I don’t think it’s so much that people have gotten dumber, there’s always been dumb folk, but the age of social media has made them less fearful of looking stupid.
It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.
You don’t feel so dumb when you can find a bunch of people who agree with you.
There’s also the compounding effect of being able to hear more voices from around the world thanks to the internet.
Every village has an idiot. These days you don’t need to visit the village to run into their idiot.
And the idiots can have conferences now
And now that it’s easy to do so, they’re banding together to form entire metropoli of only idiots.
They have their own village now.
As I tend to say: before social media every village had a village idiot. Now the village idiots are connected, more easily to find and spreading their lack of knowledge.
Then they legitimize each other too, “How can we be wrong, there’s thousands of us!”
My father was hi-jacked by QAnon so bad that he won’t even read anything else because he sees any contradictory information as an attack.
The internet has made it easy to find others to group with no matter how extreme you are.
It’s also allowed then to connect with one another. Pre- digital age, every village had their idiot. Now every village idiot can share their stupidity with one another instantly.
There was a ton of stupid conspiracy theories around the whole clones sheep thing back then. I think looking back on that time period (like two decades ago, not one) the dumb conspiracies were forgotten as they didn’t lead to anything outside of fearmongering.
Same for the moon landing, there are still conspiracies that it was all faked.
I never understood the goal of things like denying the moon landings or saying the earth is flat. “Ok, you’re right. Now what?” I especially like that they think NASA is powerful and has a huge budget. Tell that to congress and watch them laugh.
The only thing I can guess is their brains have been fried by dramatized TV shows and movies where plot gives all the relevant information to explain all inconsistencies for a satisfying ending. Sometimes you’re just a person in a cave looking at shadows, trying to find an explanation for everything with the little information you can gather in your life is a waste.
No, the earth will not be ok of we do the bare minimum
Oh the earth will absolutly be ok. It’s we that won’t be.
Humans : challenge accepted.
Or in the worst case, all life on Earth won’t be ok.
No, life in general would be fine. It will be (already is) a mass extinction but earth had a couple of those and life will bounce back.
The worst case scenario is turning Earth into a planet with a climate like Venus’s.
A planet that proves the existence of runaway greenhouse effects btw.
It is theoretically possible that life exists there, but multicellular life is considered unlikely, and we’ll probably never get to take surface samples, given it’s been measured at 464 Celsius.
We probably can’t fuck up the planet that badly, but toss in a nuclear exchange to greenhouse effects and an unfortunate volcanic eruption or two?
The question is on a scale of the extinction event at the end of the last ice age to the End Permian Extinction Event aka the Great Dying how bad do we want it
Or, if instead of reducing emissions, we try to geo-engineer our way out of global warming, screw it up, and create a real snowball Earth.
As opposed to geo-engineering our way into global warming like we have been?
“Oh no, don’t try anything! We might be too successful.”
Warming is bad, so cooling has to be good. Is that your logic?
You say that as it’s not a big deal.
Do you really want to see a world without dolphins, pandas, tigers, anacondas…?
I don’t think he’s saying it’s not a big deal for us, but for the planet.
I know, but that’s a very detached and unemotional take… Sure “life” will keep existing. But not the life we know. That we love. That we grew up loving so much.
I understand not everyone feels exactly like me. But I was absurdly fascinated by biology books and wildlife documentaries and would read and watch them religiously as a child.
Thinking of all of that just dying and ending truly breaks my heart. Almost more than anything.
Just not as much as the thought of humanity disappearing. But I know most people share that sadness.
I also don’t think the person is unemotional, it’s more about having the correct idea of what’s actually going to happen if we don’t do anything. I also think ecology needs more rationality, otherwise we get people closing nuclear plants to restart coal plants.
We’d be dead as well, so wouldn’t see them anyway.
Also, the world is pretty cool without dinonsaurs. It will still be pretty cool with what ever comes after what we currently have.
I can’t explain how knowing all the animals you grew up loving will die forever is sad. If you don’t feel it you don’t I guess.
Well, I could imagine it if I wanted to make myself sad. But I, personally, will be dead long before even the last Panda. So it’s really just a hypothetical.
It would be a shame for my anaconda if we ain’t got buns, hon.
I even think humanity will survive fine as many icy places will become habitable and we’re good at adapting to extreme climates. Overall it’s rather our current civilisations with the bad but also the good in them that are the most endangered.
If we manage to keep the warming to levels seen in previous warming periods, humanity might come out better on average in the long run, but the planet is heating faster than it did in those other periods and we haven’t demonstrated any ability to control ourselves. We’d have to stop generating CO2 pretty soon to avoid surpassing the last great warming period.
I guess people didn’t understand my point. If we don’t curb our carbon emissions, we’re certainly going to have a climate that we never lived and it will kill a lot of people. But it’s not unlimited, at some point we will not be able emit more carbon, because there’s no more or we lost the ability to do so. So while fewer than today, there will probably still be habitable places like Nothern Canada and Russia. I think humanity would be able to survive there, although much smaller and the centuries of disasters would have destroyed our civilisations as we know them.
People probably thought I’m denying the urgency to do an ecological transition, but I’m not. I’m trying to comment on what would actually happen, similarly to previous comment saying that the planet itself is not going to die.
You’re making an assumption that the feedback loops are all well understood. They might be, or maybe there will be some runaway effect, some source of carbon or other greenhouse gas that’s completely unknown, gets released, and boils the oceans.
We aren’t doing the bare minimum. We’re doing less than the bare minimum. That’s the problem.
*the Earth as we know it
We’ll cause a mass extinction, possibly taking us down with it, but the planet will survive at least until the sun expands and eats us whole in a couple billion years
I think that depends on how you define the bare minimum.
Ok fair. But what if I do nothing instead???
of course the moon exists, but it is hollow. it is a reptilian space ship and arrived 12.8k years ago
Nah, it’s a giant spider egg.
Don’t worry, though, when it hatches it will inexplicably lay an egg the same size and density as the first one somehow.
It still infuriates me to this day because most of the episode was fucking stellar.
Space Whale, not spider. The spiders are the parasites that live on the egg.
Oh, well, that makes sense then.
How can it be hollow if it is made out of cheese?
It’s swiss? With a huge air bubble in the middle?
And the Nazis flew their UFOs through a hole in Antarctica into their secret base.
There really were people who thought the world was hollow.
Hollow World is an interesting D&D setting.
Because the Earth is a hypersphere, and Antarctica has numerous geographic features in the w dimension
Some people have always believed batshit stuff with no good supporting evidence. But anti-intellectualism has been on the rise for the past, day, 30 years in particular.
Carl Sagan presciently called it out in “A Demon-Haunted World” back when new age and crystals and alien abductions were popular woo woo beliefs.
It seems to have become more popular to reject “bOoK LaRnin’” in favor of anti-science, which has also been co-opted for political purposes.
Full quote for somber appreciation, emphasis mine:
I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
The freedoms of speech and expression have morphed into a freedom of stupidity, and it really, really sucks that this isn’t something we as a culture have proven able to repudiate.
Using your freedom of speech to tell someone they’re a moron that should shut the fuck up doesn’t count as free speech, apparently.
Also, 1a specifically refers to the government silencing you.
Eh back then it was just evolution and climate change instead of this stuff
Unfortunately, not instead of, but as well as… We’re still dealing with the anti climate change and evolution people =\
Don’t forget about vaccines. The anti-vax craze happened well before the pandemic. Vaccines cause adultism.
So that’s why anti-vaxxers are so childish?
That would explain the vast amounts of menchildren in their 30s lately
Yeah the anti vax thing goes back like 20 years at least.
That exhaustion is the whole point.
Yup. It’s just bad actor syndrome and has nothing to do with ‘being right’ if they can move their goal posts so easily.
The moon does exist there’s just 3 of them. Single moon theory is a a hoax /s
Also science way back: “Hey guys, isn’t phlogiston just the absolute best? And lobotomies are so cool they deserve a Nobel prize.”
Lol fair.
But the difference between science and superstition: science gets closer to the truth over time in spite of ourselves while superstition either keeps the same bullshit or makes up new bullshit regardless of evidence or lack thereof.
science gets closer to the truth over time
Now we step into epistemology. This claim cannot be substantiated. We don’t know if science is getting closer to the truth because we don’t know what the truth is.
Science finds what works, it may or may not be finding the truth. It’s incredibly useful, and gets more useful over time, but we cannot claim that it gives us the truth. We cannot measure the “truthiness” of a science claim.
Unless you assume “If something works, then it’s the truth.”. I wouldn’t support this statement though.
I believe we already were talking about epistemology. :) Science is a means of obtaining knowledge. About what, though?
I suppose “truth” could mean different things in this context. I should have avoided that loaded term or tightly scoped what I meant by it. I meant science is interested in knowledge about how the universe behaves.
Hopefully that doesn’t imply science somehow peeks behind the proverbial curtain to see why things behave as they do. Or answering questions like “what is an electron, really”.
For example, science has progressively refined models describing how quantum mechanics behaves that can be used to make predictions. But it in no way offers any explanation for why quantum mechanics is the way that it is or what particles are, really.
Scientific experiments test whether models predict outcomes or not, thus determining if the models need to be further refined or even replaced.
The point is simply that science is the best way humanity has this far devised to learn how the universe works.
Lobotomies still work in certain cases of epilepsy
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Scientists =/= Science Educators.
Both groups existed decades ago and still exist today
It’s almost as if Western Governments have been cutting funding to education or something
really do be like that
We’re still making incredible advancements. Have you read the stuff on gravitational waves?
The real issue is that scientists have access to twitter and have the same basic urges as anyone else, the urge to correct the people who are wrong.
Sharks have smooth skin
Can confirm. I’m petting a shark right now, it’s like silk
The Earth is not flat, it’s a hypersphere. It literally explains everything, and yet no one will engage me on that fact
