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Comment by qwerty456127 | Hacker News Reader

Teaching things like critical thinking, cognitive bias/fallacies/sophism detection, formal logic and fact-checking to the masses has became a vital necessity for national security. Sadly there still are many politicians who prefer to keep their people susceptible.

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There's no conspiracy necessary: it's just extra effort.

I've always been a proponent of mandatory rhetoric courses in public schools.

Hard to see how a democracy produces good results without learning Defense Against the Dark Arts.

Indeed. Nevertheless lack of a conspiracy (which means organized effort of many cooperating actors) doesn't necessarily imply it's not the case at the level of many individual politicians. So many of them actively use so much of the dark arts routinely, trying to trick and hypnotize people into supporting them, that honest rational rhetoric starts seeming obsolete.

I'd hazard you're giving politicians far too much foresight: 1.5 year timeframe is a stretch.

>Sadly there still are EVERY POLITICIAN who prefer to keep their people susceptible.

Do you maybe know some good resources for self-learning these areas?

If you're waiting for everyone on the planet to just get smarter you're going to be waiting a long time. People can also be critical in one area yet turn their brain off in others.

It seems impossible to make everyone on the planet perfectly smart, yet it seems possible to make the majority smarter than it is, in this specific aspect. We already mass-teach reading and writing, also essentials of sexual hygiene etc. Why not just add basic logic, rhetoric and philosophy to the list of the essentials?

Sure, now you just need to convince the people who shriek about it being pagan indoctrination designed to smuggle in a communist agenda. Take a look at the people one US state have decided are best qualified to overhaul their social studies curriculum: https://x.com/tylerkingkade/status/1810746515750875537/photo...

You also don't want people so media savvy that they see through domestic propaganda.

I do want such people because it's the only way to make them see through enemy propaganda.

Easiness of controlling your people is less important than making it hard for opposing parties to control them.

This is a valuable point that gets understated in much of the discourse about public manipulation and intelligence on an individual level, or as a concept.

People, even smart people, are very, very rarely what you could call fully rounded in their reasoning and intelligence. Sure, we know that many people aren't quite as robust in certain areas of intelligence as they are in others, and on the other hand we know that some are particularly resistant to bad reasoning and dogmatic habits, but as a general trait, people of all stripes and positions, often with mostly rounded intelligence in most things, can be absolutely blind or idiotic in very specific areas of thought, to an irrational degree.

You can have a perfectly skilled engineer that is absolutely convinced the earth really is flat, or a highly capable doctor who simply won't accept any amount of evidence that AIDs is caused by a virus. Or you could have a political genius with all the pragmatism that comes with that, but who's fanatically obsessed with a very specific dogma that drags his country to ruin. Examples abound.

No amount of strong education in logic and critical thinking is going to eliminate these curious but very widespread human tendencies toward deep fissures in otherwise rounded reasoning. You might only reduce the number or depth of fissures as a tendency, but their existence in general is simply too entrenched to really be banished from our psyche.

Still? That’s how it works for them. They may be better or worse, but having a vote by bs-ing average people is fundamental to politics, which at the end of the day is just people who talk, command and avoid work.

AI gives us hope that this system will (finally!) collapse and something new will take its place. Cause it clearly doesn’t work in favor of an average man on the current civilization scale. But it’s not gonna be education and critical thinking for sure.

There’s also no reason to believe that a similar system is not already deployed by “good guys”. It’s such a low hanging fruit for politics-grade budgets that it’s almost a treason to not grab it.

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