i think actual information is way too difficult to suss out these days with the misinformation campaigns and the paywalls and the trolling, etc.
shit try to do some comparison shopping today and try to figure out which reviews are real and if the thing you’re buying is really the thing you think you’re buying.
People don’t do their own research past the most cursory google searches at best of times, and now google is absolute garbage and the links that are relevant mostly go to massive SEO whale sites written by AI.
That’s all before you get to the actual mainstream media sites that spout the same commercial news cycle stories, or spread sensationalized headlines and absolute nonsense. I have managed teams of people and on daily calls people talk about news stories they read like “Did you hear they found another spaceship on mars?” and “They found proof that covid was a Chinese bio-weapon!” and similar statements from working, middle-class people who just browse the websites and social media before work. Most people have very little time to dig into things they see, and now once-reputable sites are just cashing in on clickbait and lies.
This is how most people get their news and information, and it’s absolute garbage now. Browse a major news site like MSN and it’s worse than grocery store tabloids from the 1980’s. And don’t even get started about social media like twitter and facebook.
Something happened in the last couple decades that has made people literally just stop caring what’s real or not. I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it’s now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything.
Agreed: “I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it’s now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything.”
That is the “feature” and the dead end…
The full compliance on anything!
No thoughts, no free speech!
We now have access to the information, and we’ve discovered that all along it was our inability to distinguish between misinformation and real information that was causing the stupidity.
Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don’t bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.
I question whether or not this is true. People will remember things if they find them interesting, so incurious people didn’t know much in the past, either.
The ones that straddled the divide seem to be the most versed but also the most blind to where the other generations are, particularly the newer ones.
Many of them can’t navigate file systems, or use data abstractions like a simple node tree.
They live under eroding education systems and the free sharing of ideas seems under attack damn near everywhere.
Entire concepts like the idea that privacy or self determination are human rights aren’t really taught and are the assumptions of those who came before to them.
They’re mad and don’t even know who to be mad at, all the while their every interaction is with The Algorithm, which is (are) all too happy to break down and redirect that anger towards short term gain for the few, regardless of long term societal costs for the whole.
It’s not insurmountable, but it is so so much bullshit. A never ending deluge. Will the fact that some humans are always born with more than others and enough of them may develop enough critical thinking despite the points at everything be enough?
i think actual information is way too difficult to suss out these days with the misinformation campaigns and the paywalls and the trolling, etc.
shit try to do some comparison shopping today and try to figure out which reviews are real and if the thing you’re buying is really the thing you think you’re buying.
The signal to noise ratio is getting worse by the day, unfortunately.
Definitely doesn’t help, and modern machine learning models are only going to make this problem worse.
People don’t do their own research past the most cursory google searches at best of times, and now google is absolute garbage and the links that are relevant mostly go to massive SEO whale sites written by AI.
That’s all before you get to the actual mainstream media sites that spout the same commercial news cycle stories, or spread sensationalized headlines and absolute nonsense. I have managed teams of people and on daily calls people talk about news stories they read like “Did you hear they found another spaceship on mars?” and “They found proof that covid was a Chinese bio-weapon!” and similar statements from working, middle-class people who just browse the websites and social media before work. Most people have very little time to dig into things they see, and now once-reputable sites are just cashing in on clickbait and lies.
This is how most people get their news and information, and it’s absolute garbage now. Browse a major news site like MSN and it’s worse than grocery store tabloids from the 1980’s. And don’t even get started about social media like twitter and facebook.
Something happened in the last couple decades that has made people literally just stop caring what’s real or not. I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it’s now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything.
Agreed: “I feel like it was an attitude deliberately seeded into our culture, and it’s now maturing as a society that has lost belief in everything and accepts anything.”
That is the “feature” and the dead end… The full compliance on anything! No thoughts, no free speech!
That’s kind of the point.
We now have access to the information, and we’ve discovered that all along it was our inability to distinguish between misinformation and real information that was causing the stupidity.
Another issue is that information is easy enough to find that people don’t bother to remember things as much anymore, since they can just look up the majority of stuff on Wikipedia or something if they ever need to know it. It leads to people having a smaller pool of background knowledge, which makes them easier to mislead.
I question whether or not this is true. People will remember things if they find them interesting, so incurious people didn’t know much in the past, either.
deleted by creator
But who are those folks? Are they they the generations that straddled the divide, the generation before, or the newer generations?
I worry that the generations born into this disinformation age will not have the skills needed to even attempt wading through the bullshit.
The ones that straddled the divide seem to be the most versed but also the most blind to where the other generations are, particularly the newer ones.
Many of them can’t navigate file systems, or use data abstractions like a simple node tree.
They live under eroding education systems and the free sharing of ideas seems under attack damn near everywhere.
Entire concepts like the idea that privacy or self determination are human rights aren’t really taught and are the assumptions of those who came before to them.
They’re mad and don’t even know who to be mad at, all the while their every interaction is with The Algorithm, which is (are) all too happy to break down and redirect that anger towards short term gain for the few, regardless of long term societal costs for the whole.
It’s not insurmountable, but it is so so much bullshit. A never ending deluge. Will the fact that some humans are always born with more than others and enough of them may develop enough critical thinking despite the points at everything be enough?
I dunno. But I worry too.
It’s a feature not a bug
Best case example I know of these days: try to shop for a mattress
Ain’t hard. Bullshit has a smell
But most people don’t know how bullshit smells in the first place… Check the downvotes…