I benefit when others around me get better education, that's why I'm happy when my taxes are used to fund schools and universities and other ways of educating people. And it also benefits the economy, so every tax dollar/euro spend on education has a huge ROI.
Thinking the issue is a lack of education is a kind of procrastination, as if we can just fix this over a 20 year span. Ignorance is not the problem here, malice is. There are plenty of ignorant people who are uninformed or believe silly things without being assholes about it.
There's an unwillingness on HN to engage with the fact that the amplification effect of the broadcast/internet/social media selects for liars and propagandists and fraudsters absent countering mechanisms. That's why spamming and scamming are ubiquitous in our super high tech civilization.
Critical thinking and evidence-based reasoning, as taught in your average language arts and social studies courses, specifically calls out bias and teaches kids how to be skeptical. When I was in school, we read passages and books and got to make whatever conclusion we wanted. But the essay we wrote had to be evidence-based. The teacher didn't care so much what we said, but rather that we could form a logical string to say it.
All this is to say, I think yes - if public education is further destroyed this will only get worse.
I think this is an uncontroversial statement. I also think virtually everyone who thinks this is probably certain ~they~ wouldn't be dumb enough to be taken in.
Realistically, if information is coming at you for free (like pretty much all of it is), it's purpose is to get someone a return. We are swimming in a sea of marketing and propaganda. No class is going to save you from that.
Same for antivax movement, it was present across all education levels.
But I am not 100% on this.
I despise school sports.
If $12.5k is spent per child per year, and there are 20 children per classroom, that's $250k.
Combining random sources (which use widely different divisions), I see numbers like:
60-90% instruction salary/benefit and related (higher numbers likely include non-teacher staff)
55-60% salaries
20-25% employee benefits (probably health insurance, which is really expensive in America no matter who pays for it)
5-20% capital/operations/contractors
10% administration
8% supplies
5-35% support (likely varies depending on what counts as "support")
0-5% debt
4% otherI've hired students who graduated with a low "C" average in their area of study, who were D- at the parts of their job that required that study, and had no personal interest or accurate knowledge to share about their study.
People don't want to believe they are stupid, and they especially don't want to believe the people (or institutions) who call them stupid are superior to them. So they find a way out, by believing something that not only makes them feel important (they know but other people don't), but also superior to those who ostracised them in the first place.
I've been thinking about this for a while, but somehow never came across any similar ideas anywhere, anybody got references (or comments) ?
It's just political polarization. Conservatives (of a certain variety) in the US are polarized against the establishment (the media, science, colleges, etc), and this is the result. Better education might save some of them, but not many. The smarter ones retain the same core beliefs without the abject silliness.
Alternate Theory:
This is purely the result of "too much news". Breathless coverage of every little detail means every little mis-step blows up to infinity, quickly eroding trust.
The 24hr + internet news cycle is basically a reaction maximization optimization machine with a dt ~ 0. Fox News walked so Facebook could run and now Twitter is sprinting. Insert long form podcasts in the mix for a constant hum of algorithmic misinformation and this result is inevitable.
tl;dr: more people need to go out and touch some grass.
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7505057/#:~:tex....
Readers only have superficial means to reward or punish journalism, which is much more focused on getting attention and clicks these days. Advertising always has been their main income, but the economy thoroughly changed in recent years.
All these issues undermine trust and in the end more arcane conspiracy theories serve as an explanation, why we read so much shit left and right.
These people are likely predominantly over 50 and were in high school in the 60s/70s/80s.
They've just been deliberately choosing to stew themselves for the past decade or three in right wing and fringe media.
On the other hand, this sounds like something you just made up and decided to connect to the current topic. Is this fact or fiction?
But obviously just blindly throwing money won't help.
This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.
This also happens whenever there is an apparent "win" even if it isn't quite so. For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. Same for the Iraq war, with "weapons of mass destruction" - imagine if your child died from that lie. Repeat this every year, in multiple institutions, for 20+ years straight; and yes, observant people might well think that everything the government has ever said is a hoax. It's not about the science, or their ability to track truth from falsehood, but their reactionary hate of anything the institutions say.
- first-hand reports from other people
- private news networks
- the governments of other countries
The scale and degree of this distrust of other people is new. Arguably the US government was far, far less trustworthy in the past, such as when it was massacring people in Vietnam or secretly conducting experiments on Black people. These revelations did not lead to meteorologists getting death threats.
Anecdotal evidence? I thought we were supposed to reject that.
> private news networks
You mean rebranded affiliates? https://youtu.be/rknON89H35o?t=35
> the governments of other countries
Are governments inherently trustworthy?
I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.
News networks, twitter and podcasts got 100x better at making mountains out of mole-hills because they had continuous access to an audience to fine-tune their reaction engines. That's it.
Not when it's thousands of people showing us photos and videos.
It's not that it's impossible that [insert major event here] is a conspiracy, but you always have to ask:
- is it possible for even a highly competent government to orchestrate this conspiracy with no whistleblowers?
- what is the benefit of the conspiracy to the conspirators?
- is the benefit of the conspiracy worth the effort?
In the case of "faking a hurricane," there is no incentive (and in fact there are disincentives to being wrong about it for the meteorologists) and there is no possibly way to orchestrate that large of a conspiracy.
If the CCP is unable to successfully disappear people or put Uyghurs in camps without people finding out about it, nothing this large could be pulled off in the US.
> You mean rebranded affiliates?
No, I mean the Weather Channel and others.
> I can do this all day. There is no end to fallacies of thought.
I don't think you're doing what you think you're doing.
Isn't the joke here that for most of modern history the flat earth discussions were a debate contest by people who didn't actually believe the earth was flat but enjoyed trying to prove it was? And then it leaked out and found a welcome home amongst people gullible enough to believe all of the "evidence" that had been concocted.
I've seen this trajectory far too often to think what is happening is accidental.
And I don't think it's intelligence, smart people get sucked into cults all the time, being smart makes you better at convincing yourself of the nonsense. It's self-administered cult indoctrination. I don't think anyone has defenses for this kind of stuff outside of being primed to believe it's nonsense.
This is such a weird way of looking at it.
Imagine, for simplicity, there's an optimal amount of fluoride to add, which is X. Also imagine science can guess the number but, obviously, it's not perfect.
What will happen is that we will start at some number, and gradually change it as we get more knowledge. Sometimes we'll be below X, sometimes we'll be above X. When we're above X, and we find it out, we'll say "Oops it was too much fluoride, let's reduce it a bit."
And obviously policymakers need to work on imperfect information, so sometimes we have to add Y amount of fluoride even though we know it's not optimal - because, the alternative, adding zero fluoride, would be actually worse.
This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.
I think it's the other way around: If people understood this is how science works, they would laugh off anything they disagreed with, as likely to be overturned a decade from now.
I'm sorry, but it starts to sound like you have a poor understanding of how science works.
> This is totally natural way of how science works, and saying that this undermines public trust of science is actually a point in support of GP, namely, the American public has poor understanding of how science works, due to poor education.
So what exactly would an educated person do if they were led to believe something based on false premises which affected their life?
Are they not supposed to question the authority who makes decision based on such information? Or question the source that provides such information consistently? Or just ignore it because it doesn't aligns with their political view?
Or are they supposed to just shut up and accept it because... SCIENCE(holy text)?
> People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.
Distrusting governments is not the cause of people believing flat earth, people believe flat earth because they are unable to separate fact from fiction, which, I believe is a consequence of poor education.
That's what your gut reaction may tell you; but I don't believe this is reality. The refusal to accept widely-accepted science is often rooted in distrust of the official narrative.
It's like saying people commit violence, just because they like violence, or must be stupid. Most of the time there's an underlying cause.
That we should mistrust scientists because they are biased and instead trust think tanks financed by tabacco and oil corporations as well as billionaires...
That government agencies like the EPA are to be mistrusted because everything government is bad, but that the military and police should be supported unconditionally even if they execute innocents in the streets.
I disagree from what I've seen.
I hear a lot of crazy conspiracies from Trump followers where I live. Including from my family.
On one hand they, they have a distrust for the establishment. But on the other they're dangerously close to fascists. I mean, Trump is a monarch to them. They don't trust the DOJ. Or the house. Or the senate. Or any of the agencies. But they trust Trump. If he says they're eating cats and dogs, then that's what they're doing.
It's very odd to be both in this "anti-establishment" headspace but also basically endorse and ask for a fascist government where one King makes all the rules. And you just trust him and have absolute loyalty.
That is to say, I don't think "distrust the gov" is the end of the discussion. There's more to it.
Even the "rural vs urban divide" people talk about is really a divide between Christianity, as expressed in "traditional values" and secularism. "Left" and "right" is "atheism" versus "faith," respectively. Communism and socialism are hated primarily because they're seen as anti-religion, and this extends to a hatred of leftism, liberalism, progressivism, etc as all similarly demonic in nature.
Aspects of this fundamental struggle between theology and secularism go all the way back to Reagan, at least, and I even believe back to the founding fathers. If you look deep enough into any of the systemic issues in American culture, you'll probably find religion somewhere at the heart of them.
The apparent contradiction between being anti-establishment but pro Trump (to the point of neo-fascism) makes sense in this context. Trumpists consider the establishment to be Satanic, and they believe Trump will replace it with a Christian theocratic order. And even a cursory glance at the Bible will tell you that the Kingdom of God is not even remotely a democracy.
Quite frankly, the most common reason people believe in a flat earth is because of biblical literalism. There are a few passages in the bible (which, if you ever watch a flat earth video, those almost always come out) which mention things like the earth having corners or god rolling it up like a scroll. Those verses are used as the grounding point for why the earth must be flat and all other evidence to the contrary is a lie.
This is also, consequentially, the origin of moon landing denialism. Mormons used to believe that the moon was literally a part of heaven. As a result, it'd be impossible for god to let someone fly a spaceship there. Pretty much exactly the same process happened "It couldn't have happened because our holy texts say the moon is the terrestrial kingdom... therefor it must be a hoax".
Another is....a systemic lack of education in critical thinking and how to tell mis- and disinformation from truth.
There is a decrease in people's trust in institutions, but my read on it is that it is an effect of these other phenomena, rather than a cause.
I know that HN tends to frown on partisan politics, but it's really not possible (or at least, not intellectually honest) to talk about the rise in misinformation, distrust, and conspiracy theories without talking about Trump and his role in it.
I remember a president whose error on "weapons of mass destruction" left my uncle nearly suicidal and killed countless Americans for nothing.
I remember a president whose DOJ wiretapped the Associated Press in 2012.
I remember a president who allowed his own Director of National Intelligence to lie to Congress about the NSA's activities before Snowden.
I can go on.
But Donald Trump's lies are orders of magnitude more frequent and worse than any previous president, and frankly anyone trying to dispute that at this point is clearly using motivated reasoning.
I don't know how to quantify the extent to which I despise Donald Trump. Suffice it to say that it's "off the scale". And yet, while I agree with you in general, to some extent I think Trumpism is the symptom and not the disease itself. I think there's something deeper and older at play, something that enables Trump and his brand of bullshit to prosper. I don't pretend to understand exactly what it is.. maybe it's as simple as saying "education". Maybe not.
What I have been saying, which is admittedly a bit hand-wavy at the moment, is that "our culture is sick". We don't cherish, promote, and prioritize the right things IMO. We reward the wrong behaviors and - I believe - are somehow incentivizing the whole "rejection of science/math/logic/reason and embrace of ignorance" thing.
Yes, Trump brought out something that was already there, lying dormant. But without Trump, it would mostly have stayed dormant.
Trump's primary victory in 2016 was a massive fluke, primarily (from what I saw) enabled by a combination of the horribly fractured GOP field, with the party establishment unable to rally behind a single candidate until it was already too late, a bunch of people who thought it was funny and voted for Trump for the lulz, and a large number of people who were frustrated by the past few years. That latter group I think came in two basic flavors: the ones who were frustrated because we had a black president, and the ones who were frustrated because the GOP Congress was stopping everything he tried to do (but who didn't fully grasp that this was entirely the GOP's fault). I genuinely believe that had the circumstances been just a little bit different in any number of ways, Trump would never even have made it past the first primary.
Once he was in the position of being a major party presidential candidate, it amplified his voice and that voice gave permission for all the bigots and fascists in America and abroad to show themselves and join their power together.
That said, I think there is a sickness in our culture, and I think its current prominence can largely be traced to Reagan, through several other intermediaries.
What we don't cherish, promote, and prioritize is kindness and compassion for our fellow human beings—all of them.
On the bright side, this also means that improvement in any of them also helps, even if only a little bit, to pull the whole tangle further up.
It doesn't matter "why" someone chooses to believe a conspiracy theory. What matters is how they came to be an adult that still believes in conspiracy theories - and the failure lies somewhere between bad parenting and the education system, and definitely not with meteorologists, even IF the public agency that employs meteorologists was involved in a scandal.
I feel a degree of sympathy for antivaxxers for the same reason. Pharmaceutical companies get away with literal murder, the makers of medical devices are serial killers, and doctors are taking kickbacks to overprescribe dangerous medications. Even the CDC cares more about politics than the truth. The antivaxxers are still wrong about vaccines, but they're right that the medical industry can't be trusted.
When government waste and corruption goes unchecked people lose faith in the government. When the police are criminals, judges take kickbacks to send children into private prisons, and corrupt prosecutors go unpunished people lose faith in the justice system.
Resentment, distrust, fear, and uncertainty are just natural and appropriate responses to what's going on around us. Even if drastic action was taken today to increase accountability and transparency to fight the corruption and greed undermining people's faith in these institutions it would still take decades to restore the trust that's been lost and realistically, I don't see any kind of drastic action being taken to fix the problem any time soon, so I expect things to get a lot worse before they get better.
It’s likely both are causes, and some other things too.