Try telling someone that "the process of voting doesn't work that way" or try to clear up some common misconception about the economy or crime and it just doesn't go anywhere. People have a lot of false assurance to back up their mode of thinking and it is nearly impossible to break that. In fact, there is an entire economy in vindicating people's beliefs which makes people even more assured.
I'm convinced the only proper stance on complex ideas, concepts and topics is that we shouldn't have the hubris to think that we completely understand something or even have a solid grasp.
The political discourse around polarizing topics isn't disastrous. It takes place exactly because people realize that they are complex issues not fully understood, and are talking about it in hopes that more information will come to light to help them reach a greater understanding. This is why the more complex the issue, the more it will keep coming up over and over.
human beings are bad at gathering information, inferring the right things from it, and responsibly passing it on to others. It is incredible what we’ve achieved in spite of this
All was achieved when it was widely not so, and by people not affected by this.
As a teacher in middle school I see this demonstrated throughout my classes. I have even started collecting data points on how many times a week a topic or topic adjacent to another topic crops up as discussions in my class. There are almost always heated discussions, but in the end we typically come to an understanding about facts or how we can’t truly know fully situations. There are of course some holds outs, but for the majority we find understanding or compromise.
I read the most about topics that have no clear objective truth. Mostly around Sociology, Psychology and Politics.
Engineering principles I have a deep knowledge of do not attract my attention other than to clear up someone's misconceptions.
We treat thumbs up/down as agree/disagree, whether we're supposed to or not.
They aren't causing it, just furthering our issues for their own goals, and unfortunately it's working pretty well.
Meaning, don't believe that all confident people are bullshiting their way. The best are people that have both expertise and confidence.
This is one reason I like to stay at a company for many years, the expertise boosts my confidence more than linearly (if that makes sense).
I'd assume it is the same logic as comparative advantages in economics; it doesn't make sense for communities to become experts in everything. The only caveat is that people in the chattering communities (eg, journalists, influencers, celebrities) are some of the last to look to for informed opinions on reality since their speciality is attracting attention and telling stories rather than anything linked to success in the physical or academic worlds. They're often clever, just not involved in complex topics.
[0] average = bad. Goes to show how catastrophic dictatorships are that a democracy can consistently outperform one.
There are a lot of problems with that assumption. Thus far it seems to work out better than the alternatives, but we'll have to see if that continues to hold.
Can you expand on this? I have no idea what you mean. In what way do most people vote randomly?
In aggregate, the result of uninformed people voting would be more or less the same as voting randomly.
Not that people vote without thinking.
i don't believe that. at least western media are biased towards majority and conservative views and for profit entities, ignoring or even suppressing minorities and that is making us worse off.
These are all biases that may be politically undesirable to you (the corporate media are basically the vanguard of class warfare, so they should be undesirable to a bunch of people), but they aren't biased in the direction of making things worse at the highest level of abstraction. A rising tide benefits all ships.
If someone is not knowledgeable they will likely buy into some propaganda.
At an extremely high and oversimplified level, that’s more or less random.
It’s a thought framework, not a rigorous explanation
Who's we? I don't expect that at all. "computers" is such a broad subject, with countless areas of specialty, and in my experience HN commenters are often, all too often, quite ignorant of my particular areas of specialty, though that doesn't stop them from overconfidentally asserting falsehoods about those subjects.