3 ms·
> There's a crisis of faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. I don’t think that crisis of faith is unwarranted, given the reaction large swa
by Nursie 5y ago
> There's a crisis of faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual.
I don’t think that crisis of faith is unwarranted, given the reaction large swathes of people have had to public health measures like vaccination, plus political misinformation and straight out bullshit like Q. The average everyday man is a moron.
- swayvil 5y agoBut what if you're wrong? An idea. Popular. Backed by compelling arguments. Agreed upon by all the smart people. Broadcast from all the right news channels. Yet still totally wrong and utterly fucked. It's happened before and it'll happen again. Best to leave us our right to choose.
- Nursie 5y agoDid I say you should take that away? No, I said it’s not wrong to lose faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. Right now we have people hospitalising themselves eating horse pharmaceuticals, all the while congratulating themselves on how smart they are for doing their own “research”. It’s pitiable.
- shadowgovt 5y agoI sometimes wonder if we have a gap in public education around epistemology. In this era, we have more sources of signal to access than ever before. I don't know that people are equipped with enough tools for knowing how to know things to discern fact from fiction given those sources. In an era where people would have barely known about ivermectin / COVID-19 interaction because most doctors who look at the research discard it as insufficient, there would have been no choice to be made. In this era? Now everyone has to have a passing familiarity with how clinical studies work (or trust authority), because the data isn't filtered (and, in fact, there are people who dedicate themselves to spreading misinformation... This observation is independent of whether ivermectin is effective; we know people have been doing dishonest things "for the lulz" for decades).
- swayvil 5y agoWe take the words of strangers that we never met as gospel. As equal, if not greater in weight, to our own observations. This certainly says something about the popular epistemology.
- shadowgovt 5y agoThat's true about a lot of things. There are less than twenty people who have ever seen the surface of the moon. We believe their testimony on the topic.
- option_greek 5y agoNice to see reverting to mean happening post the collapse and defeat of fascism and communism. It just shows people in power craving for authoritarian ways and the populace supporting them are nothing unique to past. Given the us-them mentality at any period, this situation seems inevitable. So lets welcome the past with all its atrocities but this time for the "correct" reasons. Just like all the previous geniuses did. Who knows may be this time the F&C might win and rewrite history.
- Nursie 5y agoWho’s welcoming atrocities? I’m just observing that people are idiots, and it seems to be getting worse. There are probably things we can do as a society (improve education being one) that might help. But no, any observation that large groups people are unable to parse the modern world and come to reasonable conclusions simply must be because that person wants to implement newspeak and purge any that disagree. Helpful.