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Comment by Zurrrrr | Hacker News Reader

I don't see how to solve this. This is the same root cause that causes people to be 911 truthers or qanon or to vote for clearly nonsense candidates.

It's a lack of critical thinking, and it's an epidemic.

When you have people believing whatever they want on Facebook or whatever because someone makes minimal effort to photoshop something to look like a news post, of course that's something AI can take advantage of.

But it isn't a new problem, and the solution is the same.

But how do you educate a population that is aggressive and resistant to acquiring knowledge?

I'm just here to watch the band play as the ship goes down.

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Critical thinking requires time and effort. Offloading critical thinking is something every single person does in order to make sense of the world and make decisions, it's basically what trust is and it's necessary for the world to function.

The idea that we can just ignore this risk and allow critical thinking within individuals to handle it is not even wishful thinking, just shirking responsibility imo.

Also, critical thinking is a social phenomenon.

You make sense of the world based on the sources you trust, and that trust is created gregariously by learning to rely on what your peers are sharing as trustworthy. The time and effort needed is shared with the group, and the resulting wisdom of the crowds filters out the most outrageous messages from the outside, developing a 'groupthink' that establishes a consensus of what is "common sense" for the group.

However, someone with the power to broadcast messages to the whole group can overcome that group processing, and sway the whole group to a different way of thinking.

I've never seen anyone defend and make excuses for people not thinking critically.

Sure, trust is one thing, and we relax critical thinking....but trust among people we know has nothing to do with failures as large as thinking, say 5G causes covid. Trust has nothing to do with that really.

And I'm not ignoring the risk. I absolutely acknowledge it Trump almost got elected twice for chrissakes. I just don't see what can be done about it with a population resistant to thinking.

I am a big fan of critical thinking, but shouting "think harder people" is just not a solution to anything, and neither is giving up. We can and should change our system to support critical thinking, and we can change it to demand much less critical thinking to make effective decisions.

It's not so much I'm shouting "think harder people", more lamenting that I think it's too late. The shouting should have been done about 30 years ago.

I'm cynical, but I don't really see a path forward for the US when half the population is so resistant to truth.

But absolutely, I agree with should be improving education and changing things so not every single thing should have to be analyzed to make a decision.

You're looking at such a short time frame, that it's not a surprise that this all seems like a new phenomenon to you.

Lets jump back to 90 years ago to Europe. Do you think the lead up to world war two was caused by a lack of critical thinking? Do you think if I sent you back to 1920 so you could howl into the wind about critical thinking if you believe you'd have made one iota of difference to the devastation that occurred?

I would like you to give me a power, that is to make critical thinking an uninterruptable process in your mind, and also have the ability to spam the shit out of you with things that you should probably be thinking critically about anyway. You would be a wreck in days. The number of things you take for granted about the world around you, things society and the social contract take care of silently and with little notice would now be things you have to think about. You would have to back process that entire queue of completely dumb shit we don't think critically about but likely should. You wouldn't get anything else done.

Instead you, me, and Mr McGhee push those things out of our mind because we have work do to, relationships to work on, food to eat, stress to relieve, new things to learn, etc. Humans require a lot of time doing a lot of illogical human crap to remain sane, and not set around being machines.

Where did I ver say anything that indicated I thought it was a new phenomenon or that I was limiting what I was describing to a short time frame?

That aside, no idea what you are arguing here. It seems to be that because critical thinking won't solve every single problem it's worthless?

You're very close to a breakthrough there... The first thing you have to accept is that 'critical thinking' is not a thing. There is only thinking. When you have that realization it is much easier to see when a person gets themselves in a situation that requires nonbiased, factual, information based processing to get out of they are exceptionally unlikely to do it as they lack the nonbiased factual data in the first place and likely have no realization it even exists.

And that's not even the hard part. No, that's the easy part.

The hard part is when there is a set of biased agents that keep feeding you bad information that keep you away from that thinking revolution that would allow you to escape the trap. Friends, politics, advertizing, these are all ever present agents that bias you to things like societal norms, to acceptable behaviors, that tell you what to think and not think about. And these are things that you also spread to other people. It's just part of being a society, a civilization.

I'm guessing from your username you were born in 97. How are you that young and arrogant and condescending lol.

There's no 'breakthrough' I'm close to or need to have. I said everything I needed to say and it remains accurate. You said a bunch of nonsense based on your own assumptions, and you're acting like you're trying to teach me something or some bullshit.

The only thing you continue to prove with your comments is that you yourself could really benefit from learning how to think critically before you reply. I won't be replying again to you, it's simply not worth the effort.

Cheers.

Poor assumption, that was the year I picked this particular username, far far older than that, and seemingly very agist on your part too.

If any problem involves "Everybody all of a sudden doing the right thing" the problem is not solvable if that is the only solution.

May we both live in interesting times.

Whatever political side you are in, it's extremely naive to assume the other side is making choices because of stupidity. Yes there are stupid people and conspiracy theorists on the "other side", but trust me, at the lower sophisticated end of your political side there are also really stupid ideas that people believe in.

We all have our reasons for believing stupid stuff, and voting for candidates that are "clearly nonsense".

Yes, there are idiots on both sides, but that's like Trump trying to equate racists with non-racists by saying there are good people on both sides.

It's only one side of the political spectrum that as a significant portion of people who think a Kenedy will return from the dead, that you can cure covid by 'putting the light inside', that 5G causes covid, etc etc etc.

The amount of ignorance isn't equally distributed at all, and it's silly to try and claim otherwise.

As someone who grew in both eastern europe and the west, this view you have is quite wrong. The amount of stupidity on the left about "equality" and where it leads is very large, a lot of people believe it, even though it leads to more murderous places than right wing extremism ever did.

Contrary to you I don't believe these people are stupid, I just think the utopian vision of equality is a very potent one, but it also happens to be the most destructive path paved with good intentions.

Both sides have a lot of stupid ideas at the extremes, and there aren't less or more people who believe them, it just depends on how willing you are to look objectively.

There's a lot of people who grew up in the region you did who come to the weat and are suspicious and downright dismissive of many leftist ideals. That's a shame. Your experiences don't invalidate their talking points and it is still the most logical things to strive for if we want the US (or really any) country to do better.

One side is trying to force crayons as coins into a washing machine (that doesn't have a payment mechanism) to pay for laundry, the other is being fanciful and naive in some of their goals for a better tomorrow.

The two sides are not alike.

> and it is still the most logical things to strive for if we want the US (or really any) country to do better.

Actually, logic would dictate you want people to become wealthy, and inequality doesn’t matter. Usually though when societies create wealth they also create inequality, so while everyone does better, the rich do even better. People like yourself can’t see how this is a good thing, because you see equality is moral, except the only way you get equality is by pulling people down. This is the lesson of history, which many don’t understand. I’ve seen this at work in so many instances, for example the education system in the UK. The obsession with equality has not meant underperformers are lifted up, but all elite training is destroyed. Except then overall you just lower the level of everyone.

You need to get beyond your resentfulness of people doing well. Capitalism (and freedom) isn’t perfect, many people exploit it, and it creates inequality, but it’s much better for everyone than anything else. And you simply don’t have examples today or in history of anything different (and Nordic countries are still capitalist, btw).

I'm not against capitalism, I just think there should be more regulation (like the Nordic countries).

Like I said, you are making a ton of assumptions out of fear and misinformation.

> It's a lack of critical thinking, and it's an epidemic.

It's because the non-AI text generators everyone spends too much time listening to (jounos, "content creators") rely on an audience that doesn't engage with their output critically.

add in that even the real news is often lies or at least some kind of manipulation...

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