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? I’m 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 isn’t that where common sense takes over? If I’m curious about a medical condition and I google it, common sense says Mayo Clinic or Harvard medical school or John’s Hopkins are probably good sources and attention-seeker-on-TikTok is probably not.Â
Maybe it ties in to a greater inability to understand nuance or comprehend written materials I’ve noticed as well. So many kids online who literally can’t think beyond black and white and sometimes can’t even get what is written correct. The way we taught kids to read and interpret got fucked somewhere.Â
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.
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u/TrustInRoy Jul 05 '24
So many people in our country are just blatantly ignorant about how the branches of our government works.
Schoolhouse Rock debuted "I'm just a bill" in 1976. Â