That is what you get when you stop funding general education because you think people should pay for it themselves. People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
I benefit when others around me get better education, that's why I'm happy when my taxes are used to fund schools and universities and other ways of educating people. And it also benefits the economy, so every tax dollar/euro spend on education has a huge ROI.
No it isn't. There people are not clueless ignoramuses, they're paranoid assholes who have chosen to weaponize their dislike of anything 'official' for political ends. There is a market for propaganda and it is thriving, because many people want their biases reinforced.
Thinking the issue is a lack of education is a kind of procrastination, as if we can just fix this over a 20 year span. Ignorance is not the problem here, malice is. There are plenty of ignorant people who are uninformed or believe silly things without being assholes about it.
There's an unwillingness on HN to engage with the fact that the amplification effect of the broadcast/internet/social media selects for liars and propagandists and fraudsters absent countering mechanisms. That's why spamming and scamming are ubiquitous in our super high tech civilization.
While I agree with this, I will say that people most susceptible to propaganda and confirmation bias are people who lack critical thinking skills IMO.
Critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, as taught in your average language arts and social studies courses, specifically calls out bias and teaches kids how to be skeptical. When I was in school, we read passages and books and got to make whatever conclusion we wanted. But the essay we wrote had to be evidence-based. The teacher didn't care so much what we said, but rather that we could form a logical string to say it.
All this is to say, I think yes - if public education is further destroyed this will only get worse.
America spends $15k per child for education. That is a ridiculous amount of funding. I think most teachers are of the opinion that the educational decline is due to NCLB, Common Core, and other top-down initiatives that give them less power yet more responsibilities. Many teachers complain that 1-2 students disrupt a class of 25-30 students, but they can't do anything about it.
The amount of money we spend "for education" isn't reflective of the money that goes to educating children. We have waste, corruption, and people stuffing their pockets everywhere. Schools spend more of that money on sports than actual teaching. In the end, criminally unpaid teachers have to buy even the most basic school supplies with their own money or beg parents to provide them for the over-crowded classrooms in buildings that are falling apart.
I found slightly different numbers, but the exact details don't matter.
If $12.5k is spent per child per year, and there are 20 children per classroom, that's $250k.
Combining random sources (which use widely different divisions), I see numbers like:
60-90% instruction salary/benefit and related (higher numbers likely include non-teacher staff)
55-60% salaries
20-25% employee benefits (probably health insurance, which is really expensive in America no matter who pays for it)
5-20% capital/operations/contractors
10% administration
8% supplies
5-35% support (likely varies depending on what counts as "support")
0-5% debt
4% other
Teachers are simply overloaded and parents have given up responsibility for keeping their kids in check. Little Tommy can do no wrong and is just misunderstood. I personally feel if a child is disrupting class and the experience for others, out they go, back to the parents. Public education should be free, but it has to have conditions that your little Tommy isn’t messing it up for those who are there to learn. We’ve grown too lenient and expect teachers to be cops, therapists, babysitters instead of teachers and instructors. It should be more like college.
Can confirm classrooms are hazardous environments. (I have a son that teaches, and my wife substitute teaches.)
Classroom discipline is hard to enforce. For women especially, the threat of violence is real.
I wish it weren't true, but many long-time teachers say they do not recommend it as a career choice.
Education does not automatically make the person getting it wiser, nor less prone to manipulation or cognitive errors. And remember that one of the effects of propaganda bombardment is to destroy judgement.
I've hired students who graduated with a low "C" average in their area of study, who were D- at the parts of their job that required that study, and had no personal interest or accurate knowledge to share about their study.
I don't think it's (entirely) that. Did you see the recent story about how college entrants at even highly selective schools, entrants coming from highly regarded private prep schools, are struggling to read books? That seems to me to be indicative of a problem different from what you're pointing out.
I don't think this is about education, but I suspect rather something more akin to "intellectual revenge". Let me explain : In my experience, people who are into conspiracy theories are usually people who have been intellectually marginalised or disparaged during their life. It's not about being stupid - I think that's besides the point - but it's about being called and made feel stupid, literally or metaphorically.
People don't want to believe they are stupid, and they especially don't want to believe the people (or institutions) who call them stupid are superior to them. So they find a way out, by believing something that not only makes them feel important (they know but other people don't), but also superior to those who ostracised them in the first place.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but somehow never came across any similar ideas anywhere, anybody got references (or comments) ?
It's just political polarization. Conservatives (of a certain variety) in the US are polarized against the establishment (the media, science, colleges, etc), and this is the result. Better education might save some of them, but not many. The smarter ones retain the same core beliefs without the abject silliness.
This is purely the result of "too much news". Breathless coverage of every little detail means every little mis-step blows up to infinity, quickly eroding trust.
The 24hr + internet news cycle is basically a reaction maximization optimization machine with a dt ~ 0. Fox News walked so Facebook could run and now Twitter is sprinting. Insert long form podcasts in the mix for a constant hum of algorithmic misinformation and this result is inevitable.
tl;dr: more people need to go out and touch some grass.
I'd argue that it is intentional nitpicking of science/institutions because they were a threat to concentrated business interests (tobacco, lead, fossil fuels, factory farming etc.)
Anecdotally you can spend some time on facebook and see exactly that they are not consuming news at all. The seem impervious to any link or discussion that doesn't automatically feed back into their trusted sources - which of course are not trustworthy
I think I'd move the quotes - the problem is too much "news", but I think you're right. It's 24/7 misinformation factories that push people to the point where they can assume that somehow the US government both has a hurricane machine and that it would use it on its own citizens, even though that doesn't stand up to any sort of rational introspection.
> That is what you get when you stop funding general education because you think people should pay for it themselves. People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
On the other hand, this sounds like something you just made up and decided to connect to the current topic. Is this fact or fiction?
I haven't seen any evidence that giving more money to academia improves student results. It certainly hasn't worked for colleges, where you've seen a negative correlation over many years between quality of education and funding.
Well then you haven't been looking very hard. If you look at PISA results (essentially the best data we have on this so far) there is a strong correlation between investment into education and performance.
This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.
This also happens whenever there is an apparent "win" even if it isn't quite so. For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. Same for the Iraq war, with "weapons of mass destruction" - imagine if your child died from that lie. Repeat this every year, in multiple institutions, for 20+ years straight; and yes, observant people might well think that everything the government has ever said is a hoax. It's not about the science, or their ability to track truth from falsehood, but their reactionary hate of anything the institutions say.
This isn't just distrust of the government and other public institutions. It's also distrust of:
- first-hand reports from other people
- private news networks
- the governments of other countries
The scale and degree of this distrust of other people is new. Arguably the US government was far, far less trustworthy in the past, such as when it was massacring people in Vietnam or secretly conducting experiments on Black people. These revelations did not lead to meteorologists getting death threats.
The idea that government institutions suddenly got more scandal ridden after 1990's is just pure golden age fallacy.
News networks, twitter and podcasts got 100x better at making mountains out of mole-hills because they had continuous access to an audience to fine-tune their reaction engines. That's it.
> Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that.
Not when it's thousands of people showing us photos and videos.
It's not that it's impossible that [insert major event here] is a conspiracy, but you always have to ask:
- is it possible for even a highly competent government to orchestrate this conspiracy with no whistleblowers?
- what is the benefit of the conspiracy to the conspirators?
- is the benefit of the conspiracy worth the effort?
In the case of "faking a hurricane," there is no incentive (and in fact there are disincentives to being wrong about it for the meteorologists) and there is no possibly way to orchestrate that large of a conspiracy.
If the CCP is unable to successfully disappear people or put Uyghurs in camps without people finding out about it, nothing this large could be pulled off in the US.
> You mean rebranded affiliates?
No, I mean the Weather Channel and others.
> I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.
I don't think you're doing what you think you're doing.
Observant people learn to evaluate the words of government officials as critically and analytically as they would treat any source. Credulous people switch from uncritical trust in government officials to uncritical trust in talk radio hosts, podcasters, and social media.
Staff government with people that hate government and got elected on the principle that government is the problem. Those people sabotage government at every opportunity, thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Use the chaos and dysfunction you created to sell public assets on the cheap to private companies.
I've seen this trajectory far too often to think what is happening is accidental.
Isn't the joke here that for most of modern history the flat earth discussions were a debate contest by people who didn't actually believe the earth was flat but enjoyed trying to prove it was? And then it leaked out and found a welcome home amongst people gullible enough to believe all of the "evidence" that had been concocted.
Modern flat earth theory owes more to fringe Christian theology and the general normalization of conspiracy theory and meme culture than anything to do with the Flat Earth Society.
> For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged.
This is such a weird way of looking at it.
Imagine, for simplicity, there's an optimal amount of fluoride to add, which is X. Also imagine science can guess the number but, obviously, it's not perfect.
What will happen is that we will start at some number, and gradually change it as we get more knowledge. Sometimes we'll be below X, sometimes we'll be above X. When we're above X, and we find it out, we'll say "Oops it was too much fluoride, let's reduce it a bit."
And obviously policymakers need to work on imperfect information, so sometimes we have to add Y amount of fluoride even though we know it's not optimal - because, the alternative, adding zero fluoride, would be actually worse.
This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.
You assume that if people were better educated, they would trust science and wouldn't be so upset.
I think it's the other way around: If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now.
When you defund science and education, these institutions have to turn elsewhere for funding, and now you're at the mercy of the one providing the funds...
the lack of integrity and accountability really has eroded trust in critical institutions society depends on. I can't blame people for being skeptical in science when anyone can see that scientists are routinely paid by corporations to to produce whatever results they want, and that you can pay to get even obvious garbage published in peer reviewed journals. The flat-earthers are wrong about the shape of the planet, the creationists are still wrong about evolution, but they're right that what passes for science these days is full of lies and can't be trusted.
I feel a degree of sympathy for antivaxxers for the same reason. Pharmaceutical companies get away with literal murder, the makers of medical devices are serial killers, and doctors are taking kickbacks to overprescribe dangerous medications. Even the CDC cares more about politics than the truth. The antivaxxers are still wrong about vaccines, but they're right that the medical industry can't be trusted.
When government waste and corruption goes unchecked people lose faith in the government. When the police are criminals, judges take kickbacks to send children into private prisons, and corrupt prosecutors go unpunished people lose faith in the justice system.
Resentment, distrust, fear, and uncertainty are just natural and appropriate responses to what's going on around us. Even if drastic action was taken today to increase accountability and transparency to fight the corruption and greed undermining people's faith in these institutions it would still take decades to restore the trust that's been lost and realistically, I don't see any kind of drastic action being taken to fix the problem any time soon, so I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.
There have always been scandals. What changes is that nearly half of America has given up its brain and free thought and allowed the right wing media machine and various messiahs (one in particular) to fill their brains with mush about conspiracies and fear of the other. It’s ridiculous that people don’t want to think for themselves.
I don't know, I think the biggest difference is that the view we have of government isn't heavily curated by a few major papers and news broadcasts. The dirty laundry is on display 24/7 and thanks to social media The Washington Post, The Flat Earth Society, and Dave the guy with "THE END IS NEAR" signs on the corner of main street are on the same newsstand.
And I don't think it's intelligence, smart people get sucked into cults all the time, being smart makes you
better at convincing yourself of the nonsense. It's self-administered cult indoctrination. I don't think anyone has defenses for this kind of stuff outside of being primed to believe it's nonsense.
> People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.
It doesn't matter "why" someone chooses to believe a conspiracy theory. What matters is how they came to be an adult that still believes in conspiracy theories - and the failure lies somewhere between bad parenting and the education system, and definitely not with meteorologists, even IF the public agency that employs meteorologists was involved in a scandal.
People going to flat earth and believing in flat earth are two separate things. As OP said -
> People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.
> Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.
That's what your gut reaction may tell you; but I don't believe this is reality. The refusal to accept widely-accepted science is often rooted in distrust of the official narrative.
It's like saying people commit violence, just because they like violence, or must be stupid. Most of the time there's an underlying cause.
This is the narrative that has been spun, that somehow Fox News (the largest TV channel) is not mainstream, that a candidate like Trump who's been rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous since he was born, is anti-establishment, while a former waitress winning a seat through a grass root campaign with very little funding is.
That we should mistrust scientists because they are biased and instead trust think tanks financed by tabacco and oil corporations as well as billionaires...
That government agencies like the EPA are to be mistrusted because everything government is bad, but that the military and police should be supported unconditionally even if they execute innocents in the streets.
> often rooted in distrust of the official narrative
I disagree from what I've seen.
I hear a lot of crazy conspiracies from Trump followers where I live. Including from my family.
On one hand they, they have a distrust for the establishment. But on the other they're dangerously close to fascists. I mean, Trump is a monarch to them. They don't trust the DOJ. Or the house. Or the senate. Or any of the agencies. But they trust Trump. If he says they're eating cats and dogs, then that's what they're doing.
It's very odd to be both in this "anti-establishment" headspace but also basically endorse and ask for a fascist government where one King makes all the rules. And you just trust him and have absolute loyalty.
That is to say, I don't think "distrust the gov" is the end of the discussion. There's more to it.
One of the elephants in the room, I think, is the religious dimension to the divide. Trumpists don't mistrust government per se, they mistrust secular government, but tend to approve of government that espouses and enforces traditional Christian ideology. They mistrust secular science because they believe it contradicts the Bible. Their opposition to LGBTQ people is rooted in a binary view of sex and gender based on Christian doctrine.
Even the "rural vs urban divide" people talk about is really a divide between Christianity, as expressed in "traditional values" and secularism. "Left" and "right" is "atheism" versus "faith," respectively. Communism and socialism are hated primarily because they're seen as anti-religion, and this extends to a hatred of leftism, liberalism, progressivism, etc as all similarly demonic in nature.
Aspects of this fundamental struggle between theology and secularism go all the way back to Reagan, at least, and I even believe back to the founding fathers. If you look deep enough into any of the systemic issues in American culture, you'll probably find religion somewhere at the heart of them.
The apparent contradiction between being anti-establishment but pro Trump (to the point of neo-fascism) makes sense in this context. Trumpists consider the establishment to be Satanic, and they believe Trump will replace it with a Christian theocratic order. And even a cursory glance at the Bible will tell you that the Kingdom of God is not even remotely a democracy.
I like to look into wacky conspiracies and where they come from.
Quite frankly, the most common reason people believe in a flat earth is because of biblical literalism. There are a few passages in the bible (which, if you ever watch a flat earth video, those almost always come out) which mention things like the earth having corners or god rolling it up like a scroll. Those verses are used as the grounding point for why the earth must be flat and all other evidence to the contrary is a lie.
This is also, consequentially, the origin of moon landing denialism. Mormons used to believe that the moon was literally a part of heaven. As a result, it'd be impossible for god to let someone fly a spaceship there. Pretty much exactly the same process happened "It couldn't have happened because our holy texts say the moon is the terrestrial kingdom... therefor it must be a hoax".
Yes: and in this case, one of the big underlying causes is one of our two political parties—in particular its presidential candidate—aggressively spreading disinformation specifically in order to win him the presidency. (Just as they did the last two times he was trying.)
Another is....a systemic lack of education in critical thinking and how to tell mis- and disinformation from truth.
There is a decrease in people's trust in institutions, but my read on it is that it is an effect of these other phenomena, rather than a cause.
I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.
Sure, politicians lie. Presidents are definitionally politicians, so they lie sometimes too.
But Donald Trump's lies are orders of magnitude more frequent and worse than any previous president, and frankly anyone trying to dispute that at this point is clearly using motivated reasoning.
I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.
I don't know how to quantify the extent to which I despise Donald Trump. Suffice it to say that it's "off the scale". And yet, while I agree with you in general, to some extent I think Trumpism is the symptom and not the disease itself. I think there's something deeper and older at play, something that enables Trump and his brand of bullshit to prosper. I don't pretend to understand exactly what it is.. maybe it's as simple as saying "education". Maybe not.
What I have been saying, which is admittedly a bit hand-wavy at the moment, is that "our culture is sick". We don't cherish, promote, and prioritize the right things IMO. We reward the wrong behaviors and - I believe - are somehow incentivizing the whole "rejection of science/math/logic/reason and embrace of ignorance" thing.
I think you are right, but only to a certain extent.
Yes, Trump brought out something that was already there, lying dormant. But without Trump, it would mostly have stayed dormant.
Trump's primary victory in 2016 was a massive fluke, primarily (from what I saw) enabled by a combination of the horribly fractured GOP field, with the party establishment unable to rally behind a single candidate until it was already too late, a bunch of people who thought it was funny and voted for Trump for the lulz, and a large number of people who were frustrated by the past few years. That latter group I think came in two basic flavors: the ones who were frustrated because we had a black president, and the ones who were frustrated because the GOP Congress was stopping everything he tried to do (but who didn't fully grasp that this was entirely the GOP's fault). I genuinely believe that had the circumstances been just a little bit different in any number of ways, Trump would never even have made it past the first primary.
Once he was in the position of being a major party presidential candidate, it amplified his voice and that voice gave permission for all the bigots and fascists in America and abroad to show themselves and join their power together.
That said, I think there is a sickness in our culture, and I think its current prominence can largely be traced to Reagan, through several other intermediaries.
What we don't cherish, promote, and prioritize is kindness and compassion for our fellow human beings—all of them.
Yep. I think we are generally in agreement. I just wish I knew a simple answer - or any answer - for fixing the "whatever it is" that's infecting our culture/society these days.
Unfortunately, I'm very sure that there is no one simple answer—it's so many interlocking things: education spending, voting rights, voting reform (eg, ranked-choice), more spending on basic needs...
On the bright side, this also means that improvement in any of them also helps, even if only a little bit, to pull the whole tangle further up.
I want to shout out a specific man quoted in the article.
> “I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann.
I grew up in Alabama, and I am positive James Spann has saved my life more than once with his tornado outbreak coverage. I can still hear him saying, "get to shelter now". He was a comforting voice at 2am when you and your family are huddled in the most central room of your house because mother nature is actively trying to kill you.
Yes! James Spann was and is an excellent source of meteorological information. I remember him coming to our school and talking to kids about his job and encouraging us to take an interest in science and the world around us. Alabama needs more people like him and fewer people who are likely to encourage conspiratorial thinking for political points at the potential cost of human life.
Maybe people are getting dumber because of COVID.[1] Even after recovery, having mild COVID seems to cost 3 IQ points.[1] Reinfection, 2 more IQ points.[2] This is for people who have recovered, and does not include "long COVID".
This is actually the result of Facebook, youtube the hyper focus on surfacing a topic a post you see share or like to keep you engaged. You see a post share it with your friends Facebook algo see your interest shows your a hundred and keeps taking deeper down the rabbit whole. So the main reason for this is social media. A few years ago I used to argue with family and friends over such stupid topics to tell them it is wrong but mostly keep quite or ignore as my mental health is more important to me.
This clicked for me back in 2015. A friend shared something on Facebook that sounded plausible but felt off. I looked into it, and added a polite comment pointing out that it was a hoax. With a link to the Snopes article. I expected a reaction like "haha, oops". Instead, she deleted my comment.
That's when I realized that Facebook was a platform for spreading digital viruses that use human minds as their host. I deleted my account shortly after and never returned.
That seems unlikely, but if we accept it's true, that's only 5% dumber for someone with an average IQ, and that doesn't seem like nearly enough to account for believing something obviously implausible like controlling hurricanes. If people had basic scientific literacy they should be able to see the amounts of energy needed would be staggering.
Between covid brain, ipad kids, heavy metal poisoning, and decades of attacks on the education system the US is dropping IQ points while mental illness is on the rise.
Did you leave out the /s? Or are you seriously implying the crazy conspiracy garbage we're seeing recently is a result of COVID? Because that sounds just as deranged as <waves hands at all the other dumb shit on the internet>.
It's not a joke. "A three-point downward shift in IQ would increase the number of U.S. adults with an IQ less than 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million – an increase of 2.8 million adults with a level of cognitive impairment that requires significant societal support."
Then there's long COVID. A detailed overview of that.[1] As of late 2023, about 5% of US adults report having long COVID. It appears that, if it lasts a year, there's usually no further recovery.
Some new results indicate that at least some long COVID sufferers still have a reservoir of the active virus.[2] That's encouraging, because antivirals may help them. It indicates where to look.
This is very real. Most people are tired of hearing about COVID, but the virus isn't tired.
Except a lot of this conspiracy nonsense is being propagated by people who are otherwise functioning adults, with decent jobs, etc. I'm not saying COVID isn't impacting IQs, but to claim that COVID is a major contributing factor to the current era of mainstream conspiracy theories is, as I said, just as insane as the rest of the madness.
I take COVID and long COVID seriously, but we have many examples of anti-rationality as a political problem predating the pandemic. The fact that Trump was elected as a candidate who was more about slogans than policies and achieved political success by being overtly anti-intellectual seems to weaken your theory of COVID as the sole or even major factor.
Think farther back to conspiracy theories that gained wide acceptance in earlier administrations - FEMA concentration camps, Obama isn't a US citizen, 9-11 was an inside job etc. The same patterns of ideation were laid out in Richard Hofstatder's famous essay 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' which was written in 1964: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
...and of course you could trace them farther back through the red scare, the interwar period, the gilded age, post Civil War reconstruction, and the ideas that drove the outbreak of the civil war in the first place.
So while I agree COVID is an exacerbating factor, it's a quantitative rather than a qualitative change.
Anti-rationality and ignorance aren't new to the scene in the US. In 1980, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay titled "Cult of Ignorance." [1]
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and
there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism
has been a constant thread winding its way through our
political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion
that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as
your knowledge.'”
These kinds of articles reinforce my idea that we're witnessing our society collapse before our very eyes. I tend to blame it on Republican idiocracy and Russian trolling, but I suspect the problem is larger than that.
It's just depressing.
Is the US the only country suffering from this lunacy, or is this a more global phenomenon?
Its crazy elsewhere too like in the UK, Hungary, Russia, most of eastern and southern europe, India, Brasil, etc. same MO just nationalist/racist/anti intellectual/conspiracy junk shared on social media.
When hasn't it been mainstream? It sure qualified as mainstream for JFK assassinations and arguably Roswell as well. And that is before going to the Know-Nothings and their anti-catholic conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories about JFK, Roswell, moon-landings, and things like that are basically harmless. Well, mostly harmless anyway. Usually spread by someone trying to flog some nonsense book, or a confused "true believer".
But this is different: it's just a plain ordinary self-serving lie. Completely invented by a sad narcissistic liar and his merry band of sycophantic enablers to win ("win") an election.
There's also a type of maliciousness to it that's lacking in more traditional conspiracy theories.
We probably shouldn't even call it "conspiracy theory".
I read an Atlantic article the other day where a lit professor from Columbia University said that he has students nowadays who admit to having never read a book cover to cover. Ones that have tend to say their favorite book is something like Percy Jackson. They also can't focus on a small poem. This confirms what a teacher I know has been saying for a long time: highschool kids since around the class of 2010 are getting very noticably stupider.
I'm beginning to wonder if social media really has caused kids to miss key developmental stages. Parents being on their phones has led to kids hearing a substantially reduced vocabulary, these kids also receive less interaction from their parents and interact less with their environments and other kids. This stuff is really important for brain development, and we've replaced it with an iPhone.
I don't think social media started this, just accelerated the trend. I do think commercialized media for decades now has really been a driver of insipid banality.
But, ignorance predisposes you to stupidity. In the absence of knowledge, you can either admit you don't know enough about a topic to have an informed opinion on it, or, you can cobble together some bullshit, making up stuff as you go.
Since admitting you know nothing takes humility, most (ignorant) people opt to cobble together bullshit. Or accept plausible-sounding cobbled-up bullshit as true.
I guess my point is that we as a society have allowed things to get to a point where some of our brightest students have graduated highschool without ever reading a book, or having to focus their attention undivided for the duration of a short poem.
What kind of society produces kids like that? Our values have changed focus from effort, hard work and self improvement to ease, comfort and a one-dimensional notion of happiness. It's a downward spiral.
She's also not the only one, she's just low hanging fruit. This same point can be made about Trump, and as you know, he has a lot of dedicated followers who are smart, functioning adults. Not Gen Z.
And MTG is 50 and she has to know what she's spouting is nonsense, so why does she spout it? Is her audience really that dimwitted, or is there something else at play? For example, is this part of some mass brainwashing ploy? Are they Jim Jonesing millions of Americans? If so, then to what end?
Are all the people parroting this stuff actually believers? My instinct is that the majority tried to grab the bull by the horns by jumping on the Trump schtick when he took power and are now left riding this increasingly deranged and unpredictable animal. At this point they can do nothing but try to keep holding on lest they be trampled by the beast they created.
But there's also gotta be true believers in there, and yeah, I don't know what those people actually want, and it's pretty scary.
The lunacy is definitely worse in the Anglosphere. I moved to Eastern Europe a few years ago and it's way more sane (and yes, I speak the local languages here).
There's always been nutcases (apologies to people with actual mental illness).
The problem is that politicians (worldwide) have figured out how to utilize them for their own benefit.
I agree that at times it does seem like a very bad premonition.
I can’t imagine this kind of stuff happens in the PRC.
The upside to a tightly-controlled “infosphere” is that people who are at the controls and have rational thought can jump right in and quench the idiocy fires right away.
Funny enough, the fact that your link lists 9 pages compared to 112 for the US[1], it could be taken as stronger evidence for the parent's point. Not that I think this is a particularly reliable way to gauge the phenomenon.
And the downside of that upside is that they jump right in and quench things, not always on the basis of idiocy, but also on the basis of opposing the government's narrative. That doesn't actually lead to rationality.
It is significantly worse in the PRC, where they don't believe that the Uyghur genocide is happening. At least (for now) the West has no similar level of denial about something within their own borders.
It is global. I was just in Poland. Literally same thing as in the US just a bit different flavor. Mainstream media bad, covid fake just a little flu and used to control society, proud for not wearing masks, did not vaccinate because some crazy reasons.
Not everyone obviously, but I was visiting smaller cities where I grew up. I always thought I could go back one day but I don't think I would be able to deal with people there. The customer service is non existent and when you are shopping/getting services you are an inconvenience. Crazy.
I think many other cultures are crippled by pervasive conspiracies that re-enforce views of having no agency. And their rulers like it that way.
In street drug circles today there are widespread complaints about the quality of fentanyl, withdrawal effects and treatment. OD's are apparently dropping. For those that live in some semblance of reality, I think many there's withdrawal going on. For those that don't get out and call in threats like this, they don't really believe anything persistently, they just believe whatever is the rage of the day. They'll OD someday, you just won't see it in the obits.
A few people say or do something completely nutty and the 'country is suffering this lunacy'. At what golden period in history were there no nutcases pitching some irrational extremes into the public sphere?
On the other hand maybe I'm quite wrong about all this. Someone has estimated (an open calculation) the payback time for the US debt burden at 90,000 years if it was paid back at the rate of $1,000,000 per day. Some might argue there's lunacy at work over many decades to achieve this result.
$1m per day divided by ~400m population is essentially zero. Why even mention this? It's just using numbers with a lot of zeros to sound scary, but means nothing.
1. It's different because the internet feeds us every bit of lunacy that happens anywhere in the country, so it looks like everyone has gone insane. (Especially in politics, where the Ds will tell you about every single stupid thing an R says anywhere in the country, and the Rs will tell you about every single stupid thing a D says.)
2. The national debt is probably a result of long-term lack of wisdom, yes. But with an economy the size of the US, there is absolutely no reason to pay it back at only $1,000,000/day. A serious attempt would be more like $1,000,000,000/day.
My take is that this is a symptom of something else. Populism has existed for a long time, but it feels to me that the environment we created also created the perfect target audience for it on a scale that never existed before. Observing the alt-right and conspiracy bubbles collapse into one over the last five years, it feels like it's the result of a sort of mental defense mechanism for a group of people that is growing every day. As I see it, we have built a world around us that is very complex and abstract, and hostile to the mind in a way that enables this sort of ideology immensely.
In it, it is very hard to feel a sort of purpose, and it is very easy to be overwhelmed. On average, the work people do has little to no effect on themselves or their direct peers. All day, every day is spent shuffling around numbers on a spreadsheet, or doing work to aid someone who shuffles around numbers on a spreadsheet. Then you clock out having a net zero benefit on your life, or that of people that matter. Other than, of course, a number that goes up in a different spreadsheet. And while you do your shuffling about to scrape by another month, you get bombarded with a flood of information about this war or that catastrophe or those disasters.
It leaves people numb, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, helpless, purposeless, etc.
Keep that up long enough, and what happens is something like a narcissistic collapse, except that it's not narcissists it happens to, but normal, healthy but vulnerable minds whose mental health can no longer be reconciled with a toxic reality.
In comes an ideology that does three things: It simplifies. It gives purpose. It provides an outlet.
Once you subscribe to it, everything returns from countless shades of gray to black and white. If you're not one of the good guys, you're one of the bad guys. If a bad guy says a thing, it's a bad thing. If you say a bad thing, you're a bad guy. The simple prescriptive labels of what counts as good and bad are delivered to you, on the house. Takes away all the nuance, all the complexity and all the mental burden that came with it.
Then, it gives purpose. If you fall into this hole, you end up seeing yourself as two things: A victim, and a savior. You see what others don't, and you suffer for it. "They" - the bad guys - are out to get you, to destroy everything. Every confrontation is thus someone attacking you, the victim, or defying you, the savior. It provides a narrative in a chaotic world where bad things happen for no reason and without explanation.
Last, it creates a target for all your bottled up frustration and anger. The bad guys are responsible for all the bad things, and it is made clear how very okay it is to channel all your negative emotions into hate towards some group. Be it Jewish people, immigrants, scientists, democrats or some imaginary lizard people. Hate is fine.
The end result is a full abdication of responsibility, and a return of control at the low, low price of a divorce from reality. To the mind that slips into this rabbit hole it is not so much a choice as it is a lifeline. That is why it is so incredibly hard to get people out of it, as well.
This sounds like a discussion I'd love to have with you over a beer!
With that in mind, how serious are you? This is fascinating stuff and sounds like you've been thinking about it for a while. Is this your attempt to make sense of it all or is this reflective of something you've observed and studied?
It turns out that "The remedy for bad speech is more speech" doesn't actually scale globally.
You can blame this on Russian and/or Chinese disinformation ops and tik-tok, etc, but the problem is more general than that. One of the assumptions around free speech ideals is that the people who are speaking or publishing are citizens of the community in which they are speaking or publishing, and now a large part of the content on the internet is produced by people who are crossing national boundaries, or not even produced by people at all.
You used to be able to assume that the vast majority of the content you're exposed to is produced by people who live in your community or country and would not like to see it destroyed, and now, in fact, you should probably assume the opposite. You should assume that most content on the internet is produced by bad actors trying to rip the fabric of your society apart, particularly if you're reading something that enrages you.
The especially insidious part of this is that most of the rage bait stuff plays on widespread personal biases so it's self sustaining after a while. People start to hate each other, so then they do stuff to each other to make each other hate each other more and so on and so on until you've got Rwanda.
not really -- rather consider the ability of a very small minority of voices to amplify tremendously without sufficient dampening.. stability in public communication is never simple. A psychologist might say that social rage itself, or anger with blame itself, is the root of the behavior. Every language group on Earth has rational, constructive people in it.
Russian propaganda doesn't actually necessary need to collude with the people who's voices they amplify to meet their goals.
(it also doesn't necessarily need to spread false information, either. The general strategy is just 'find divisive statements and/or figures and amplify them'. Making up their own isn't usually necessary)
Just because no one acted doesn't mean that "they essentially found nothing".
The Muller report described Russian interference in the 2016 election as “sweeping and systemic.” The report spent a bunch of pages saying that there were “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.”
Which are you saying - that the Muller report didn't find things, despite it clearly finding things, or that it was a coup, even though it was under the Trump admin, by DAs placed by Trump?
Go watch the interview with Mueller at the end of the investigation. He was completely senile and knew nothing about the case. Mueller himself was a puppet for other people.
The "other people" being Trump's DAs? Why would that be the case? Do you believe that Muller did the entire report alone? Who was behind the coup? Why did it fail?
If you look through your last few messages you'll see that your argument is constantly changing. First that they investigated and found nothing, but then presented with evidence you try to discredit that source of evidence, first by saying they didn't find anything, and changing tactics to accuse Muller of senility. It as if the truth doesn't so much matter as maintaining your worldview does.
My argument isnt changing, its just there were so many holes in the investigation I dont even know where to start. I'm busy at work, but again, just go watch the end of the investigation interview with Muller. Watch how little he understands, how little he was involved. Then go watch all media coverage, and how they Gush over him. Go look at the facts of what actually came out. Why didnt they prosecute trump? If you cant look at the above points with open eyes and read between the lines, then you are clouded by ideology.
The muller interview doesnt disprove/get Trump off the hook at all. It was for me, just a shocking display of realizing that what was shown in the public eye about the invesitgation had nothing to do with the reality.
Much like everyone realizing biden isnt running the country, and probably has alzheimers.
I appreciate that you're repeating talking points about Muller, but that's ignoring that Muller had a whole team. Does Muller being feeble mean that the content in his report is wrong?
They didn't prosecute Trump because the report was presented to Barr. He had no interest in prosecuting, and there was a ton of constitutional questions regarding charging a sitting president.
Do you believe that all people charged and found guilty as an outcome of the investigation were innocent and it was all political theatre? There were a lot of people who weren't Trump, where there were no constitutional problems, who were found guilty.
To wit, Barr spread disinformation (otherwise known as "lies") about the report before it was even released to the public. Barr made sure the well was poisoned before anyone could get a drink.
> it was political theater, and essentially a coup
That's an interesting relabeling of what would normally be regarded as simply the gathering, vetting, and reporting of evidence — some reliable, some not — in accordance with established statutory- and constitutional processes and norms.
If it'd really been a coup, Trump would either have been imprisoned without trial or he'd have fled the country to Russia or someplace else without an extradition treaty.
This is what happens when you coopt science as cover for political decisions - people stop trusting all "science" including real science. From what I've seen I more associate the issue with Democrats than Republicans, especially in the COVID lockdown days.
> From what I've seen I more associate the issue with Democrats than Republicans, especially in the COVID lockdown days.
Can you explain the chain of logic here? During the pandemic I "did my own research" which amounted to basically masking when other people did and getting the vaccines as they came out. At the time my SO was a nurse working on a hospital covid floor, so it seemed prudent. So, I'm not really sure how you see Democrats as being less science based? No snark intended, I'm truly curious.
My interpretation of their comment is that it's the other way around. Democrats tend to use "science" to justify political decisions. Because people don't like those political decisions, and/or because pop science is allegedly used vs "real science", it devalues "real science" and causes people not to trust it as much
The left also tends to use higher education in their political positions. Which is why the right now seems to really have a bone to pick with higher education.
What people should be asking is, why does science have a supposedly left-leaning bias? Why does education have a left-leaning bias? It feels like there's some obvious conclusions the republican can draw there, but they see those conclusions and draw something else instead.
> Democrats tend to use "science" to justify political decisions.
I'd much rather politicians use science to justify political decisions instead of just doing whatever is popular, or would make them and their friends the most money.
I won't say "less science based" but I will say "mixes science and politics".
For example, there were covid lockdowns because "science" but then if anyone wanted to participate in the George Floyd protests and join a huge crowd of people that was A-OK, no pushback on that, no "scientific" worries about virus transmittal applied.
In that case "science" just becomes another tool to suppress the other side.
I will add to this that a very common line among republicans during COVID was "it's no worse than the flu". I heard this from my family members even though I lost a few from COVID. I nearly lost a sister-in-law in her 20s from COVID (she came DAMN close) and she is still anti-vax/mask/etc.
We can also talk about misinformation about covid vaccines. I mean, it's really kind of depressing that one of the best decisions of the Trump administration (IMO) was project warp speed which got mRNA vaccines approved and on the shelves in record time. But now, he can't really talk about that as a positive thing because the entire republican party is against those very vaccines.
we are mostly unable to process the fact that science lied to us
what's worse, it became an authoritative tool of (often foreign) powers; at least in most of America (as science came from Europe, ...they brought us "culture" when they colonized us in the south; the north did not get colonized but replaced)
but of course science lied, but it's not that it lied, it is that it changes. newer truth comes along and fights the old truth until it dies ("the pace of scientific funerals")
turns out, breaking people's trust is much easier than gaining it.
but my hill to die on, is the old truth of material scarcity and media (or licensing) content versus the new truth of digital abundance and freely sharing things without the license to do so. why do I need permission from some faceless corporate owner to copy cultural assets that I love and wish to share?
I have only anecdata for this, but I have a strong suspicion that people just don't think about things on social media the same way they do physical interactions.
If someone standing outside the grocery store hands you a flyer that claims the government can control the weather and they're sending you hurricanes on purpose, you'd dismiss them as insane and continue on your way. When your high school buddy Denise posts it on Facebook, though, you're more likely to believe it. Even if you'd think Denise would be crazy if she went out and handed out flyers at the grocery store.
It's like most of us have a built-in crazy filter that works fine for in-person interactions, but it breaks down when that exact same interactions happens online.
I'm not so sure about this explanation; people believed in conspiracy theories in the past. Witch-hunts for example are fundamentally not that different from Q-Anon and all of that bollocks: "mysterious dark forces do evil stuff when we're not looking".
The whole "they're abusing our children" is also a trope that goes back a long time, most recently during the 80s with the whole "Satanic Ritual Abuse" stuff. That was much worse, because innocent people's lives were complete wrecked over what was complete bollocks. Pizzagate is near-identical, with s/daycare/pizzahut/.
More examples can be found throughout history – they're typically not called "conspiracy theories", but often they're not that different at its core.
I think what social media has done is allowing people to reach a wider audience. That person outside the grocery store reaches what, maybe a few hundred people with several hours of work? On the internet you can reach about 1.5 billion English speaking people with a minute of work. And that person outside the grocery store has no real way to organise a meaningful community, even if they do manage to gain 2 or 3 acolytes. On the internet you just create a Facebook group, or reddit sub, or whatever.
And all of that is including only the "crazy people". Add bad faith actors to the mix spreading misinformation simply to cause chaos and things quickly become well fucked.
This is why I never believe a tweet that I can’t confirm myself. I only pay attention to sciencey/CS people on twitter. Talking heads and political sources there are always nearly extremely biased and most are flat out untruthful.
I’m beginning to understand the worldview of these people. For those who don’t understand science and technology, it is simply magic. And the government and scientists are magicians. So it’s not surprising when they blame the magicians for what is happening to them. From their point of view, their entire experience is dictated by powerful figures who create magical things such as “click a button to make stuff appear at my home with same day shipping” and “bring Napoleon alive on the screen”. I’m beginning to understand why they start to attribute everything to these entities who create such seemingly impossible things. It is a type of pagan idolatry.
This is not an education issue, conspiracy theory prevalence is driven entirely by social dynamics and motivated reasoning. Watch that 2018 documentary about flat-earthers; one of the main 'characters' is like an aeronautics engineer capable of setting up a $12K laser gyroscope, but unwilling to believe it when it tells him the Earth is not flat. MGT is not spouting this stuff because she's stupid, she's spouting it because she can use the narrative to further her political agenda. All this conspiracy stuff over the last 10 years starts from what people want to be true about the world (ex. "the current political regime is evil and it is ethical to overthrow it"), and works backwards to decide what facts will justify that ("they are using the weather to hurt their political enemies"). That rank-and-file voters parrot this stuff is because it's a shibboleth for their social circle, and because it gives their chosen political proxies clout and attention; its truth is irrelevant to all but the most gullible.
I've always been fascinated by conspiracy theories. The weather weapon conspiracy isn't even new. I remember hearing "they" were controlling the weather to create storms using HAARP [0] like 20 years go.
Back then you had to seek this stuff out though. It was on obscure internet forums, fringe websites, and late night talk radio.
I am not sure what to make of the current situation. Its concerning. I think there are a lot of factors at play though with a big one being we gave everyone a megaphone and then monetized the result regardless of any negative consequences.
It’s time that the government forms a department for this to prosecute these crimes, including working with interpol to track down foreign criminals. Then throw them in jail for a very long time. Death threats shouldn’t count as pranks but precursors to murder and be charged harshly (5-10 years in prison). I don’t care if you’re a radicalized suburban mom or MS13, no mercy for this buffoonery
The problem is we taught people to trust science, instead of teaching them science. People should learn to be able to critically analyze data and statistics.
Is the real crisis here Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/TikTok? The lies just fly through all of them in an instant.
Why bother sending a military against the United States when we can be divided defeated by some guy "just asking questions" after "doing his own research" and sharing to his millions of followers.
It's mind boggling. And I can't even begin to explain it. We live in an age when something pretty close to the sum total of human scientific knowledge is available online, and mostly for free (especially if you count shadow libraries like Anna's Archive, LibGen, Sci-Hub, Zlib, etc). There's millions or billions of pages of high-quality scientific content, millions or billions of hours of lectures on everything from Geology to Abstract Algebra to High Energy Physics.
Anybody can use Khan Academy to get a reasonably decent education on critical aspects of math and science. Sites like Stack Exchange, (some) sub-reddits, physicsforums.com, etc. make it possible for anybody to solicit feedback and corrections on almost any technical topic.
In short, it's possible to be as educated as you want to be, and it's mostly free except for the time and effort involved. And instead a large portion of the population seem to be not only not pursuing real knowledge, but actively rejecting it and embracing obvious bullshit.
WTH people?
OK yes.. I know. Somebody is going to say it. The critical phrase above is time and effort involved. And maybe that's right. Maybe it's just laziness. But somehow that doesn't feel right. And I understand the notion that the widespread interconnectedness of the Internet allows small numbers of people with fringe beliefs to "find each other" and reinforce each other's nuttery, and that has some amplification effect on the prevalence of flat-earth thinking, etc.
And yet, I still don't think that explains what's going on with people. And the frank truth is, I don't have an explanation. Or a solution. And I wish I did. I hope sombody does. Because as @taylodl says in another thread:
These kinds of articles reinforce my idea that we're witnessing our society collapse before our very eyes.
I can't explain it either, but maybe prophesies of impending collapse are a bit premature. The world has never been particularly rational, even in places that have near 100% literacy. Just look at the number of people who believe in astrology or homeopathy, not to mention that one guy who created the Earth and its inhabitants some 4000 years ago, in six days no less.
Fair enough. But I'll just say that I feel like I've seen a pronounced change in my lifetime, and more pointedly in the last 5-10 years, that I find acutely disturbing, even compared against that "background rate".
And maybe the answer really is as simple as "social media". Which I find to be a sad idea, as the potential of social media act as a force for good still exists and is something I've always been particularly appreciative of.
For myself, the last 5 years have been a qualitative change. I don't think the unreasonableness of the world has increased that much per se, but since COVID it has started to intrude into my life in ways that it didn't before. Social media, or abuse thereof, seems a likely culprit, but there's probably more to it. In any case, I mostly agree with you, despite my previous comment.
> And yet, I still don't think that explains what's going on with people. And the frank truth is, I don't have an explanation.
Humans are social creatures and feel the need to align with those around them. Combine this natural inclination with social media algorithms that show you more and more of whatever they have determined to be "engaging content", and you get a feedback loop that spreads viral content and drives people insane.
I think sadly there are some people that simply will not be able to understand the material. For them it is much easier to believe in fairy tales and giant egg beaters that cause hurricanes than it is to study science. They certainly are concerned about a reproducibility crisis in academia.
If I've learned anything by occasionally listening to Joe Rogan is that people (men I guess?) demand to be heard - even if they have no idea what they're talking about. The fact that exist means they should have a say in matters they have no understanding off in the slightest.
It's not hard to accept that stupid people fall for these kinds of conspiracy theories, but I'll never forget that one professor I had in uni who was teaching us chaos theory and dynamical systems and was convinced that the government was controlling the weather. I'm kinda skeptical how much education can do to fix conspiratorial thinking. If even a professor teaching chaos theory is convinced that the government is controlling the weather then frankly anyone could probably be convinced.
You've got to look at rates. I'd place a substantial bet that the percentage of professors, or even just college grads, who believe that is lower than in the general population. (Though you have to be specific about the question. We can control the weather in some very limited ways, but we can't, for example, trigger a hurricane. Or prevent one.)
yeah, idiots fall for more misinformation, but lots of very well educated people still fall for conspiracy theories. I feel like it's more of a lack of trust than a lack of education.
MGT accused Democrats of colluding with other worldly forces and creating Milton.
She said "ask your government if the weather is being manipulated or controlled. Did you give them permission to do this? Are you paying for it? Of course you are paying for it."
She said the same thing about Helene. She is feeding the mental illness that grips MAGA. This is a sitting Representative and has the full support and admiration of the Republican Candidate for President.
Even Republicans are now coming out to try to explain that humans can't create or control Hurricanes all while their own and their Candidate for President is suggesting otherwise.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a Representative, not Senator. Even for the Republican party she’s a weirdo and she’s only able to win due to the “unique” demographics of her district. She’s unlikely to be able to win a statewide race anywhere, and Senators in general tend to be less radical.
> Even for the Republican party she’s a weirdo and she’s only able to win due to the “unique” demographics of her district
What are the unique demographics of her district? I know it is heavily gerrymandered to make it almost impossible for anyone other than a Republican to win the general election, but to get to be the Republican candidate in the general election they have to win the Republican primary.
In every Republican primary she has won there were several other conservative Republicans who were not batshit insane and were actually well qualified to be a Representative in Congress. So why is she winning?
Her district is mostly rural Appalachia and the Republicans that vote for her feel neglected by the mainstream branches of both parties so MTG is their political hand grenade.
This is all second hand info so take it with a grain of salt.
I have to disagree with you here. Most of the Senators from the GOP have been happy to share the same drivel. Indeed, Senator JD Vance and Donald Trump — arguably the most powerful men in the GOP are as unhinged as MTG.
I predict that if Trump does not get elected, the GOP will completely drop his name and they will act as though he never existed.
He is truly insane. It is unbelievable to me that the mainstream GOP - who I have always perceived as reasonable people - would back him with such loyalty. But, then again, due to his previous presidency he probably has the best odds.
As always, the media softens the truth to try and keep their subscriber numbers up. Or their inboxes from overflowing with death threats. They sugarcoat the problem as "political polarization" but this is bullshit. These conspiracy theories are almost entirely a right wing phenomenon.
If you put a Trump sign in your yard, will you get death threats? Nope. Laughed at? Maybe, but not to your face.
People are afraid of Trump supporters. Now try putting a Harris sign in your yard. Your local sheriff will tell the world to make sure they keep track of you for future recriminations. You'll get anonymous death threats in your mailbox.
There is sickness in politics today, but the solution is not "fix both sides."
Agreed, I won't absolve the left from having some loonies. But they are recognized as the loonies they are. On the right it has become mainstream. The things I hear from friends and family are just mind blowing, and they think what they're saying is normal. So much anger, so much venom.
> These conspiracy theories are almost entirely a right wing phenomenon
This is true, but probably not for the reasons you think it is. "Left wing" in the US refers to a set of very closely converged beliefs that are largely defined by academia and journalists. "Right wing", then, includes virtually everything else. Republicans, libertarians, democrats 30 years ago, russia, national socialism, and conspiracy theories on how the moon is made of pudding. Saying this is tautological because by definition, if you don't believe the official narratives, you are not left wing. Muslims often get classified by the ADL as right-wing as well for the same reason.
>If you put a Trump sign in your yard, will you get death threats? Nope. Laughed at? Maybe, but not to your face. People are afraid of Trump supporters. Now try putting a Harris sign in your yard. Your local sheriff will tell the world to make sure they keep track of you for future recriminations. You'll get anonymous death threats in your mailbox.
I'll adjust my definition, then. By right wing I mean republican. Conspiracy theories are that mainstream now.
> Now this is just creative writing.
Respectfully, you're not paying attention, or you are willfully deluding yourself if you believe this to be true. Democrats didn't gang up on a Trump bus and try to run it off the road. Can you imagine the shitstorm if they did?
Democrats largely don't have the devotion to their representatives so putting up yard signs and waving flags isn't nearly as much of a thing, but I assure you many people I know won't advertise their political opinions in any way because it endangers their health. And when they do put something up, it's small and unobtrusive, so as to avoid attracting too much attention.
Reap what you sow, I guess. Call for violence enough times and you find people that are willing to use it. Like a guy who supported you but became disillusioned. A risk of riling up people is they're not guaranteed to always be for you.
> Please tell me where the highest violent protesters reside? blue or red states?
Of the top five most violent states, four of them are 'red states.'
There is a problem with this logic though, Trump says some wild things, like the "illegal immigrants are eating your pets". This can result in real violence against those groups.
If you say extreme things that get a positive or a very negative reaction you run this risk. Wasn't one of the attempts by a registered republican?
You cannot assume the attempts were done by democrats.
What about the republican voter that drove through protesters in Charlottesville? That has happened in 2017, so within your 10 year timeframe.
Both dems and reps say ridiculous stuff. Or did you only read half of history in the past 30 years?
Yes, the attempts were both done by democrats. Both of which gave contribution. Do you not know how to use the search bar?
The UTR rally is one of hundreds of rallies that happened between 2014-2024. the murderer had no political ties with Reps. Whoever fed you this lie made you a disservice. You believed in a total and utter lie for 7+ years.
No... Trump definitely says way more ridiculous stuff than Kamala or Biden.
Granted, Trump does not belong in the GOP. But, he's their champion right now. The end result is that average republicans now look insane. Maybe they're not - but Trump is, and they are very loyal to him.
I can't remember the last time I have seen a politician make such blatantly offensive statements. The way he speaks about women is hard to listen to. The racist things he says and implies are kind of unbelievable. I mean, Bush was never like this.
It is only 1 to 2 at best. You forgot the weird Indian Nazi and (badly) attempted assassin from Missouri, Sai Varshith Kandula. And that is excluding everyone else who got arrested for death threats.
To get clicks, or to keep people alive after a few storms in the not-that-distant past were not recognized for the monsters they were until it was too late for people to evacuate?
There is certainly a risk that people will take the next warnings less seriously. And then an unexpectedly large number of people will die, and we will cycle again.
Guys I am not disagreeing with anyone here but the patents for weather technologies are very real and gag orders are also very real so could someone please explain or link to info on why these things exist instead of saying covid made people stupid, which I assume means you also think yourself and all government leaders are now dumber? That does not mean anyone is causing hurricanes but maybe if more information on technologies that has been for decades was explained it would not be so confusing and these things would not get so out of hand.
One doesn't need to be able to build the thing they patent. I've seen conspiracy theorist link to weather technology patents but they are things like "create a fog", which I think we'll both agree is SLIGHTLY less energetic than the current extreme weather, so if you know of a patent for and evidence of a working hurricane machine I'd like to see it. We can't just say "well they seed rain, therefore they have a hurricane machine".
> the patents for weather technologies are very real
Would you cite some of them, then? Especially ones that are not just "weather technologies" but are capable of creating, amplifying, and/or steering hurricanes?
That is what you get when you stop funding general education because you think people should pay for it themselves. People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
I benefit when others around me get better education, that's why I'm happy when my taxes are used to fund schools and universities and other ways of educating people. And it also benefits the economy, so every tax dollar/euro spend on education has a huge ROI.
No it isn't. There people are not clueless ignoramuses, they're paranoid assholes who have chosen to weaponize their dislike of anything 'official' for political ends. There is a market for propaganda and it is thriving, because many people want their biases reinforced.
Thinking the issue is a lack of education is a kind of procrastination, as if we can just fix this over a 20 year span. Ignorance is not the problem here, malice is. There are plenty of ignorant people who are uninformed or believe silly things without being assholes about it.
There's an unwillingness on HN to engage with the fact that the amplification effect of the broadcast/internet/social media selects for liars and propagandists and fraudsters absent countering mechanisms. That's why spamming and scamming are ubiquitous in our super high tech civilization.
While I agree with this, I will say that people most susceptible to propaganda and confirmation bias are people who lack critical thinking skills IMO.
Critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, as taught in your average language arts and social studies courses, specifically calls out bias and teaches kids how to be skeptical. When I was in school, we read passages and books and got to make whatever conclusion we wanted. But the essay we wrote had to be evidence-based. The teacher didn't care so much what we said, but rather that we could form a logical string to say it.
All this is to say, I think yes - if public education is further destroyed this will only get worse.
America spends $15k per child for education. That is a ridiculous amount of funding. I think most teachers are of the opinion that the educational decline is due to NCLB, Common Core, and other top-down initiatives that give them less power yet more responsibilities. Many teachers complain that 1-2 students disrupt a class of 25-30 students, but they can't do anything about it.
The amount of money we spend "for education" isn't reflective of the money that goes to educating children. We have waste, corruption, and people stuffing their pockets everywhere. Schools spend more of that money on sports than actual teaching. In the end, criminally unpaid teachers have to buy even the most basic school supplies with their own money or beg parents to provide them for the over-crowded classrooms in buildings that are falling apart.
I found slightly different numbers, but the exact details don't matter.
If $12.5k is spent per child per year, and there are 20 children per classroom, that's $250k.
Combining random sources (which use widely different divisions), I see numbers like:
Teachers are simply overloaded and parents have given up responsibility for keeping their kids in check. Little Tommy can do no wrong and is just misunderstood. I personally feel if a child is disrupting class and the experience for others, out they go, back to the parents. Public education should be free, but it has to have conditions that your little Tommy isn’t messing it up for those who are there to learn. We’ve grown too lenient and expect teachers to be cops, therapists, babysitters instead of teachers and instructors. It should be more like college.
Even in Canada one of my kids decided to try a different school because their class was so disruptive.
Can confirm classrooms are hazardous environments. (I have a son that teaches, and my wife substitute teaches.) Classroom discipline is hard to enforce. For women especially, the threat of violence is real. I wish it weren't true, but many long-time teachers say they do not recommend it as a career choice.
Education does not automatically make the person getting it wiser, nor less prone to manipulation or cognitive errors. And remember that one of the effects of propaganda bombardment is to destroy judgement.
I've hired students who graduated with a low "C" average in their area of study, who were D- at the parts of their job that required that study, and had no personal interest or accurate knowledge to share about their study.
I don't think it's (entirely) that. Did you see the recent story about how college entrants at even highly selective schools, entrants coming from highly regarded private prep schools, are struggling to read books? That seems to me to be indicative of a problem different from what you're pointing out.
I don't think this is about education, but I suspect rather something more akin to "intellectual revenge". Let me explain : In my experience, people who are into conspiracy theories are usually people who have been intellectually marginalised or disparaged during their life. It's not about being stupid - I think that's besides the point - but it's about being called and made feel stupid, literally or metaphorically.
People don't want to believe they are stupid, and they especially don't want to believe the people (or institutions) who call them stupid are superior to them. So they find a way out, by believing something that not only makes them feel important (they know but other people don't), but also superior to those who ostracised them in the first place.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but somehow never came across any similar ideas anywhere, anybody got references (or comments) ?
This has little to do with education.
It's just political polarization. Conservatives (of a certain variety) in the US are polarized against the establishment (the media, science, colleges, etc), and this is the result. Better education might save some of them, but not many. The smarter ones retain the same core beliefs without the abject silliness.
Then why is the problem worst among Boomers [1]?
Alternate Theory:
This is purely the result of "too much news". Breathless coverage of every little detail means every little mis-step blows up to infinity, quickly eroding trust.
The 24hr + internet news cycle is basically a reaction maximization optimization machine with a dt ~ 0. Fox News walked so Facebook could run and now Twitter is sprinting. Insert long form podcasts in the mix for a constant hum of algorithmic misinformation and this result is inevitable.
tl;dr: more people need to go out and touch some grass.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7505057/#:~:tex....
I'd argue that it is intentional nitpicking of science/institutions because they were a threat to concentrated business interests (tobacco, lead, fossil fuels, factory farming etc.)
Anecdotally you can spend some time on facebook and see exactly that they are not consuming news at all. The seem impervious to any link or discussion that doesn't automatically feed back into their trusted sources - which of course are not trustworthy
I think I'd move the quotes - the problem is too much "news", but I think you're right. It's 24/7 misinformation factories that push people to the point where they can assume that somehow the US government both has a hurricane machine and that it would use it on its own citizens, even though that doesn't stand up to any sort of rational introspection.
> That is what you get when you stop funding general education because you think people should pay for it themselves. People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
On the other hand, this sounds like something you just made up and decided to connect to the current topic. Is this fact or fiction?
It's a theory, that may need validation ;-)
I haven't seen any evidence that giving more money to academia improves student results. It certainly hasn't worked for colleges, where you've seen a negative correlation over many years between quality of education and funding.
Well then you haven't been looking very hard. If you look at PISA results (essentially the best data we have on this so far) there is a strong correlation between investment into education and performance.
"Fewer students per teacher" is widely supported by research, and teachers do cost money.
But obviously just blindly throwing money won't help.
I actually disagree.
This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.
This also happens whenever there is an apparent "win" even if it isn't quite so. For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. Same for the Iraq war, with "weapons of mass destruction" - imagine if your child died from that lie. Repeat this every year, in multiple institutions, for 20+ years straight; and yes, observant people might well think that everything the government has ever said is a hoax. It's not about the science, or their ability to track truth from falsehood, but their reactionary hate of anything the institutions say.
This isn't just distrust of the government and other public institutions. It's also distrust of:
- first-hand reports from other people
- private news networks
- the governments of other countries
The scale and degree of this distrust of other people is new. Arguably the US government was far, far less trustworthy in the past, such as when it was massacring people in Vietnam or secretly conducting experiments on Black people. These revelations did not lead to meteorologists getting death threats.
> first-hand reports from other people
Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that.
> private news networks
You mean rebranded affiliates? https://youtu.be/rknON89H35o?t=35
> the governments of other countries
Are governments inherently trustworthy?
I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.
The idea that government institutions suddenly got more scandal ridden after 1990's is just pure golden age fallacy.
News networks, twitter and podcasts got 100x better at making mountains out of mole-hills because they had continuous access to an audience to fine-tune their reaction engines. That's it.
> Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that.
Not when it's thousands of people showing us photos and videos.
It's not that it's impossible that [insert major event here] is a conspiracy, but you always have to ask:
- is it possible for even a highly competent government to orchestrate this conspiracy with no whistleblowers?
- what is the benefit of the conspiracy to the conspirators?
- is the benefit of the conspiracy worth the effort?
In the case of "faking a hurricane," there is no incentive (and in fact there are disincentives to being wrong about it for the meteorologists) and there is no possibly way to orchestrate that large of a conspiracy.
If the CCP is unable to successfully disappear people or put Uyghurs in camps without people finding out about it, nothing this large could be pulled off in the US.
> You mean rebranded affiliates?
No, I mean the Weather Channel and others.
> I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.
I don't think you're doing what you think you're doing.
Observant people learn to evaluate the words of government officials as critically and analytically as they would treat any source. Credulous people switch from uncritical trust in government officials to uncritical trust in talk radio hosts, podcasters, and social media.
Staff government with people that hate government and got elected on the principle that government is the problem. Those people sabotage government at every opportunity, thus it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Use the chaos and dysfunction you created to sell public assets on the cheap to private companies.
I've seen this trajectory far too often to think what is happening is accidental.
> People go flat earth
Isn't the joke here that for most of modern history the flat earth discussions were a debate contest by people who didn't actually believe the earth was flat but enjoyed trying to prove it was? And then it leaked out and found a welcome home amongst people gullible enough to believe all of the "evidence" that had been concocted.
Modern flat earth theory owes more to fringe Christian theology and the general normalization of conspiracy theory and meme culture than anything to do with the Flat Earth Society.
> For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged.
This is such a weird way of looking at it.
Imagine, for simplicity, there's an optimal amount of fluoride to add, which is X. Also imagine science can guess the number but, obviously, it's not perfect.
What will happen is that we will start at some number, and gradually change it as we get more knowledge. Sometimes we'll be below X, sometimes we'll be above X. When we're above X, and we find it out, we'll say "Oops it was too much fluoride, let's reduce it a bit."
And obviously policymakers need to work on imperfect information, so sometimes we have to add Y amount of fluoride even though we know it's not optimal - because, the alternative, adding zero fluoride, would be actually worse.
This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.
You assume that if people were better educated, they would trust science and wouldn't be so upset.
I think it's the other way around: If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now.
> If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now.
I'm sorry, but it starts to sound like you have a poor understanding of how science works.
When you defund science and education, these institutions have to turn elsewhere for funding, and now you're at the mercy of the one providing the funds...
the lack of integrity and accountability really has eroded trust in critical institutions society depends on. I can't blame people for being skeptical in science when anyone can see that scientists are routinely paid by corporations to to produce whatever results they want, and that you can pay to get even obvious garbage published in peer reviewed journals. The flat-earthers are wrong about the shape of the planet, the creationists are still wrong about evolution, but they're right that what passes for science these days is full of lies and can't be trusted.
I feel a degree of sympathy for antivaxxers for the same reason. Pharmaceutical companies get away with literal murder, the makers of medical devices are serial killers, and doctors are taking kickbacks to overprescribe dangerous medications. Even the CDC cares more about politics than the truth. The antivaxxers are still wrong about vaccines, but they're right that the medical industry can't be trusted.
When government waste and corruption goes unchecked people lose faith in the government. When the police are criminals, judges take kickbacks to send children into private prisons, and corrupt prosecutors go unpunished people lose faith in the justice system.
Resentment, distrust, fear, and uncertainty are just natural and appropriate responses to what's going on around us. Even if drastic action was taken today to increase accountability and transparency to fight the corruption and greed undermining people's faith in these institutions it would still take decades to restore the trust that's been lost and realistically, I don't see any kind of drastic action being taken to fix the problem any time soon, so I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.
There have always been scandals. What changes is that nearly half of America has given up its brain and free thought and allowed the right wing media machine and various messiahs (one in particular) to fill their brains with mush about conspiracies and fear of the other. It’s ridiculous that people don’t want to think for themselves.
I don't know, I think the biggest difference is that the view we have of government isn't heavily curated by a few major papers and news broadcasts. The dirty laundry is on display 24/7 and thanks to social media The Washington Post, The Flat Earth Society, and Dave the guy with "THE END IS NEAR" signs on the corner of main street are on the same newsstand.
And I don't think it's intelligence, smart people get sucked into cults all the time, being smart makes you better at convincing yourself of the nonsense. It's self-administered cult indoctrination. I don't think anyone has defenses for this kind of stuff outside of being primed to believe it's nonsense.
I don’t know why you are getting downvoted. This is just as valid as saying education has gotten worse.
It’s likely both are causes, and some other things too.
> People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.
It doesn't matter "why" someone chooses to believe a conspiracy theory. What matters is how they came to be an adult that still believes in conspiracy theories - and the failure lies somewhere between bad parenting and the education system, and definitely not with meteorologists, even IF the public agency that employs meteorologists was involved in a scandal.
People going to flat earth and believing in flat earth are two separate things. As OP said -
> People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.
> Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.
That's what your gut reaction may tell you; but I don't believe this is reality. The refusal to accept widely-accepted science is often rooted in distrust of the official narrative.
It's like saying people commit violence, just because they like violence, or must be stupid. Most of the time there's an underlying cause.
This is the narrative that has been spun, that somehow Fox News (the largest TV channel) is not mainstream, that a candidate like Trump who's been rubbing shoulders with the rich and famous since he was born, is anti-establishment, while a former waitress winning a seat through a grass root campaign with very little funding is.
That we should mistrust scientists because they are biased and instead trust think tanks financed by tabacco and oil corporations as well as billionaires...
That government agencies like the EPA are to be mistrusted because everything government is bad, but that the military and police should be supported unconditionally even if they execute innocents in the streets.
> often rooted in distrust of the official narrative
I disagree from what I've seen.
I hear a lot of crazy conspiracies from Trump followers where I live. Including from my family.
On one hand they, they have a distrust for the establishment. But on the other they're dangerously close to fascists. I mean, Trump is a monarch to them. They don't trust the DOJ. Or the house. Or the senate. Or any of the agencies. But they trust Trump. If he says they're eating cats and dogs, then that's what they're doing.
It's very odd to be both in this "anti-establishment" headspace but also basically endorse and ask for a fascist government where one King makes all the rules. And you just trust him and have absolute loyalty.
That is to say, I don't think "distrust the gov" is the end of the discussion. There's more to it.
One of the elephants in the room, I think, is the religious dimension to the divide. Trumpists don't mistrust government per se, they mistrust secular government, but tend to approve of government that espouses and enforces traditional Christian ideology. They mistrust secular science because they believe it contradicts the Bible. Their opposition to LGBTQ people is rooted in a binary view of sex and gender based on Christian doctrine.
Even the "rural vs urban divide" people talk about is really a divide between Christianity, as expressed in "traditional values" and secularism. "Left" and "right" is "atheism" versus "faith," respectively. Communism and socialism are hated primarily because they're seen as anti-religion, and this extends to a hatred of leftism, liberalism, progressivism, etc as all similarly demonic in nature.
Aspects of this fundamental struggle between theology and secularism go all the way back to Reagan, at least, and I even believe back to the founding fathers. If you look deep enough into any of the systemic issues in American culture, you'll probably find religion somewhere at the heart of them.
The apparent contradiction between being anti-establishment but pro Trump (to the point of neo-fascism) makes sense in this context. Trumpists consider the establishment to be Satanic, and they believe Trump will replace it with a Christian theocratic order. And even a cursory glance at the Bible will tell you that the Kingdom of God is not even remotely a democracy.
I like to look into wacky conspiracies and where they come from.
Quite frankly, the most common reason people believe in a flat earth is because of biblical literalism. There are a few passages in the bible (which, if you ever watch a flat earth video, those almost always come out) which mention things like the earth having corners or god rolling it up like a scroll. Those verses are used as the grounding point for why the earth must be flat and all other evidence to the contrary is a lie.
This is also, consequentially, the origin of moon landing denialism. Mormons used to believe that the moon was literally a part of heaven. As a result, it'd be impossible for god to let someone fly a spaceship there. Pretty much exactly the same process happened "It couldn't have happened because our holy texts say the moon is the terrestrial kingdom... therefor it must be a hoax".
Yes: and in this case, one of the big underlying causes is one of our two political parties—in particular its presidential candidate—aggressively spreading disinformation specifically in order to win him the presidency. (Just as they did the last two times he was trying.)
Another is....a systemic lack of education in critical thinking and how to tell mis- and disinformation from truth.
There is a decrease in people's trust in institutions, but my read on it is that it is an effect of these other phenomena, rather than a cause.
I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.
Oh whatever; presidents have been lying for decades now.
I remember a president whose error on "weapons of mass destruction" left my uncle nearly suicidal and killed countless Americans for nothing.
I remember a president whose DOJ wiretapped the Associated Press in 2012.
I remember a president who allowed his own Director of National Intelligence to lie to Congress about the NSA's activities before Snowden.
I can go on.
Are you suggesting that quality and quantity of lies does not matter?
Sure, politicians lie. Presidents are definitionally politicians, so they lie sometimes too.
But Donald Trump's lies are orders of magnitude more frequent and worse than any previous president, and frankly anyone trying to dispute that at this point is clearly using motivated reasoning.
I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.
I don't know how to quantify the extent to which I despise Donald Trump. Suffice it to say that it's "off the scale". And yet, while I agree with you in general, to some extent I think Trumpism is the symptom and not the disease itself. I think there's something deeper and older at play, something that enables Trump and his brand of bullshit to prosper. I don't pretend to understand exactly what it is.. maybe it's as simple as saying "education". Maybe not.
What I have been saying, which is admittedly a bit hand-wavy at the moment, is that "our culture is sick". We don't cherish, promote, and prioritize the right things IMO. We reward the wrong behaviors and - I believe - are somehow incentivizing the whole "rejection of science/math/logic/reason and embrace of ignorance" thing.
I think you are right, but only to a certain extent.
Yes, Trump brought out something that was already there, lying dormant. But without Trump, it would mostly have stayed dormant.
Trump's primary victory in 2016 was a massive fluke, primarily (from what I saw) enabled by a combination of the horribly fractured GOP field, with the party establishment unable to rally behind a single candidate until it was already too late, a bunch of people who thought it was funny and voted for Trump for the lulz, and a large number of people who were frustrated by the past few years. That latter group I think came in two basic flavors: the ones who were frustrated because we had a black president, and the ones who were frustrated because the GOP Congress was stopping everything he tried to do (but who didn't fully grasp that this was entirely the GOP's fault). I genuinely believe that had the circumstances been just a little bit different in any number of ways, Trump would never even have made it past the first primary.
Once he was in the position of being a major party presidential candidate, it amplified his voice and that voice gave permission for all the bigots and fascists in America and abroad to show themselves and join their power together.
That said, I think there is a sickness in our culture, and I think its current prominence can largely be traced to Reagan, through several other intermediaries.
What we don't cherish, promote, and prioritize is kindness and compassion for our fellow human beings—all of them.
Yep. I think we are generally in agreement. I just wish I knew a simple answer - or any answer - for fixing the "whatever it is" that's infecting our culture/society these days.
Unfortunately, I'm very sure that there is no one simple answer—it's so many interlocking things: education spending, voting rights, voting reform (eg, ranked-choice), more spending on basic needs...
On the bright side, this also means that improvement in any of them also helps, even if only a little bit, to pull the whole tangle further up.
> That is what you get when you stop funding general education...
These people are likely predominantly over 50 and were in high school in the 60s/70s/80s.
They've just been deliberately choosing to stew themselves for the past decade or three in right wing and fringe media.
I want to shout out a specific man quoted in the article.
> “I’ve been doing this for 46 years and it’s never been like this,” says Alabama meteorologist James Spann.
I grew up in Alabama, and I am positive James Spann has saved my life more than once with his tornado outbreak coverage. I can still hear him saying, "get to shelter now". He was a comforting voice at 2am when you and your family are huddled in the most central room of your house because mother nature is actively trying to kill you.
James Spann has also claimed that climate change isn't happening and it's just scientists chasing funding that explains their findings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Spann#Global_warming
So a bit of a "first they came for the climate scientists and I did nothing" vibe.
That is unfortunate, but the man still does good work every time weather is putting lives at stake in Alabama.
Yes! James Spann was and is an excellent source of meteorological information. I remember him coming to our school and talking to kids about his job and encouraging us to take an interest in science and the world around us. Alabama needs more people like him and fewer people who are likely to encourage conspiratorial thinking for political points at the potential cost of human life.
Also, appreciate the username - great game.
Maybe people are getting dumber because of COVID.[1] Even after recovery, having mild COVID seems to cost 3 IQ points.[1] Reinfection, 2 more IQ points.[2] This is for people who have recovered, and does not include "long COVID".
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-iq-brain-age-cognitive...
[2] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2400189
This is actually the result of Facebook, youtube the hyper focus on surfacing a topic a post you see share or like to keep you engaged. You see a post share it with your friends Facebook algo see your interest shows your a hundred and keeps taking deeper down the rabbit whole. So the main reason for this is social media. A few years ago I used to argue with family and friends over such stupid topics to tell them it is wrong but mostly keep quite or ignore as my mental health is more important to me.
This clicked for me back in 2015. A friend shared something on Facebook that sounded plausible but felt off. I looked into it, and added a polite comment pointing out that it was a hoax. With a link to the Snopes article. I expected a reaction like "haha, oops". Instead, she deleted my comment.
That's when I realized that Facebook was a platform for spreading digital viruses that use human minds as their host. I deleted my account shortly after and never returned.
That seems unlikely, but if we accept it's true, that's only 5% dumber for someone with an average IQ, and that doesn't seem like nearly enough to account for believing something obviously implausible like controlling hurricanes. If people had basic scientific literacy they should be able to see the amounts of energy needed would be staggering.
This was going full force well before COVID. Before 2016, though that was when it became a lot more overt.
Between covid brain, ipad kids, heavy metal poisoning, and decades of attacks on the education system the US is dropping IQ points while mental illness is on the rise.
[dead]
Maybe, but people were going like this before COVID.
Did you leave out the /s? Or are you seriously implying the crazy conspiracy garbage we're seeing recently is a result of COVID? Because that sounds just as deranged as <waves hands at all the other dumb shit on the internet>.
It's not a joke. "A three-point downward shift in IQ would increase the number of U.S. adults with an IQ less than 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million – an increase of 2.8 million adults with a level of cognitive impairment that requires significant societal support."
Then there's long COVID. A detailed overview of that.[1] As of late 2023, about 5% of US adults report having long COVID. It appears that, if it lasts a year, there's usually no further recovery.
Some new results indicate that at least some long COVID sufferers still have a reservoir of the active virus.[2] That's encouraging, because antivirals may help them. It indicates where to look.
This is very real. Most people are tired of hearing about COVID, but the virus isn't tired.
[1] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/27756/chapter/8
[2] https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2024/10/getting-to-th...
Except a lot of this conspiracy nonsense is being propagated by people who are otherwise functioning adults, with decent jobs, etc. I'm not saying COVID isn't impacting IQs, but to claim that COVID is a major contributing factor to the current era of mainstream conspiracy theories is, as I said, just as insane as the rest of the madness.
I take COVID and long COVID seriously, but we have many examples of anti-rationality as a political problem predating the pandemic. The fact that Trump was elected as a candidate who was more about slogans than policies and achieved political success by being overtly anti-intellectual seems to weaken your theory of COVID as the sole or even major factor.
Think farther back to conspiracy theories that gained wide acceptance in earlier administrations - FEMA concentration camps, Obama isn't a US citizen, 9-11 was an inside job etc. The same patterns of ideation were laid out in Richard Hofstatder's famous essay 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' which was written in 1964: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...
...and of course you could trace them farther back through the red scare, the interwar period, the gilded age, post Civil War reconstruction, and the ideas that drove the outbreak of the civil war in the first place.
So while I agree COVID is an exacerbating factor, it's a quantitative rather than a qualitative change.
Anti-rationality and ignorance aren't new to the scene in the US. In 1980, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay titled "Cult of Ignorance." [1]
[1] https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...Note that the person you are replying to never said that COVID was the only explanation for this stuff.
I think one only has to look at history to discount such theories as this but people will still try to propagate such pseudo science.
- We can't measure "IQ" accurately enough to 2 or 3 points.
- People have been dumb for decades, the modern internet + social media has just weaponized it.
- It didn't remotely start in 2020 unless COVID caused a time loop that caused Trump to get elected in 2016.
These kinds of articles reinforce my idea that we're witnessing our society collapse before our very eyes. I tend to blame it on Republican idiocracy and Russian trolling, but I suspect the problem is larger than that.
It's just depressing.
Is the US the only country suffering from this lunacy, or is this a more global phenomenon?
It's a global phenomenon but it's only crazy in the US, like most things
Its crazy elsewhere too like in the UK, Hungary, Russia, most of eastern and southern europe, India, Brasil, etc. same MO just nationalist/racist/anti intellectual/conspiracy junk shared on social media.
We've always had conspiracy theories and fringe believes, but it's now mainstream in the US.
When hasn't it been mainstream? It sure qualified as mainstream for JFK assassinations and arguably Roswell as well. And that is before going to the Know-Nothings and their anti-catholic conspiracy theories.
Conspiracy theories about JFK, Roswell, moon-landings, and things like that are basically harmless. Well, mostly harmless anyway. Usually spread by someone trying to flog some nonsense book, or a confused "true believer".
But this is different: it's just a plain ordinary self-serving lie. Completely invented by a sad narcissistic liar and his merry band of sycophantic enablers to win ("win") an election.
There's also a type of maliciousness to it that's lacking in more traditional conspiracy theories.
We probably shouldn't even call it "conspiracy theory".
I read an Atlantic article the other day where a lit professor from Columbia University said that he has students nowadays who admit to having never read a book cover to cover. Ones that have tend to say their favorite book is something like Percy Jackson. They also can't focus on a small poem. This confirms what a teacher I know has been saying for a long time: highschool kids since around the class of 2010 are getting very noticably stupider.
I'm beginning to wonder if social media really has caused kids to miss key developmental stages. Parents being on their phones has led to kids hearing a substantially reduced vocabulary, these kids also receive less interaction from their parents and interact less with their environments and other kids. This stuff is really important for brain development, and we've replaced it with an iPhone.
I don't think social media started this, just accelerated the trend. I do think commercialized media for decades now has really been a driver of insipid banality.
There’s a difference between stupid and ignorance. They aren’t “stupider”
But, ignorance predisposes you to stupidity. In the absence of knowledge, you can either admit you don't know enough about a topic to have an informed opinion on it, or, you can cobble together some bullshit, making up stuff as you go.
Since admitting you know nothing takes humility, most (ignorant) people opt to cobble together bullshit. Or accept plausible-sounding cobbled-up bullshit as true.
Why are we blaming kids when elected representatives are parroting these conspiracy theories? MTG isn't seeking Gen Z approval.
I guess my point is that we as a society have allowed things to get to a point where some of our brightest students have graduated highschool without ever reading a book, or having to focus their attention undivided for the duration of a short poem.
What kind of society produces kids like that? Our values have changed focus from effort, hard work and self improvement to ease, comfort and a one-dimensional notion of happiness. It's a downward spiral.
MTG is playing a character to get votes. She isn’t stupid.
She's also not the only one, she's just low hanging fruit. This same point can be made about Trump, and as you know, he has a lot of dedicated followers who are smart, functioning adults. Not Gen Z.
And MTG is 50 and she has to know what she's spouting is nonsense, so why does she spout it? Is her audience really that dimwitted, or is there something else at play? For example, is this part of some mass brainwashing ploy? Are they Jim Jonesing millions of Americans? If so, then to what end?
That's where I'm at a loss.
Are all the people parroting this stuff actually believers? My instinct is that the majority tried to grab the bull by the horns by jumping on the Trump schtick when he took power and are now left riding this increasingly deranged and unpredictable animal. At this point they can do nothing but try to keep holding on lest they be trampled by the beast they created.
But there's also gotta be true believers in there, and yeah, I don't know what those people actually want, and it's pretty scary.
The lunacy is definitely worse in the Anglosphere. I moved to Eastern Europe a few years ago and it's way more sane (and yes, I speak the local languages here).
See this article about Emmanuel Todd forecasting the collapse of the West using the same methodology he used to successfully predict the collapse of the Soviet Union: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-dec...
There's always been nutcases (apologies to people with actual mental illness). The problem is that politicians (worldwide) have figured out how to utilize them for their own benefit.
I agree that at times it does seem like a very bad premonition.
I can’t imagine this kind of stuff happens in the PRC.
The upside to a tightly-controlled “infosphere” is that people who are at the controls and have rational thought can jump right in and quench the idiocy fires right away.
Category:Conspiracy theories in China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracy_theories_i...
(From Category:Conspiracy theories by country)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracy_theories_b...
Funny enough, the fact that your link lists 9 pages compared to 112 for the US[1], it could be taken as stronger evidence for the parent's point. Not that I think this is a particularly reliable way to gauge the phenomenon.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Conspiracy_theories_i...
And the downside of that upside is that they jump right in and quench things, not always on the basis of idiocy, but also on the basis of opposing the government's narrative. That doesn't actually lead to rationality.
It is significantly worse in the PRC, where they don't believe that the Uyghur genocide is happening. At least (for now) the West has no similar level of denial about something within their own borders.
It is global. I was just in Poland. Literally same thing as in the US just a bit different flavor. Mainstream media bad, covid fake just a little flu and used to control society, proud for not wearing masks, did not vaccinate because some crazy reasons.
Not everyone obviously, but I was visiting smaller cities where I grew up. I always thought I could go back one day but I don't think I would be able to deal with people there. The customer service is non existent and when you are shopping/getting services you are an inconvenience. Crazy.
I think many other cultures are crippled by pervasive conspiracies that re-enforce views of having no agency. And their rulers like it that way.
In street drug circles today there are widespread complaints about the quality of fentanyl, withdrawal effects and treatment. OD's are apparently dropping. For those that live in some semblance of reality, I think many there's withdrawal going on. For those that don't get out and call in threats like this, they don't really believe anything persistently, they just believe whatever is the rage of the day. They'll OD someday, you just won't see it in the obits.
A few people say or do something completely nutty and the 'country is suffering this lunacy'. At what golden period in history were there no nutcases pitching some irrational extremes into the public sphere?
On the other hand maybe I'm quite wrong about all this. Someone has estimated (an open calculation) the payback time for the US debt burden at 90,000 years if it was paid back at the rate of $1,000,000 per day. Some might argue there's lunacy at work over many decades to achieve this result.
(from a comment on this blog) - -https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/10/08/the-smartest-pe...
$1m per day divided by ~400m population is essentially zero. Why even mention this? It's just using numbers with a lot of zeros to sound scary, but means nothing.
1. It's different because the internet feeds us every bit of lunacy that happens anywhere in the country, so it looks like everyone has gone insane. (Especially in politics, where the Ds will tell you about every single stupid thing an R says anywhere in the country, and the Rs will tell you about every single stupid thing a D says.)
2. The national debt is probably a result of long-term lack of wisdom, yes. But with an economy the size of the US, there is absolutely no reason to pay it back at only $1,000,000/day. A serious attempt would be more like $1,000,000,000/day.
> I suspect the problem is larger than that.
My take is that this is a symptom of something else. Populism has existed for a long time, but it feels to me that the environment we created also created the perfect target audience for it on a scale that never existed before. Observing the alt-right and conspiracy bubbles collapse into one over the last five years, it feels like it's the result of a sort of mental defense mechanism for a group of people that is growing every day. As I see it, we have built a world around us that is very complex and abstract, and hostile to the mind in a way that enables this sort of ideology immensely.
In it, it is very hard to feel a sort of purpose, and it is very easy to be overwhelmed. On average, the work people do has little to no effect on themselves or their direct peers. All day, every day is spent shuffling around numbers on a spreadsheet, or doing work to aid someone who shuffles around numbers on a spreadsheet. Then you clock out having a net zero benefit on your life, or that of people that matter. Other than, of course, a number that goes up in a different spreadsheet. And while you do your shuffling about to scrape by another month, you get bombarded with a flood of information about this war or that catastrophe or those disasters.
It leaves people numb, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, helpless, purposeless, etc.
Keep that up long enough, and what happens is something like a narcissistic collapse, except that it's not narcissists it happens to, but normal, healthy but vulnerable minds whose mental health can no longer be reconciled with a toxic reality.
In comes an ideology that does three things: It simplifies. It gives purpose. It provides an outlet.
Once you subscribe to it, everything returns from countless shades of gray to black and white. If you're not one of the good guys, you're one of the bad guys. If a bad guy says a thing, it's a bad thing. If you say a bad thing, you're a bad guy. The simple prescriptive labels of what counts as good and bad are delivered to you, on the house. Takes away all the nuance, all the complexity and all the mental burden that came with it.
Then, it gives purpose. If you fall into this hole, you end up seeing yourself as two things: A victim, and a savior. You see what others don't, and you suffer for it. "They" - the bad guys - are out to get you, to destroy everything. Every confrontation is thus someone attacking you, the victim, or defying you, the savior. It provides a narrative in a chaotic world where bad things happen for no reason and without explanation.
Last, it creates a target for all your bottled up frustration and anger. The bad guys are responsible for all the bad things, and it is made clear how very okay it is to channel all your negative emotions into hate towards some group. Be it Jewish people, immigrants, scientists, democrats or some imaginary lizard people. Hate is fine.
The end result is a full abdication of responsibility, and a return of control at the low, low price of a divorce from reality. To the mind that slips into this rabbit hole it is not so much a choice as it is a lifeline. That is why it is so incredibly hard to get people out of it, as well.
This sounds like a discussion I'd love to have with you over a beer!
With that in mind, how serious are you? This is fascinating stuff and sounds like you've been thinking about it for a while. Is this your attempt to make sense of it all or is this reflective of something you've observed and studied?
It turns out that "The remedy for bad speech is more speech" doesn't actually scale globally.
You can blame this on Russian and/or Chinese disinformation ops and tik-tok, etc, but the problem is more general than that. One of the assumptions around free speech ideals is that the people who are speaking or publishing are citizens of the community in which they are speaking or publishing, and now a large part of the content on the internet is produced by people who are crossing national boundaries, or not even produced by people at all.
You used to be able to assume that the vast majority of the content you're exposed to is produced by people who live in your community or country and would not like to see it destroyed, and now, in fact, you should probably assume the opposite. You should assume that most content on the internet is produced by bad actors trying to rip the fabric of your society apart, particularly if you're reading something that enrages you.
The especially insidious part of this is that most of the rage bait stuff plays on widespread personal biases so it's self sustaining after a while. People start to hate each other, so then they do stuff to each other to make each other hate each other more and so on and so on until you've got Rwanda.
not really -- rather consider the ability of a very small minority of voices to amplify tremendously without sufficient dampening.. stability in public communication is never simple. A psychologist might say that social rage itself, or anger with blame itself, is the root of the behavior. Every language group on Earth has rational, constructive people in it.
Russian disinformation is itself a conspiracy theory. Trump was investigated for the last decade, they essentially found nothing.
This is just a flat lie.
Russian propaganda doesn't actually necessary need to collude with the people who's voices they amplify to meet their goals.
(it also doesn't necessarily need to spread false information, either. The general strategy is just 'find divisive statements and/or figures and amplify them'. Making up their own isn't usually necessary)
Just because no one acted doesn't mean that "they essentially found nothing".
The Muller report described Russian interference in the 2016 election as “sweeping and systemic.” The report spent a bunch of pages saying that there were “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign.”
They would have thrown him in jail if they found anything. it was political theater, and essentially a coup
Which are you saying - that the Muller report didn't find things, despite it clearly finding things, or that it was a coup, even though it was under the Trump admin, by DAs placed by Trump?
Go watch the interview with Mueller at the end of the investigation. He was completely senile and knew nothing about the case. Mueller himself was a puppet for other people.
The "other people" being Trump's DAs? Why would that be the case? Do you believe that Muller did the entire report alone? Who was behind the coup? Why did it fail?
If you look through your last few messages you'll see that your argument is constantly changing. First that they investigated and found nothing, but then presented with evidence you try to discredit that source of evidence, first by saying they didn't find anything, and changing tactics to accuse Muller of senility. It as if the truth doesn't so much matter as maintaining your worldview does.
My argument isnt changing, its just there were so many holes in the investigation I dont even know where to start. I'm busy at work, but again, just go watch the end of the investigation interview with Muller. Watch how little he understands, how little he was involved. Then go watch all media coverage, and how they Gush over him. Go look at the facts of what actually came out. Why didnt they prosecute trump? If you cant look at the above points with open eyes and read between the lines, then you are clouded by ideology.
The muller interview doesnt disprove/get Trump off the hook at all. It was for me, just a shocking display of realizing that what was shown in the public eye about the invesitgation had nothing to do with the reality.
Much like everyone realizing biden isnt running the country, and probably has alzheimers.
I appreciate that you're repeating talking points about Muller, but that's ignoring that Muller had a whole team. Does Muller being feeble mean that the content in his report is wrong?
They didn't prosecute Trump because the report was presented to Barr. He had no interest in prosecuting, and there was a ton of constitutional questions regarding charging a sitting president.
Do you believe that all people charged and found guilty as an outcome of the investigation were innocent and it was all political theatre? There were a lot of people who weren't Trump, where there were no constitutional problems, who were found guilty.
To wit, Barr spread disinformation (otherwise known as "lies") about the report before it was even released to the public. Barr made sure the well was poisoned before anyone could get a drink.
> it was political theater, and essentially a coup
That's an interesting relabeling of what would normally be regarded as simply the gathering, vetting, and reporting of evidence — some reliable, some not — in accordance with established statutory- and constitutional processes and norms.
If it'd really been a coup, Trump would either have been imprisoned without trial or he'd have fled the country to Russia or someplace else without an extradition treaty.
This is what happens when you coopt science as cover for political decisions - people stop trusting all "science" including real science. From what I've seen I more associate the issue with Democrats than Republicans, especially in the COVID lockdown days.
> From what I've seen I more associate the issue with Democrats than Republicans, especially in the COVID lockdown days.
Can you explain the chain of logic here? During the pandemic I "did my own research" which amounted to basically masking when other people did and getting the vaccines as they came out. At the time my SO was a nurse working on a hospital covid floor, so it seemed prudent. So, I'm not really sure how you see Democrats as being less science based? No snark intended, I'm truly curious.
My interpretation of their comment is that it's the other way around. Democrats tend to use "science" to justify political decisions. Because people don't like those political decisions, and/or because pop science is allegedly used vs "real science", it devalues "real science" and causes people not to trust it as much
The left also tends to use higher education in their political positions. Which is why the right now seems to really have a bone to pick with higher education.
What people should be asking is, why does science have a supposedly left-leaning bias? Why does education have a left-leaning bias? It feels like there's some obvious conclusions the republican can draw there, but they see those conclusions and draw something else instead.
> Democrats tend to use "science" to justify political decisions.
I'd much rather politicians use science to justify political decisions instead of just doing whatever is popular, or would make them and their friends the most money.
I won't say "less science based" but I will say "mixes science and politics".
For example, there were covid lockdowns because "science" but then if anyone wanted to participate in the George Floyd protests and join a huge crowd of people that was A-OK, no pushback on that, no "scientific" worries about virus transmittal applied.
In that case "science" just becomes another tool to suppress the other side.
Thanks for the reply.
I guess I see your perspective, but I kinda just saw that sorta thing as like... fighting for civil rights has always been a dangerous activity?
And that specific talking point to me always read like:
"Oh I have to wear a mask in a grocery store and can't go to movies, but they're allowed to protest for their civil rights??"
I will add to this that a very common line among republicans during COVID was "it's no worse than the flu". I heard this from my family members even though I lost a few from COVID. I nearly lost a sister-in-law in her 20s from COVID (she came DAMN close) and she is still anti-vax/mask/etc.
We can also talk about misinformation about covid vaccines. I mean, it's really kind of depressing that one of the best decisions of the Trump administration (IMO) was project warp speed which got mRNA vaccines approved and on the shelves in record time. But now, he can't really talk about that as a positive thing because the entire republican party is against those very vaccines.
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we are mostly unable to process the fact that science lied to us
what's worse, it became an authoritative tool of (often foreign) powers; at least in most of America (as science came from Europe, ...they brought us "culture" when they colonized us in the south; the north did not get colonized but replaced)
but of course science lied, but it's not that it lied, it is that it changes. newer truth comes along and fights the old truth until it dies ("the pace of scientific funerals")
turns out, breaking people's trust is much easier than gaining it.
but my hill to die on, is the old truth of material scarcity and media (or licensing) content versus the new truth of digital abundance and freely sharing things without the license to do so. why do I need permission from some faceless corporate owner to copy cultural assets that I love and wish to share?
Science doesn't lie, people do. And people are stubborn that's why new discoveries need time to get accepted.
But this is different, this is not science but simply BS that is spread.
I have only anecdata for this, but I have a strong suspicion that people just don't think about things on social media the same way they do physical interactions.
If someone standing outside the grocery store hands you a flyer that claims the government can control the weather and they're sending you hurricanes on purpose, you'd dismiss them as insane and continue on your way. When your high school buddy Denise posts it on Facebook, though, you're more likely to believe it. Even if you'd think Denise would be crazy if she went out and handed out flyers at the grocery store.
It's like most of us have a built-in crazy filter that works fine for in-person interactions, but it breaks down when that exact same interactions happens online.
I'm not so sure about this explanation; people believed in conspiracy theories in the past. Witch-hunts for example are fundamentally not that different from Q-Anon and all of that bollocks: "mysterious dark forces do evil stuff when we're not looking".
The whole "they're abusing our children" is also a trope that goes back a long time, most recently during the 80s with the whole "Satanic Ritual Abuse" stuff. That was much worse, because innocent people's lives were complete wrecked over what was complete bollocks. Pizzagate is near-identical, with s/daycare/pizzahut/.
More examples can be found throughout history – they're typically not called "conspiracy theories", but often they're not that different at its core.
I think what social media has done is allowing people to reach a wider audience. That person outside the grocery store reaches what, maybe a few hundred people with several hours of work? On the internet you can reach about 1.5 billion English speaking people with a minute of work. And that person outside the grocery store has no real way to organise a meaningful community, even if they do manage to gain 2 or 3 acolytes. On the internet you just create a Facebook group, or reddit sub, or whatever.
And all of that is including only the "crazy people". Add bad faith actors to the mix spreading misinformation simply to cause chaos and things quickly become well fucked.
This is why I never believe a tweet that I can’t confirm myself. I only pay attention to sciencey/CS people on twitter. Talking heads and political sources there are always nearly extremely biased and most are flat out untruthful.
I’m beginning to understand the worldview of these people. For those who don’t understand science and technology, it is simply magic. And the government and scientists are magicians. So it’s not surprising when they blame the magicians for what is happening to them. From their point of view, their entire experience is dictated by powerful figures who create magical things such as “click a button to make stuff appear at my home with same day shipping” and “bring Napoleon alive on the screen”. I’m beginning to understand why they start to attribute everything to these entities who create such seemingly impossible things. It is a type of pagan idolatry.
This is not an education issue, conspiracy theory prevalence is driven entirely by social dynamics and motivated reasoning. Watch that 2018 documentary about flat-earthers; one of the main 'characters' is like an aeronautics engineer capable of setting up a $12K laser gyroscope, but unwilling to believe it when it tells him the Earth is not flat. MGT is not spouting this stuff because she's stupid, she's spouting it because she can use the narrative to further her political agenda. All this conspiracy stuff over the last 10 years starts from what people want to be true about the world (ex. "the current political regime is evil and it is ethical to overthrow it"), and works backwards to decide what facts will justify that ("they are using the weather to hurt their political enemies"). That rank-and-file voters parrot this stuff is because it's a shibboleth for their social circle, and because it gives their chosen political proxies clout and attention; its truth is irrelevant to all but the most gullible.
I've always been fascinated by conspiracy theories. The weather weapon conspiracy isn't even new. I remember hearing "they" were controlling the weather to create storms using HAARP [0] like 20 years go.
Back then you had to seek this stuff out though. It was on obscure internet forums, fringe websites, and late night talk radio.
I am not sure what to make of the current situation. Its concerning. I think there are a lot of factors at play though with a big one being we gave everyone a megaphone and then monetized the result regardless of any negative consequences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_Active_Auroral_...
It’s time that the government forms a department for this to prosecute these crimes, including working with interpol to track down foreign criminals. Then throw them in jail for a very long time. Death threats shouldn’t count as pranks but precursors to murder and be charged harshly (5-10 years in prison). I don’t care if you’re a radicalized suburban mom or MS13, no mercy for this buffoonery
Why are there no class actions to take politicians to task for spreading life risking lies? It seems like a slam dunk in such a litigious society.
The problem is we taught people to trust science, instead of teaching them science. People should learn to be able to critically analyze data and statistics.
The paradox seen in many today is that the stupider people in fact really are the smarter they believe themselves to be.
Is this really indicative of a broad societal trend, or is it just one guy with an LLM and some burner emails?
Is the real crisis here Twitter/X/Facebook/Youtube/TikTok? The lies just fly through all of them in an instant.
Why bother sending a military against the United States when we can be divided defeated by some guy "just asking questions" after "doing his own research" and sharing to his millions of followers.
Is this what hackers do all day? Watch mainstream media articles talk sh* about politicians they don't like? https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/tcfaqC.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-frequency_Active_Auroral_... https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/ee/53/36/ac05709...
It's an interesting theory, at best this is virtue signalling taken as GOSPEL by the other side.. so BAU.
> Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes
But even before the Speed: Horseback tech upgrade was discovered, "kill the messenger" was an all-too-common human reaction.
It's mind boggling. And I can't even begin to explain it. We live in an age when something pretty close to the sum total of human scientific knowledge is available online, and mostly for free (especially if you count shadow libraries like Anna's Archive, LibGen, Sci-Hub, Zlib, etc). There's millions or billions of pages of high-quality scientific content, millions or billions of hours of lectures on everything from Geology to Abstract Algebra to High Energy Physics.
Anybody can use Khan Academy to get a reasonably decent education on critical aspects of math and science. Sites like Stack Exchange, (some) sub-reddits, physicsforums.com, etc. make it possible for anybody to solicit feedback and corrections on almost any technical topic.
In short, it's possible to be as educated as you want to be, and it's mostly free except for the time and effort involved. And instead a large portion of the population seem to be not only not pursuing real knowledge, but actively rejecting it and embracing obvious bullshit.
WTH people?
OK yes.. I know. Somebody is going to say it. The critical phrase above is time and effort involved. And maybe that's right. Maybe it's just laziness. But somehow that doesn't feel right. And I understand the notion that the widespread interconnectedness of the Internet allows small numbers of people with fringe beliefs to "find each other" and reinforce each other's nuttery, and that has some amplification effect on the prevalence of flat-earth thinking, etc.
And yet, I still don't think that explains what's going on with people. And the frank truth is, I don't have an explanation. Or a solution. And I wish I did. I hope sombody does. Because as @taylodl says in another thread:
These kinds of articles reinforce my idea that we're witnessing our society collapse before our very eyes.
I concur, and this troubles me deeply.
I can't explain it either, but maybe prophesies of impending collapse are a bit premature. The world has never been particularly rational, even in places that have near 100% literacy. Just look at the number of people who believe in astrology or homeopathy, not to mention that one guy who created the Earth and its inhabitants some 4000 years ago, in six days no less.
Fair enough. But I'll just say that I feel like I've seen a pronounced change in my lifetime, and more pointedly in the last 5-10 years, that I find acutely disturbing, even compared against that "background rate".
And maybe the answer really is as simple as "social media". Which I find to be a sad idea, as the potential of social media act as a force for good still exists and is something I've always been particularly appreciative of.
For myself, the last 5 years have been a qualitative change. I don't think the unreasonableness of the world has increased that much per se, but since COVID it has started to intrude into my life in ways that it didn't before. Social media, or abuse thereof, seems a likely culprit, but there's probably more to it. In any case, I mostly agree with you, despite my previous comment.
> And yet, I still don't think that explains what's going on with people. And the frank truth is, I don't have an explanation.
Humans are social creatures and feel the need to align with those around them. Combine this natural inclination with social media algorithms that show you more and more of whatever they have determined to be "engaging content", and you get a feedback loop that spreads viral content and drives people insane.
I agree that that is at least part of the problem. I'm iffy on the issue of whether or not that is the entirety of the problem.
I think sadly there are some people that simply will not be able to understand the material. For them it is much easier to believe in fairy tales and giant egg beaters that cause hurricanes than it is to study science. They certainly are concerned about a reproducibility crisis in academia. If I've learned anything by occasionally listening to Joe Rogan is that people (men I guess?) demand to be heard - even if they have no idea what they're talking about. The fact that exist means they should have a say in matters they have no understanding off in the slightest.
> “Nowadays, there’s so much bad information out there that if we spent our time getting rid of it, we’d have no more time.”
Are they referring to the Mayor of Tampa warning "you will die"?
It's not hard to accept that stupid people fall for these kinds of conspiracy theories, but I'll never forget that one professor I had in uni who was teaching us chaos theory and dynamical systems and was convinced that the government was controlling the weather. I'm kinda skeptical how much education can do to fix conspiratorial thinking. If even a professor teaching chaos theory is convinced that the government is controlling the weather then frankly anyone could probably be convinced.
You've got to look at rates. I'd place a substantial bet that the percentage of professors, or even just college grads, who believe that is lower than in the general population. (Though you have to be specific about the question. We can control the weather in some very limited ways, but we can't, for example, trigger a hurricane. Or prevent one.)
yeah, idiots fall for more misinformation, but lots of very well educated people still fall for conspiracy theories. I feel like it's more of a lack of trust than a lack of education.
MGT accused Democrats of colluding with other worldly forces and creating Milton.
She said "ask your government if the weather is being manipulated or controlled. Did you give them permission to do this? Are you paying for it? Of course you are paying for it."
She said the same thing about Helene. She is feeding the mental illness that grips MAGA. This is a sitting Representative and has the full support and admiration of the Republican Candidate for President.
Even Republicans are now coming out to try to explain that humans can't create or control Hurricanes all while their own and their Candidate for President is suggesting otherwise.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a Representative, not Senator. Even for the Republican party she’s a weirdo and she’s only able to win due to the “unique” demographics of her district. She’s unlikely to be able to win a statewide race anywhere, and Senators in general tend to be less radical.
Not that it makes her insanity any less insane…
> Even for the Republican party she’s a weirdo and she’s only able to win due to the “unique” demographics of her district
What are the unique demographics of her district? I know it is heavily gerrymandered to make it almost impossible for anyone other than a Republican to win the general election, but to get to be the Republican candidate in the general election they have to win the Republican primary.
In every Republican primary she has won there were several other conservative Republicans who were not batshit insane and were actually well qualified to be a Representative in Congress. So why is she winning?
Her district is mostly rural Appalachia and the Republicans that vote for her feel neglected by the mainstream branches of both parties so MTG is their political hand grenade.
This is all second hand info so take it with a grain of salt.
Greene is a top fundraiser for the republican party. Part of the reason she gets so much attention is because she is bringing in more funds than most.
You can call her weird, I agree she is, but she's clearly representing a significant portion of republican voter sentiment.
If the rest of the GOP actually didn't want her they could vote and expel her today.
Yes you're correct, will edit my post.
I have to disagree with you here. Most of the Senators from the GOP have been happy to share the same drivel. Indeed, Senator JD Vance and Donald Trump — arguably the most powerful men in the GOP are as unhinged as MTG.
I predict that if Trump does not get elected, the GOP will completely drop his name and they will act as though he never existed.
He is truly insane. It is unbelievable to me that the mainstream GOP - who I have always perceived as reasonable people - would back him with such loyalty. But, then again, due to his previous presidency he probably has the best odds.
They didn’t drop him after his loss in 2020.
As always, the media softens the truth to try and keep their subscriber numbers up. Or their inboxes from overflowing with death threats. They sugarcoat the problem as "political polarization" but this is bullshit. These conspiracy theories are almost entirely a right wing phenomenon.
If you put a Trump sign in your yard, will you get death threats? Nope. Laughed at? Maybe, but not to your face. People are afraid of Trump supporters. Now try putting a Harris sign in your yard. Your local sheriff will tell the world to make sure they keep track of you for future recriminations. You'll get anonymous death threats in your mailbox.
There is sickness in politics today, but the solution is not "fix both sides."
There is also left wing violence, more often from the right but not zero from the left.
Agreed, I won't absolve the left from having some loonies. But they are recognized as the loonies they are. On the right it has become mainstream. The things I hear from friends and family are just mind blowing, and they think what they're saying is normal. So much anger, so much venom.
> These conspiracy theories are almost entirely a right wing phenomenon
This is true, but probably not for the reasons you think it is. "Left wing" in the US refers to a set of very closely converged beliefs that are largely defined by academia and journalists. "Right wing", then, includes virtually everything else. Republicans, libertarians, democrats 30 years ago, russia, national socialism, and conspiracy theories on how the moon is made of pudding. Saying this is tautological because by definition, if you don't believe the official narratives, you are not left wing. Muslims often get classified by the ADL as right-wing as well for the same reason.
>If you put a Trump sign in your yard, will you get death threats? Nope. Laughed at? Maybe, but not to your face. People are afraid of Trump supporters. Now try putting a Harris sign in your yard. Your local sheriff will tell the world to make sure they keep track of you for future recriminations. You'll get anonymous death threats in your mailbox.
Now this is just creative writing.
I'll adjust my definition, then. By right wing I mean republican. Conspiracy theories are that mainstream now.
> Now this is just creative writing.
Respectfully, you're not paying attention, or you are willfully deluding yourself if you believe this to be true. Democrats didn't gang up on a Trump bus and try to run it off the road. Can you imagine the shitstorm if they did?
Democrats largely don't have the devotion to their representatives so putting up yard signs and waving flags isn't nearly as much of a thing, but I assure you many people I know won't advertise their political opinions in any way because it endangers their health. And when they do put something up, it's small and unobtrusive, so as to avoid attracting too much attention.
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Completely false.
For many reasons, among others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_incidents_involving_B...
wasn't the butler attempted assassin a republican? the second attempted assassin was a democrat.
Reap what you sow, I guess. Call for violence enough times and you find people that are willing to use it. Like a guy who supported you but became disillusioned. A risk of riling up people is they're not guaranteed to always be for you.
> Please tell me where the highest violent protesters reside? blue or red states?
Of the top five most violent states, four of them are 'red states.'
Fallacies on top of fallacies. Let's look at CIA crime rate demographics again I guess. /doesnt know what a data fallacy is
There is a problem with this logic though, Trump says some wild things, like the "illegal immigrants are eating your pets". This can result in real violence against those groups.
If you say extreme things that get a positive or a very negative reaction you run this risk. Wasn't one of the attempts by a registered republican?
You cannot assume the attempts were done by democrats.
What about the republican voter that drove through protesters in Charlottesville? That has happened in 2017, so within your 10 year timeframe.
Both dems and reps say ridiculous stuff. Or did you only read half of history in the past 30 years? Yes, the attempts were both done by democrats. Both of which gave contribution. Do you not know how to use the search bar? The UTR rally is one of hundreds of rallies that happened between 2014-2024. the murderer had no political ties with Reps. Whoever fed you this lie made you a disservice. You believed in a total and utter lie for 7+ years.
No... Trump definitely says way more ridiculous stuff than Kamala or Biden.
Granted, Trump does not belong in the GOP. But, he's their champion right now. The end result is that average republicans now look insane. Maybe they're not - but Trump is, and they are very loyal to him.
I can't remember the last time I have seen a politician make such blatantly offensive statements. The way he speaks about women is hard to listen to. The racist things he says and implies are kind of unbelievable. I mean, Bush was never like this.
It is only 1 to 2 at best. You forgot the weird Indian Nazi and (badly) attempted assassin from Missouri, Sai Varshith Kandula. And that is excluding everyone else who got arrested for death threats.
Who? The non-US resident that got bad google map directions with his U-Haul? /s
A lot of storms are blown out of proportion to get clicks. There is a large gap between the predicted damage and the actual damage.
To get clicks, or to keep people alive after a few storms in the not-that-distant past were not recognized for the monsters they were until it was too late for people to evacuate?
There is certainly a risk that people will take the next warnings less seriously. And then an unexpectedly large number of people will die, and we will cycle again.
Guys I am not disagreeing with anyone here but the patents for weather technologies are very real and gag orders are also very real so could someone please explain or link to info on why these things exist instead of saying covid made people stupid, which I assume means you also think yourself and all government leaders are now dumber? That does not mean anyone is causing hurricanes but maybe if more information on technologies that has been for decades was explained it would not be so confusing and these things would not get so out of hand.
One doesn't need to be able to build the thing they patent. I've seen conspiracy theorist link to weather technology patents but they are things like "create a fog", which I think we'll both agree is SLIGHTLY less energetic than the current extreme weather, so if you know of a patent for and evidence of a working hurricane machine I'd like to see it. We can't just say "well they seed rain, therefore they have a hurricane machine".
> the patents for weather technologies are very real
Would you cite some of them, then? Especially ones that are not just "weather technologies" but are capable of creating, amplifying, and/or steering hurricanes?