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Comment by marcodiego | Hacker News Reader

There is more people using the internet than hungry. This is both good and bad. Consider that most of these people do have access to internet but have minimal culture or education to judge what is conspiracy, conspiracy theory, fake news or downright lies. People don't know what science is or what is the scientific method. They don't know what is the difference between opinion and fact, prejudice and moral, dogma and respect. Most have no idea of probabilities and statistics and fall prey to very very poor arguments that appeal to personal emotional triggers. Makes me remember an old report that favelas in Brazil had more TV's than refrigerators.

Instead of becoming an instrument to strengthen freedom, it actually weakens it and promotes domination and inequality.

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That's pretty elitist. Do you want to check for a college degree at the door?

Hell, you can just look around HN to see that a formal education/"culture consumption" doesn't stop people from falling into messy baseless conspiracy theories. And a lot of people confuse "disagreeing with me/having different foundational truths" with "being wrong" no matter how much Foucault they've read.

I think a lot of what people take as indicators of lack of judgement or skills to handle information are more often just indicators of those who have little or no trust in the institutions or its messengers.

> That's pretty elitist.

Perhaps the parent post sounded harsh but there's nothing elitist in acknowledging that billions of people lack access to good education (and food, water, etc). It's not their fault and nothing shameful.

> And a lot of people confuse "disagreeing with me/having different foundational truths" with "being wrong" no matter how much Foucault they've read.

HN is known to be an echo chamber, and also no amount of education is a silver bullet. But learning critical thinking (including reading Foucault) does wonders.

Unfortunately a lot of "formal education", especially around STEM, is focusing more and more around the "how" and less about the "why".

> Instead of becoming an instrument to strengthen freedom, it actually weakens it and promotes domination and inequality.

I don't agree with this, other communication mechanisms can be more easily controlled for propaganda purposes and can completely exclude contrary information.

The idea that "access to information is bad because some information is wrong" is very popular but there's not much to it other than elitism and a desire for control over others.

> Most have no idea of probabilities and statistics and fall prey to very very poor arguments that appeal to personal emotional triggers. Makes me remember an old report that favelas in Brazil had more TV's than refrigerators.

For someone who is taking the high ground on this topic, this is a strange topic. I'm pretty sure there are more TVs on my street than there are refrigerators; we only have one fridge but have >1 tv for example.

https://restofworld.org/2021/instagram-and-class-in-india/

read this.

now, i have family members who are "glued" to their "insta". constantly swiping up, laughing, "see this, see this", meh, "oh cool, nice", sharing on whatspp.

rinse and repeat. i don't know how that feels like. i personally do not use whatsapp or telegram so i am somewhat shielded by the whole sharing culture. neither i use instagram or facebook for some reason. i'd rather spend my time window shopping on libby, granted that is becoming a small minority but still...

the amount of absurd BS peddled on instagram and tiktok is staggering. like you have endless supply of videos sharing health benefits of ginger and for the next week your family tells you about ginger and balding, weight loss, weight gain, kidney stones, heart health, brain power, on and on.

next week its chia seeds, then nigela seeds. There was a time i hear when astrology was seen as harmless, now, not so much because your insta astrologer can make you do stupid stuff for "cosmic alignment" and its all like farming.

i have a question. When discussion on peertube comes up, "creators" cry "well, youtube gives me ad revenue so why bother" but those same people and more than them spend considerable time on instagram and tiktok without any cash earnings so why is that acceptable that time ?

You're on hacker news which is really just instagram for people who like startup cosplay. Most of the internet is a waste of time but at least things are written forever and the global consciousness moves faster together as one. If that's through Instagram or Wikipedia who cares.

ok point taken but that was about me. instagram imo is ephemerial, tiktok more so. same as whatsapp. you need fresh content to keep the machine churning. people don't usually spend time rewatching old stuff, or do they?

I thought people (Kashmiri Muslims) thought astrology was haram?

that is "haram" by all means. i'm not advocating it, i was making a point. that's all.we don't have newspapers publishing the horoscope or something or palmists on roadside willing to read your hand for a sum. that thing is properly not practised in the masses. i was saying, the "internet" with all it s good because of lack of proper education, people are warming up to ideas that they should not.

take the example of online gambling. people bet like anything today. we have dozens of "he won 1 crore today, wish i had won the same. let me try to do this tomorrow". the argument is, "well, no money is changing hands. we are not handing out money with our hands. that is haram. this is just taking money from our accounts and getting back some. we aren't touching anything".. i have genuinely heard this argument the other day and my mind was blown at that time. my point is, people are milking the gullible for profit and justifying it.

I mean sure, my family used to do “fal nikaalna” with Divan-e-Hafiz, I was just surprised to hear about dissemination via TikTok of such things

i had to look that one up.... that.. i had not heard that one before

>"well, no money is changing hands. we are not handing out money with our hands. that is haram. this is just taking money from our accounts and getting back some. we aren't touching anything"

You’re right I needed to sit down for that one.

what do you know https://youtu.be/fXqc_F3rm7k?t=204

enjoy

Unfortunately my family doesn’t belong to Kashmir :( - I had a Kashmiri Muslim classmate in Masjid Sunday school in grade school but only Kashmiri speaking people I know now are family of this Pandit lady I went to university with

One of the greatest ironies of the 20th-21st centuries is that the lower and upper classes are closer to each other (in living a life driven by primal forces), than the middle classes are to either.

Everything you've written is a middle class construct that doesn't exist on either---extreme---end of the class spectrum. These abstract constructs posit that there can be facts, truths, and "good" -- when the reality is that all the forces behind everything that impacts us are human in nature.

We're all working to push our agendas, and reach our own ends (almost always unconsciously or unaware of the deeper reasons).

So long as you keep off-loading all of your thinking and decision-making to others (in this case, the other would be Platonian woo-woo aether concepts), you're instigating the proliferation of middle class "intellectual" propaganda, and further widening the rift between you and the lower classes (one could even say, you're building a moat, because you're pushing the upper classes even further away).

The internet exposes inequality of education, material circumstance, cultural access, and the repulsive superiority complexes that justify it all.

> Makes me remember an old report that favelas in Brazil had more TV's than refrigerators.

When radio and television started to make inroads into public life in many developed country they benefited from a lot of reasonably curated, even cultural programs ran as a public services.

In many countries national television did a lot to provide bits of education to adults, encourage adoption of the national language, learn about other cultures and so on.

What is really bad on the Internet is that many websites and services benefit from misleading content, ignorant comments, conspiracy theories, and so on.

Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

But perhaps it's not so bad: when the level of misinformation is high enough (e.g. on platforms like tiktok) most people learn quickly to be skeptical.

The formally educated have always feared that the poor, unwashed and educated would get access to information. How would they be able to interpret it? After all, they might only have 0–5 years of vegetating at a desk in front of a scolding teacher whereas I have 13+ years of experience with that.

I think those fears are overblown and mostly class-motivated in any case.

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