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Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

A almost guarantee that 100% of the people who believe clickbait fake news articles from bogus and untrustworthy sources also have never heard of the scientific method.

I believe that many older people find critical thinking to be taboo, and prefer to take things at face value because they confuse passivity with wisdom. Why question something when someone will come along any minute to make you feel comfortable anyway?

They tend to be wrong when they think independently because they were never any good at critical thinking to begin with, so they just parrot what they were told makes sense. What's going to keep their lives "the same."

This article does a better job than I ever could explaining my reasoning... https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/014616721243921...

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> 100% of the people who believe...have never heard of the scientific method

Ludicrous. Smart and educated people fall for scams and join cults.

> many older people find critical thinking to be taboo

What?

> They tend to be wrong when they think independently

You realize everything in our world was built by the generations before us, right? Shoulders of giants and all that?

My mother taught me to be autodidact. She would never answer my questions and instead told me to go get an encyclopedia (It was the 70's) and find out myself. When I spouted ignorance she would correct me.

Now she's widowed. As my father declined with Alzheimer's he tuned into FOX news all day long. Oddly, he became less racist despite this because my wife is black. The more he fell in love with her as his daughter, the better person he became.

My mom still watches FOX news all day long. I know this because my son is living with her right now to help her out and he tells me outrageous stuff she does with her ideas and money. She's a devout Republican now. She hated the Obamas but could never tell me why. She loves Trump, but again she can't tell me why other than she "Likes the way he talks."

Any evidence of truth given to her elicits an "OK" and then she walks away. I have no idea how she went from "always look up the answer for yourself" to believing anything that fits her current worldview as shaped by the television she watches.

The problem is Fox News. They have a cynical disregard for the truth.

Lies are sticky. If you passively listen to lies all day, it will affect even you.

Take an excerpt from this article:

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/why-lies-often-st...

Suppose you hear of a family of four who died after eating at Golden Gate Chinese Restaurant. The authorities investigate, and release the information that food poisoning was not the cause. Do you go out for Chinese tonight?

"The Brainwashing Of My Dad" is a very personal documentary about this effect on the director's father.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh3TeTxgNVo

I found the documentarian to be more interesting than her subject which was an old white man listening to talk radio that appeals to old white men and agreeing with it. Her old man is just very agreeable having gone from the left to the right to the center seemingly just parroting the news source he's listening to at the time.

The documentarian on the other hand appears to have never listened to Rush Limbaugh before setting out to do this documentary since she knows so little that's non-controversial about the man. Such as his quirk of saying ditto. She seems ro have just decided who he was by osmosis by reading left wing news articles about him. Rather than try to genuinely understand the appeal of right wing radio she just dismisses it as naziesque brainwashing. The way she belittles her father while not appreciating the narrow range of political thought she has exposed herself to is just so incredibly smug and oblivious.

This documentary in a nutshell is what is wrong with political discourse.

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