<story><title>The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’</title><url>http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/07/the-internet-isnt-making-us-dumber-its-making-us-more-meta-ignorant.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even.&lt;p&gt;If you haven&amp;#x27;t learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won&amp;#x27;t. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I&amp;#x27;ve run into so many people who are misinformed, and let&amp;#x27;s just say &amp;quot;misinformed&amp;quot; means they don&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn&amp;#x27;t get ill. A half a dozen of her friends jump in with articles about how vaccines work, and she ends it with &amp;quot;sure but I&amp;#x27;m skeptical&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been invited to a friends house to look at his &amp;quot;Time Waver&amp;quot; machine, which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of how it scans every single one of someone&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t really beyond undergrad, and then he gets excited and and spouts something about how I&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;These are just a couple of recent examples. Common to them is there&amp;#x27;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>canadian_voter</author><text>&lt;i&gt;The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn&amp;#x27;t get ill.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;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 &amp;quot;bugs&amp;quot; that had been in her system. Then we discovered that she had forgotten to put in the batteries.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;Gullibility is a dangerous thing, especially at the intersection of personal health and second party financial incentive.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Internet Isn’t Making Us Dumber – It’s Making Us More ‘Meta-Ignorant’</title><url>http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/07/the-internet-isnt-making-us-dumber-its-making-us-more-meta-ignorant.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lordnacho</author><text>The problem with ignorance in the internet age is you can now find sources that confirm your wrong headed ideas, entire ecosystems even.&lt;p&gt;If you haven&amp;#x27;t learned how to think before becoming an adult, I fear that you won&amp;#x27;t. Sorry for sounding condescending, but I&amp;#x27;ve run into so many people who are misinformed, and let&amp;#x27;s just say &amp;quot;misinformed&amp;quot; means they don&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t work for her, and how she took a homeopathic vaccine, went to India, and didn&amp;#x27;t get ill. A half a dozen of her friends jump in with articles about how vaccines work, and she ends it with &amp;quot;sure but I&amp;#x27;m skeptical&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ve been invited to a friends house to look at his &amp;quot;Time Waver&amp;quot; machine, which supposedly connects to one of your auras, and has a nice animation of how it scans every single one of someone&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t really beyond undergrad, and then he gets excited and and spouts something about how I&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;These are just a couple of recent examples. Common to them is there&amp;#x27;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.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pavlov</author><text>I personally know a man in his late thirties who nearly died of AIDS a few years ago because he had read &amp;quot;credible sources&amp;quot; on the Internet and convinced himself that HIV is harmless.&lt;p&gt;This happened already in the early 2000s. For over a decade, he ignored his HIV status (not knowing either way) thanks to the &amp;quot;advice&amp;quot; from contrarian experts on the Internet. One day he finally had a flu that didn&amp;#x27;t seem to go away. A doctor took one look at the lesions on his face and told him the bad news.&lt;p&gt;He survived, and now he wants to warn everyone about the dangers of hopeful biases when combined with the immense amount of misinformation on the Internet. He&amp;#x27;s even appeared on national media here in Finland to tell his story, and I admire his courage.</text></comment>