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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

Spaces is amazing. It was great listening Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador talk while they were making history by voting Bitcoin to be adopted as legal tender in the country. He was just looking at his Twitter feed at that time, and was interested in what people are talking about the bill in spaces.

I know he's controversial, but I wish more politicians would make themselves more accessible through Twitter (and I'm not a Trump fan, I just think he used it more effectively than other politicians).

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Yeah, they give lunatics like Nayib a voice, by the way good luck going to el salvador and hope to use bitcoin.

But so does Instagram and Facebook and other socials. Politicians doing live QAs on facebook was happening a decade ago already, since live streams were a thing.

Giving people a voice sure seems like a clear downside of this whole internet thing. Or does it simply mean that humanity is fucking destructive (while individual humans generally are beautiful)?

It's not a downside.

The downside is that we don't teach critical thinking to children in school.

So you end up with adults that believe whatever tv tells them or will buy any compelling argument without trying to debunk it first.

And with more opinions available to people, there is less likelihood of a large mass galvanized around one crazy theory (the one that the overlords deem not crazy).

I don't think that's necessarily true. Is QAnon not an issue? The church of scientology? There are a lot of large groups of people "galvanized around one crazy theory." But, maybe you're right that if they're exposed to more, non crazy views that they'll be better off and less galvanized. How would we test the hypothesis? I wonder if you took some fox news viewers and showed them CNN for a month or so if that would change their worldview?

I wish HN had bots, I would write one to debunk this critical thinking fallacy with respect to social media.

Better powers of discrimination, higher IQ, are illusory when it comes to inoculating yourself against propaganda.

So it's amazing at miseducating and misinforming politicians in impoverished countries?

In industrial economies money is credit and countries issue their own money by setting up a banking system to lend it into existence on security of domestic tangible capital to promote wealth formation and create liquidity for domestic employers to make payroll. Since the early 1700s western governments have known how to create stable money from nothing without any gold, private banks, or external investors by lending it into existence through land loan office system.

It looks like El Salvador didn't create its own money before and was just using US Dollars sent back by emigrants though.

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