Stupidification on the WWW
When I started to use the WWW, finding information was easy. Information was supplied mainly be universities, scientific institutions, newspapers, tv and radio stations, portals, non governmental organisations, and on all of them learned people had a reputation to preserve. So most information was reasonably reliable. The same with discussion forums.
Only of course those people, who want to make money, are never to be trusted. Any alleged information supplied for business and commercial purposes could never have been expected to be valid.
In those days, there were mainly either learned people or ignorant people.
All this valid information is still there, but it is hidden and buried beneath and between a huge amount of misinformation, prejudice, urban legends, lies, propaganda, rumors, delusions, half truths, that comes from those millions of people, who use the web to write anything in public blogs, web-pages, forums.
Goethe, Faust: "Denn was man schwarz auf weiss besitzt, kann man getrost nach Hause tragen." That means: What one has in black upon white, one can carry home easily.
Children grow up with written material, that claims truth without sources, books on geography, history, biology, they are meant to learn the content, not to doubt its truth. Later they have the tendency to be taken in by the authority of printed material appearing as more true than it is, this is generalized even to what is printed on a screen. Some even take the preposterous nonsense of the bible as literal truth.
I have been repeating several times, that anything on this blog is just my personal world view, wild speculations, assumptions, no claims of anything based upon evidence, except as far as I have given external sources. But no matter my warnings, anybody reading this blog can pick a sentence or a paragraph out of context and repeat it elsewhere as a fact. The only reason, why this probably has not happened, is the lack of much popularity of this blog between millions of others.
When I started to use the WWW, finding information was easy. Information was supplied mainly be universities, scientific institutions, newspapers, tv and radio stations, portals, non governmental organisations, and on all of them learned people had a reputation to preserve. So most information was reasonably reliable. The same with discussion forums.
Only of course those people, who want to make money, are never to be trusted. Any alleged information supplied for business and commercial purposes could never have been expected to be valid.
In those days, there were mainly either learned people or ignorant people.
All this valid information is still there, but it is hidden and buried beneath and between a huge amount of misinformation, prejudice, urban legends, lies, propaganda, rumors, delusions, half truths, that comes from those millions of people, who use the web to write anything in public blogs, web-pages, forums.
Goethe, Faust: "Denn was man schwarz auf weiss besitzt, kann man getrost nach Hause tragen." That means: What one has in black upon white, one can carry home easily.
Children grow up with written material, that claims truth without sources, books on geography, history, biology, they are meant to learn the content, not to doubt its truth. Later they have the tendency to be taken in by the authority of printed material appearing as more true than it is, this is generalized even to what is printed on a screen. Some even take the preposterous nonsense of the bible as literal truth.
I have been repeating several times, that anything on this blog is just my personal world view, wild speculations, assumptions, no claims of anything based upon evidence, except as far as I have given external sources. But no matter my warnings, anybody reading this blog can pick a sentence or a paragraph out of context and repeat it elsewhere as a fact. The only reason, why this probably has not happened, is the lack of much popularity of this blog between millions of others.
I know that I am complaining about the mental pollution and stupidification, and I am participating in its production myself.
With more popular blogs and pages, it happens every day millionfold. Someone writes his more or less correct thoughts on a public page. Others read it, distort it in their mind with wishful thinking, selective perception, simplification and misunderstanding. Gullible and lacking scientific thinking, they then write down themselves a more distorted version. What is written as a claim, and repeated often enough, starts to appear more and more true. Therefore, more and more people get their brains filled with distorted misinformation, they are getting stupidified.
Googling for valid information has become very difficult. On many searches, there are over a million results, of which google shows as maximum selection 10 pages with 100 results each, chosen by some obscure algorithm, that is not in favor of the quality and validity. Sometimes I look over several hundreds of those results, and all there is looks doubtful. Scientific articles are only accessible by paying, and it is impossible to evaluate private pages, if they are written by a learned person or by some halfwit or highschool kid, without opening the page first.
The gullible people get, what they want, but for the skeptics, finding valid information has become difficult. Now instead of learned and ignorant, there are learned and misinformed people, who believe to know a lot, but have no clue, how much they are the gullible victims of stupidification. Misinformed people, who belief in their misinformation are more dangerous than people, who admit and acknowledge their ignorance, and more dangerous to themselves too. Scammers, quacks, frauds of all kinds profit from this general stupidification.
With more popular blogs and pages, it happens every day millionfold. Someone writes his more or less correct thoughts on a public page. Others read it, distort it in their mind with wishful thinking, selective perception, simplification and misunderstanding. Gullible and lacking scientific thinking, they then write down themselves a more distorted version. What is written as a claim, and repeated often enough, starts to appear more and more true. Therefore, more and more people get their brains filled with distorted misinformation, they are getting stupidified.
Googling for valid information has become very difficult. On many searches, there are over a million results, of which google shows as maximum selection 10 pages with 100 results each, chosen by some obscure algorithm, that is not in favor of the quality and validity. Sometimes I look over several hundreds of those results, and all there is looks doubtful. Scientific articles are only accessible by paying, and it is impossible to evaluate private pages, if they are written by a learned person or by some halfwit or highschool kid, without opening the page first.
The gullible people get, what they want, but for the skeptics, finding valid information has become difficult. Now instead of learned and ignorant, there are learned and misinformed people, who believe to know a lot, but have no clue, how much they are the gullible victims of stupidification. Misinformed people, who belief in their misinformation are more dangerous than people, who admit and acknowledge their ignorance, and more dangerous to themselves too. Scammers, quacks, frauds of all kinds profit from this general stupidification.
