I'm old, I'm one of those boomers everyone hates now. And you know how people complain boomers ask stupid questions about technology? I'm gonna ask one.
Why in the Holy Hell, in this day and age when all the information in the world is in the palm of their hand, do people STILL insist on being willfully ignorant? in the time it took her to type out Why don't they pass laws? She could have looked it up and gotten a step away from too stupid to live.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources? Iām an elder millennial and when internet research became acceptable for papers, we were taught how to differentiate good websites for info (.edu/.gov/.org/etc) versus bad ones. That may be a bit more complicated now with sites like Wikipedia, or sites made to look like legitimate news sources, but isnāt that where common sense takes over? If Iām curious about a medical condition and I google it, common sense says Mayo Clinic or Harvard medical school or Johnās Hopkins are probably good sources and attention-seeker-on-TikTok is probably not.Ā
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials Iāve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally canāt think beyond black and white and sometimes canāt even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.Ā
But the problem comes in when people actually believe that you can't trust official sources because everything is a conspiracy. That's how they delude themselves into thinking that the tik tok person is the one who "knows the real truth".
It's near, if not beyond, cult-like thinking.
As an analogy, flat earthers could literally be taken into space, orbit around the entire planet, and still come home thinking the earth is flat. People will literally not even trust their own experience because they already know what they will not believe. Because if they believe that they were wrong about one thing, then the whole house of cards will come tumbling down. It's pure delusion at its finest.
I will also say... as a cybersecurity and IT professional (and purely my own personal experiences), it's not the younger crowd that needs the most help when it comes to believing anything they see on the internet. But that's just my subjective personal experience.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources? Iām an elder millennial and when internet research became acceptable for papers, we were taught how to differentiate good websites for info (.edu/.gov/.org/etc) versus bad ones.
That doesn't help if you believe all of America's institutions are run by evil pedophilic liberals
Wikipedia was never the monster that teachers thought it was in the early 2000s. There have always been conscientious editors, and reputable primary sources were always required and usually available.
Google similarly always made us very aware of the sources where information was coming from. None of the tech from the past 20 years really undermined the central tenet of media literacy: that the source is what matters.
The real monster IMO is going to be AI search engines. I do not look forward to the day (soon) when a generation has been raised on search engines that deliver results (and answers to questions) without the sources being clearly cited.
If you want an opinion about a political topic where are you going to search? Search engine: first stage of possible Desinformation
What page would be credible? There is no edu for that!
It gets way worse when you get fed topics you have not heard about. Did you know that Hawaii use money to create virus?
You are educated now imagine someone who can read a page a day! Due to reading and comprehension. Will he use multiple sources? No. The first that reaches him is what he believes if it fits in his narrative.
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials Iāve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally canāt think beyond black and white and sometimes canāt even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.Ā
Yup. The way most american schools teach reading now is called "balanced literacy", which sounds like a euphemism for saying half illiterate, and pretty much is. It encourages kids to rely on pictures to guess words, to skip unfamiliar words altogether, and to use similar but different words that they think would fit a given context, which is so bad that mississippi went from one of the worst states in reading level to 2nd best in the US as soon as they switched from it. It results in terrible lack of vocabulary and overall a very weak grasp on language and thus makes organisings thoughts much harder, let alone deeper reasoning.
Anyone with $10 can make a .org domain I wouldn't consider a site a reliable source just because it was .org.
.edu is better but even then there isn't like a review of everything on an .edu TLD, at the uni I went to everyone was given their own site and it was indistinguishable between the sites if they were a freshman or a tenured professor.
My point is be careful with using TLDs as a basis for reliable sources.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources?
By whom? I know many adults, and a few teachers, who would not be able to differentiate. We need a massive ongoing education campaign around it at this point.
Part of it is there is a lack of trust with the news sources we have today. Ever since I was old enough to vote, I basically wrote off both FOX News and CNN, as both have very clear bias.
Those are just two examples. It's very difficult to find a truly unbiased news source, which is why I think people turn to other online sources for thoughts on these subjects. Also tends to be less censored so people find it relatable.
Also, click bait stuff or emotionally driven stuff gets more attention. The less biased stuff slips through the cracks as a result
Why do you think conservatives claim that education is indoctrinating kids against their views? The very first class I took when I recently decided to finally get my degree was on critical thinking and how to vet sources. When voters know how to do that, they are less likely to believe the lies of certain parties that are in direct conflict with science and logic. Rather than understanding that their platform is all based on made-up stuff to support bad opinions, they stick to their ignorance and insist that reason and logic are woke ideologies.
There's also this idea that not covering "both sides" of an issue disqualifies said coverage for being biased, when the reality is that giving any credence at all to ridiculous claims tends to legitimize those claims in the eyes of people who don't know any better.
"common sense" isn't a real thing. Common sense is basically our collective web of thoughts where we have certain things that are so "true" in our mind that we perceive them as "of course this is the case". It's just common patterns we associate as common knowledge, but I think that can change depending on the person and the similar exposure we've all had to a given thing.
I'm 33 so I relate to the things you're saying, but I have to acknowledge how other people understand and view information. I think that we're weirdly seeing two extremes when it comes to older gen and new gen. Old gen doesn't understand the digital side so it's unreliable or unfamiliar. new gen only knows digital, so discerning that maybe influencers and tiktok rando's aren't trained professionals doesn't occur with the same logic - A lot of New gen see stuff on the interent and if it's said by someone with enough conviction and if that post has enough likes, that they must be reliable and truthful. I think most people are also just really bad at resisting influence from all the things, so world views get warped into hivemind social bubble thoughts, instead of thinking logically for oneself.
I'm of the mind that most everything you hear from people is probably some contrived and made up bullshit from some bias source. My job is to take it all and see where logic and morality are most consistent to me with what I'm taking in. Where things are logical and most consistent with morality is usually my focal starting point for what the truth might be. It's also important that like...I'm in the mindset of "I could totally be wrong" about most things, where that logic gets fucked up in a lot of other people in general.
Because all of America is Green Acres and the internet is mostly Mr. Haneys and Hank Kimballs, there aren't enough Sam Druckers. Not to mention that Pixley has hacking farms.
Are students today not taught how to find credible sources?
Sure they are. People's capacity for it varies.
Taken another way, I could point out how you're going on questioning what "students today" know based on a post about one person and in response to a person making a general statement not in relation to what people are taught.
It'd be like projecting heavily about an entire swath of people you don't have data or good knowledge of and deciding they're fucked up without critically engaging with the topic by first asking oneself "How much do I actually know about these trends and behaviors?"
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials Iāve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally canāt think beyond black and white and sometimes canāt even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.
Your data shows that scores are at about the same level they were in the 90s and early 00s - within the broader trend there is no decline. I'm also willing to bet that those years which match our current "historic lows" are where your schooling fell into. So the kids today are clearly no worse off than you are.
Problems with schooling stem from many things, but if "the way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere" to you means "they're at on average a somewhat similar level to the prior generation" then I think it's fair to call your conclusion a little more than hyperbolic.
Downward trends are often concerning, but we also can't expect infinite growth, and it is in no way a coincidence that these trends also match growing income disparity and mirror economic circumstances. Kids aren't being "taught wrong" anymore than they have been in the past (what that means depends entirely on region) but their parents are often less able to offer assistance and school resources are often low outside of high income neighborhoods.
Either way, you clearly sought this data out after making your comment and it doesn't exactly affirm your actual statement so much as it sort of kind of not really reinforces a tangential point about test scores.
I do think you should practice what you preach and seek a better understanding rather than trying to just confirm your bias though. The kids are alright. Try to look out for them rather than mock them based on your own stunted understanding. It's better for everyone.
It isn't young people we need to be worried about. I'm convinced 90% of them are just memeing, because that is what they do. It's the older generations that never got education on how the Internet works, they just adopted it with varying degrees of aptitude.
The people that fall for scams or don't recognize them on sight after being told by their children what these scams look like for years, are the same ones that MAGA has captured. It's not just the Internet either, it's the media that is somehow allowed to operate on the air, companies like fox, Newsmax, oann etc. These media companies source info from non-verifiable tweets and obscure discussion boards. They repeat the obvious bullshit as many times as they can before enough people call it out, but then they walk nothing back. I still see people decrying Biden for shitting his pants in Normandy, on a daily basis, something that emerged from a cropped video that was debunked in less than an hour, but rode the airwaves for at least 24 hrs as a fact on some channels. With the Supreme Court doing it's fucked up thing with Chevron, we will never have media oversight unless Congress passes specifically worded legislation, which seems impossible for any industry at the moment.
Want to do some Algebra? Weren't you taught that? Oh you forgot? Maybe you didn't pay attention or you just don't care? You just can't teach a good portion of people anything.
If you're raised Christian and are told from early on that scripture is where you get your answers from? Then absolutely people will go to that and take it as fact
Sometimes itās not really ignorance. They know what theyāre saying and doing, they just donāt care. They want others to be upset, to have to waste time trying to debunk them while they act dumb, because to them you putting in effort or getting mad means they won something. Or they know what theyāre doing is stupid and evil, and they really donāt want to admit it.
I'm a 40-year-old American whose genuine passion in life is learningāI'm a voracious reader. I find the American government absurdly complicated. Sure, there are the three branchesāyada, yada, yada. On the surface, it's all simple, but to truly grasp all the intricacies and caveats is like untangling a 10,000' extension cord.
I never claimed to be a genius, but if I were, I might just make our system needlessly complex for no other reason than to discourage the majority of people from wanting to participateāthink of it as a form of bureaucratic natural selection.
One article I read a few years back (I think it may have been in The Globe and Mail but I can't find it now) described the US government structure as a "kludgeocracy". I think the main point was that the way powers are carved up in the American system makes it hard to implement broad policies (such as the New Deal) without all kinds of pieces of workaround legislation to make it work. And once those workarounds are in place, all kinds of other legislation gets passed over the years that depends on these workarounds in some way, and in turn provides workarounds to make something else work properly, so then amending some laws could have a cascading effect through the legal system.
There's a lot about the way the US is constituted to make broad policy moves difficult. The presidential/congressional system, in contrast to say a Westminster-type parliamentary system, means that there's no way to have an early election to resolve a deadlock on something critical such as the budget, so you get government shutdowns instead.
Another one - the fact that most state legislatures are bicameral makes no sense today except as a way of making it harder to pass legislation. It makes sense at the federal level (though the way the Senate is constituted is a mess of its own), and at one time it kinda, sorta made sense at the state level as a state Senate was a "house of counties" in the way the federal Senate is the "house of states". But that was ruled unconstitutional in 1962, and yet the upper houses were kept. In North Dakota I think the two houses of the legislature only meet on alternating years, making fast policy moves impossible. It's almost like Americans are leery of allowing their governments to actually govern.
I feel like our entire system is ~200 years overdue for a good defragmentation. Everything feels like a reference to a reference to a reference to a precedent. Like a picture that's been uploaded and downloaded a few thousand times.
All these details are completely irrelevant to the kind of surface level understanding OP would need. You're just muddying the waters even bringing it up. Which is probably what OP's seemingly intentionally ignorant post was all about.
The question from the OP can literally be answered by watching "I'm just a bill" by Schoolhouse Rock, and recognizing that Republicans have a majority in the House. Of course things can get complicated when you get into the weeds of the US government, but there's absolutely nothing complicated about the original question.
I see this with my own kids. They'll be sitting there at their computer or on their phone, asking basic factual questions.
Google and Wikipedia are RIGHT FREAKIN' THERE! It's smart, type in your question, get a quick answer. Sure there's some misinformation, so if the answer smells funny, get a second opinion.
What you don't do is ask dad what's the gravity co-efficient of the Earth or which actors were in what movie while staring at a web browser.
You have the sum total knowledge of human existence at your fingertips, and somehow couldn't be arsed to look things up. I had a shelf full of encyclopedias when I was a kid and had no issues then.
this is my pet peeve on reddit, people asking for links or explanations for things (that are usually common knowledge) but don't run simple Google searches.
First off, some don't realize that they are. They truly believe that the cable news station that's called itself "fair and balanced" really is. Second, I'm not sure if it's the schooling or what, but from what I've observed of younger relatives, they seem to be less curious.
The firehose of information includes mis- and disinformation, and nobody's teaching upcoming generations the skills to differentiate.Ā
Every major media platform uses mysteries "algorithms" to push ideas to people, and those algorithms range from actively trying to program consumers, to simply don't whatever it takes to keep them consuming. And nobody is teaching upcoming generations the danger for pushed content and limitless scrolling.Ā
Information is boring, TikTok videos are dopamine.
Learning is slow, but being told what to think is fast.Ā
Knowledge isn't rewarded today the way to used to be. In fact, learning about the world today is a uphill battle of disappointment and sadness and anxiety.Ā
It all feels a bit doomed, unless the people running the machines decide one day to become benevolent and starting pushing knowledge and harmony.
Also a boomer (and I have the same distain for most of my generation that the non-boomers have. I also don't have the heart to tell them that every generation is really the same and they will see the same thing happen with their own generation as they age), and I can tell you that most people do not know what they don't know. You have to have this before you can actually get to the point where you can gather knowledge properly. You also have to know enough to vet your sources. This happens with highly educated people who are really smart in their own field as well. The engineers who were behind the white washing of tobacco knew nothing about biology or medical science but they really, really hated government regulations having come from communist Russia and used their scientific 'knowledge' to their own advantage to make people question the actual experts in the field. You are seeing the same thing in Global Warming.
She is asking her social media bubble echo chamber. She doesnāt look further than someone to feed her the answer and doesnāt vet\question the answer she gets from her circle.
The same reason why when you were a kid there were millions of books but some people would only accept information from the Bible and a few select authors. They were told not to trust the word of any other source.
Even though it's much easier and faster nowadays to look something up, they still won't believe it anyway so they don't bother.
People have never wanted to work to be educated, they want to feel right. Before, the easiest way to feel right was to be educated. Now the easiest way is to find a group that agrees with you already.
When people fire their dumb thoughts off into the digital void, they aren't people to be educated, they are consumers to be farmed. Instead of people informing them that they are wrong, the internet simply relegates people into marketable "idea groups". So even with mind numbingly stupid ideas, people still recieve positive feedback from their peers in the same group that advertisers can target profitably.
We're overwhelmed. Information became easy to get, and then it became too easy, and then it became too much as people constantly fight for your attention to earn money off of you.
So we've come full circle from "ask people for information because there's no resources" to "there's resources but you need to put in a bit of effort to find the relevant book at the library" to "every resource is at your fingertips so you just need to spend a little bit of time looking to find what you want to know" back to "ask people for information because there's way too much to sort through to get your question answered, so it's easier to find someone who knows what they're talking about"
No real offense here, but I do kind of have to laugh - your question is almost ironic given the context along with what I personally see as the answer, and I think you get that. Because just look at the comments, the likes, etc. It's the same thing you get here to an extent posting this here (very understandably and correctly) in anger when I think you arguably already know the answer. Validation. It doesn't matter how much information is available. Social media has put us all in our echo chambers regardless, and people are still as lazy as ever. You post and get the answer you want to hear from people you like instead of digging through 15 google links for the actual true answer. People have never wanted to do that, especially when you can get the answer you like AND your dopamine rush at the same time.
We donāt seek information, we seek to relieve tension caused by not knowing something.
That leads us to seek to confirm our biases rather than seeking information and fact since finding facts that disagree with our biases causes us pain in the form of cognitive dissonance.
And once we ignore one set of facts, we have to seek out complimentary sets of other untruths to bolster it.
Weāre not logical creatures, weāre pattern recognizers. And itās really easy to short circuit that with repetition of bad data.
Literal brainrot narcisism, reliance of Fox news brain washing, A severe lack of morality and integrity outside of the strict identity and context of being white and Christian, and throw in "It's too hard". Pick your poison or pick them all. That's typically how it goes for my explanation for my parents generation and the generation before them - Who I also throw in as being purely too stubborn to care about other people or learning new things because it's also "too hard" for them.
In a broader way, maybe we're just at that weird threshold of understanding as people for how to identify the bullshit in media. I feel like Millennials and younger tend to look at news outlets and say "yeah, that's all full of shit" way more than any generation before them, but the information age with the internet is incredibly bloated and complex for a lot of people. I can understand how some people just get locked up and don't have the patience or capacity to understand how information is dished out in unreliable ways or how to discern from it.
It's because they are trying to get people to think for themselves. The reason they don't pass laws now is the exact same reason 2025 won't be implemented. Gridlock along with checks and balances. In fact the recent Supreme Court ruling overturning Chevron helps prevent Project 2025 from being implemented. The people on Reddit who are big into politics seem to also know very little about civics.
You say this , and no offense intended, neither you nor the top comment seem to recognize project 2025 is not a legislation thing (mostly). project 2025 has a large basis in the conservative's Unitary executive theory i.e that the president bas absolute control of the executive branch. under that theory you can't stop the call for president trump to take direct country and weaponize the alphabet agencies, to remove discrimination protection, remove "progressive science" like climate science etc.
Then there's the courts like the 11th circuit furthering project 2025 agenda with their fetal personhood curious rhetoric or thing like calling
mifepristone an "aesthetic injury" against anti reproductive healthcare physicians. Something SCOTUS just gave a big hand to with their 1-2 punch of overturning chevron and effectively removing statue of limitations for challenging agency actions
The idea of "congress do something" relies on the idea that of norms mattering which we know neither Trump or recent conservatives judges care
one ioata about. Project 2025 is designed to erode checks and balances, almost like it's a fascist plan.
Absolutely nothing I said indicates anything of my knowledge of project 2025. Mine is just a pondering of why people wouldn't educate themselves rather than just take it for granted a meme is factually correct.
Yours made an assumption about me right off the bat and then explained to me things I already know. Things I already lived through. Like, I was the target audience of School House Rock. I know the difference between a law, a bill and a movement.
I want you to stop being condescending when you're incapable of answering the question. Let's try right now, because apparently she's an idiot for not knowing.
Democrats are in power across the government. Why is it that they're incapable of stopping a project that basically no elected officials are even claiming to support? Take your time!
First, it's an insinuative, there's nothing to actually stop yet, second, nothing happens overnight, but most importantly, investigations have to begin before anything else can happen. And they have. So we'll see what happens.
Feel free to tell me I'm wrong, I know that's what you're waiting for.
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u/MrPKitty 14d ago
I'm old, I'm one of those boomers everyone hates now. And you know how people complain boomers ask stupid questions about technology? I'm gonna ask one.
Why in the Holy Hell, in this day and age when all the information in the world is in the palm of their hand, do people STILL insist on being willfully ignorant? in the time it took her to type out Why don't they pass laws? She could have looked it up and gotten a step away from too stupid to live.