i think actual information is way too difficult to suss out these days with the misinformation campaigns and the paywalls and the trolling, etc.
shit try to do some comparison shopping today and try to figure out which reviews are real and if the thing you're buying is really the thing you think you're buying.
People don't do their own research past the most cursory google searches at best of times, and now google is absolute garbage and the links that are relevant mostly go to massive SEO whale sites written by AI.
That's all before you get to the actual mainstream media sites that spout the same commercial news cycle stories, or spread sensationalized headlines and absolute nonsense. I have managed teams of people and on daily calls people talk about news stories they read like "Did you hear they found another spaceship on mars?" and "They found proof that covid was a Chinese bio-weapon!" and similar statements from working, middle-class people who just browse the websites and social media before work. Most people have very little time to dig into things they see, and now once-reputable sites are just cashing in on clickbait and lies.
This is how most people get their news and information, and it's absolute garbage now. Browse a major news site like MSN and it's worse than grocery store tabloids from the 1980's. And don't even get started about social media like twitter and facebook.
Something happened in the last couple decades that has made people literally just stop caring what's real or not. I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it's now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything.
Agreed: "I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it's now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything."
That is the "feature" and the dead end...
The full compliance on anything!
No thoughts, no free speech!
We now have access to the information, and we've discovered that all along it was our inability to distinguish between misinformation and real information that was causing the stupidity.
Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don't bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.
I question whether or not this is true. People will remember things if they find them interesting, so incurious people didn't know much in the past, either.
To the people saying that this is because of "laziness" or "lack of curiosity":
I'm bombarded with so much information every day that it's not feasible to fact-check it all. I have to pick my battles and take things I care less about at face value until I have a reason not to.
I have to admit, even while finding the crooked corners of the internet with rotten and CJ, I did hold onto the belief that access to information was going to lift the masses up out of ignorance. I knew about flamewars since the BBS days. I knew about trolls since rm -rf advice was given. I, in my naivete, seriously underestimated the effects of these phenomenon on society writ large.
It's still the problem. Information is widely available but misinformation is easier to find and the ones that need information are the ones that find the misinformation
dumb people still had access to bullshit information prior to the internet. remember grocery store tabloids? papers with "Bat Boy" on them or how Jesus was constantly coming back, etc? I knew a couple adults that firmly believed and bought that shit.
The problem with internet was always that access to bullshit is way easier than access to information. Except now the difference gets exponentially bigger, and bullshit is indistinguishable from truth.
Yes and no. If people had access to correct information, rather than every passing thought anyone has ever had ever, including complete fabrications and things that were never meant to be taken seriously, then they'd probably be okay.
Even making a claim about what is true and factual seems to be a point to be argued on the internet lately.
We've given everyone a voice and access to everyone else's voice as well as access to all information. Most are lost in the noise, and can't find the signal.
Now I think it was because they were actively looking for understanding something new, and did not represent the general population.
Assuming that intelligence (and I don't mean IQ or any other psychometric "proxy" for intelligence, but intelligence as an abstract trait) is normally distributed like most other traits, 50% of people are going to be dumber than average because in normal distributions the mean is the median. The "general population" is not smart by any definition.
And anyone trying to claim that intelligence as a concept is completely socially constructed and that there is no difference in intelligence between people, or tries to conflate IQ etc psychometric measures and intelligence, can shove it up their ass.
We shall not confuse data and information. With internet we have access to a lot of data, but information is hard to find.
Furthermore information are structured by the institution that made it : university, TV, newspaper, and social network
Those dominant institution are not very interested in homelessness or other class struggle in your neighborhood. So relevant information for your social and geographical position is even more rare.
People here seem to be mistaking stupidity as a measure of intelligence. Stupidity is a measure of wisdom.
An abundance of information doesn't fix stupidity in the same way that shoveling water out of a boat with a leak won't stop it from sinking.
You have to address the leak before shoveling water becomes productive. Or to circle back around, you have to address how someone learns, parses, and applies information before feeding them more information becomes productive.
Agreed. Smart people aren't smart because they simply are. They're smart because they learn how to learn. They learn the recognize that the steps to success involve failure. Being smart is about being willing to feel stupid, since anything new you learn/try you're going to feel overwhelmed.
Late 90s to 2000s was the decade of internet glory. Then social media and big tech took over. Now with personalized feeds and searches, along with conflict promoting engagement metrics, many people spend their time within echo chambers and those chambers keep getting more partisan. On top of that, rampant misinformation has made it all the more difficult to separate fact from fiction.
But you had to deliberately look for BBSs that contained what you wanted. Platforms weren’t as all-encompassing as they are now compared to the scattered and independent phpBB groups of yesteryear. People didn’t have social media in their faces all the time. You had to dial-up and go looking for whatever it was, whether it was AIM, ICQ, or your favorite forum.
No, social media in the super-limited context that it existed in 20 years ago wasn’t an issue. It absolutely is an issue today because of their size, popularity, ease of access, and definitely the algorithms.
Lemmy can have its fair share of echo chamber syndrome. For example, almost nobody here vocally likes Reddit, and if you post anything pro-Reddit, it's likely to be met with a lot of negativity. I'm anti-Reddit too, for the record, but it's good to acknowledge tribalism even when you agree with the tribe. But the nice part is Lemmy can't have competing echo chambers nearly as easily as Reddit can because we're so much smaller.
Kinda? I figured that there's some portion of the population that's not smart - bell-curve statistical distribution and all that. But I always thought that the problem was education, or rather, access to a good1 education and all the socio-economic and political boundaries around that.
To be blunt: modest to insanely powerful people have something invested in keeping such barriers high, and it's worrysome.
Good = a program that teaches critical thinking and has access to liberal arts, trades, traditional arts, libraries, and information technology.
To be blunt: modest to insanely powerful people have something invested in keeping such barriers high, and it's worrysome.
cheaper workers tend to be less intelligent, ergo: prevent children from being expensive by preventing them becoming intelligent see:"a brave new world"
Stupid, ignorant, misinformed, and gullible are all different things.
Access to information helps with ignorance, and even then only if the ignorant person isn't too dumb to understand or hear had their mind poisoned with falsehood.