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't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won't. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I've run into so many people who are misinformed, and let's just say "misinformed" means they don'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'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't work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn't get ill. A half a dozen of her friends jump in with articles about how vaccines work, and she ends it with "sure but I'm skeptical".<p>I've been invited to a friends house to look at his "Time Waver" machine, which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of how it scans every single one of someone'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't really beyond undergrad, and then he gets excited and and spouts something about how I'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'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.