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This might be my raw unfiltered bitterness talking, but as someone who's a few weeks off from getting their associates I'm 100% in for the peacocks tail theory of education. >This doesn’t mean that everybody without a formal education can’t understand complex ideas or everybody with a formal education honours them. But raising the level in a communication is always good. https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/06/06/against-tulip-subsidie... "And to paraphrase Dirkson, $200,000 here, $200,000 there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money. 20,000 doctors graduate in the United States each year; that means the total yearly cost of requiring doctors to have undergraduate degrees is $4 billion. That’s most of the amount of money you’d need to house every homeless person in the country ($10,000 to house one homeless x 600,000 homeless). ... This is why, despite my reservations about libertarianism, it’s not-libertarianism that really scares me. Whenever some people without skin in the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless people in the country." Look, the problem here is that people feel (and probably are) economically disenfranchised, so they're angry. Then on top of that the level of trust in our institutions is so low that people would rather trust some shady crank website on vaccines than the CDC. When you combine the two with a bizarre tendency to just believe whatever nonsense is put in front of them, and zero-marginal-cost global telecommunications; people believe and do stupid things. 'More formal education' doesn't solve this, I'm not sure anything solves this. In Clarke County it took an actual measles outbreak to convince people to vaccinate their kids, suggesting the only remedy we have right now for widespread stupidity is the gods of the copybook headings. http://deadstate.org/vaccinations-increase-500-in-anti-vaxxe... EDIT: Having had a few minutes to think it over some more, I think part of what might have happened here is that trust in 'large institutions' as a category has fallen faster than peoples trust in their fellow man. There's a tragic optimism to the situation then: people are skeptical of even the most basic ideas coming from governments, non profits, corporations, etc, but will throw common sense out the window over a well written appeal from an ordinary person. I'm not sure how you'd test this hypothesis, but I'd really like to see the results if someone did. |