[olladecarne]

I think if you look at the brain as a neural network then it's easy to see how this happens. Not everyone is born to educated parents and receives high quality education. If a lot of the information your brain received growing up was bad, then you can easily reach bad conclusions. The collapse of institutions makes it worse because now no one trusts anything. So to many the information on the internet is as valid as the information in the textbooks. Then if you keep feeding the brain bad information it starts generating bad information. Lately I've been thinking of information as a "substance" that has been diluted by the internet. So the whole "organize and make all information easily accessible" motto of big G and the web in general has had the consequence of diluting the concentration of good information.

[randcraw]

Yeah, I think our schools have long done US students a disservice in underemphasizing “information quality” — how to deal with incomplete, ambiguous, questionable, and bad info. A very large fraction of tests in school reinforce that every question has only one right answer. The notion of minimizing error is seldom even imagined. Instead it's taught that all learning must seek only one goal: “knowing the one and only truth”. Yet all too often, competing facts are not mutually exclusive and can change with time.

And don't get me started on the poor coverage of concepts like “necessary” and “sufficient” in judging evidence in support of an assertion or model.

After working in science for the past 15 years (drug development), I've come to appreciate how little in medicine we know in absolute terms. With any system as complex as the human body, generally the best you can hope for is to be less wrong.

[sergeykish]

Aristotle’s Physics is a good example how common sense ridiculed in our society while it

> is to be properly understood as the physics of objects immersed in a fluid, air or water [1]

Kindergarten children can engage in physics, construct their theories. And only much later learn that space bodies move differently and how that knowledge can be applied to the world around us.

Trust experiment not authority.

[1] Aristotle’s Physics: a Physicist’s Look https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/157866135.pdf