[mistermann]

> I can't know for sure either way. I guessed that you were trolling since you brought up vaccines causing autism; if it was just the question about God, I might not have thought so much of the intent. It seems I misjudged you, though.

I revealed my motive though: these two particular questions are guaranteed to invoke errors in normative cognition, and often especially in intelligent people.

>> I am very suspicious that this is not a 100% naturally emergent aspect of our culture - I speculate that people have been made this way.

> Agree.

Well now I'm curious...any theories (wild and speculative is fine by me) on some candidate causes?

> It definitely happens at times, but there's no plane that can truly just airlift a person across such a gap.

Which was more than we could say about actual planes, before a couple of weirdos got off their asses and actually built one.

But it seems there's something about this problem that's different, almost like it doesn't allow itself to be analyzed, or even noticed. "Some day" humanity will reach the oft-discussed but never pursued world of widespread critical thinking seems to be the plan, without having even taken the first step towards it.

Noteworthy: I am far from the first person who has noticed this phenomenon.

[vacuity]

> Well now I'm curious...any theories (wild and speculative is fine by me) on some candidate causes?

Maybe we are an experiment by higher beings to see how well sparks of rationality can develop into an enlightened being or whatever. I wonder how they'd rate us so far.

> But it seems there's something about this problem that's different, almost like it doesn't allow itself to be analyzed, or even noticed. "Some day" humanity will reach the oft-discussed but never pursued world of widespread critical thinking seems to be the plan, without having even taken the first step towards it.

Put all elementary/middle children on Hacker News for fifteen minutes a day until they can demonstrate critical thinking in live debates. /s

Seriously though, I think fostering curiosity and critical thinking, as abstract as they are, is important to improving society as a whole. Parents probably need to be involved in this kind of education, and schools too. I think Hacker News has good examples of both great discussions with critical thinking and...suboptimal discussions. A lot easier said than done though.

[mistermann]

> Maybe we are an experiment by higher beings to see how well sparks of rationality can develop into an enlightened being or whatever. I wonder how they'd rate us so far.

Another way to look at it: there is an experiment of sorts underway to see whether humanity can reach some sort of enlightenment before killing itself off - regardless of whether there is a higher power to help us along the way (which doesn't necessarily have to be supernatural btw, though it may appear that way, and thus "be" that way), this may indeed be the situation we are in, but cannot know (or maybe even true to know, so far away are we from the goal).

> Put all elementary/middle children on Hacker News for fifteen minutes a day until they can demonstrate critical thinking in live debates.

An alternative idea I've had: teach junior & high school kids certain skills, and then cherry pick culture war threads from Hacker News (a site well populated by genuinely intelligent adults, though only on a relative scale) and then have the children ruthlessly critique the literal delusions of the adults. I think this is a good idea for many different reasons, the main one being to demonstrate how easily kids could be upgraded to utterly dominate the thinking of smart adults, in specific types of thinking. Considering bad thinking and decisions are the roots of all our problems, and the adults seem utterly helpless to do anything about it, empowering those who can be demonstrated to perform better seems like a no brainer to me.

> Parents probably need to be involved in this kind of education, and schools too.

The parents and adults would first need to be trained in the necessary skills - as we can see here on HN, hardly anyone can do it at a high level, or realize that they cannot (the affliction renders the subject unable to accurately self-diagnose, a phenomenon which can also occur at the culture/species level).

> I think Hacker News has good examples of both great discussions with critical thinking and...suboptimal discussions.

Providing near endless material for running case studies of the limited quality of high level 21st century human cognition: even our best and brightest are dumb on an absolute scale.