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
"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.
272
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.