4 ms·

I don't see how to solve this. This is the same root cause that causes people to be 911 truthers or qanon or to vote for clearly nonsense candidates. It's a la

I don't see how to solve this. This is the same root cause that causes people to be 911 truthers or qanon or to vote for clearly nonsense candidates. It's a lack of critical thinking, and it's an epidemic. When you have people believing whatever they want on Facebook or whatever because someone makes minimal effort to photoshop something to look like a news post, of course that's something AI can take advantage of. But it isn't a new problem, and the solution is the same. But how do you educate a population that is aggressive and resistant to acquiring knowledge? I'm just here to watch the band play as the ship goes down.

fullshark 4y ago
Critical thinking requires time and effort. Offloading critical thinking is something every single person does in order to make sense of the world and make decisions, it's basically what trust is and it's necessary for the world to function. The idea that we can just ignore this risk and allow critical thinking within individuals to handle it is not even wishful thinking, just shirking responsibility imo.
- TuringTest 4y ago
  Also, critical thinking is a social phenomenon. You make sense of the world based on the sources you trust, and that trust is created gregariously by learning to rely on what your peers are sharing as trustworthy. The time and effort needed is shared with the group, and the resulting wisdom of the crowds filters out the most outrageous messages from the outside, developing a 'groupthink' that establishes a consensus of what is "common sense" for the group. However, someone with the power to broadcast messages to the whole group can overcome that group processing, and sway the whole group to a different way of thinking.
- Zurrrrr 4y ago
  I've never seen anyone defend and make excuses for people not thinking critically. Sure, trust is one thing, and we relax critical thinking....but trust among people we know has nothing to do with failures as large as thinking, say 5G causes covid. Trust has nothing to do with that really. And I'm not ignoring the risk. I absolutely acknowledge it Trump almost got elected twice for chrissakes. I just don't see what can be done about it with a population resistant to thinking.
  - wpietri 4y ago
    I am a big fan of critical thinking, but shouting "think harder people" is just not a solution to anything, and neither is giving up. We can and should change our system to support critical thinking, and we can change it to demand much less critical thinking to make effective decisions.
    - Zurrrrr 4y ago
      It's not so much I'm shouting "think harder people", more lamenting that I think it's too late. The shouting should have been done about 30 years ago. I'm cynical, but I don't really see a path forward for the US when half the population is so resistant to truth. But absolutely, I agree with should be improving education and changing things so not every single thing should have to be analyzed to make a decision.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    You're looking at such a short time frame, that it's not a surprise that this all seems like a new phenomenon to you. Lets jump back to 90 years ago to Europe. Do you think the lead up to world war two was caused by a lack of critical thinking? Do you think if I sent you back to 1920 so you could howl into the wind about critical thinking if you believe you'd have made one iota of difference to the devastation that occurred? I would like you to give me a power, that is to make critical thinking an uninterruptable process in your mind, and also have the ability to spam the shit out of you with things that you should probably be thinking critically about anyway. You would be a wreck in days. The number of things you take for granted about the world around you, things society and the social contract take care of silently and with little notice would now be things you have to think about. You would have to back process that entire queue of completely dumb shit we don't think critically about but likely should. You wouldn't get anything else done. Instead you, me, and Mr McGhee push those things out of our mind because we have work do to, relationships to work on, food to eat, stress to relieve, new things to learn, etc. Humans require a lot of time doing a lot of illogical human crap to remain sane, and not set around being machines.
    - Zurrrrr 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
finnthehuman 4y ago
> It's a lack of critical thinking, and it's an epidemic. It's because the non-AI text generators everyone spends too much time listening to (jounos, "content creators") rely on an audience that doesn't engage with their output critically.
runsWphotons 4y ago
add in that even the real news is often lies or at least some kind of manipulation...
zpeti 4y ago
Whatever political side you are in, it's extremely naive to assume the other side is making choices because of stupidity. Yes there are stupid people and conspiracy theorists on the "other side", but trust me, at the lower sophisticated end of your political side there are also really stupid ideas that people believe in. We all have our reasons for believing stupid stuff, and voting for candidates that are "clearly nonsense".
- PrimeMcFly 4y ago
  Yes, there are idiots on both sides, but that's like Trump trying to equate racists with non-racists by saying there are good people on both sides. It's only one side of the political spectrum that as a significant portion of people who think a Kenedy will return from the dead, that you can cure covid by 'putting the light inside', that 5G causes covid, etc etc etc. The amount of ignorance isn't equally distributed at all, and it's silly to try and claim otherwise.
  - zpeti 4y ago
    As someone who grew in both eastern europe and the west, this view you have is quite wrong. The amount of stupidity on the left about "equality" and where it leads is very large, a lot of people believe it, even though it leads to more murderous places than right wing extremism ever did. Contrary to you I don't believe these people are stupid, I just think the utopian vision of equality is a very potent one, but it also happens to be the most destructive path paved with good intentions. Both sides have a lot of stupid ideas at the extremes, and there aren't less or more people who believe them, it just depends on how willing you are to look objectively.
    - Zurrrrr 4y ago
      There's a lot of people who grew up in the region you did who come to the weat and are suspicious and downright dismissive of many leftist ideals. That's a shame. Your experiences don't invalidate their talking points and it is still the most logical things to strive for if we want the US (or really any) country to do better. One side is trying to force crayons as coins into a washing machine (that doesn't have a payment mechanism) to pay for laundry, the other is being fanciful and naive in some of their goals for a better tomorrow. The two sides are not alike.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

fullshark 4y ago

Critical thinking requires time and effort. Offloading critical thinking is something every single person does in order to make sense of the world and make decisions, it's basically what trust is and it's necessary for the world to function. The idea that we can just ignore this risk and allow critical thinking within individuals to handle it is not even wishful thinking, just shirking responsibility imo.

TuringTest 4y ago
Also, critical thinking is a social phenomenon. You make sense of the world based on the sources you trust, and that trust is created gregariously by learning to rely on what your peers are sharing as trustworthy. The time and effort needed is shared with the group, and the resulting wisdom of the crowds filters out the most outrageous messages from the outside, developing a 'groupthink' that establishes a consensus of what is "common sense" for the group. However, someone with the power to broadcast messages to the whole group can overcome that group processing, and sway the whole group to a different way of thinking.
Zurrrrr 4y ago
I've never seen anyone defend and make excuses for people not thinking critically. Sure, trust is one thing, and we relax critical thinking....but trust among people we know has nothing to do with failures as large as thinking, say 5G causes covid. Trust has nothing to do with that really. And I'm not ignoring the risk. I absolutely acknowledge it Trump almost got elected twice for chrissakes. I just don't see what can be done about it with a population resistant to thinking.
- wpietri 4y ago
  I am a big fan of critical thinking, but shouting "think harder people" is just not a solution to anything, and neither is giving up. We can and should change our system to support critical thinking, and we can change it to demand much less critical thinking to make effective decisions.
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago
    It's not so much I'm shouting "think harder people", more lamenting that I think it's too late. The shouting should have been done about 30 years ago. I'm cynical, but I don't really see a path forward for the US when half the population is so resistant to truth. But absolutely, I agree with should be improving education and changing things so not every single thing should have to be analyzed to make a decision.
- pixl97 4y ago
  You're looking at such a short time frame, that it's not a surprise that this all seems like a new phenomenon to you. Lets jump back to 90 years ago to Europe. Do you think the lead up to world war two was caused by a lack of critical thinking? Do you think if I sent you back to 1920 so you could howl into the wind about critical thinking if you believe you'd have made one iota of difference to the devastation that occurred? I would like you to give me a power, that is to make critical thinking an uninterruptable process in your mind, and also have the ability to spam the shit out of you with things that you should probably be thinking critically about anyway. You would be a wreck in days. The number of things you take for granted about the world around you, things society and the social contract take care of silently and with little notice would now be things you have to think about. You would have to back process that entire queue of completely dumb shit we don't think critically about but likely should. You wouldn't get anything else done. Instead you, me, and Mr McGhee push those things out of our mind because we have work do to, relationships to work on, food to eat, stress to relieve, new things to learn, etc. Humans require a lot of time doing a lot of illogical human crap to remain sane, and not set around being machines.
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

finnthehuman 4y ago

> It's a lack of critical thinking, and it's an epidemic. It's because the non-AI text generators everyone spends too much time listening to (jounos, "content creators") rely on an audience that doesn't engage with their output critically.

runsWphotons 4y ago

add in that even the real news is often lies or at least some kind of manipulation...

zpeti 4y ago

Whatever political side you are in, it's extremely naive to assume the other side is making choices because of stupidity. Yes there are stupid people and conspiracy theorists on the "other side", but trust me, at the lower sophisticated end of your political side there are also really stupid ideas that people believe in. We all have our reasons for believing stupid stuff, and voting for candidates that are "clearly nonsense".

PrimeMcFly 4y ago
Yes, there are idiots on both sides, but that's like Trump trying to equate racists with non-racists by saying there are good people on both sides. It's only one side of the political spectrum that as a significant portion of people who think a Kenedy will return from the dead, that you can cure covid by 'putting the light inside', that 5G causes covid, etc etc etc. The amount of ignorance isn't equally distributed at all, and it's silly to try and claim otherwise.
- zpeti 4y ago
  As someone who grew in both eastern europe and the west, this view you have is quite wrong. The amount of stupidity on the left about "equality" and where it leads is very large, a lot of people believe it, even though it leads to more murderous places than right wing extremism ever did. Contrary to you I don't believe these people are stupid, I just think the utopian vision of equality is a very potent one, but it also happens to be the most destructive path paved with good intentions. Both sides have a lot of stupid ideas at the extremes, and there aren't less or more people who believe them, it just depends on how willing you are to look objectively.
  - Zurrrrr 4y ago
    There's a lot of people who grew up in the region you did who come to the weat and are suspicious and downright dismissive of many leftist ideals. That's a shame. Your experiences don't invalidate their talking points and it is still the most logical things to strive for if we want the US (or really any) country to do better. One side is trying to force crayons as coins into a washing machine (that doesn't have a payment mechanism) to pay for laundry, the other is being fanciful and naive in some of their goals for a better tomorrow. The two sides are not alike.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]