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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.