The internet was supposed to make humanity smarter. It’s failing. https://t.co/gdNSPiVUN3
— Catherine Rampell (@crampell) March 29, 2024
The always readable Catherine Rampell, at the Washington Post — “The internet was supposed to make humanity smarter. It’s failing.” [gift link]:
Not long ago, humankind seemed destined to grow more informed over time.
After all, we’ve had millennia to accumulate scientific findings, brilliant literature and new technologies. Then something miraculous happened: The internet made it easy to disseminate and democratize all that wisdom. With reliable broadband and ubiquitous smartphones, the entire sum of human knowledge is now at our fingertips 24/7.
Yet here we are in 2024, and the internet seems to have made many of us so much dumber. Or at least, much more susceptible to wildly false information.
For example:
– Young women have been dumping their birth control because viral influencer videos claim ye olde “rhythm method” is safer.– The tragic collapse of a Baltimore bridge, after a ship lost power, launched a zillion viral conspiracy theories blaming diversity education, capitalism, immigrants and (inevitably) the Jews.
– The Islamic State practically had to beg for credit for its slaughter of civilians at a Russian concert hall because too many conspiracy theorists have blamed other culprits. (“I had never considered before that we might solve terrorism by becoming so collectively stupid that no one can agree who perpetrated the attack,” observed tech policy researcher Eli Dourado. “No point in terrorizing if you don’t get the credit!”)…
So how is it that the internet has made so many of us less informed?
It’s easy to understand how mistruths can spread. Lies can be optimized for virality. The truth cannot because it’s constrained by reality, which is sometimes boring. So it’s no surprise that lies can do better online; they can be designed to appeal to their audiences’ biases and desires. The underlying principle is not new. As the saying goes, a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its boots.
The internet also makes it easier to find communities that can reinforce and embellish any given conspiracy theory, no matter how improbable. “Old wives’ tales” and hoaxes are not new, of course, but it’s hard to imagine QAnon lore proliferating as widely and quickly and with such elaborate detail in a pre-internet era. Those who wish to spread misinformation — perhaps for political or financial gain — can now efficiently share their message at scale.
The puzzle is why consumers haven’t grown savvier about spotting misinformation. During the 2016 election cycle, lots of Americans proved easily manipulable by Russian trolls and disinformation agents on Facebook. But those Facebook victims were disproportionately older users who hadn’t grown up in the digital era and presumably had less practice scrutinizing the credibility of online sources.
As new generations arose who were digital natives, I (naively) assumed Americans would become better at differentiating between a viral social-media anecdote and a vetted news story or credible statistical source. Somehow, the opposite has happened. Gen Zers appear to struggle with news literacy as much boomers, at least based on the large share of young people who trust and reshare random TikTok influencers for hard news…
To quote Men in Black: “A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet.”
Baud
I was worried for a second that the story was about us.
Old School
You can always fake being smart.
Or so I heard on the internet.
cain
That’s why I like being on this blog because all of us can fall to propaganda – when you have people of different backgrounds you can suss out the bullshit. It’s much harder to fall for false narratives.
bbleh
Aw it’s just taking us social bio-mechanisms a little time to catch up with the digital technology. And I think the perception of dumb is greater than the reality precisely because of the intertubes: we see a lot more dumb, so we think people are dumber, but really they’re no different; it’s just that we see more of it.
I’m amazed at the tech-savvy — and more importantly, the skepticism — of, say, 30-somethings and younger. They’ve grown up with profiles and media manipulation, and they know how easy it is to distort things, and what you should and shouldn’t adopt at face value (nearly nothing).
Give it a generation. Look how long it took us to cope with the Bomb ffs, and that in many ways was/is much simpler.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud:
Isn’t it, Baud? Isn’t it?
Matt McIrvin
What it feels like to me is where mass electronic and print media were in the 1970s. The same kind of bullshit abounded, it just took longer to circulate.
One difference is that if you do have a little bit of media literacy, you can actually pretty easily find the debunkings of all of these things, whereas back in the day, you’d just sort of file it away in your mind as a dubious thing and ten years later, think “what the hell was up with Admiral Byrd finding the secret portal to the Hollow Earth at the North Pole?” or whatever.
cain
@Old School:
Generative AI is gonna make faking it – look pretty good.
Generative AI can now recreate your looks and voice. I think you’re going to see a lot of dead famous people doing things that they would never do.
It’s going to be ratfucking all the time.
I imagine criminal networks will be buying a lot of hardware to train their own AI to do these things.
SpaceUnit
Along with every form of gratuitous stupidity.
Bill Arnold
Win for the MiB quote.
I disagree, in part. The internet is much much much better for those who actually want to research something and are vaguely familiar with appropriate; methods.
For instance, scholar.google.com and a few others are game-changing, allowing a interested person to scope out a random academic field quickly and easily, over a few pots of coffee. (It used to be a bit easier, but sci-hub still works for older papers that happen to be paywalled. Also, arxiv and other preprint servers are a game changer; science can move faster, like 2-4x.)
Same, but with much more caution needed, for scanning news, or doing investigations of persons and organizations.
Another game changer is automated translation. We regularly literally read news articles in unfamiliar languages, machine translated to our native language. The translations are not perfect, but they are very helpful.
satby
@Baud: kinda was
Baud
@Bill Arnold:
I agree. For me the Internet has made bad people worse and good people better.
JustRuss
I know a college student who just lost $1000 to a phishing scam. Not a horrible one, but when I saw the email I instantly knew it was fraud. Our digital natives can be very clueless. I know we want schools to fix everything, but on-line savvy is a critical life skill they should be teaching. Cuz the kids sure can’t learn it from their parents.
Redshift
@bbleh:
Tech-savvy, yes, appropriately skeptical, not so much. There’s plenty of research showing that “digital natives” are more susceptible to bullshit online than us olds. Just one example that includes links to several of them:
Teens Are ‘Digital Natives,’ But More Susceptible to Online Conspiracies Than Adults
The willingness of my younger co-workers to buy into stuff like “Joe Biden has gone way downhill, and other people are running everything for him” is terrifying.
dmsilev
Back when the Internet was called the “information Superhighway”, I remember people joking that it should instead have been called the “Information Supercollider”, where streams of information and anti-information slam into each other. Doesn’t really seem like much of a joke now.
NotMax
Seems like a fitting place to drop this in.
Cuts many corners but overall a cute effort. Every Birth Generation Explained in 9 Minutes.
UncleEbeneezer
How Disinformation Is Sabotaging America– A conversation with Barb McQuade (Author of Attack From Within) and Joyce White Vance.
VFX Lurker
This. To paraphrase someone else (Asimov?) the Internet is like fire. It can warm your house or burn it down.
If someone wants to believe in nonsense, they can find nonsense on the Internet. Lots of nonsense.
If someone wants to lean math or Python or watch cat videos, the Internet can give them that, too.
SNCO
The issue is the same as it always has been: the number of people who do critical thinking well is about as common as the number of people who play the violin well.
The Internet has democratized the spreading of information extremely well. We all now have a firehose of information at our fingertips on our smart phones.
The Internet has not – however – spread the knowledge and practice of thinking critically. And it never will. Thinking critically is an individually-acquired skill, and there is no shortcut for each individual human working to acquire skill for himself/herself/themselves.
This universal fact of human existence is as true today as it was in the time of Socrates.
What I would like to know, therefore, is how we surf the wave of knowledge dissemination in a way so we can keep good knowledge available and understood by critical thinkers – particularly those with power to make a measurable difference in our lives.
Doc Sardonic
This ancient (2012) State Farm commercial seems to be rather prescient
youtube.com/watch?v=34CHqptjj9E
PAM Dirac
I see drumpf’s favorite judge made a ruling. Looks like drumpf not let off the hook, but Cannon trying for more bullshit delay and posturing. I guess the question is does Smith go nuclear now or continue to build up the pressure.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Bad example here. Show me a problem of national significance that doesn’t tie back to capitalism and I’ll ship you a box of Girl Scout Cookies.
Tony G
My dumb point of view: Humans have (with rare exceptions) always been a stupid and mean-spirited species. The advent of the internet, however, has made it much easier for people to access, and to spread, the mean-spirited lies that they crave. The core of the problem, as always, has been the nature of us humans.
The Kropenhagen Interpretation
Build each other up. We need a process of mutual edification.
We need to be discerning regarding what we share. When we see an evidently teachable person who needs a skill developed, we need to help.
NotMax
Once again, Carl Sagan’s Baloney Detection Kit (.pdf file).
NotMax
@PAM Dirac
Obligatory IANAL.
As the order (for now, albeit weakly) affirms Smith’s case, there is nothing in it for him to bring to the 11th circuit on appeal.
Urza
I think the internet has made humanity smarter. If you watch children today they know so much more than pre-internet children and can do things never dreamed of before the 90s. The problem is not the internet but that a subsection of humans are gullible and stupid all on their own and the internet magnifies them now that we think every voice should be heard no matter how far from reality it is. And also there’s a chunk of people, often but not always religious, that are willfully ignorant and avoid exposing themselves to knowledge that contradicts what they were molded to believe. Those people also have a louder voice than before. And its easier to toss out crap than to refute it. But people were always doing these same things, it was just more hidden because it didn’t make the news and if you were lucky you grew up in an intelligent family and didn’t realize its all around you all the time.
SNCO
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: I agree with you.
. . .
And I might add that I think we are better if we have empathy both for those who can learn and those who aren’t capable of it. Having contempt for the mass of humanity has never seemed to work out well for either the critical thinkers or the general mass, either group.
PAM Dirac
@NotMax:
right, but the worry is that the bullshit jury instructions aren’t really addressed and might still cause problems at a point where they can’t be appealed. It seems Cannon is trying to do the absolute minimum to delay while also denying easy appeals.
Spanky
Over at Despair.com, there’s a demotivational poster titled MEETINGS and a picture of several hands joined together. The small print is relevant here:
Matt McIrvin
It seems like one of the failure modes that easy fakery and abundant disinformation produce is a kind of hypertrophied skepticism in which you just start to believe that everything is fake. The Flat Earth/Space is Fake people are kings of this. They will insist that things are “CGI” when they’re views you can get through an amateur backyard telescope. Perhaps they COULD be CGI, but there’s no reason to think they are.
Everything gets analyzed with an “anomaly hunting” protocol in which they’re just looking hard for something that seems off or wrong, even if it doesn’t make any sense (e.g. complaining that something looks the wrong size in a photo, in a situation where it could legitimately look any size whatsoever depending on how the picture was taken and processed, as anyone past toddler age should understand).
To some extent it might be the result of having been exposed to a torrent of realistic fake images. A kind of Philip K. Dick-like corruption of perception.
Roberto el oso
“The entire sum of human knowledge is now at our fingertips 24/7.”
No. It. Is. Not.
Martin
I don’t like this framing.
It kind of suggests that if you come to believe one wrong thing, but learned 10 right things, that we’re worse off for it.
Here’s a bunch of big counterexamples:
In aggregate, it’s been a clear informational benefit. And a lot of the insanity on the right is simply them being exposed to this whole other side of society that Must See TV dutifully hid from them. It’s not that they’re less informed, it’s that they’re more informed. And yeah, their reaction sucks, and their conspiratorial thinking about where all these trans people suddenly came from sucks, but in net, we’re better off.
TBone
One thing that irks me is that people are (in general) no longer willing to invest more than a few minutes/seconds on any given article or subject that requires deep, sustained attention/comprehension. Everyone wants to skim and the results are, dare I say, shallow.
Michael Bersin
Conversation between a time traveler from our period visiting an individual in the 1950s:
Time Traveler: “I have in my pocket a device which allows me to access the totality of human knowledge. Most people in my time period use it to watch cat videos and get in arguments with people they don’t know. I use it to read and post comments on Balloon Juice.”
George McFly: “So, it’s a wash then.”
UncleEbeneezer
Re: Women’s NCAA Basketball:
Shalimar
@NotMax: I don’t have any personal experience with the intricacies of appeals, but it seems to me that her reserving the right to change her mind later after double jeopardy has attached should open up an appeal for the 11th Circuit to explain the law to her now rather than later. Not call for her recusal, just for a decision explaining that PRA has nothing to do with this case.
TBone
@Shalimar: 👍
hueyplong
Gotta rudely interrupt the daily lament about the inevitable delay past November of the stolen documents trial to remind all that Joe Lieberman remains dead, and one of that event’s many happy consequences is that No Labels will not field a candidate. Anywhere. The fact that it was the Wall Street Journal that “first reported the story” is pretty much proof positive to all but the internet clickbait sponsors of Nigerian prince cashflow solutions that it was a Trumpian ratfucking project all along.
May Lieberman’s mouldering body be a daily inspiration when we despair of just deserts ever being delivered to Trump, Bibi, Gaetz, Putin, Thomas, Alito, Musk, et al.
Mr. Bemused Senior
The machine learning boosters will assert that useful and accurate summaries will be generated automatically, freeing us from the drudgery of reading. Feh.
Damien
A lot of the younger generation was raised on apps and smartphones, I have several students who truly can’t even use a mouse properly.
You know why capitalism? Because as much as we might want to deny it the great mass of humanity can barely handle doing one thing adequately, let alone do a dozen things well, and the more information they have access to the more it crowds out the adequate parts. I actively try to teach people critical thinking and it’s like getting my dog to play the piano: there just isn’t either the aptitude nor the ability, and at some point we’re both happier if he’s just running in the back yard.
cain
@Tony G:
Agent Smith was right when he described us as a disease.
cain
@Urza: and you can’t really blame the Internet for folks falling for Fox News, right? That’s straight up 80s technology right there.
smith
@Shalimar: I’ve seen a suggestion that Smith file a motion in limine to forbid the use of the PRA as a defense and see what she does.
Urza
@cain: People fell for their neighbor making things up. The town crier, the leaflets and books, radio. I mean I get why people used to imagine if it was written down it was real since it took so much effort to do the writing and so few people were educated enough to do a good job of it. But in reality almost all writing for all of human history has been a best guess without any actual evidence until the Renaissance and that was all people had to go off, plus whatever spin the local religious leader put on it.
noncarborundum
The MiB quote is cool and catchy and even correct in its main point, but it’s absolutely not true that everybody thought the world was flat 500 years ago.
Citizen Alan
@noncarborundum: I think either Tommy Lee Jones or the writers got it wrong. If he’d said 1500 years ago the earth was flat and 500 years ago the earth was center of the universe, it would have made more sense. That’s abut the time frame for (a) the Greeks figuring out we had a round earth and (b) Copernicus, isn’t it?
Matt McIrvin
@Martin: A lot of the discourse seems to be fundamentally misanthropic/anti-democratic too.
I never like the MiB quote: in-story, it’s a justification for an authoritarian information-control and police organization, that freely uses the power to wipe people’s memories and suppress the truth, inspired by a popular conspiracy theory in which they were obviously supposed to be the bad guys. It’s a fun, entertaining movie, but I think it also shows you where this goes. If people can’t be trusted, someone needs to be the wise controller over them.
Matt McIrvin
@noncarborundum: More people think the world is flat today than they did 500 years ago. (But they don’t just think it’s flat, they’re the sort of people who will believe anything as long as it’s a conspiracy theory, and this happens to be a currently fashionable one.)
sab
@UncleEbeneezer: My husband played basketball and loves basketball, and he is mesmerized. He says these women play a much higher version of the game that he played, and he loves watching it because he understands what they are doing. They aren’t huge. They can’t make incredible jumps to overcome their mistakes, so they have to play smart and not make mistakes. Also they know how to dribble. The professional men get away with ridiculous amounts of travelling.
sab
@cain: In college or law school I had a project where I was reading mid 1800s Tennessee newspapers, and they made Fox News feel like Parade magazine. Outrageously biased and inflamatory. No wonder men were all fighting duels with each other.
ColoradoGuy
It’s a little sobering that Gutenberg’s invention set off one or two centuries of religious wars in Europe. Mass access to knowledge resulted in squabbles over the most arcane aspects of religion, and many of the new books were about advances in military technology. It took a while for things to settle down, eventually resulting in the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution (which we are still living in).
But parts of the world reject the Enlightenment, most importantly, Russia and parts of the Mideast. They seek a return to the pre-scientific medieval order, only with HDTV and smartphones sitting behind a national firewall.
cain
@sab: I heard that the 30s and 40s were filled with small newspapers saying a bunch of shit. They had limited reach but the internet makes it globally available.
But I think what the internet does is enable people to see the world, see the possibilities, and what other people are doing.
Omnes Omnibus
I originally read that as “parts of the Midwest” and said to myself, “Harsh, but fair.”
Redshift
@Urza: One of the most chilling things I’ve ever read was an article about interviews with people in Bosnia about the genocide. There was a woman who was asked why she would believe the radio broadcasts saying her Muslim neighbors wanted to enslave her children and put them in harems, when she had grown up with these people and lived with them for generations.
She answered “why would the radio lie?”
Timill
@Citizen Alan:
More like 2500 years ago: aps.org/publications/apsnews/200606/history.cfm
cain
@ColoradoGuy:
Which is bullshit – the Muslim scholars were renowned in their heyday. It only turned to crap after the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
“The division of the Ottoman Empire led to the creation of new nation-states in the region, such as Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. New borders, however, were often drawn arbitrarily, without regard for the region’s ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity. This contributed to conflict and instability throughout the 20th century.”
theworldwar.org/learn/educator-resource/wwi-and-middle-east#:~:text=New%20Nation%2DStates,%2C%20reli….
A good example of why the Internet is awesome despite its flaws. :) You can again thank colonial powers for this crap. Just like you can thank them for encouraging the split between India and Pakistan.
ColoradoGuy
Midwest, Mideast, I guess it’s a return to the 1850’s or before Genghis Khan, whichever feels good. Just so long as they keep their TV’s. Can’t give up that.
None of the “traditionals” want to return to an actual past. They want to live in Disneyland forever, with all the modern toys to entertain them.
different-church-lady
It’s really quite simple: clever, affluent sociopaths realized they could use high tech to get really really good at leveraging the weak spots in human psychology and become very rich, and everyone thought it was great as long as they got dopamine hits as a result.
Geminid
@sab: A friend had an interesting thought about women’s and men’s basketball. She said the women’s game is better because, given the women’s size and quickness, the court is the right size. She thinks that the men have outgrown the traditional court, and that it could be expanded 2 or 3 feet on each side to good effect.
cmorenc
@NotMax: Canon’s ruling today is designed to attempt to shield her from immediate 11th Circuit review/rebuke, while leaving her path to fuck over the case after the jury is impaneled (double jeopardy, Smith!) intact.
Matt McIrvin
@cain: Agent Smith dressed like a MiB too! The entity that says you’re a disease, or an easily-panicked herd animal… that’s the Man.
We all have it in us. The thing is to try to not act that way.
WaterGirl
@cmorenc: Exactly!
She had help crafting that, you can be sure.
kindness
I don’t know that the internet has made us dumber. I think it has amplified previously ignored voices who are lying. Somehow that the gullable don’t see the con artists the internet provides is curious. Were Boomers more suspicious types back in our youth? Maybe. I mean, the 50 & 60 year olds that sent us off to Vietnam on bullshit reasons makes it easy to become a bit suspicious. You know?
Matt McIrvin
@kindness: There’s a conventional wisdom that the Vietnam War, Watergate, the oil crisis, stagflation and rising crime all hitting in the same decade or so broke American trust in institutions. I suspect that the high trust in institutions in the postwar US was actually more the historical exception than the norm. But it does seem like there was sort of a perfect storm.
Ihop
I will never blame the internet for making me believe that people could be stupider than the old farts with which I spend Wednesday evenings.
Getting older has its costs.
Frankensteinbeck
I don’t think it has. I think you’re noticing the stupid. The amount of information we take for granted now that pre-internet I just hoped I could look up in a library is staggering. Life changing.
Sovereign Citizens want to talk to you. There is a point here – people generally went to their church to get the insanity. Their conspiracies were less uniform and they had to stick more with Jews eating babies and black helicopters.
EDIT – Oh, and Elvis sightings! And Area 51 was waaaay more popular.
sab
Caitlin Clark likes Cleveland! She says it feels like a bigger Des Moines.
DesMoines is slightly bigger than Akron, so that made me laugh.
I think Cleveland has a better orchestra and art museum and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Lake Erie, but it still made me laugh.
Matt McIrvin
“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” only needed the printing press to spread, though it adapted to other media as they appeared and continues to do so.
ColoradoGuy
The Republicans have been trafficking in fantasy for a long time. “Who Lost China?”, the Red Scare and HUAC, where Nixon and Roy Cohn got their start, Nixon’s panoply of lies and the courting of the antebellum South, the decades-long gay panic that got Reagan and George HW Bush elected, the rise of AM Hate Radio, Murdoch and Fox (fantasy) News, flag pins, the War on Terror, one made-up panic after another. For seventy years, and the rubes never get tired of it.
Matt McIrvin
@ColoradoGuy: That nice fellow Ronald Reagan on the 8mm film shown in your church basement, warning you that Medicare would be end of our freedoms!
Poe Larity
I blame Obama – wasn’t he the one who created the intertubes?
I miss all those Bermuda Triangle and Erich von Daniken books at the front of Waldenbooks.
Baud
@Frankensteinbeck:
WHERE IS BIGFOOT?!?!
Dorothy A. Winsor
No Labels has dropped out of the 2024 race.
Jackie
TIFG and Weisselberg just can’t stop frauding:
Nooneithinkisinmytree
John Wilkes Booth, Timothy McVeigh and Robert Welch are the founders of the worldwide conservative movement.
But one wonders, regarding the subject of this post, if the UniBomber might have been on to something.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
And for some segments of the population, civil rights.
Geminid
@Poe Larity: I miss those New Agey books too: stuff about Atlantis, reprints like Worlds in Collision by Velikovsky, Carlos Casteneda….
They all faded after the early 1980s except for one: Hal Lindsay’s The Late, Great Planet Earth. That one had legs, unfortunately.
AlaskaReader
Rest In Peace John Sinclair
youtube.com/watch?v=c57qLiskcYk
Jackie
Colin Allred has Cancun Ted’s panties in a twist!
Cue The Tears of an Angel…🎶
sab
OT: In defense of the internet:
One of my favorite authors is Dorothy Dunnett who wrote long two long complex series of historical novels about two generations of renaissance families, based mostly in Scotland and Flanders, but wandering all over the then known world.
She wrote it before the internet, with meticulous research in excellent libraries in Edinburgh and possibly London. In addition to her excellent writing, her research is a marvel. Back with just libraries.
I cannot imagine reading her books without the internet. What did Trebizond look like, or Cyprus? Who has ever even heard of Trebizond. Family trees of the incredibly inbred European aristocracy. Africa had huge empires fighting each other back when the Europeans were fighting each other. Europe didn’t discover there was anything safe to sail to south of Portugal until the 14th century.
RSA
The people who made the Internet possible, going back to the 1960s, were geniuses and technological idealists. They naturally assumed that given the choice, people would want to be smarter. If you read their papers today you’ll see amazing creative thought mixed in with remarkable naivety.
As it turns out, becoming smarter seems to have lower priority than finding like-minded people to reflect and amplify one’s viewpoints, attitudes, goals, and such.
schrodingers_cat
The internet made stuff accessible. People, knowledge and things. Its a powerful tool. My art hobby really took off after I found resources on YouTube
ETA: I attended a Zoom seminar by a botanical illustrator from the Smithsonian this afternoon. This would not have been possible without the internet.
Melancholy Jaques
@Matt McIrvin:
Think of the twelve and a half year time frame that starts with the Cuban Missile Crisis and ends with the Fall of Saigon with the helicopters on the roof and being thrown into the ocean. I will not bother to make out the list of Boomer Agonistes, but it is much much worse than can be described. And it was all intensified by the fact that there were only three TV news stations (fewer in many rural areas) and they were all covering the same stories.
Melancholy Jaques
@sab:
In this native’s opinion, the single greatest thing Cleveland has is the Metropark system.
Mr. Bemused Senior
This is what comes of reading Thomas Friedman in the FTFNYT. /s
KrackenJack
@Spanky:
The Journal of Irreproducible Results had an article entitled “The Collective Clown Problem” which proposed that group intelligence is multiplicative rather than additive. Ergo two half-wits make a quarter-wit. It has stayed with me ever since I read it, but I haven’t been able to find a link.
PJ
@sab:
Well, people who were interested in Greek or Turkish history (or who actually lived there) assuredly had heard about Trebizond. Your question is like a person from say, Hanoi, reading historical fiction about the Renaissance in Britain and saying “Whoever heard of Scotland, or Flanders?” The existence of major cities or countries in history was not exactly a secret. Pre-internet, you could have found a decent summary about Trebizond in your family’s encyclopedia.
Matt McIrvin
@Geminid: Random and surreal 1970s paranormal lunacy gave way to Jesus-flavored 1980s paranormal lunacy. Then the Seventies stuff kind of came back in the 1990s, the X-Files era.
But I’m not sure that was all harmless. There was always a sinister conspiracy angle that I think fed into the situation we’re in now.
Jackie
It’s sure a “slow” news day!
A D.C. Bar panel found that Jeffrey Clark’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election should result in discipline, potentially including disbarment.
huffpost.com/entry/jeffrey-clark-january-6_n_660f0394e4b078af1447e2db
Baud
@Jackie:
👍
CliosFanBoy
Science in the 1990s: We cloned a sheep, put a rover on Mars, and are deciphering Human DNA!
Science in the 2020s: For the last time, the Earth is ROUND!
WaterGirl
@Jackie: Chickens coming home to roost!
Oh wait, didn’t someone get in trouble once for saying that? :-)
SW
When I was young and stupid, I thought that the more information we humans had the better decisions we would make. I thought that we all possess a bullshit detector and when confronted with two opposing claims we would usually choose the most truthful because the truth resonates with us and the lies seem hollow in comparison. Turns out that is completely wrong. We believe what we want to believe and if the lie conforms to our prejudice we will choose it nearly all the time.
Princess
@Citizen Alan: More like 2500 years ago for a spherical earth.
And there’s a strain of modern astronomy that thinks it makes a lot of sense — given the universe has no actual centre — to consider the centre for observational purposes the earth on which we stand.
Princess
@sab: I love Dorothy Dunnett too. Her research and writing skills are off the charts good.
Gvg
I don’t remember anyone telling me the internet would make us smarter, just that we could get information faster and more completely. That does not equal smarter.
My kook cousin was always that way, before the internet.
wise people always wanted to improve teaching critical thinking skills.
Decades ago I didn’t think most important Republicans were also stupid, and I did not think the Supreme Court had a majority of pathetic thinkers on it. I don’t think I was ignorant, I think they courted fools until they were replaced by them.
mrmoshpotato
I never thought I’d read something like this that wasn’t an April Fool’s joke. How incomprehensible stupid!
Melancholy Jaques
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
It’s not just that people like Friedman and Brooks are published by the FTFNYT. It’s that no one there seems to be embarrassed by them.
Another Scott
Meh.
[ insert Asimov quote here ]
I read a lot when I was a kid and into my young adulthood. Lots of nonsense (along with lots of other stuff). Erich von Däniken. Immanuel Velikovsky. Gary Allen. Yes, even Ayn Rand. In my first year of college, I would often go to events sponsored by the Spartacus Youth League to hear what they had to say and to argue with them.
People need the space to figure out things on their own, and there also needs to be a baseline trust that the world isn’t run by some hidden cabal that is hiding the truth (and worse). It used to be that people could go through a phase of stupidity like that and be able to recover and be a quasi-normal human being afterwards.
Now, too many in the media have figured out that the path to riches is to keep readers “engaged” and angry and feeling that they’re more special than everyone else that isn’t in the club. That people who don’t believe the same things are not just wrong, but the enemy.
The problem isn’t “the internet”. It’s mass, talking head, media that is totally insular. (Rush Limbaugh probably did a lot more damage than catturd2.)
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
brantl
@The Kropenhagen Interpretation: WE HAVE A WINNER!
brantl
@Roberto el oso: It is; you may not know how to find it, or even what to call it, but it is.
sab
@Melancholy Jaques: YES!
Sister Golden Bear
@Martin:
The most important thing fueling the trans rights movement is that the internet and social media finally enabled us trans and non-binary people to easily connect with each other. Given how stigmatized being trans was, even finding support groups, or just people like me, was extremely difficult.
Tony G
@Gvg: Well, Ronald Reagan was pretty damn stupid 50 years ago. But, compared to the current GOP “leaders”, Reagan was a scholar and a statesman.
sab
@PJ: Actually no. We had a family encyclopedia that I read covers to covers. My point is that not being of Turkish or Cyprene background I didn’t know this and probably never would have, but the internet makes it accessible even if I don’t live near a major metropolitan library system. Amd I certainly wouldn’t have seen the pictures.
I knew Africa had big rivers, but without the internet I never would have seen how huge the Niger and the Congo are. Just jaw droppingly huge for those of us who think the Mississippi is big.
Tony G
@Baud: Speaking as a Boomer, and remembering the stories of my parents, aunts and uncles, it seems like the Boomers were the first generation in history who expected more out of life than misery and death. I think that earlier generations were too busy getting enough to eat to indulge in conspiracy theories.
Ironcity
@Poe Larity: G
@Poe Larity: I think it was Al Gore who reputedly invented the internet, but I’m sure Obama had something to do with it. Gore went on to l
oose the presidential election to shrubhave the presidential election stolen by shrub. Gore’s consolation prize was venture capital or something to make bags of bank, identify climate change as a global threat, and I think a divorce.Uncle Cosmo
@dmsilev: Before its cancellation, one of my best friends (astronomy professor) referred to the SCSC as the SuperCorrupting StupidCollider. I think he was joking…
Subsole
@Matt McIrvin:
Yeah. Turns out the antiMan isn’t actually your friend, either.
It’s like assuming the fact that you don’t trust the cops means the Cartels are your allies.
NotMax
@Tony G
Things such as (for only two examples) the Inquisition and witch burning were not exactly blips.