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The amount of absolute stupidity these days is shocking.
It was always there, the internet just gave them leverage to find each other and make professional sounding networks of absolutely rock stupid fucking people.
Here's the question: Idiots and wise people both have this megaphone to reach the world. Why do the idiots seem to succeed much more often?
because people find confidence attractive and appealing. for most people, blind faith and never admitting you are wrong is seen as confident.
and wise people don't seem confident because they acknowledge their limits and that they might be wrong.
human psychology is full of this stuff. it is not optimized to be truth seeking, it's optimized to look for the easiest explanation and the one that unifies the tribe.
For the same reason people think Kent Hovind and Ben Shapiro are smart, it takes time and energy to explain why someone is wrong whereas the claim that oneself is right takes less energy. Compare say a Miniminuteman or Stefan Milo to the average pseudoscience video, the pseudoscience video can throw out 20 claims in the time it takes for someone to explain something that is actually correct.
Also the natural social defenses against this type of shit are effectively bypassed by the ability for idiots to communicate and propagate their ideas. Historically communities had the learned, the experienced, and the wise who could generally call bullshit or otherwise deal with the problem directly, nowadays shaming, beating, and killing are notable less effective.
Because most people, even including people who aren't complete idiots, want to be told what they want to hear more than they want to be faced with hard truths. Simple as.
they have done studies.
truth is more cognitively difficult to obtain and it is not emotionally rewarding.
fiction and fantasy is easy to process, and it's much more emotionally rewarding.
Just like our bodies want to get fat and lazy unless we otherwise force them not to, our brains are the same way.
People can become smarter and value good mental work, just like they can get fitter and start feeling the rewards of fitness. But there is a massive gulf you have to overcome to get there where it is incredibly painful and difficult and most people give up rather than push through the pain and difficulty.
Yeah you start to see this stupidity increase in size with every major information transmission breakthrough. A lot of these people would probably be hit with a big stick for being stupid and causing problems historically.
That’s insulting to rocks.
I swear that America - well the world at large, but especially America - has a reality problem.
I see the swell of anti-science anti-intellectual 'experts', the aggressive evangelicals beating queerfolk with holy books they haven't read, the facebook addicts praising pyramid oils and herbs and crystals instead of medicine, the pearl-clutching racists shouting off statistics as justification to expel the 'others' ... and I just wonder if we've collectively lost the ability to think.
Leaded gasoline really did a number on us not gonna lie.
Smartphones have been worse for people by a thousand miles.
At least lead can be taken out of the system with enough advocacy and effort. How do you get people to stop wanting to see interesting things? How do you get people to regrow their attention spans?
COVID-MANIA did a number on these people.
A reminder that the human brain has not changed since modern humans emerged about 300,000 years ago.
Think about what that means.
The people who spent millennia throwing rocks at the moon, drawing stick figures on walls and hunting mammoths with pointy sticks? That's just us. That is exactly what we would be doing in that time and place. The people that burned witches? That is us too. Those people had the exact same capacity for intelligence, compassion, and reason as we do.
What I am saying is that the capacity for human stupidity is boundless. It is our intelligence and civilization that defies our nature. We can always be dumber. We might not be able to get any smarter.
There's this weird phenomenon that people tend to think those in the past were less intelligent then now, when really it was history being spun a certain way. For example: the witch burning thing, most people accusing witches, etc didn't actually believe that shit. Its coming to light in modern times, that they realized they could grab land and money by accusing vulnerable people, and then just taking their land when they couldn't defend themselves against a confession under torture.
Keep in mind all the advancements and progress humans have made in mathemathics and sciences over the last few thousand years. Those people weren't stupid, if they were doing stupid things, its probably because they were evil (like burning witches for their own financial gain)
Sounds like the people running today's megachurches. They might not actually believe any of what they are spinning, as long as the rubes are giving them enough money to keep them farting through silk and flying around in private jets (and probably some hookers and blow on the DL, I bet, too).
The Salem witch trials were just land thefts
Yup.
It has changed in shape but not in size. Source
Always a good thing to check the data before posting.
Obligatory semi tangential RSA animate post
Recent studies suggrst our brains have shrunk: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1191274/full
That theory has been challenged.
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2022.963568/full