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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

The silent majority is pretty fucking stupid as a whole. It’s hard to have an informed populous when they are allowed to censor the stories that make their emotions feel bad. It’s like allowing grade schoolers to vote on what they eat for lunch every day.

As a reddit user, this is what you’re dealing with. The non-college educated majority has control over the following things:

- what politics you see - what comments you see - what science you see - what news you see

It’s going to take a while, but one of the emerging lessons of this era is that democracy for information spreading is a pretty terrible idea. Ted the conspiracy enthusiast/barista maybe shouldn’t have the same voting power on a comment thread about orbital dynamics as an astrophysicist.

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> The non-college educated majority...

Ironicaly the college educated way overrate themself on how objectively they see the world and think they know better than the rest, but they fail to see the forest for the tree just as often as non-college educated.

College does not give you the ability to see objectivity, it just increases knowledge across a specific field.

See: reproductability crisis.

College is the only level of education where they even attempt to teach critical thinking skills. It’s definitely not a high success rate, but it’s better than the rote memorization that comes from high school level.

What’s left is self taught which is a tiny slice of both populations.

> See: reproductability crisis.

That has no relationship to college education. The reproducibility crisis impacts the quality of research for PhD programs. It has nothing to do with spending time learning logic and philosophy that hasn’t changed for hundreds to thousands of years. The fact that you think the reproducibility crisis has anything to do with a college education sort of proves the point...

Yes, the system doesn't work. When Usenet died it got replaced by forums and the old trolls got granted admin rights. The non-sane people that have a lot of time to post all day end up with the highest reputation and privileges.

On the other hand closed groups of experts also don't work. I once knew some really extreme religious guys - pretty much flat-earthers. They were all heading for bioscience and networked like crazy - they got jobs in academia. Lonely brilliant scientists didn't.

Most likely a lot of science-communities have already been overrun by "networks".. Maybe the era of rational thinking is coming to an end.

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