| 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. |