3 ms·

There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of l

by rhelz 1mo ago

There is one difference, and it is a very telling difference. In Idiocracy, people openly scorned smart people. They made no pretense of using any kind of logic or scientific method. What we have now is different. People stopped vaccinating their kids because they actually believed the scientific evidence proved vaccines were dangerous. They can point to endless documents which have the overt form of being an actual research paper, written by people who are actually Ph.D.s from good universities. You can go online and find endless meta-analysis, written by and endless number of untenured professors, that, say, Masking and social distancing didn't help stop the spread of Covid. Because these endless number of untenured professors need to land research grants and write papers. Sure, a face mask is useless against an airborne disease. Go ahead and sneeze on the salad bar. If this were really like idiocracy, nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. They would just make fun of anybody who was smarter than they were, because they sounded "effeminate." I don't know which style of stupid is worse, but it is a pretty big difference.

DonHopkins 1mo ago
[dead]
icantevenhold 1mo ago
We’ll give it 50-100 years down this trajectory and we will have arrived there
majorchord 1mo ago
> nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. How do you know they're not too stupid to realize what/the damage they're doing in the first place?
- rhelz 29d ago
  They most certainly are too stupid. This is a true story. In 1995, a guy named McArther Wheeler was flabbergasted when police picked him up for robbing a bank. He said "But I put the lemon juice on my face!!" He figured that since Lemon juice was used for invisible ink, putting it on his face would make him invisible. So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror. He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place. This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating." This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them. (If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)

by rhelz 1mo ago

DonHopkins 1mo ago

[dead]

icantevenhold 1mo ago

We’ll give it 50-100 years down this trajectory and we will have arrived there

majorchord 1mo ago

> nobody would be funding fake research papers, bribing professors, etc. How do you know they're not too stupid to realize what/the damage they're doing in the first place?

rhelz 29d ago
They most certainly are too stupid. This is a true story. In 1995, a guy named McArther Wheeler was flabbergasted when police picked him up for robbing a bank. He said "But I put the lemon juice on my face!!" He figured that since Lemon juice was used for invisible ink, putting it on his face would make him invisible. So far, just a story about a dumb guy--but here the story take an epistemologically terrifying turn: He actually did an experiment to prove that it would work. He put Lemon juice on his face, went to the bathroom, and took a selfie. (Since this was 1995, he took a selfie with a polaroid camera.) When he looked at the picture, it just showed a blank mirror. He was too dumb to know that he had not pointed the camera at the right place. This is how the anti-vaxers, the anti-covid-ppe crowd are. It's not like they want to ignore the latest results of cutting edge science. It's not even like they don't want to do "research" on the internet. It's that they simply do not know how to tell what is and what is not genuine experimental results. They don't know when they are "hallucinating." This is not the world that the movie "Idiocracy" presents us with. In idiocracy, everybody is even worse than old McArther Wheeler was. They don't even bother to do any research. Anything they believe is just self-evidently true to them. (If you really want to freak yourself out, ask yourself how you would be able to tell whether or not you were fooling yourself just as McArther Wheeler did. If you are anti vax or anti Covid PPE, you really should ask yourself that question.)