4 ms·

The majority of the US electorate is underinformed and/or misinformed. The most popular cable news network is Fox News, which pushes straight-up falsehoods as

by Fej 7y ago

The majority of the US electorate is underinformed and/or misinformed. The most popular cable news network is Fox News, which pushes straight-up falsehoods as propaganda for the right. That's not to say the left-wing networks are innocent, just that the most popular one is also the most dishonest. It has a wide reach and many voters get all of their news from only this network. The right-wing party is completely bought out by the fossil fuel lobby, which has peddled the "global-warming-is-a-myth" narrative since the early 80's. Both the party and this lobby push that narrative through the right-wing media, which uninformed voters eat up, as the left-wing party has been completely demonized to them via that same media. Those who trust these right-wing media outlets often do so on principle since these outlets are not "leftist" and the "left-wing media" is "out to get them". As a result, they often do not trust other media sources. There is also the poisoning of the well that is filter bubbles on social media platforms (particularly Facebook) but I won't get into that as this comment is quite long already. Hopefully this explains our problems to an extent. (I love explaining/ranting to non-Americans as they can empathize with my incredulity.)

caseysoftware 7y ago
> The majority of the US electorate is underinformed and/or misinformed. It starts long before that. Most of the US is poorly educated and lacks critical thinking capability. That is the fault of a broken education system focused on the lowest common denominator instead of helping the top or even just supporting the middle.
- fkdo 7y ago
  I think most Americans receive a quality education that covers a lot of really valuable material. The US population isn't the most well educated, but it's unfair to our teachers to say that most Americans are poorly educated.
  - komali2 7y ago
    I disagree as a product of the southern education system. Worth noting that some schools can't even afford to stay open five days a week. Gems from my public schooling in South Carolina: 1. A teacher telling me to put my Harry Potter book away as it was written by Satan. Not that it was satanic or written by a Satanist. No, written literally by the hand of Lucifer himself. 2. The moon landing might not have happened. I got sent to the principal's office for refusing to back down over this. 3. Dinosaurs might not have been real. 4. Evolution probably isn't real. 5. Having sex before marriage will give me herpes. 6. The civil war was a war for state's rights.
    - caseysoftware 7y ago
      I'd wager those are exceptional cases, but even if they're the norm, being able to read is above and beyond many. In Chicago, my peers were promoted to the point of graduation still being functionally illiterate. In Northern Virginia, my 4th grader was barely a 1st grader by ability - math, reading, and general knowledge - but kept getting promoted.
    - wahern 7y ago
      I had a very similar experience in middle school and high school in rural Florida, almost point-by-point. Yet I thought I had rather decent education. So what if my 11th grade American History teacher gave a week-long seminar on the Civil War as "states rights", and explained to the class (nearly 1/3 of which was black) the lexicon of racial classifications--"now a _blue_ black was somebody who was really dark and because of the sun reflected on their skin...". I still learned 99% of the same American History as everybody else. Most of us were rolling our eyes in class, anyhow, and while these types of teachers are not uncommon, they're not exactly common, either. It's more like that they're tolerated because it's understood that they represent a persistent aspect of the local culture that isn't going anywhere. And for the most part for any particular subject you're learning from multiple different teachers at different times, so it's not like you don't learn the legitimate subject material. It's more like you're taught what today we call "alternative facts", and in practice they're really only taken in by the same segment of the population that's creating those facts. If a kid grows up steeped in this culture at home, the presence or absence of it at school is almost irrelevant. The important point is that they're at least exposed to the real facts--which they are, perhaps with the exception of sex education. Combined with the fact that most people aren't particularly intellectually curious and don't retain much of the detail, it's sufficient that they're taught the proper material in broad strokes. And they are. Plus, after having traveled the world some as an adult, most places around the world--even in places Americans look up to as more "civilized"--have similar issues where local biases and mythologies are taught as fact when they're glaringly, painfully wrong-headed to more objective observers. While most of the kids in my class were rolling their eyes, there are kids in similar classes in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and even Europe eagerly taking notes on some ridiculous and patently prejudiced narrative. The weird thing about being American is that we've been having an intense, rancorous, open argument about ourselves and our prejudices for at least 50, if not 100, or even 200 years. Everybody else gets to watch it, too. You'd think Americans are the most racist, bigoted, backward people on the face of the earth. In reality, it's just that we were one of the first--and still one of the few--to recognize our bigotry and prejudices systematically. Not just by an intellectual, bourgeois elite. Even the most bigoted American won't take at face value a narrative that group A is intellectually, genetically, or morally inferior from group B. Every coal rolling white nationalist (not that these things always come together) have shockingly modern and sophisticated ideas about race and culture, even if cringe worthy. In most parts of the world people will treat claims that group A is worse than group B no more worthy of suspicion than claims that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Except for Americans--everybody knows how racist Americans are. Racism is an American problem. It's why they're talking about it so much. To be clear, we are racist and we are biased. I don't want to say that we're any more or less these things than somewhere else; I'm not sure what value there is in that comparison.[1] But there's a level of self-reflection here that is absent or at least lesser in most of the rest of the world. [1] I mean, we had slavery here. That's crucial. But so did most of the Americas. Slavery was at least as formative to Brazil as it was to the U.S., and any curious traveler to Venezuela, Columbia, and even Ecuador can see shadows of the same anti-black prejudices and ostracism we're familiar with in the U.S., entirely home grown and stemming from their native histories of slavery. It's just these shadows are often simply considered as the way things are supposed to be, though I think Brazil is more like the U.S. than other countries in how they've internalized a more sophisticated ability to reflect on these things.
- xvilka 7y ago
  It is because of the love of modern mythology[1] in US culture. Starting from the religion, ending in the love of superheroes. You cannot change current generations, they are too ignorant for that. But you can start work with schoolchildren, promoting critical thinking instead, in the style of Less Wrong[2] or Rational Wiki[3] projects. THAT will change people, at least most of them. P.S. Yes, I am aware there a lot of biases and illogical elements[4] in the Less Wrong community as well, but it is still a step forward from the current state of affairs. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame... [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/ https://www.lesswrong.com/ [3] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page [4] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong
emilsedgh 7y ago
What you're saying is not very far from what I've observed as a person who moved to the states ~2 years ago. But it seems that current situation is not Fox New' fault. Read this quote from Isaac Asimov from decades ago: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. To me it seems that Fox News is riding on the wave of this ignorance and fueling it. Edit: I feel like I need to add another opinion. This phenomenon exists in, probably all countries. It's just that in the U.S. the stakes are so high, that anything that could be exploited, is going to be. And exploiting under educated voters is not exactly new.
agumonkey 7y ago
After observing some neighbors, I tend to think that Fox news and the likes are not really misinforming but mostly a reflection of these people. Echo chambers etc etc
dang 7y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. All such discussions just circulate the same generic material, and it's exceedingly tedious. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20539876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20539876 and marked it off-topic.
espeed 7y ago
During periods of transition, it can help to take the meta perspective. Fox began its remake first. It began during the Obama administration. Hollywood is being tested now. Some have been late to get the memo.

by Fej 7y ago

caseysoftware 7y ago

> The majority of the US electorate is underinformed and/or misinformed. It starts long before that. Most of the US is poorly educated and lacks critical thinking capability. That is the fault of a broken education system focused on the lowest common denominator instead of helping the top or even just supporting the middle.

fkdo 7y ago
I think most Americans receive a quality education that covers a lot of really valuable material. The US population isn't the most well educated, but it's unfair to our teachers to say that most Americans are poorly educated.
- komali2 7y ago
  I disagree as a product of the southern education system. Worth noting that some schools can't even afford to stay open five days a week. Gems from my public schooling in South Carolina: 1. A teacher telling me to put my Harry Potter book away as it was written by Satan. Not that it was satanic or written by a Satanist. No, written literally by the hand of Lucifer himself. 2. The moon landing might not have happened. I got sent to the principal's office for refusing to back down over this. 3. Dinosaurs might not have been real. 4. Evolution probably isn't real. 5. Having sex before marriage will give me herpes. 6. The civil war was a war for state's rights.
  - caseysoftware 7y ago
    I'd wager those are exceptional cases, but even if they're the norm, being able to read is above and beyond many. In Chicago, my peers were promoted to the point of graduation still being functionally illiterate. In Northern Virginia, my 4th grader was barely a 1st grader by ability - math, reading, and general knowledge - but kept getting promoted.
  - wahern 7y ago
    I had a very similar experience in middle school and high school in rural Florida, almost point-by-point. Yet I thought I had rather decent education. So what if my 11th grade American History teacher gave a week-long seminar on the Civil War as "states rights", and explained to the class (nearly 1/3 of which was black) the lexicon of racial classifications--"now a _blue_ black was somebody who was really dark and because of the sun reflected on their skin...". I still learned 99% of the same American History as everybody else. Most of us were rolling our eyes in class, anyhow, and while these types of teachers are not uncommon, they're not exactly common, either. It's more like that they're tolerated because it's understood that they represent a persistent aspect of the local culture that isn't going anywhere. And for the most part for any particular subject you're learning from multiple different teachers at different times, so it's not like you don't learn the legitimate subject material. It's more like you're taught what today we call "alternative facts", and in practice they're really only taken in by the same segment of the population that's creating those facts. If a kid grows up steeped in this culture at home, the presence or absence of it at school is almost irrelevant. The important point is that they're at least exposed to the real facts--which they are, perhaps with the exception of sex education. Combined with the fact that most people aren't particularly intellectually curious and don't retain much of the detail, it's sufficient that they're taught the proper material in broad strokes. And they are. Plus, after having traveled the world some as an adult, most places around the world--even in places Americans look up to as more "civilized"--have similar issues where local biases and mythologies are taught as fact when they're glaringly, painfully wrong-headed to more objective observers. While most of the kids in my class were rolling their eyes, there are kids in similar classes in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and even Europe eagerly taking notes on some ridiculous and patently prejudiced narrative. The weird thing about being American is that we've been having an intense, rancorous, open argument about ourselves and our prejudices for at least 50, if not 100, or even 200 years. Everybody else gets to watch it, too. You'd think Americans are the most racist, bigoted, backward people on the face of the earth. In reality, it's just that we were one of the first--and still one of the few--to recognize our bigotry and prejudices systematically. Not just by an intellectual, bourgeois elite. Even the most bigoted American won't take at face value a narrative that group A is intellectually, genetically, or morally inferior from group B. Every coal rolling white nationalist (not that these things always come together) have shockingly modern and sophisticated ideas about race and culture, even if cringe worthy. In most parts of the world people will treat claims that group A is worse than group B no more worthy of suspicion than claims that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Except for Americans--everybody knows how racist Americans are. Racism is an American problem. It's why they're talking about it so much. To be clear, we are racist and we are biased. I don't want to say that we're any more or less these things than somewhere else; I'm not sure what value there is in that comparison.[1] But there's a level of self-reflection here that is absent or at least lesser in most of the rest of the world. [1] I mean, we had slavery here. That's crucial. But so did most of the Americas. Slavery was at least as formative to Brazil as it was to the U.S., and any curious traveler to Venezuela, Columbia, and even Ecuador can see shadows of the same anti-black prejudices and ostracism we're familiar with in the U.S., entirely home grown and stemming from their native histories of slavery. It's just these shadows are often simply considered as the way things are supposed to be, though I think Brazil is more like the U.S. than other countries in how they've internalized a more sophisticated ability to reflect on these things.
xvilka 7y ago
It is because of the love of modern mythology[1] in US culture. Starting from the religion, ending in the love of superheroes. You cannot change current generations, they are too ignorant for that. But you can start work with schoolchildren, promoting critical thinking instead, in the style of Less Wrong[2] or Rational Wiki[3] projects. THAT will change people, at least most of them. P.S. Yes, I am aware there a lot of biases and illogical elements[4] in the Less Wrong community as well, but it is still a step forward from the current state of affairs. [1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-ame... [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/ https://www.lesswrong.com/ [3] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page [4] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/LessWrong

emilsedgh 7y ago

What you're saying is not very far from what I've observed as a person who moved to the states ~2 years ago. But it seems that current situation is not Fox New' fault. Read this quote from Isaac Asimov from decades ago: There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge. To me it seems that Fox News is riding on the wave of this ignorance and fueling it. Edit: I feel like I need to add another opinion. This phenomenon exists in, probably all countries. It's just that in the U.S. the stakes are so high, that anything that could be exploited, is going to be. And exploiting under educated voters is not exactly new.

agumonkey 7y ago

After observing some neighbors, I tend to think that Fox news and the likes are not really misinforming but mostly a reflection of these people. Echo chambers etc etc

dang 7y ago

Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. All such discussions just circulate the same generic material, and it's exceedingly tedious. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20539876 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20539876 and marked it off-topic.

espeed 7y ago

During periods of transition, it can help to take the meta perspective. Fox began its remake first. It began during the Obama administration. Hollywood is being tested now. Some have been late to get the memo.