4 ms·

> Educated people are naturally more skeptical of their media and what the sources are. I have not found that to be the case and I think you should scrutinize

> Educated people are naturally more skeptical of their media and what the sources are. I have not found that to be the case and I think you should scrutinize that assumption very carefully. Perhaps a majority of intellectuals in the West thought the Soviet Union was a step forward - again and again it's the 'smart' people who get the big things wrong.

majewsky 8y ago
> Perhaps a majority of intellectuals in the West thought the Soviet Union was a step forward I wasn't there at the time, so I have no way of knowing, but this smells like hindsight bias.
- repolfx 8y ago
  No. It was obvious at the time that the USSR was bad news. George Orwell was writing about the dystopian nature of Soviet society in 1948. It had become obvious decades earlier that the Russian revolution had gone horribly wrong, after western powers realised that Soviet lumber exports were coming from forced labour camps. And the fact that a Russian revolution would go wrong in this way was obvious even at the turn of the century. Lenin was put on a train in Switzerland and sent back to Russia specifically to cause chaos. Going even further back, it was a constant frustration of Marx that the working classes in the UK (where he lived) stubbornly refused to rise in violent revolution. His ideology was well discussed in his own time but somehow actual working people were too smart to believe in it. Only intellectuals far removed from the real lower classes thought his theories were good. tl;dr it's widely known that academics and other intellectuals couldn't accept the disastrous nature of communism long after supposedly more "stupid" people had fully understood the nature of Marxist ideology. Even shorter tl;dr - education often seems to make people dumber in important ways, not smarter.

4 ms·

> Educated people are naturally more skeptical of their media and what the sources are. I have not found that to be the case and I think you should scrutinize

by bachbach 8y ago

majewsky 8y ago
> Perhaps a majority of intellectuals in the West thought the Soviet Union was a step forward I wasn't there at the time, so I have no way of knowing, but this smells like hindsight bias.
- repolfx 8y ago
  No. It was obvious at the time that the USSR was bad news. George Orwell was writing about the dystopian nature of Soviet society in 1948. It had become obvious decades earlier that the Russian revolution had gone horribly wrong, after western powers realised that Soviet lumber exports were coming from forced labour camps. And the fact that a Russian revolution would go wrong in this way was obvious even at the turn of the century. Lenin was put on a train in Switzerland and sent back to Russia specifically to cause chaos. Going even further back, it was a constant frustration of Marx that the working classes in the UK (where he lived) stubbornly refused to rise in violent revolution. His ideology was well discussed in his own time but somehow actual working people were too smart to believe in it. Only intellectuals far removed from the real lower classes thought his theories were good. tl;dr it's widely known that academics and other intellectuals couldn't accept the disastrous nature of communism long after supposedly more "stupid" people had fully understood the nature of Marxist ideology. Even shorter tl;dr - education often seems to make people dumber in important ways, not smarter.