
The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’ - vezycash
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/07/the-internet-isnt-making-us-dumber-its-making-us-more-meta-ignorant.html
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lordnacho
The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources
that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even.

If you haven't learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you
won't. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I've run into so many people who
are misinformed, and let's just say "misinformed" means they don't know what
the academic orthodoxy is in a given field, but they think they know the
facts, and they even have theories about why other people are wrong.

I've tried to explain to a friend why vaccinations are a good idea, and I get
a bunch of crap about how modern medicine doesn't work for her, and how she
took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn't get ill. A half a dozen
of her friends jump in with articles about how vaccines work, and she ends it
with "sure but I'm skeptical".

I've been invited to a friends house to look at his "Time Waver" machine,
which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of
how it scans every single one of someone's organs. Remotely. In fact he showed
me a woman in Italy that he was helping out. First he asked me if I knew
anything about quantum theory, which I don't really beyond undergrad, and then
he gets excited and and spouts something about how I'll appreciate a
cleansing. Good thing I can stay polite. But someone in his 40s who thinks
this is how the world works is not going to have the veil of ignorance lifted.

These are just a couple of recent examples. Common to them is there's a bunch
of stuff you can readily access which supports it. If you have some opinion
about just about anything, you can find support for it, in fact a web of
support, which will really test your reasoning skills.

~~~
canadian_voter
_The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources
that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even._

When I was young, lonely and isolated, the internet was a godsend: it
connected me to like minded individuals and expanded my horizons. It exposed
me to a world of ideas about science, technology, history, politics, music,
etc. at a time when everyone around me was mentally stagnant.

That same power to connect can lead people down a dark or dangerous path.
Approach the internet with an uncritical mind and you could emerge as a flat-
earther, anti-vaccer, or worse.

 _I 've tried to explain to a friend why vaccinations are a good idea, and I
get a bunch of crap about how modern medicine doesn't work for her, and how
she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn't get ill._

I once knew someone who bought an expensive electronic detoxification device.
The idea was you held on to the handles and it sent purifying waves through
your body, killing any parasites. She insisted on showing off her stool after
the process was complete. She said she could see the little "bugs" that had
been in her system. Then we discovered that she had forgotten to put in the
batteries.

I knew someone else who wanted to invest in a $50,000 machine that made
similarly dubious claims. The idea was to make the money back by selling
treatments. Thankfully her daughter talked her out of it.

Gullibility is a dangerous thing, especially at the intersection of personal
health and second party financial incentive.

~~~
astrodust
It's not just gullibility, it's being taken in by the siren song of some
compelling hypothesis and then being slow-boiled by these increasingly
ridiculous "facts" that are used to sustain that trance.

Normal, grounded people don't wake up one morning and go "I get it, the Jews
and Soros are conspiring to suppress the _truth about the Flat Earth_ ", they
get there by baby steps, each one veering more and more into the illogical.

Maybe it was when they were unemployed or in medical trouble and stressed out
beyond their ability to cope, then wanted explanations, however implausible,
that gave them at least an _idea_ of what was wrong with their world. From
there it took root and by degrees they slip into this other world of nonsense
and batshittery.

Crystal therapy and detox can lead to healing rituals can lead to cults can
lead to suddenly selling everything and donating it all to some fraudulent
healer.

Like you observe, I think we're all in need of a best friend, family member,
or spouse who can say "You've got a problem, this has to stop now."

The problem with the internet is it delivers. If you want to know more about
quantum physics or molecular biology or cancer research you can dig and dig
and keep on digging, you will never run out of material. Likewise if you're
looking for harmful material, it will unquestioningly keep going all the way.

If Google started to detect the pattern of someone slipping into madness and
did what they could to start to refute things, to sprinkle in some helpful
counter-points with their diet of pure nonsense, maybe we can save people
who'd otherwise be lost.

~~~
quirkafleeg
> If Google started to detect the pattern of someone slipping into madness and
> did what they could to start to refute things, to sprinkle in some helpful
> counter-points with their diet of pure nonsense, maybe we can save people
> who'd otherwise be lost.

To which the response is who are Google to influence how or what people think?

It's easy to make up pure-nonsense examples that nobody believes - like _Soros
suppressing the truth about the flat Earth_ \- and say believers should be
saved.

What if someone questions the official version of 9/11? What if they believe/d
the NSA taps internet, social networks and world leaders? What if they think
an omnipotent sky fairy watches over us all and blesses America?

Google's "did you mean" is irritating enough when applied to assumed typos;
its purpose should be to give people what they're looking for, not tell people
what they should be looking for instead.

~~~
winfred
>To which the response is who are Google to influence how or what people
think?

But they are already doing just that. I watched a few Youtube videos related
to Quantum Mechanics and my recommended queue was flooded with videos full of
pseudo scientific nonsense.

It took me considerable effort in having these weird videos no longer
recommended to me. I think we can just be honest about what caused it, it's a
lack of intelligence in the sorting algorithm, that currently isn't able to
distinguish between true and false statements.

I understand there are areas where this line is vague, but if I watch a few
videos about astronomical events, why am I getting recommendations about
aliens visiting earth?

~~~
astrodust
You watch one "free energy" video for chuckles and all of a sudden YouTube
keeps surfacing more and more of these things, there's an infinite supply of
them apparently. It just won't stop.

------
awarer
"The fundamental cause of the trouble in the modern world today is that the
stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.” — Bertrand
Russell

~~~
mpweiher
That and our psychological quirk the we mistake self-confidence for
competence. The two together make a pretty combustible mixture and explain a
lot, IMHO.

------
edmccard
_The brain must constantly be doing triage on memories, without conscious
intervention. And apparently it recognizes that there is less need to stock
our minds with information that can be readily retrieved._

Or as my grandmother always said, "if you want to forget something, just write
it down."

------
cwp
Ok, if the article is right, then:

    
    
      - our minds don't bother to remember things when we know the information is stored externally and easy to access
      - given the aggressive way our minds exploit this, remembering must be expensive
      - given that we can now get by while remembering less than before
      - to what end can we put memory capacity we've now freed up?
    

One answer might be "living longer". As our lifespans extend, we may find
ourselves accumulating too much knowledge to quickly remember things when we
need them. If we're able to conserve memory more during our early lives, we
may be able to stave of senility longer.

Or maybe we can put that capacity to other uses. Our brains are pretty
adaptable, and maybe we can use some of it that was devoted to remembering
facts and experiences to instead remembering skills or languages or thinking
about the present.

------
SolarNet
Ranking systems help solve this. For example in games. Even in 5v5 games
better players will eventually get to the top, because they will cause more
games to be won in aggregate over their career. Similarly, systems of
apprenticeship, and rankings found in things like martial arts and sports.

The problem is that we need 100,000 doctors, some of them will be more
informed than others. The less informed ones will cause the other's to look
worse. A doctor is still more informed, but when there are disagreements, it
would be useful to know the relative standing of them. It would help with
these sorts of problems.

~~~
Qwertious
Problem with ranking is that the worse you are, the more you're put into toxic
teams with players that don't cooperate/are griefing, thus are much easier to
blame for your failure. What's worse, that blame is _often legitimate_.

~~~
SolarNet
Games have a solution for this. Toxic players have their own separate section
where they are ranked against each other.

------
visarga
We used to remember information, now we remember keywords to retrieve the
information. We haven't lost it, it's just one step away. The information is
stored implicitly.

The upshot is that we have turned into skilled information seekers and are
used to evaluate the quality and credibility of our sources.

We might not remember all the trivia, but when it comes to discovering new
interesting domains and quickly learning a lot about them, and finding people
with similar rare interests, the internet (google) is king.

~~~
tomjakubowski
I'll have to remember to recall that, once, I saw a very insightful HN comment
about how we used to remember information, and now we remember... -- bah, I
forgot, let me go look that up.

------
russellprose
Today, people around the world marched in the name of science. Back in 1969 we
put a man on the moon, and in 2017 we're having to march in the name of
science.This appears to be one giant leap backwards for mankind.

The age of the printing press coincided with the age of reason. Is the age of
the internet the harbinger of an age of disinformation, alternative facts, and
ignorance?

This post looks at that very possibility, and if so, is the future taking us
backwards? Are we devolving as a species?

[https://jimdroberts.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/the-
information...](https://jimdroberts.wordpress.com/2017/04/23/the-information-
communication-technology-paradox-or-why-the-internet-is-for-
idiots/?iframe=true&theme_preview=true﻿)

------
olivermarks
I've often wondered whether McArthur Wheeler - the lemon juice disguised bank
robber discussed in this article - actually had some mental challenges rather
than lacked common sense. It seems a whole branch of academia has grown off
his unfortunate back...

~~~
fiatjaf
Is this real? It is unbelievable.

~~~
lern_too_spel
The lemon juice story first appeared in the entertainment section of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in a compilation format article about dumb criminals.
This article was referenced in Dunning's and Kruger's paper, and the story
spread from there. The original article looks suspicious to me as well.

[https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ZNlRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DXAD...](https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=ZNlRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=DXADAAAAIBAJ&pg=6777%2C3720310)

------
fiatjaf
Difference in skills is clearest in games. When you can see someone winning
and someone losing you can know who's better, despite perhaps not
understanding why the winner won.

~~~
RangerScience
I think a variation on this is a key factor of life and culture in engineering
- at some point, either what you made works, or it doesn't. You can argue,
debate, philosophize and talk, but at the end of the day - there's either a
working thing someone else can look at, or there's not.

(I imagine this is true in other places - sales, business, design - it just
gets increasingly hard to tell "if it worked")

~~~
fiatjaf
You're right, but sales, business and design have too many variables involved
in the apparent success of what you make, so you're not able to safely verify
what "worked".

Even in engineering, two people can make something that "works", but which one
is better? Maybe the worst product had the better marketing, so it sold more
and in the end there are more people praising it, then you'll think it is
better.

~~~
icebraining
Yes, "it works" is a rather low bar. Almost all generic products in the market
"work", but some are clearly better than others.

------
ars
This is why I never took notes as a child. If I took notes I forgot everything
I learned. If I didn't, I remembered it.

~~~
kichuku
I found the opposite to be true for myself. If I don't take notes, I forget
soon. But if I take notes, at the time of taking notes, I am processing the
information in a way that I can explain myself. So somehow that helps me
remember a little longer even if I don't read those notes a second time.

------
4ydx
Deepak Chopra comes to mind. Listening to him weave a tail of why something is
because of quantum vibrations always makes me feel slightly ill.

------
dkarapetyan
Since we are playing with words. Startup idea: the meta-internet to restore
humanity to its previous intellectual glory.

------
JohnJamesRambo
I see this sort of thing on Hacker News all the time. Programmers that are,
I'm sure, the top of their field comment in threads about biology or something
out of their field with the most silly and wrong answers. A thread about
nutrition or something out of their realm of expertise on here is about as
useful as reading a Facebook or YouTube comment chain. That doesn't stop them
from speaking authoritatively about it. :)

~~~
kuschku
Luckily most of the people here, if they wanted, could easily get an entry-
level education in any field, because they know how to study from books, can
get access to the material, etc.

~~~
louithethrid
Oh, yes, its so easy, thats why every programmer aquiring domain specific
knowledge never makes any mistake and the software - once feature complete,
always guarantees satisfied customers. We are instant experts, just add hot
water and stire for five minutes.

~~~
alexbecker
I don't see the need for this much snark in response to a relatively innocuous
comment.

~~~
louithethrid
Yes, i was over-shooting, because i had that attitude myself - and this is not
innocuous . This hybris ruins lifes. Better snarky here, then Snarky out
there, at the end of project, when it really hurts.

