this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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But is it the chicken or the egg?
Are the people themselves "antithetical" to the scientific method, using emotions to reach self serving conclusions, and this serves them very much that on a platter, or are these technologies uniquely sabotaging everyone in some way? Why are there people who are utterly unaffected by all this, and those who don't even like algorithmic social media?
its basically fast and easy vs long and ardous. The second type gives better results but if your not motivated to get the higher quality you won't be willing to go through it. Now granted folks can trust the people that actually do the methodical work which was why things were not so bad for so long. One thing that hit me is I have a nice lady neighbor. She knows I got a college degree in science with two majors and have a masters of education. We were talking about the winter and whats the worst weather and I mentioned realy cold rain and she was like yeah the worst was somewhere in the forties (F) where you have rain and snow and im like um no its more like 30. Anyway she said she was pretty sure and she would go look it up on the internet. Because, you know, your neighbor who you know who has a science degree. You can't trust them on the temperature that water freezers in fahrenheit. Gotta go see what what some rando on the internet, maybe rephrased by ai has to say.
You should definitely not trust any random neighbours with or without a "science degree" (wut) on much of anything, but especially facts and figures, even if they aren't just making shit up - which you should assume they are if you're not that gullible - the brain is terrible at remembering specifics, and you should absolutely look it up on the internet, which has extremely easily accessible written information, i.e. Wikipedia, where it's validity is established by the same means that the scientific method ultimately establishes knowledge - consensus.
The only thing I'd trust my neighbours on is their bloodlust towards anyone and everyone who isn't literally them and especially those different enough where they can bend their empathy driven pretense of morality, and that they would do anything for their share of the pie.
and there you go. Sure I had teachers that were surprisingly off base and doctors but when dealing with things in their wheelhouse I will give an expert more weight than me looking around for an alternative. Why would I even just assume they must not be right. Its kinda silly. I point to this as one reason our society is the way it is because searching the internet means trying to find anything to determine whatever my passing misunderstanding is is right. Don't get me wrong if research is something you understand. If you can go to a library and just with the card catalogue find books to write a paper on. And you bring that kind of rigor to internet research. Then you can likely find good data on the internet but it will require throwing out a lot of crap. Wikipeia is great but using it is like using ai. You have to sorta know enough about the subject to see if any bs edits have been made. Heck last time I looked up the life of jesus it was full of bad logic and data.
Yes, the experts however are on the internet, not random neighbours. If I listened to neighbours who claimed to be experts I wouldn't be wearing any masks or take any vaxx, but instead I listened to experts on the internet and got the vaxx.
No, you're just a fucking idiot. People who go on the internet not to find the truth but to find arguments to support conclusions they've already reached are just fucking idiots, the internet didn't make them irrational, they were never on board with the truth anyway.
Why would you do that, instead of going on the internet where all this material is a.) actually available and b.) available for free.
Yes, 99% of everything is crap, but generally speaking it doesn't take long to arrive at something good enough for a layman's approximation of the truth, open source consensus knowledge resources like Wikipedia are usually incredibly accurate, but of course you must check sources.
You do understand this, right? Neighbours are like Facebook, random sample of crackheads and weirdos ready to claim to be experts and die on strange hills, Wikipedia has a bit of a barrier to entry, and you can examine the source (or note the lack thereof) and assign a trust likelihood to that piece of knowledge.
No you really don't in most cases.
That sounds like you just didn't like the points that were made there.
I'm not an expert, but it is obvious to anyone that research that far back into the past is just grasping at straws so conclusions vary wildly depending on what evidence you accept.
What were the oxygen levels in x year of the precambrian? If you're a dum-dum you might look this up and find a paper with estimates and say that's it, but if you dig deeper, there are more papers with different estimates, you start to understand that stuff way back in the past like that is hard to know with any degree of certainty.
It's not because science is bad or scientists are bad but because it's obviously really hard to know that, and knowing with total precision is actually not really necessary for most things, sure it helps, but if the big bang happened 15 bya and not 13.8 bya like tends to be the understanding now, does it even make that much of a difference? No, it doesn't.
Historians have an incredible system for verifying and piecing together information from accounts and documents which I frankly, do not understand, I do not understand how they have such an incredibly detailed picture of much of anything, and I'm amazed and endlessly impressed by them and their expertise.
It's also not entirely surprising to me in the slightest when things change or some proposed versions of a given story don't match up with established 'canon' or anything like that, neither should you be.
Knowledge is good, but intelligence is important, you must be able to analyse information to understand it.
Im just going to hit on two parts. Im not talking about neighbors who claim. Im talking friends, family, and neighbors who you actually know. Its more than a claim because you know were they work and various elements of their past. As for the jesus thing I do know what historians use but there are two groups about the historacity of jesus. One feels there are multiple independent sources for the existence of christ based on historians using unsited independent sources they had. One feels multiple sources used each others accounts along with christian accounts until you go back to josephus who only was talking to christians. So my use of bad logic was the assumption sources are independent when their sources are not given.
I'm sorry, is there a difference? Does you or me knowing them give them some sort of extra expertise or knowledge on a subject?
No, of course it doesn't.
I've corrected plenty of friends and family and even acquaintances on blatantly false shit they "know" from their isolated silos and bubbles IRL, whereas I - "terminally online" (aka Informed) always seem to actually know better, but even more importantly I can actually quickly find exactly the source I am using for that information I'm giving to them and show why it's a decent source, or even enhance my understanding if I misremembered any detail.
Which does what? How does this help them be a reliable source of information in the slightest?
You must critically analyze information regardless of source, and learn to mentally cancel the bias towards those you know. Information (and context) must be evaluated on its own in a vacuum (though again, with context, to determine intent), but things such as the pure validity of factual statements don't actually become substantially different based on who is speaking (though the intent may change).
Yeah, but again, why are the sources like that? Dig deeper, the answers you want are there, they just might not be satisfying.
look. I am in no way saying someone should not critically analyze something regardless of source. There are however. many, many, many. folks that do not. To me you are saying trust wikipedai without critical analyses. What I am saying is that of the folks who don't critically analyze and just go with what folks tell them and what they read. well they used to at least look at the source and they would trust doctors more on medical things and teachers more on academic things and lawyers more on legal things. especially if they knew them a bit and had free access to them. it would be better if they took an elementary logic class and learned how to do research (this was why I talked about the card catalogue, if you cannot do it with the outdated methods you are likely not really going to be able to do it with modern conveniences). fact is that most are not going to do that though and if they are not then they are better off listening to people who have spent time learning about a particular subject or whos schooling or background would make it likely they are more knowledgable around it.
It's not that people can't be better critical thinkers, its the observed "radicalization" pipeline is driven by emergent algorithmic incentives rather then a alt-right or alt-left conspiracy
Chasing engagement, to chase money, results in normal people being put into heavily saturated incendiary emotional bubbles.