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Comment by kgwxd | Hacker News Reader

The people for whom this stuff isn't glaringly obvious, relatively early in life, will never get it. Except, maybe, specific instances that directly affect them in a bad way. Switch "brands" and they'll be fooled again. They'll probably even double-down on it.

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> The people for whom this stuff isn't glaringly obvious, relatively early in life, will never get it

How do you know this?

Yeah I hard disagree with their statement.

I've come to observe with having kids (and also moving to Germany and seeing other kids shaped) that so so much is taught. There is a ton born into a kid but so many things like the ability to think critically about a problem is actually taught in primary school and early years education (kindergarten/kita/preschool). There might be some raw horsepower that some people have more or less of with regards to certain problem spaces but for the most part - how to tackle a problem and think critically is very much a learned skill that some may get on their own but it can certainly also be given to them.

I concur with regard to critical thinking being a taught skill. My read is that parent's comment is possibly more of a vent about the type of person many of us have become more familiar with than we ever wanted to in the past decade or so of "post-truth" discourse- the virulent, intentional ignoramus. (We could write reams about what leads people to be this way, but in the interests of keeping short-form commentary short-form, I'll say that I think there are a confluence of causes :P).

People who can assert both "Fauci was wrong about masks" and "Nobody really died from COVID" come to mind.

I spoke in absolutes. Guess I'll say I've never observed it happening in anyone after maybe late teens. Some learn to keep quiet about whatever they're bought into, because they've learned it will scare a lot of people off. Or they end up pseudo intellectuals with a podcast. Or scamming their way into huge money and political positions. So they can be pretty good at "winning". But most of them are just sad and lonely, living mostly to prop up those "winners".

I've fallen for it enough to see it almost instantly now. So much time wasted, thinking some people just needed to figure things out, or maybe they figured out something I couldn't see. But, little by little, they just keep getting worse, more unreasonable, dangerous even.

Unfortunately, I wasted my youth on that idea. Now the people that warned me not to, moved on to much better things, far outside the environment I've been hanging out in.

Guess I'm just passing along the warning.

What I'm getting at is you also don't seem to be applying the balony detection kit to what you're saying. I could be wrong, but you seem to be describing people with center or right wing views. That seems like tribalism rather than anything reasoned, as while the right has people like that, the left does too, and perhaps currently with more fundamental reasoning issues.

Hard disagree. I grew up with parents who LOVED science; my earliest memories in the 80s are my mom checking out Cosmos from the library on VHS and binging it. It is a big reason I have an engineering PhD. At the same time, they were 60s hippies and into meditation woo-woo, as in "visualize a beam of light coming from your stomach and you can instantly travel to Jupiter!", being able to walk through walls because of quantum physics, etc. Tons of pseudoscience. So, I grew up in both worlds, while always somewhat skeptical of the woo, still was sort of in it through high school. I read Demon Haunted World in college, and the woo was eradicated overnight. I think part of this also has to do with PhD programs, particularly reviewing papers, where it is basically BS detection. But, DHW framed it spectacularly for me, and is one of the most influential books I have read.

Another anecdote: Ann Druyan (Sagan's wife and collaborator) was into the wu herself!

Spot on. I just finished reading the demon haunted world to my daughter. She’s 13 and we have been very concerned about her going on social media.

I framed it as being more important than ever to be skeptical of what you see. Everything online is fake in some way. Every picture is touched up at best, AI slop at worst. You need to question everything.

I honestly fear her generation is just cooked. They were forced into online learning during covid, have socialization issues, and are coming of age in an era of rampant disinformation and generated content that is too good to spot and designed to addict and influence.

More than just question everything, but also develop a facility to answer the questions.

Otherwise it just means don't believe anything, which is more or less the same as believe everything, or believe & disbelieve things at random or according to wish.

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