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Comment by toss1 | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, this is another topic of questions to add to job interview filters - ask about the moon landings & vaccines.

Anyone subscribing to any of this conspiracy nonsense, especially as an identity is (pardon the language) too effin stupid to work in any serious technical endeavor - if they're deeply willing to ignore those facts & reason, what will they ignore on your project?

Plus, their deeply ingrained ideas that any authority is trying to control them has a high probabilty of turning against any employer lie a rabid dog, creating at least a costly series of problems and toxicity.

I'd even filter them out for manufacturing or fast food work.

edit: should add I'm talking about willful stupidity - deliberate cultivation of ignorance, as distinguished from naturally low intellectual horsepower

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Keep in mind that things such as mass surveillance or the US government drugging its own citizens would have gotten you in an institution for suffering from paranoid delusions until these things came to light. There is always more and sometimes interesting perspective to consider.

"Stupid" is not a useful way to generally describe the people vulnerable to conspiracy theories. I have met people who are relatively intelligent who fall into these. See also: religion, politics.

I have met stupid intelligent people. Sometimes knowledge just doesn't seem to translate to actual behavior and decisions (it's mostly about the lack of decisions, IMHO).

> I have met stupid intelligent people.

The irony happens when it is education itself that compromises the critical faculties of someone, as the article mentions.

Intelligent people are sometimes loyal to an ideology built during their upbringing and belong to their circle. Sometimes the exact opposite happens and drives them to a complete rejection of said ideas. Religion, culture, and politics are prone to create blind spots, where otherwise critical, highly educated, and intelligent individuals don't question specific biases because they are too closely related to their identity.

What's a better term for people with a lack of critical thinking skills and/or a lot of unexamined closely held beliefs?

I've met a number of religious people who were quite good at their technical jobs that required critical thinking skills. So long as the knowledge, skills and behaviors required of them don't clash with their identity beliefs, there's no problem in terms of performance.

Sure, but most of those fields don't require a carefully examined set of beliefs about the world itself in order to succeed. A logically inconsistent but functional worldview is usually enough. As an extreme example it's entirely possible to be an award-winning pediatric neurosurgeon while simultaneously believing that the Egyptian pyramids were grain storage silos.

Fields that require carefully examined beliefs about almost everything (physics for example) are a lot harder to pull that off in.

With religion ymmv. A lot of people do not believe in some super-being, but do believe in belief and the benefits it brings them. A feeling of happiness, a social group to belong to, and a way of coping with the bigger philosophical questions around death and the meaning of life.

Religion is too broad a term to sweep everyone under. It’s very diverse.

Now creationists, who believe the world is 5.000 years old - yeah, that’s a whole other bag-of-fish.

To your first point, even creationists believe in empirical science and I doubt you'll find any meaningful disagreement between a die hard creationist and an evolutionary biologist on the empirical data. The line between empirical and circumstantial or interpretive evidence is often very blurry, however.

My 3rd though 6th grade education was at a private Christian school. We were explicitly taught that the Earth is ~6,000 years old and that fossils are a test of faith in that belief. Fundamentalist creationists exist.

https://enki.org/2018/07/30/things-i-learned-in-elementary-s...

I don't doubt you, but neither of those ideas are empirical in nature and not what I was referring to.

Maybe I am misunderstanding you. What good is empiricism if you will reject evidence that conflicts with your beliefs?

This isn't my field so forgive me if this is a little confusing, but consider the big bang's origin. We have empirical data that suggests that the universe is expanding. To be clear, the interpretation of the data is that it's expanding, but it's non-controversial since virtually everyone accepts that almost all galaxies are moving away from each other. It's also not controversial to suggest the idea to creationists that everything could have come from one point, and that point expanded in all 3 dimentions (time, space) then matter.

The belief on the creationist side is that this original event must have a cause, because everything else in the universe that we can empirically study obeys that principle.

The belief on the atheist side, for lack of a better label, is that the universe was/got created out of nothing. It must be possible for it to occur without God, in the purest sense of the word atheist.

But whether God created it or it created itself, there are only interpretations and no direct empirical evidence.

That doesn't help with the direction from my Seventh-day Adventist teachers that I should ignore empirical evidence. They specifically taught that any evidence found which would falsify their calculated age of the Earth should be ignored.

Yes, one can be a creationist and choose to believe that God created the universe with a big bang. But some creationists literally believe that the Earth was created in six days.

It’s amazing how many intelligent people believe 5G will give you <whatever condition is trending>.

It's easy to explain -- just not to people whose salary whose salary depends on not understanding it, who keep shaking their heads as the predictable results of the boat they won't rock roll in.

> people want some understanding of what's happening, but they're not getting it from the media, they're not getting it from the intellectual classes, they're certainly not getting it from the government

[..]

> it's happening all over and I think you can trace a good deal of it to the effect of neo-liberalism. It had a goal remember: the goal of neo-liberalism was to transfer decisions away from the public to the hands of private power and to atomize the population.

-- Noam Chomsky, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiCeqySVhCE&t=20m55s

> the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act - but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- Erich Fromm, https://hrc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15878coll...

Sure, if "Stupid" is limited to the inability to form a sequence of connected thoughts, it is probably the wrong word.

If it encompasses the inability to reliably connect thoughts to reality, inability to trust anything other than naive constructs and actively distrusting others (which will certainly limit the problem space in which they can work), then it serves as a good shorthand.

Do you have any better suggestions (that aren't full sentences or paragraphs)?

Ah yes, the famous "I don't like them so they shouldn't be able to live"...

Since you're willing to deny people's basic rights such as "working", following your logic, someone could argue that you obviously lack empathy and shouldn't be in a managing position or anywhere above the very bottom of the hierarchy ladder

No matter how smart you think you are there will always be someone who think you're as dumb as a rock, hopefully they're not in a position to chose if you're allowed to get a job or not

if you live in a place where being allowed to work by other people is a prerequisite for living, I suggest doing something about your barbaric local culture.

I'm not sure I get your point, if there is a point or if you're trying to be sarcastic, could you elaborate ?

You appear to have equated depriving somebody of employment opportunities with disallowing them from living, and the opportunity to be employed somewhere with basic rights.

In general, the two are not the same. And if they are in a given society, in this age, that society is in need of help. Nobody in a modern, healthy society with ample resources should have to work to be allowed to live.

Define "living". Sure you can "exist" without a job, maybe even afford rent in some countries like France or Germany (they give you something like 30% of the min wage for just being there), but I'd doubt many people would call that life.

In countries like the US or third world countries you're in for a pretty miserable existence if you don't have a job. I'm not saying it's good, but it's reality

> I'm not saying it's good, but it's reality

No argument there, but we should do something about our barbaric local culture.

> I'd even filter them out for manufacturing or fast food work.

Barking insanity. You've just suggested sending people with completely harmless beliefs to the gulag. Either that or starving them to death; feel free to clarify how you expect these people to live. What would you consider appropriate treatment for people with what you consider actively "harmful" beliefs? Pull their fingernails out until they agree?

Intolerant assholes who would cashier harmless nincompoop flat earthers are the ones who should be unhirable outside of shoveling holes in the ground and scrubbing pots and pans: nobody wants a tin pot fascist in a management chain -for liability reasons if nothing else. This level of intolerance for nonconforming beliefs would have suggested burning Giordano Bruno or Galileo at the stake for their heresies in a different era, for precisely the same "reasons."

> I'd even filter them out for manufacturing or fast food work.

Would shoveling manure be a fitting enough means for them to earn their living in your eyes or is there something even lower that you think would be appropriate?

"I'd even filter them out for manufacturing or fast food work."

What an awful approach to hiring. But, perhaps you see it as a good way to make sure that all of your colleagues are the "right" sort of people and that you never have to work with someone as lowly as a manufacturer or restaurant server.

Remember, as an employer, you'll be asking people to come to your place, and accomplish things alongside of you.

The first qualification of the "right" sort of people is integrity and an ability to trust them.

As Warren Buffet said:

"Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don't have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it's true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy."

Deep belief in conspiracy theories demonstrates maintained willful ignorance in the face of overwhelming facts -- i.e., a complete lack of intellectual integrity

It also shows an overwhelming distrust of anyone in authority, which would include an employer. A persons ability to trust shows their own trustworthiness - and in this case, it is for all practical purposes, zero. The second the conspiracist perceives that you are somehow slighting him, he will turn on you.

Why would anyone pay a person to work alongside them when their ability to think is self-constrained, they lack intellectual integrity to think clearly, and they are actively working to mistrust you?

Considering that I AM a manufacturer, and also enjoy the company of restaurant servers and practice tipping well, that's a quite ignorant accusation.

The point is that if I'm hiring for manufacturing, or restaurant, I don't want someone in a shop with many hazards who makes a major practice in their life to 1) ignore actual facts, and 2) actively foment mistrust of any 'authority'.

I'm Sorry. I had completely misunderstood your comment.

as did apparently many others :-/

I'm sure these types of policies would never be used against you and your beliefs.

It has zero to do with the specific beliefs

It has everything to do with the person actively maintaining willful ignorance and complete distrust

I find your whole line of argument to be pretty frail and ignorant, I wouldn't bar you from being able to work though.

If you don't see how this kind of system would be abused you have a very peculiar perspective on life.

Who said anything about barring anyone from work?

It is a specific employer choosing to question someone on their voluntary relationship with facts.

How is it that people insisting on believing in provable falsehoods (not religious beliefs) is somehow a protected class?

There is also nothing preventing a flat-earther employer setting up the same filter with the opposite polarity, i.e., filtering out people who actively work with scientific principles, perhaps because he considers that science-minded people are less likely to follow direction. It's his choice.

Real example, a lawsuit in Connecticut affirmed that a police department was within its rights to deny employment to a candidate who scored too HIGH on their intelligence test.

> if they're deeply willing to ignore those facts & reason, what will they ignore on your project?

And yet there are & have been brilliant engineers with uncommon beliefs, e.g. Terry Davis.

You could have picked any number of brilliant iconoclasts, but Terry Davis didn't have "uncommon beliefs," he had schizophrenia and it ruined his life and may have driven him to suicide.

And at the end of the day, his operating system is an interesting novelty and little more. Manic obsession and technical skill aren't equivalent to genius.

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