[dmerks]

The patch to gullibility is critical thinking. Rudimentary critical thinking in any field requires general knowledge of it. Citizens of democracies need to think critically on many topics, hence they need to know a lot in many fields, and to learn ongoingly throughout their lives. Education becomes important. But Education costs a lot...

Maybe the solution is to gradually make learning as accessible, inexpensive and beneficial as possible.

[_qulr]

I'm not sure you can teach critical thinking. In my experience, people are mostly "born" with it... or not. I say this as a former academic philosopher who actually taught "critical thinking" classes at the university level. They amounted to a hodgepodge of subject-specific wisdom collected under a generic title. (I didn't design the courses but merely adopted the preexisting curriculum and textbooks.)

In general, individual students vary widely in their receptiveness to education of any kind. A lot of them are just "seat fillers" who barely pay attention and are only there out of fear of the negative consequences of nonattendance. It's incredibly difficult to get through to them. In this world where information is easily available everywhere, at your fingertips, ignorance is a deliberate choice.

[dmerks]

If I tell a child who knows squirrels are usually white, brown, grey or black, and say "hey look! A purple squirrel!", chances are the child will think I'm fooling around. If I say the same thing to a child who has never seen a squirrel, he's more likely to turn his head without doubting my words.

Is knowing the possible colors of squirrel fur an innate trait, or is it something that is learned?

I agree, critical thinking is difficult to teach directly. I can't tell the child-- or an adult for that matter-- to foretell something he doesn't know. The focus of Education is knowledge in various fields like politics, history, physics, mathematics, linguistics, etc.

I was an academic as well. Some classes were certainly funded, maintained and encouraged because of ignorance or political reasons. The entire educational system were I live was reformed based on political reasons. The pilot study in numerous schools failed miserably 20 years ago. The results were never shared with the public before its nation wide implementation. The reform is still in place today. The only copy of the evaluation I know of is a university library and was printed by the professor who was its director and who was subsequently demoted. This happened in a G8 country. Universities are far from immune from selfish or poor decision making.

Try telling the 100000+ homeless students in NY that ignorance is a deliberate choice. Maybe it is a deliberate choice for those in power to dictate others' ignorance. It's also tough being a good learner when you're both a full time worker and student.

When I was a student, I remember not being particularly interested in listening to TA drones regurgitate empty words either, especially when I was sleepy.

[_qulr]

> Try telling the 100000+ homeless students in NY that ignorance is a deliberate choice.

Let's not lose sight of the subject of the article, which is disinformation, promulgated for example via Facebook and Twitter. There's no evidence that this issue is correlated with homelessness. In fact the people who eat up the disinformation tend to have easy access to internet and television. If homelessness were the problem, then solving homelessness would solve disinformation, but there's no reason to think that's the case. You're more likely to hear internet disinformation repeated in a country club than on the streets.

Lack of financial access to a good education is of course a severe societal problem. But it's not the heart of the matter here, specifically.

> It's also tough being a good learner when you're both a full time worker and student.

It's tough, but in my experience the people who work full time and go to school simultaneously tend to be the most motivated. They want to learn, even if they struggle to find the time, otherwise they'd just drop out. The laziest students are often the ones with plenty of free time, which they spend on partying, sports, and other leisure as opposed to studying.

However, as I suggested in another comment, college is probably too late to reach most kids. If you don't start working on them earlier, they're already set into a lot of bad attitudes and habits.

[dmerks]

There is plenty of evidence indicating socio-economic status correlates with educational outcomes. Wouldn't you agree victims of disinformation are those least equipped to tell apart facts from fabrications? Isn't it the heart of the issue? The article unfairly refers to a "nation of idiots". Aren't many "idiots" responsible for electing the likes of the current American, English or Brazilian leaders. What is the solution? Taking the "idiot's" power away isn't democratic, it's a speedway to totalitanism. Protecting the "idiots" from disinformation is impossible: plenty of money sees benefits in compromising the people, it will find a way. Quality initial and continuing education is possible and democratic. Democratic societies are founded partly on the idea of the aware citizen. When are we victims of disinformation? When we decide to believe something that we know little about. It's easy: we all need a representation of the world. If all we are given are fabrications, we will never make it out of the cave. The idea is at least as old as Plato or the first democracy.

[_qulr]

> There is plenty of evidence indicating socio-economic status correlates with educational outcomes.

Of course, but not sure how that's relevant here.

> The article unfairly refers to a "nation of idiots".

Not sure that's unfair.

> What is the solution?

What if there is no solution? What if "Idiocracy" was accurate? Or "Planet of the Apes"? Science "fiction" is rife with stories about how humanity ended up destroying itself, especially via technology. It's not like we haven't seen this coming for a long time.

[dmerks]

> Of course, but not sure how that's relevant here.

The relevance is fairly obvious in my previous comments. See the child who knows of squirrels example. Here is an excerpt from the article that speaks for the relevance:

"For people, patching means education. And not the worker-prep kind of education where you learn how to be an obedient and productive office worker, but the kind that teaches the fundamentals of how things work—from physics to psychology, and from physiology to philosophy."

> Not sure that's unfair.

Many people grow up in terrible conditions and are never given a proper chance to acquire a decent education. It's not especially fair or helpful to insult them.

> What if there is no solution? What if "Idiocracy" was accurate? Or "Planet of the Apes"? Science "fiction" is rife with stories about how humanity ended up destroying itself, especially via technology. It's not like we haven't seen this coming for a long time.

Possibilities aren't definitive. Promoting hopelessness and fortune telling doesn't seem very appealing. It leads to negative outlooks and self-fulfilling prophecies that aren't in anyone's interest.

[_qulr]

In fairness, maybe we just start way too late? I mean, I'm all in favor of debates over the existence of God for example in elementary school, at the same age kids start getting forced to go to Sunday school. But a lot of parents would have fits over that topic in public schools, which is why we can't do it until college, at which point it's unlikely to make much difference.

The formative years of a child are almost completely under control of the parents. It's a chicken and egg problem, because it's difficult to change the public education policy without the consent of the parents who themselves were not raised to think critically. There's near universal agreement that math education is important, but "critical thinking" is controversial at best among parents. A lot of them would rather home school their kids than allow exposure to different ways of thinking.

[dmerks]

The contextual backdrop is never negligible, but it's the powers that be that change the course of the world. Secularization has been seen as the step forward. So has quality initial and ongoing Education for all. We trudge forward as individualistic pursuits erode those of the collective.

It reminds me of a study: many groups undertake a turn-based team game in which the prize grows until a certain maximum. Make it to the end of the game: everyone takes an equal part of the prize home. At any point before the end, the entirety of the current prize can be claimed by one individual. Not in one single group was the prize shared. There was always at least one person who waited long enough to claim more than what would have been shared otherwise.

[notduncansmith]

I think you’re spot-on with making learning as accessible as possible to have a more informed populace, but making the information available is only half of getting people to take it in. Trauma blocks critical thinking and internal honesty, and we have a massive trauma and PTSD problem, to the point where poverty and food insecurity meaningfully reduces effective IQ. Thankfully MAPS is working on treating PTSD at scale. I have set up a recurring monthly donation and I encourage anyone who values intellectualism to do the same, so that we may swell our ranks with those who are currently too hurt to think clearly.

[spicybright]

Can you be more specific with this "mass trauma" idea? Never heard of it before.

[jdietrich]

>we have a massive trauma and PTSD problem

Do we, or are the diagnostic criteria of PTSD so broad that the disorder is being massively over-diagnosed?

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1002/da.20586

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.09.006

https://sci-hub.tw/10.1177/1745691613504115

[dmerks]

Helping those in need overcome their difficulties and become ready to learn is a part of accessibility to Education. It's a part of offering equal opportunity to all.

[dmerks]

Pro-democracy votes also go a long way, for your distantly involved citizen.

[varispeed]

Government is also blocking research and treatment of PTSD using certain drugs to help pharmaceutical companies. For many years getting medical cannabis or other substances deemed illegal was next to impossible without becoming a criminal.

[pbronez]

Can you provide some more information about MAPS?

[notduncansmith]

Sure, they are a non-profit organization doing research on some breakthrough treatment options for mental health issues like PTSD and depression. You can check out their website here: https://maps.org/

[thu2111]

I think that's not enough. Our societies problem is not that learning (or information) is expensive and inaccessible. The internet has solved that problem already, with open access papers lagging behind general progress but that is now being resolved as well.

The problem is deeper. Critical thinking requires you to be willing to engage in criticism. Or phrased another way, it's about skepticism.

Skepticism is deeply unpopular. People who engage in critical thinking are shamed, censored, fired, sometimes punished by the police if their critical thinking leads to them to criticise the beliefs of those in power. There are a lot of people in the world, and especially in the sort of Hacker News reading social groups, who are deathly afraid of critical thinking of any form because they don't believe most people can really do it. They would much prefer blind, automatic belief and credulity.

This article is a prime example of the genre, but you can see this in the way Wojcicki makes YouTube block anyone who doesn't "believe" in the pronouncements of the WHO, even though the WHO has constantly changed its own advice and thus anyone engaged in critical thinking could easily have disagreed with it at any point. LinkedIn has the same policy.

However these people are usually the worst at critical thinking. The author himself is so poor at it that he's spreading misinformation and making loony claims, whilst railing against others he accuses of doing so.

For instance, he provides a list of things Americans supposedly don't believe or believe. He says, "Millions don’t believe in vaccination". What does it mean to "believe" in vaccination? His citation for this is a Washington Post report on polling that actually asked people two rather specific questions:

1. Should vaccination be mandatory? (~33% said no)

2. Is the measles vaccine harmful? (in the west, ~90% said it's safe)

The vast majority of people say no and no, which are the conventional answers. In fact the statement is useless - the population of the US is so large that for "millions" of Americans to believe something requires only 0.5% of the population to believe it, and in this case he isn't even precise about what he means by "believe". When you drill into the actual data it's hardly an issue.

As for "45% of Americans believe in ghosts and demons", does he really believe people will take a poll like that seriously? Only someone incapable of critical thinking would take such a claim at face value. If half of Americans believed in ghosts and demons, there would be a thriving industry of anti-ghost and anti-demonic services. There'd be ghostbusting shops in every town. There aren't, but there sure are a lot of people who will troll pollsters and fools who blindly believe them for a laugh.