wonders, there are concepts of aura. The application of the method is wrong: non physical nature of the aura concept presented via foreign means to the method itself: a device. Or, the context is wrong: general immune system boost with alternative medicine will also cover the fact that her organism could fight off a specific case of infection. While she is ignorant in why that might have worked, I would not equate the method with the application of the method in your post.
"The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” — Bertrand Russell
That and our psychological quirk the we mistake self-confidence for competence. The two together make a pretty combustible mixture and explain a lot, IMHO.
The brain must constantly be doing triage on memories, without conscious intervention. And apparently it recognizes that there is less need to stock our minds with information that can be readily retrieved.
Or as my grandmother always said, "if you want to forget something, just write it down."
- our minds don't bother to remember things when we know the information is stored externally and easy to access
- given the aggressive way our minds exploit this, remembering must be expensive
- given that we can now get by while remembering less than before
- to what end can we put memory capacity we've now freed up?
One answer might be "living longer". As our lifespans extend, we may find ourselves accumulating too much knowledge to quickly remember things when we need them. If we're able to conserve memory more during our early lives, we may be able to stave of senility longer.
Or maybe we can put that capacity to other uses. Our brains are pretty adaptable, and maybe we can use some of it that was devoted to remembering facts and experiences to instead remembering skills or languages or thinking about the present.
Ranking systems help solve this. For example in games. Even in 5v5 games better players will eventually get to the top, because they will cause more games to be won in aggregate over their career. Similarly, systems of apprenticeship, and rankings found in things like martial arts and sports.
The problem is that we need 100,000 doctors, some of them will be more informed than others. The less informed ones will cause the other's to look worse. A doctor is still more informed, but when there are disagreements, it would be useful to know the relative standing of them. It would help with these sorts of problems.
We used to remember information, now we remember keywords to retrieve the information. We haven't lost it, it's just one step away. The information is stored implicitly.
The upshot is that we have turned into skilled information seekers and are used to evaluate the quality and credibility of our sources.
We might not remember all the trivia, but when it comes to discovering new interesting domains and quickly learning a lot about them, and finding people with similar rare interests, the internet (google) is king.
Today, people around the world marched in the name of science. Back in 1969 we put a man on the moon, and in 2017 we're having to march in the name of science.This appears to be one giant leap backwards for mankind.
The age of the printing press coincided with the age of reason. Is the age of the internet the harbinger of an age of disinformation, alternative facts, and ignorance?
This post looks at that very possibility, and if so, is the future taking us backwards? Are we devolving as a species?
I've often wondered whether McArthur Wheeler - the lemon juice disguised bank robber discussed in this article - actually had some mental challenges rather than lacked common sense. It seems a whole branch of academia has grown off his unfortunate back...
Difference in skills is clearest in games. When you can see someone winning and someone losing you can know who's better, despite perhaps not understanding why the winner won.
It's only totally clear in one on one, perfect information games like chess. Take a 5 on 5 game with hidden information such as League of Legends and people come up with excuses for losing: bad luck, bad teammates, bad game balance. All it takes is a little bit of ambiguity for people to seize upon an escape hatch for their threatened ego.
I think a variation on this is a key factor of life and culture in engineering - at some point, either what you made works, or it doesn't. You can argue, debate, philosophize and talk, but at the end of the day - there's either a working thing someone else can look at, or there's not.
(I imagine this is true in other places - sales, business, design - it just gets increasingly hard to tell "if it worked")
I found the opposite to be true for myself. If I don't take notes, I forget soon. But if I take notes, at the time of taking notes, I am processing the information in a way that I can explain myself. So somehow that helps me remember a little longer even if I don't read those notes a second time.
I see this sort of thing on Hacker News all the time. Programmers that are, I'm sure, the top of their field comment in threads about biology or something out of their field with the most silly and wrong answers. A thread about nutrition or something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain. That doesn't stop them from speaking authoritatively about it. :)
This happens on HN within our field too :) . I see stuff hit the front page all the time, only to be ripped to pieces a few hours later when someone that knows what they're doing appears.
Do you remember the "super fast hash algorithm" from a few weeks ago that turned out to be rubbish? What about the "high performance TCP proxy" on the front page right now that's not proxying correctly or with unusual speed?
Haha! So true. And nutrition in particular seems to be something the tech-literate crowd seems to want to "hack". It's always fascinating to read threads in HN about dietary supplements or keto-this-or-that or paleo diets or how it's better if you only sleep 2 hours per day total and only drink special shakes made by some dodgy startup, all of this frequently debated with religious reverence.
Well, in regards to the article I think experimentation should be cheered and not tossed away as stupidity. Wheeler isn't actually a good example of this effect.
Creating environments where people, especially people with the correct answers, are not afraid to voice their sincere opinions without the fear of being called or looked at as stupid is what is needed. Experts today, are now challenged, by persons who are incorrect and correct. An authority usually tries to shut up both as if the two were the same.
"something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain."
Casting aside the clear flaw there (which YT, FB chains?), I'd bet on HN against the general public because people here are more likely scientifically minded and therefore self-correcting.
"That doesn't stop them from speaking authoritatively about it. :)"
This effect should only really matter when it comes to an individual having authority (decisions or influence) over others.
Nutrition, science news and economics are the worst subjects for discussion in HN.
I'm cautiously optimistic because I see multiple levels ignorance that was me 5,10,15,20,25 years ago. I'm sure someone sees my comments the same way. Even if the the average quality of discussion stays at the same low level in HN as it was in Usenet long time ago, it's not the same people making the same stupid comments over and over again. There may be personal development.
I don't believe that one person keeps posting "correlation is not causality" comment to every science news discussion for 10 years without good reason. It's just a phase after learning statistics, I hope.
I think, in my ignorance, that this is a deeply human desire to understand the world or at least parts of it. If there is a simpler, less complex concept you can grasp it's always something that appeals to some.
And also there is a need for belonging and FOMO, so if you find a nice subculture that appeals to you and is graspable in it's complexity, it's way easier to stay informed and connected in that, than a more general topic.
Specialisation is indeed is the only way to understand something to the state of the art for more than two centuries or so now, since it's humanly impossible to have a working understanding of the whole of human knowledge.
Luckily most of the people here, if they wanted, could easily get an entry-level education in any field, because they know how to study from books, can get access to the material, etc.
[+] [-] lordnacho|9 years ago|reply
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 they think they know the facts, and they even have theories about why other people are wrong.
I've tried to explain to a friend why vaccinations are a good idea, and I get a bunch of crap about how modern medicine doesn't work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn't get ill. A half a dozen of her friends jump in with articles about how vaccines work, and she ends it with "sure but I'm skeptical".
I've been invited to a friends house to look at his "Time Waver" machine, which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of how it scans every single one of someone's organs. Remotely. In fact he showed me a woman in Italy that he was helping out. First he asked me if I knew anything about quantum theory, which I don't really beyond undergrad, and then he gets excited and and spouts something about how I'll appreciate a cleansing. Good thing I can stay polite. But someone in his 40s who thinks this is how the world works is not going to have the veil of ignorance lifted.
These are just a couple of recent examples. Common to them is there's a bunch of stuff you can readily access which supports it. If you have some opinion about just about anything, you can find support for it, in fact a web of support, which will really test your reasoning skills.
[+] [-] canadian_voter|9 years ago|reply
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.
That same power to connect can lead people down a dark or dangerous path. Approach the internet with an uncritical mind and you could emerge as a flat-earther, anti-vaccer, or worse.
I've tried to explain to a friend why vaccinations are a good idea, and I get a bunch of crap about how modern medicine doesn't work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn't get ill.
I once knew someone who bought an expensive electronic detoxification device. The idea was you held on to the handles and it sent purifying waves through your body, killing any parasites. She insisted on showing off her stool after the process was complete. She said she could see the little "bugs" that had been in her system. Then we discovered that she had forgotten to put in the batteries.
I knew someone else who wanted to invest in a $50,000 machine that made similarly dubious claims. The idea was to make the money back by selling treatments. Thankfully her daughter talked her out of it.
Gullibility is a dangerous thing, especially at the intersection of personal health and second party financial incentive.
[+] [-] pavlov|9 years ago|reply
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 doctor took one look at the lesions on his face and told him the bad news.
He survived, and now he wants to warn everyone about the dangers of hopeful biases when combined with the immense amount of misinformation on the Internet. He's even appeared on national media here in Finland to tell his story, and I admire his courage.
[+] [-] Xeoncross|9 years ago|reply
Academic orthodoxy is sometimes wrong (re: history); But even it is isn't, we all ignore academic orthodoxy in some field of life: diet, travel, wars, entertainment choices, etc...
So who decides which academic orthodoxy we need to force people to conform too? If you leave room for free-thought, you have to expect bad thoughts.
[+] [-] laretluval|9 years ago|reply
On average the results in science papers are probably more accurate than random stuff you read on the internet. But I suspect the difference in error rate is uncomfortably small, much smaller than those who are smug about science would like to believe.
[+] [-] CountSessine|9 years ago|reply
Maybe this is a technological problem with a technological solution?
This strikes me as being a sort of blindness to the epistemic web-of-supporting-knowledge. What we claim to know is ultimately supported and reinforced by other propositions that are consistent with it. There is a view of reality defined by the proposition that vaccines do more harm than good, and there is a small web of propositions that stand in support of this; but its a very small web and it stands in opposition to far more propositions than are in its web.
What if there was some kind of page-rank for ideas we see on the internet? What if it was made obvious, in your web browser or something, that you were viewing information that had a very low epistemic probability based on the amount of supporting information on the web? Maybe we're 10 or 20 years out from whatever technological solution could accomplish this (AI, clever algorithms, ... ?) but I really think that sometimes people just have a hard time seeing or understanding the sheer scale of evidence that is opposed to their flawed beliefs.
[+] [-] type0|9 years ago|reply
This kind of things makes me feel sick.
I knew a family, their child got some minor infection, they didn't believe in antibiotics and tried to cure him with "alternative" methods. Suffices to say - that kid is no longer alive.
Edit: I wish they were convicted for manslaughter.
[+] [-] sametmax|9 years ago|reply
As an individual, you have most probably a huge number of things you just believe and never try to challenge. And among that, many that, if challenged by someone else, you would still hold to.
All in all, you can't start to change the world unless you recognize your own failures in the other people. They may do stuff you know are perfectly dangerous. And you may know better for a lot of things. But in the end, you are like them, and need to see it instead to have a real influence instead of thinking you are above that.
[+] [-] askafriend|9 years ago|reply
I find this a really scary thought. It's not that people can't because of their age, but intuitively we know that people just won't be bothered to put in the effort. Especially when they've spent their whole life in a certain frame of mind. What's the incentive to change after so much time? For the vast majority of people there will be none, and that's scary.
[+] [-] jasonkostempski|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boomboomsubban|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smitherfield|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cookiecaper|9 years ago|reply
It must be understood that this is the case with all mentally competent people. An ego's appetite can be trained and controlled, but generally speaking, everyone wants to see themselves in the same basic, overwhelmingly positive way.
When an "empiricist" comes into the fray, they've trained their ego's appetite to prefer circumstances that allow themselves to be on the side of "hard data", "scientific consensus", or, as you've put it, "academic orthodoxy". Thus, the empiricist will dismiss theories that seem to be "outside of the orthodoxy" and ridicule their purveyors/supporters/believers.
This is your ego operating to give you the room to feel superior and keep your self-image adequately positive. The same thing is happening in your friend who has the quantum healer machine. They see themselves as someone who is able to spot frauds even when many other people cannot and use this information to their advantage (something you have in common).
Most likely the key difference here is the amount of trust each party has learned to place in secular/technological/academic institutions. You believe you can see the fraud perpetrated on the public by exploitative marketers and snake oil salesmen. They believe they can see the fraud perpetrated on the public by exploitative elitists and the corporate upper class (that's currently suing them for an unpaid medical bill).
The truth is that both perspectives are sometimes valid. "Learning how to think" is learning how to recognize your biases and think about an issue from a neutral, dispassionate perspective, without discounting any potential argument without consideration.
It's never too late to learn that, but most people have internalized their emotional disdain for "the bad guy" that they believe is oppressing them, whomever they assume that is, such that they'd rather make up a justification to discredit the other side's arguments rather than admit that they're potentially, though not necessarily, reasonable. And while overriding this impulse is a great skill to practice, it must be understood that very few people will ever do so to an extent that makes it usable.
---
The key to understanding people, IMO, is recognizing that human decision-making does not operate on objectivity or observation, but rather on the unavoidable and undeviating need to see oneself as intelligent, aware, and discerning.
People must see themselves as important and significant to justify their existence. This is true of all people; it's part of human self-preservation. Do not believe there are exceptions. Most people don't like this explanation because it implies that their self-importance is illusory, which funnily enough, really only reinforces its correctness.
The way to control your ego is to train it to value the right things as signals of importance.
If you want to change someone's mind, you must not argue that their conclusion is incorrect; rather, you must discover what biases and emotional mechanisms are at play in shaping the perception that leads them to that conclusion.
Once you accept this, the world is much easier to understand, social situations are much simpler, sales and marketing become both much more practicable and much easier to notice, and a lot of bitterness and antipathy goes away.
Disclaimer: I have no research or supporting evidence, this is pure conjecture, and there is no reason at all why you should listen to me.
[+] [-] vivekd|9 years ago|reply
There are many other examples of pre-internet mass gullibility, like homeopathy, Reiki and assorted foolishness. Maybe the internet has made it easier to market foolishness, but I doubt we can say it has made us more foolish or gullible.
[+] [-] chris_va|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] new299|9 years ago|reply
However it also makes it easier for them to organize and spread their ideas...
I'd love to see data on wether this is a net gain/negative.
[+] [-] iamacynic|9 years ago|reply
you could think the moon is square, doesn't bother me one bit. i'm living my life, not yours.
it's far better to focus on your own knowledge and self improvement. it yields a higher return on investment.
if you want to affect change, throw your time and money into actually influential things, not social media arguments.
[+] [-] pb000|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awarer|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mpweiher|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nebabyte|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UltimateFloofy|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phoenixProgram|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] edmccard|9 years ago|reply
Or as my grandmother always said, "if you want to forget something, just write it down."
[+] [-] cwp|9 years ago|reply
Or maybe we can put that capacity to other uses. Our brains are pretty adaptable, and maybe we can use some of it that was devoted to remembering facts and experiences to instead remembering skills or languages or thinking about the present.
[+] [-] SolarNet|9 years ago|reply
The problem is that we need 100,000 doctors, some of them will be more informed than others. The less informed ones will cause the other's to look worse. A doctor is still more informed, but when there are disagreements, it would be useful to know the relative standing of them. It would help with these sorts of problems.
[+] [-] visarga|9 years ago|reply
The upshot is that we have turned into skilled information seekers and are used to evaluate the quality and credibility of our sources.
We might not remember all the trivia, but when it comes to discovering new interesting domains and quickly learning a lot about them, and finding people with similar rare interests, the internet (google) is king.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] russellprose|9 years ago|reply
The age of the printing press coincided with the age of reason. Is the age of the internet the harbinger of an age of disinformation, alternative facts, and ignorance?
This post looks at that very possibility, and if so, is the future taking us backwards? Are we devolving as a species?
https://jimdroberts.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/the-information...
[+] [-] olivermarks|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fiatjaf|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chongli|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RangerScience|9 years ago|reply
(I imagine this is true in other places - sales, business, design - it just gets increasingly hard to tell "if it worked")
[+] [-] MiddleEndian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kichuku|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4ydx|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkarapetyan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JohnJamesRambo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shouldbworking|9 years ago|reply
Do you remember the "super fast hash algorithm" from a few weeks ago that turned out to be rubbish? What about the "high performance TCP proxy" on the front page right now that's not proxying correctly or with unusual speed?
People seem to upvote on title alone
[+] [-] the_af|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sotojuan|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awarer|9 years ago|reply
Creating environments where people, especially people with the correct answers, are not afraid to voice their sincere opinions without the fear of being called or looked at as stupid is what is needed. Experts today, are now challenged, by persons who are incorrect and correct. An authority usually tries to shut up both as if the two were the same.
"something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain."
Casting aside the clear flaw there (which YT, FB chains?), I'd bet on HN against the general public because people here are more likely scientifically minded and therefore self-correcting.
"That doesn't stop them from speaking authoritatively about it. :)"
This effect should only really matter when it comes to an individual having authority (decisions or influence) over others.
[+] [-] nabla9|9 years ago|reply
I'm cautiously optimistic because I see multiple levels ignorance that was me 5,10,15,20,25 years ago. I'm sure someone sees my comments the same way. Even if the the average quality of discussion stays at the same low level in HN as it was in Usenet long time ago, it's not the same people making the same stupid comments over and over again. There may be personal development.
I don't believe that one person keeps posting "correlation is not causality" comment to every science news discussion for 10 years without good reason. It's just a phase after learning statistics, I hope.
[+] [-] mxfh|9 years ago|reply
And also there is a need for belonging and FOMO, so if you find a nice subculture that appeals to you and is graspable in it's complexity, it's way easier to stay informed and connected in that, than a more general topic.
Specialisation is indeed is the only way to understand something to the state of the art for more than two centuries or so now, since it's humanly impossible to have a working understanding of the whole of human knowledge.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kuschku|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rustynails|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Ben2Wilson|9 years ago|reply
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