| I appreciate your well reasoned response and I totally agree with almost all of it. > media literacy may not be enough I would grant that there is an intelligence distribution in the population and the capacity to acquire critical thinking skills is clamped by something that is largely genetic (and somewhat random), not to mention education or experience. Further, people who are on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum need some way of reasoning about the world even without that capacity. They then must rely on more intelligent people to analyze and synthesize a cohesive perspective that will work for them and their level of interpretation. In other words, I agree that objectively it's not enough for everyone. But still, we certainly ought to educate as many people as possible and certainly the capacity of society to manage a consistent cohesive perspective for those people would increase as well. > Human brains are reckless This and your following point about engineers compartmentalizing their thinking ability is hard to refute. However I would say two things on the matter. 1. It's a matter of degrees and having a system which optimizes human development (e.g. parenting, family) to leverage as many developmental windows as possible (on an individual basis) would minimize reckless thinking. 2. At scale, a functioning and diverse media with a healthy amount of honest journalism also minimizes the likelihood that reckless thinking would persist for very long. > this is a reductive answer True. It's difficult to know what level of interpretation is appropriate in any context. I agree that there are complex issues and forces in play, however I would argue that after a certain point it is necessary to trim the fat and synthesize a cohesive, if not simplistic, perspective. Western civilization is known for it's ability to do that and maintain much of the original value of a thought. I'm not an oncologist, but there is a vested public interest for oncologists to "spread awareness" and educate people about cancer. We typically don't challenge the oncologist when they make an analogy, don't describe cancer with exactly the correct technical terminology, or unpack every individual aspect of cancer in their explanation. Your point about ordinary people having an incentive to minimize critical thinking is very true and insightful. None of this occurs in a vacuum, and to some extent there is a degree of personal responsibility to be sure. Personally I am less inclined to lay this problem at the feet of an individual, who in my estimation, was sabotaged for generations by corrupted media and educational institutions. However, I will definitely acknowledge the pendulum of moral responsibility swings in both directions. > There’s no one single source of this quagmire, and no One Simple Trick that will solve it. This is true in analysis but not in synthesis.
Abuse and predation, in particular against children (primarily perpetrated by parents) is the single biggest and impactful source of this quagmire. The One Simple Trick: peaceful parenting. |