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by cykotic 1037 days ago
It's primarily the educated who fall for nonsense arguments and don't see how they are being misled and used.

Are you able to justify this belief with anything more concrete than selective memory of anecdotal encounters?

3 comments

Pretty sure uneducated was the word they meant to be there. Phone keyboards and spellcheckers are often worse than typos for regular communication.
In this age of anti-intellectualism amongst certain political groups in the U.S. it wasn’t too foolish to think “educated” was the intended word.
Yup, fixed now.
It's not a belief. I'm not really sure why you think it would be.
[flagged]
> I see you edited your comment and changed educated to uneducated. It’s petty of you to not acknowledge this important change in your response to me.

It was an obvious error and I acknowledged it in two other replies. A quick glance at your reply in context will show that.

Mine was the second comment and you had not responded to the first comment when I made my post. As Crzy demonstrates it was not an obvious error. Anti-intellectualism is quite common in the U.S.
Joost Meerloo, in The Rape of the Mind, noted that the ones most susceptible to some methods of interrogation or propaganda were often those trained to withstand it.

Perhaps it's a false sense of security, or the dunning-kruger effect.

[flagged]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...

> The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities.

That isn’t quite what Dunning-Kruger is about. People with less competence tend to overestimate their abilities more than people with higher competence. For example, a person with ability 3 out of 10 might say their skill is a 5 whilst a person with ability 9 out of 10 might say their skill is a 10.

Where was the overestimation of one’s abilities in the comment made by Crzy?

The alleged fact that people trained to resist propaganda are more susceptible to it is only an instance of Dunning-Kruger if said people overestimate their abilities in this area greater than people with a higher ability to resist propaganda. That wasn’t established.

From webmd.com https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/dunning-kruger-effect-wh... :

To observe this phenomenon, Dunning and Kruger gave students tests of grammar, logical reasoning, and humor. The psychologists found that those who scored in the bottom 25% tended to overestimate their ability and test score. Most predicted their scores to be above the 60th percentile.

On the other hand, those who overperformed -- those in the top 25% of the students -- also incorrectly assessed their final result. Most of these students estimated their scores to be in the 70th- to 75th-percentile range. But most actually scored above the 87th percentile. While this is also not a realistic self-assessment, the researchers found that this group was competent enough to understand how they got a higher score, unlike the low performers. In other words, the gap between perceived and actual performance is smaller.