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Comment by babesh | Hacker News Reader

That is why you need an educated populace. By educated, we mean one that can think critically and independently rather than a college credential.

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Germany in the early 1930s was one of the best, most rigorously educated nations in the world.

It was also crushed by weight of enormous economic crisis.

Smart people pushed to the wall will be more dangerous than stupid(ish) people who have something to lose.

It’s almost as if education is a proxy for being a social conformist. But people still think school cures groupthink. It does the opposite by definition.

We’ve got one of the most educated populations in the world. Europe is only recently catching up to is in e.g. the percentage of people with college degrees.

College degrees are not a relevant metric. What percentage of the population are being taught fundamental critical thinking skills? How many are taught how to evaluate the quality of data and the quality of sources? How many people have a good grounding of statistics? Or civics? Or logical fallacies? How many people can describe the scientific method?

I don't have many vivid memories of my primary school education but one of them was being taught how to be suspicious of claims made in advertisements. That one class stuck with me for a long time. (This was in Melbourne, Australia sometime around 1988.)

Very few people are being taught this anywhere. Even M.D.s (some of the most intelligent and educated among us) have so little statistical knowledge they can barely reason about novel type 1 versus type 2 errors.

I wouldn't put MDs on such a high pedestal. They're people who specialize, just like people in many other professions, and having little knowledge of statistics beyond an (oft-forgotten) undergraduate-level course wouldn't surprise me. It's a different story for doctors who go the research route rather than practicing medicine, of course.

My classmates who went on to become medical doctors were no smarter and possibly less ethical. What they had was the family circumstances to delay gratification. Sometimes this was family wealth to support them for years, other times it was the family pooling their resources for one chosen member of the family, other times it was the family wealth to support them going to a lower tier medical school, and lastly it was family members who got them positions. I really hated the guy who cheated in honors English and went on to become a doctor.

Turning your descendants into doctors and lawyers is one of the traditional ways families use to preserve their wealth. It isn’t because these people were smarter.

> how to be suspicious of claims made in advertisements. That one class stuck with me for a long time. (This was in Melbourne, Australia sometime around 1988.)

FWIW, advertising and to a larger extent advocacy in 1988 and what is today are entirety different animals.

Though I do agree with your point. The number of college graduates does not equate to higher critical thinking of a nation's populace.

I did attend a journalism class almost a decade ago. Even though the powerful effects of mass media on people were likened to a magic bullet [0] It would be correct to assume that social media tech today has transcended this very capability and in more powerful ways than ever imaginable by its inventor.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypodermic_needle_model

> FWIW, advertising and to a larger extent advocacy in 1988 and what is today are entirety different animals.

There certainly are more forms and techniques of advertising, but if you teach the fundamentals sufficiently well, the critical thinking skill set can adapt as advertising adapts.

An important fundamental is to recognise that you have a desire for a product or service and to know to be conscious of the chain of events that have led to that desire.

You mean tracking? Advertisements themselves didn't change. And you don't need any complex countermeasure, just knowing that the information not trustworthy is enough for all practical purposes and for all information sources. People who fall for lies have only one wrong assumption: that the information they receive is trustworthy, once that one is out, it stops working for good.

I think integrity might be what you're aiming toward. When people are taught to live integrous lives and manage to do so, they are more able to see a lack of integrity when it comes.

So if level of schooling achieved is not a good metric for education, what is?

Even if everyone experiences the same schooling, everyone isn’t going to be equally educated.

> We’ve got one of the most educated populations in the world.

Keeping children in school for 12 years doesn't mean they are educated.

Keep in mind that between 7-9% of school-age children in the US are homeschooled.

https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/

Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.

James Madison, The Federalist Papers

Education isn’t a panacea. Think about how there’s the stereotype of pro-Confederates as ignorant hillbillies but then look at who reacts whenever someone suggests not having an inaccurate statute in a public place or naming a U.S. military base after someone who fought against the U.S. military. You’ll find people with Ph.Ds arguing to protect that, not because they’re incapable of learning but because they were deliberately educated with incorrect information and, since the results haven’t harmed them personally, will use their critical thinking and analytic skills to mount as strong a defense as they can. Thinking “critically and independently” is also how people who believe in creationism, are anti-vaccination, climate change deniers, opposed to public health practices during the pandemic, etc. explain their beliefs, too, often sincerely.

I’m not sure how to break that cycle. It seems to require some kind of forcing function which pushes the topic into verifiable facts and logic but that’s hard to against opposition and only works when things are fairly clear-cut (e.g. you can show Robert E. Lee was a bad person from historical records but it’s not easy to objectively prove the causes of poverty or crime rates).

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