5 ms·

> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capabl

> What a callous view of people. Who's your benchmark? TikTok addicted kids? brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat.

yladiz 4mo ago
Access to knowledge doesn’t mean you automatically acquire that knowledge.
- koolba 4mo ago
  Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge. If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them. But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.
  - yladiz 4mo ago
    This doesn’t make any sense. We have more access to entertainment, be it comics, porn, or films, than any period in history, yet we continue to make more substantial scientific progress than any point in history.
    - angiolillo 4mo ago
      Scientific progress is typically the result of outliers at the upper end of the normal distribution which doesn't inherently contradict a decrease in average knowledge. (i.e. a larger standard deviation could overcome a lower average) Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.
    - adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
      We have one of the most incredible vaccine technologies in mRNA and yet vaccination rates are going down. We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries. We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations. We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less. We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever. The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.
      - komali2 4mo ago
        The things you describe may be problems in your country, but they're not universal. Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.
baal80spam 4mo ago
This hurts.
wiseowise 4mo ago
> brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
- Forgeties79 4mo ago
  I’m not religious but there’s a significant difference here. Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false. Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.
  - technothrasher 4mo ago
    I don't think you've thought through what you're trying to assert. A god could make you believe anything they wanted to about the earth. So if you cannot disprove a god, then you cannot disprove the theory that the earth is flat.
    - detourdog 4mo ago
      I’m not sure you thought this through. Why would G-d want to or care to make one have thoughts.
      - DiggyJohnson 4mo ago
        why are you censoring the word 'God'?
coldtea 4mo ago
>and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!
skywhopper 4mo ago
I think you have the causation backwards: we have people thinking the world is flat because they can access the sum total of human knowledge, both true and false. There’s so much available, with similar production values, that going down brainwashing rabbit holes like flat earth, anti-vax, and more is a lot easier than it has ever been before.
- iamnothere 4mo ago
  Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7. There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures. Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!
  - flohofwoe 4mo ago
    Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the people - and at least Marx tried to put some rational thought into the idea by extrapolating from history - but how does one get from at least 2300 years of knowing that the Earth is round back to believing the Earth is flat?
    - komali2 4mo ago
      > Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants. Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2]. > but nobody believed in communism either I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy [2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016-0127/html https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016... Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?locations=CU https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...
thunky 4mo ago
> brother, Why am seeing "brother" a lot recently?
- sanex 4mo ago
  Tiktok addicted kids, brother.
- wett 4mo ago
  It’s kind of a meme https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ
  - derwiki 4mo ago
    I heard it with the voice of Macho Man Randy Savage
    - matwood 4mo ago
      That's the only way I hear it. I wonder if that gives away our age? When I was a teenager WWF came to my town. The day before the event a bunch of the wrestlers randomly showed up to my local gym to get a workout in. None of the guys, and especially Macho Man ever broke character the entire workout. They were super nice and after a bit of handshakes with us there we all just went back to our workouts.
    - parpfish 4mo ago
      Annyong hermano
    - MisterTea 4mo ago
      Let me tell you something, brother - whatcha gonna do when a thousand Hulkamaniacs come tell you Macho Man was known for his Oh Yeah!
  - Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
    Kind of, but younger generation will prefix every sentence with "bro" so you can kind of see a generational difference. But also, Warhammer 40K is popular.
mcculley 4mo ago
> capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.
- alnwlsn 4mo ago
  Plenty has already been lost due to being buried in search, removed for lack of interest, or simplified so far as to be too generalized.
graemep 4mo ago
> yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life. Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.
- librasteve 4mo ago
  but, the earth is flatter than it looks … since, according to GR, spacetime is convex around it gravity well
jollyllama 4mo ago
Nice snark, but they're not all convinced of that via short form video. You can reach the same conclusion from 4-hour podcasts. Your point is kind of irrelevant.
sph 4mo ago
My pet peeve is that every flat earther there are 1000 people complaining about them and keeping the meme alive at every chance possible. At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.
- cicko 4mo ago
  Mate, I was buying a kebab and the guy was convincing me that the Earth is flat, there's no Moon. And it's proven by... something with shadows. At least I got a real kebab in the end.

yladiz 4mo ago

Access to knowledge doesn’t mean you automatically acquire that knowledge.

koolba 4mo ago
Sadly access to knowledge strongly correlates with access to mindless entertainment that competes with the absorption of said knowledge. If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them. But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.
- yladiz 4mo ago
  This doesn’t make any sense. We have more access to entertainment, be it comics, porn, or films, than any period in history, yet we continue to make more substantial scientific progress than any point in history.
  - angiolillo 4mo ago
    Scientific progress is typically the result of outliers at the upper end of the normal distribution which doesn't inherently contradict a decrease in average knowledge. (i.e. a larger standard deviation could overcome a lower average) Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.
  - adjejmxbdjdn 4mo ago
    We have one of the most incredible vaccine technologies in mRNA and yet vaccination rates are going down. We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries. We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations. We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less. We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever. The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.
    - komali2 4mo ago
      The things you describe may be problems in your country, but they're not universal. Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.

baal80spam 4mo ago

This hurts.

wiseowise 4mo ago

> brother, we are all walking around with a supercomputer in our pocket thats capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
Forgeties79 4mo ago
I’m not religious but there’s a significant difference here. Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false. Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.
- technothrasher 4mo ago
  I don't think you've thought through what you're trying to assert. A god could make you believe anything they wanted to about the earth. So if you cannot disprove a god, then you cannot disprove the theory that the earth is flat.
  - detourdog 4mo ago
    I’m not sure you thought this through. Why would G-d want to or care to make one have thoughts.
    - DiggyJohnson 4mo ago
      why are you censoring the word 'God'?

coldtea 4mo ago

>and yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!

skywhopper 4mo ago

I think you have the causation backwards: we have people thinking the world is flat because they can access the sum total of human knowledge, both true and false. There’s so much available, with similar production values, that going down brainwashing rabbit holes like flat earth, anti-vax, and more is a lot easier than it has ever been before.

iamnothere 4mo ago
Let’s be real, some people are going to believe absurd things even if you strap them in a chair Clockwork Orange style and force them to consume your favorite propaganda 24/7. There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures. Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!
- flohofwoe 4mo ago
  Say about the Eastern side of the iron curtain what you will, but we didn't have flat earthers or a chemtrail conspiracy - teaching rational thinking is the very least requirement for an education system, but even this seems to fail in the 'free world'. Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly, but nobody believed in communism either, everybody knew it was just a carrot dangling in front of the people - and at least Marx tried to put some rational thought into the idea by extrapolating from history - but how does one get from at least 2300 years of knowing that the Earth is round back to believing the Earth is flat?
  - komali2 4mo ago
    > Okay, okay, that whole idea of 'communism' is just as silly But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants. Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2]. > but nobody believed in communism either I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause. [1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy [2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016-0127/html https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016... Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?locations=CU https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...

thunky 4mo ago

> brother, Why am seeing "brother" a lot recently?

sanex 4mo ago
Tiktok addicted kids, brother.
wett 4mo ago
It’s kind of a meme https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/my_brother_in_Christ
- derwiki 4mo ago
  I heard it with the voice of Macho Man Randy Savage
  - matwood 4mo ago
    That's the only way I hear it. I wonder if that gives away our age? When I was a teenager WWF came to my town. The day before the event a bunch of the wrestlers randomly showed up to my local gym to get a workout in. None of the guys, and especially Macho Man ever broke character the entire workout. They were super nice and after a bit of handshakes with us there we all just went back to our workouts.
  - parpfish 4mo ago
    Annyong hermano
  - MisterTea 4mo ago
    Let me tell you something, brother - whatcha gonna do when a thousand Hulkamaniacs come tell you Macho Man was known for his Oh Yeah!
- Cthulhu_ 4mo ago
  Kind of, but younger generation will prefix every sentence with "bro" so you can kind of see a generational difference. But also, Warhammer 40K is popular.

mcculley 4mo ago

> capable of accessing the sum total of human knowledge No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.

alnwlsn 4mo ago
Plenty has already been lost due to being buried in search, removed for lack of interest, or simplified so far as to be too generalized.

graemep 4mo ago

> yet we're still stuck with people who think the earth is flat. Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life. Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.

librasteve 4mo ago
but, the earth is flatter than it looks … since, according to GR, spacetime is convex around it gravity well

jollyllama 4mo ago

Nice snark, but they're not all convinced of that via short form video. You can reach the same conclusion from 4-hour podcasts. Your point is kind of irrelevant.

sph 4mo ago

My pet peeve is that every flat earther there are 1000 people complaining about them and keeping the meme alive at every chance possible. At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.

cicko 4mo ago
Mate, I was buying a kebab and the guy was convincing me that the Earth is flat, there's no Moon. And it's proven by... something with shadows. At least I got a real kebab in the end.