MJ2.0
Senior Associate
Joined: Jul 24, 2014 10:27:09 GMT -5
Posts: 11,049
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Post by MJ2.0 on Aug 10, 2015 17:05:42 GMT -5
This thread reminded me that I needed to unfriend someone - DONE!!!
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Virgil Showlion
Distinguished Associate
Moderator
[b]leones potest resistere[/b]
Joined: Dec 20, 2010 15:19:33 GMT -5
Posts: 27,448
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Post by Virgil Showlion on Aug 10, 2015 18:15:19 GMT -5
Doesn't that scare the living shit out of you though? I guess people have always been susceptible to misinformation that tells them what they want to hear or are inclined to believe. Maybe I'm wrong that it's not so much worse today... Maybe it's just more easily displayed... I don't know. It kind if scares me though... It's unsettling, I admit. The root of the problem is intellectual laziness. You have some people with too little faith in the scientific method, ignoring its rigorous and defensible conclusions. Some who place too much faith in it, extending it into domains it can't properly be applied, failing to perceive its intrinsic limitations. Some who place too little faith in scientific and medical authorities, demanding unreasonable standards of proof, unreasonable standards of perfection, and turning away from sound advice to chase after myths and strange doctrines. Some who place too much faith in such authorities, becoming complacent with false beliefs that "so many people can't be wrong", "surely that can't happen here and now", and "surely if this conclusion was wrong, we'd know by now". In all cases, intellectual laziness and lack of research ability is to blame. People want somebody qualified, who seemingly knows what they're doing, to sift through everything, bundle together the salient results, and present a simple, digestible narrative. In the course of several generations, western society has bred this very quality into the citizenry. It was the dream of thinkers like Russel, Malthus, Bernays, Huxley, and many others that society become a technocracy led by her experts, and TPTB succeeded in building this ideal into the very brick and mortar of society. What they didn't expect is that their means also led to abuse of authority, mistrust by the public, and ultimately to apathy and malaise. Our governments are sclerotic, our economies are on perpetual life support, nobody has any clue who the real experts are. The true experts, acknowledging the pointed limitations of their capacity to turn a handful of data and theories into sensible policy decisions, rarely lead. Hence out of the ground spring experts upon experts, bolder and larger than life, espousing every doctrine under the sun, united only in their certainty of the correctness of their conclusions. The public, now bitter, mistrustful, and succumbed to anomie, practically bred into intellectual servitude, equates critical thinking with parroting the conclusions of these experts, and so they do. The pro-vaxers, the anti-vaxers, the pro-AGW, the anti-AGW, the believers, the free thinkers, the faithful, the skeptical, and everyone in between, all latching on to the experts of their choice and parroting their conclusions without prejudice. Blogs upon blogs; wikis upon wikis; Facebook pages upon Facebook pages. Filtering out, downplaying, rationalizing, minimizing data inconsistent with their clean-cut theories. All-out ideological warfare. It was inevitable. If you bombard people with enough information and they lack the means to process it all, they turn to somebody they trust to do it for them. We're living in Lord Russell's paradise, in a sense. It just didn't turn out the way he thought it would.
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