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Your post provides a great data point supporting your thesis, but the real problem with the intelligence of society is rational ignorance. People don't expend a
by ben509 8y ago
Your post provides a great data point supporting your thesis, but the real problem with the intelligence of society is rational ignorance. People don't expend a great deal of resources trying to understand things that don't matter to them.
For example, you're happy to fire off about how dumb everyone is for reading tabloids because the finer points of how people unlike you consume media are not particularly important. And, likewise, the typical person buying a DNA test as largely a conversation starter isn't going to invest a great deal of effort to understand how DNA tests work.
- Pharmakon 8y agoYour post provides a great data point supporting your thesis, but the real problem with the intelligence of society is rational ignorance. People don't expend a great deal of resources trying to understand things that don't matter to them. Tragically people are notoriously bad at long term predictions of what will matter to them and how that relates to a broad corpus of knowledge or habit of skepticism. The result is that people are so ignorant they’re under an illusion of being knowledgeable, and at that point they’re more or less a lost cause. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect It might help to know enough about DNA to wish to avoid these services, especially given how they cooperate with law enforcement. Mostly though, it’s just really hard to calibrate your corpus of useful knowledge from a position of profound ignorance. Plus a lot of people really are quite stupid, and ignoring that in favor of some superficially positive message about mutual respect is potentially dangerous.