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Comment by Cheer2171 | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to remember when they first said that about the Internet. We were going to enter a new enlightened age of information, giving everyone access to the sum total of human knowlege, no need to get a fancy degree, universities will be obsolete, expertise will be democratized.... See how that turned out.

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The motivated will excel even further, for the less motivated nothing will change. The gap is just going to increase between high-agency individuals and everyone else.

I'm old enough to remember when they first said that about the Internet.

(Shrug) It was pretty much true. But it's like what Linus says in an old Peanuts cartoon: https://www.gocomics.com/peanuts/1969/07/20

I’d suggest we are much closer to that reality now than we were in the 90s, in large part thanks to the internet.

Since the Internet became ubiquitous, more people believe the moon landing, climate change, and vaccines are hoaxes.

Is it really that much worse today? When I was a kid, my great aunt died of skin cancer. She was a Christian Scientist and rejected medical treatment in favour of prayer.

As a teenager, I remember being annoyed that the newspapers had positive articles on the rejuvenating properties of nonsense like cupping and reiki. At least a few of my friends' parents had healing crystals.

People have always believed in whatever nonsense they want to believe.

It feels like the friction to get un-science has been completely removed now. Before you had to get lagged content and physically fetch it somehow. Now you can have it in the palm of your hands 24-7 with the bonus of the content being designed to enrage you to get you sucked in.

LLMs and the internet both make it easier for us to access more information, which also means we can reach dumber conclusions quicker. It does go both ways though.

As an aside, internet hasn’t officially been a proper noun since 2016 or so.

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