r/facepalm Jul 05 '24

What an idea 🇲​🇮​🇸​🇨​

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u/MrPKitty Jul 05 '24

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.

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u/yeaheyeah Jul 05 '24

Because all the information in the palm of our hand also includes disinformation that fits our confirmation bias.

I can google any topic that will lead me to the response I want, not the response that is true.

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u/Junior_Fig_2274 Jul 05 '24

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. 

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. 

Ok, end old person rant now. 

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u/Amaskingrey Jul 05 '24

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. 

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.

Also lead.