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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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?
It's 2023... People still believe some dude walked on water... And some other dude split the moon in half with a sword.. Then put it back... The stupid has been with us since forever.
Woah, what's the second one from?
Quran.
Although I think Scientology is by far still the most fucked up story: Possessed by aliens.
Possessed by very confused alien souls that got here because an intergalactic alien warlord named Xenu wanted to do a genocide so he rounded up a bunch of other aliens, tied them to volcanoes on Earth, bombed those volcanoes with hydrogen bombs, captured their souls and made them go to therapy.
(For those who may have missed that south park episode)
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.
Scientists =/= Science Educators.
Both groups existed decades ago and still exist today
really do be like that