Comment by tartoran
2 days ago
I wish people who believed that kind of fake news had this piece of critical thinking. I don't think they do though, they'll take whatever confirms their views and reject everything else as faked by AI with no logic or proof whatsoever.
Almost everyone believes they're thinking critically, that's just how it feels to think at all. As an aside, I wonder about the average person who extols critical thinking, and how proficient he actually is himself; in my experience they're often conformist and susceptible to uncritically accepting consensus positions.
The truth is, for those of us with lower IQ, it doesn't matter how critically we think, we lack the knowledge and mental dexterity to reliably arrive at a nuanced and deep understanding of the world.
You have to stop dreaming of a world where everyone can sort everything out for themselves, and instead build a world where people can reliably trust expert opinion. It's about having a high-trust society. That requires people in privileged positions to not abuse their advantage in a short term way, at the cost of alienating, and losing the trust of the unwashed masses.
Because that's what has happened, the experts have been exploited as a social cudgel, by the psychopathic and malignant managerial class, in such an obvious and blunt way, that even those of us who are self-aware of our limitations, figure we're as likely to get it right ourselves, as to get honest and correct information from our social institutions.
There's always someone willing to outthink you. That's the whole premise of a magic show: there are people willing to dedicate irrational amounts of time to trick you in to believing something that isn't true.
But if you accept my premise, it suggests a different course of action than most people are focused on today. That is, if you're a good person, and want to build a healthier society, then rather than focusing on the stupidity of the masses, and trying to suppress every errant idea that emerges from them, you should instead create an incentive structure that engenders their trust. You would focus on stern, even corporal, punishments for those at the pinnacle of society, more than those at the bottom. Politicians should not emerge from their time in government with hundreds of millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains; which is a non-partisan problem today. And any "scientist" that fakes research data, should be treated very harshly, as a criminal. Undermining public trust in expert opinion causes more death and hardship than a typical street-thug murderer.
There is zero chance of making everyone smart enough to navigate the world adroitly. But there is a slightly better than zero chance we could organize our society to earn their trust.