The Internet was a mistake because it expected every person to become a paradigm of rationality, yet we are at the end of the day stupid hairless monkeys that can be easily swayed for the promise of a banana.
I thought that already when I was a kid and saw that people do not care at all if their beliefs are correct, and because of that don't care about learning any critical thinking skills, but I wasn't convinced and thought maybe adults just know something I don't, but today it is clear the same problem is even worse and the most important factor to why we are so screwed up as a species
Journalism has been decimated with advertising dollars moving to Google and Meta. This creates 2 camps of journalists, one who attempt to report as if the old standards hold, and others who are the media wings of political parties.
Educating people is always Good. However, no education will empower individuals enough to be competitive with people whose job it is to keep them ignorant.
But I'm not even sure if it was possible - lots of people seem hellbent on believing what they want, I've thought that probably comes from evolution from time when we didn't really have ways to study reality that well, and group cohesion was more important than individual thinking. But we should have at least tried. It was quite clear people would get corrupted when they're sent out of school with a bag of knowledge but no real ways (or will) to really judge any future information
I always love when people insist that schools should teach "Critical thinking"
Because they do. What did you learn in English class? What did you learn the days you were brought to the library in middle school to learn about how libraries worked?
If you took AP language and comp, you were given a very thorough education on how to construct a persuasive essay and therefore a pretty good education in how to evaluate a persuasive claim.
I learned this in bumbfuck nowhere that couldn't afford to heat the school.
It's like all the dumbasses who say "School should teach important skills like how to balance a checkbook or how to do your taxes" as if you don't learn addition, subtraction, and basic english literacy as part of your elementary school education.
You did learn those things, you are just expected to be able to read simple instructions and complete very simple tasks. You aren't supposed to need hand holding for filling out your check book and filling in 14 rows with data from another sheet for fucks sake.
The same people who whine about how school didn't teach them anything important sat next to me in precalc and learned how to calculate loans and interest and yet still sign up for absurd stupid car loans. They literally did not pay attention.
In reality, people don't learn those critical thinking skills because they ignore school. Their parents taught them that education is liberal brainwashing and that it shouldn't be trusted. Their experience is that school is useless because that's what parents and media told them so they didn't pay attention and now as adults they blame the schools and more media insists that it is the schools fault.
In school the scientific method, maybe the most important invention of human kind, was pretty much skimmed over on some science classes on 5th-6th grade. People didn't learn how to apply it and do their own tests in everyday life, at all. Didn't even understand they should, it was just a part of science (subject that nobody cared about anyways).
Even those essays and other projects it's crazy how much weight was put on "books great, reliable magazines ok, tabloids bad, internet mostly bad but .fi domain is the most reliable.." and later down the road "wikipedia bad". That does not help much in current media landscape, where you can buy a book to confirm whatever you want to believe.
I learnt my own critical thinking skills from scientific books and my own curious neurodivergent mind that was obsessed with being as correct as I could. I saw in real time how lacking it was in school, how it affected my peers, and thought this is gonna be a problem in the future, and here we are.
> In reality, people don't learn those critical thinking skills because they ignore school. Their parents taught them that education is liberal brainwashing and that it shouldn't be trusted. Their experience is that school is useless because that's what parents and media told them so they didn't pay attention and now as adults they blame the schools and more media insists that it is the schools fault.
This was absolutely not something that meaningful in my community. Yes there were people like that, but they were just a tiny slice of all the people that didn't really learn to think critically but would probably have wanted to if we just taught them.
I'd call what was taught in school "vibe critical thinking", it seems good on the surface but it really is not even close to good enough. Sure if you get to university it gets better, but that doesn't help with majority of voters.
I don't really know much about education, but even having something like weekly session where we'd talk about how we applied scientific method and other tools in our life to test our claims, and would have judged the tests/methods used by others to see the problems in them to improve, would probably have mattered greatly. At least people would see that you can and should do that in real life, while learning a good intuition on what makes a test good. Honestly people hearing me testing my claims thoroughly made everyone look at me like I'm a crazy person obsessed with the thing I'm trying to prove, when I just understood that if I don't do that my beliefs are worthless.
