The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’
The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even.<p>If you haven&#x27;t learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won&#x27;t. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I&#x27;ve run into so many people who are misinformed, and let&#x27;s just say &quot;misinformed&quot; means they don&#x27;t know what the academic orthodoxy is in a given field, but they think they know the facts, and they even have theories about why other people are wrong.<p>I&#x27;ve tried to explain to a friend why vaccinations are a good idea, and I get a bunch of crap about how modern medicine doesn&#x27;t work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn&#x27;t get ill. A half a dozen of her friends jump in with articles about how vaccines work, and she ends it with &quot;sure but I&#x27;m skeptical&quot;.<p>I&#x27;ve been invited to a friends house to look at his &quot;Time Waver&quot; machine, which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of how it scans every single one of someone&#x27;s organs. Remotely. In fact he showed me a woman in Italy that he was helping out. First he asked me if I knew anything about quantum theory, which I don&#x27;t really beyond undergrad, and then he gets excited and and spouts something about how I&#x27;ll appreciate a cleansing. Good thing I can stay polite. But someone in his 40s who thinks this is how the world works is not going to have the veil of ignorance lifted.<p>These are just a couple of recent examples. Common to them is there&#x27;s a bunch of stuff you can readily access which supports it. If you have some opinion about just about anything, you can find support for it, in fact a web of support, which will really test your reasoning skills.