It’s better than what we have now though, which is going “I think elephants are actually seals that got lost on the way to the south pole” and then going on the internet and searching until you find exactly what you already believe, and then forming a social group around that, then voting in politicians who think that until that stupid belief becomes mainstream and there are politicians debating in congress whether to invade Kenya to transport all the elephants to Antarctica.
Your face will not get stuck like that.
It is not illegal to turn on the light in the car while driving.
Bears do not sleep all winter long.
Bats are not blind.
Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day.
Searing a steak does not seal in moisture.
Waking a sleepwalker is not dangerous to their health.
:)
You won’t get cramps if you jump in the pool soon after eating.
Lol no that’s not true! If you did that, the teacher or the school nerd about this subject would challenge you. He will come to your house, ring your doorbell, and you’ll go together to your city library. Unlike the internet, you could not just source some shit some-nobody made up and spread online. You had to prove it with hard-text published sourced papers.
We used to pay higher cost in money, time and effort in order to learn any topic. As a result, once you learn it, you hold it for life, and spread it and proudly challenge others about its truth everywhere you go, which pushes you to seek further.
Each room of our house still has a large bookshelf library. I never left any of the books which I personally bought untouched including those large expensive hard-cover multi-series encylopedias about physics, chemistry, mathetics, history, philosophy, language, geology, politics and everything. I had to read them at least once to learn their topics otherwise I would’ve lost that money.
Btw I’m not talking about school textbooks; no those we used to burn in celebration at the end of each year’s graudation outside the parking lots!
Lol we really grew up in different timesWe used to pay higher cost in money, time and effort in order to learn any topic.
Coughs in crippling student loan debt that no prior generation has ever known
Now you are permanently overwhelmed by a tsunami of misinformation spewing out of your addictive phone instead. Progress.
If you can’t find the right information from the internet then skill issue
Who defines the “right information”? The algorithms? The information conforms to what your peer group is saying is the “right information”? It’s consistent with what government agencies are saying?
We really aren’t any better off than just believing what aunt Marge said since you can find the exact same thing she said and things the exact opposite and which one you believe is just down to what feels right. It’s just believing what aunt Marge said with more steps.
I would have agreed with you about 15 years ago when everything on the Internet wasn’t AI slop, calculated misinformation spread by foreign governments, and white supremacists using memes to spread their ideology.
Sadly, I gotta disagree. Searching used to be easier, back when search engines prioritized finding useful information. Now they are vehicles for delivering ads and collecting user data.
Google of the early-2000s era was an entirely different site. I used to be able to find almost anything I needed to search for. As far as I’ve seen, there is nothing comparable to that early-Google out there today. (Though I’d be ecstatic to be proven wrong on that!)
Unfortunately Google is still the king of search engines. Try searching for most technical facts or most common issues or anything else on most search engines and you really can’t find it. You might find some things but you won’t find the amount of information you can find on Google. The problem with the internet nowadays is not that searching has gotten worse, it’s that there is such a plethora of information out there that you have to have the right skill set to be able to go through it. The reason you were able to find everything in the olden days was that there was so few websites out there that it was very very simple to search all of them. And the counterpoint to saying that there is a plethora of misinformation now when you’re looking at your phone simply means that you’re visiting websites and looking at sources that have a plethora of misinformation. It is very very simple to cross reference and find the correct information pretty much anywhere.
Searx is my way to go when i need to do research, it’s a search engine, that takes results from others
Fun fact: You can still order a current print volume of World Book Encyclopedia for the low price of $1,349.00
I’m willing to bet it’s cheaper than ever, (inflation adjusted)
My parents got me this set of the Childcraft children’s encyclopaedias when I was like 6? I inhaled those things for knowledge back in the pre-internet days!
Am considering getting one for my own kiddo when they get old enough, but like most things from my childhood - they look to have been discontinued.
Honestly surprisingly inexpensive given that about what a set of encyclopedias would cost you 35+ years ago. Not sure about World Book specifically but I know Britannicas were over $1k in 1990 because I remember a door-to-door salesmen trying to sell them to me. Can’t imagine anyone other than a library buying these now, and even there they’re probably all collecting dust.
We only use 10% of our brains.
Tbf, they might have been right about themselves at the time they thought that.
Even that is a common misconception. Our brains are working fully, all the time.
Our brains are working fully, all the time.
Hey, speak for yourself
Most people in my life still don’t fact check. I’m constantly chasing the truth while the convo runs away full of misinfo
I honestly have no idea how people can live like that. Yet I see it so often that I’m convinced it’s the norm.
People like to live within their comfort zones. I remember a study being referenced that claimed to show introducing facts contrary to a person’s existing viewpoint don’t get them to change, it just made them double-down and be more defensive.
A reminder of https://yourschoolgotwrong.com/
Originally posted by https://lemmy.world/u/MiraLazineI remember looking up “dirty” words in the dictionary as a real young one with a gaggle of friends
People don’t imagine what it was like then. It was wild. Wild in a sort of you’re all alone all the time, except when you physically is hanging out or at home, and no one knows what’s going on. At all. Some people have theories but they are insane. School teaches you things that are compley useless for living right now.
Thank all the medical and educational texts that chose blue to identify veins returning to the heart with a blue color and arteries away from the heart as red. A simple color choice to differentiate and somehow someone decided that this was the color of blood.
It doesn’t help that some blood vessels close enough to the surface of the skin can appear blue.
Fair point.
This is why encyclopedia salesmen was even a thing.
If you didn’t have that, go to a library.
Eventually there was encyclopedia britannica which was basically one of the coolest things you could have for free on your computer in that era.
Funnily even the usage was pretty similar to doom-browsing Wikipedia:
- pick a volume
- open random page
- read about medieval remedies for mental illnesses
- open another random page
- read about some rare tropical bird
- repeat and rinse
- maybe brag about your tidbit knowledge to your friends later (if you had any)
red blood is a myth. all the homies have neon purple blood
According to my color-blind friend, purple isn’t a real color - our blood is actually green.
sounds like your color-blind friend ain’t one of the homies. i’m sorry for your loss
And there was a friend’s older brother or cousin, who said some unbelievable horseshit, you thought was true for many years. And you didn’t even ask.
That still holds true even with the internet around
Joe Rogan
Actually fucking Joe Rogan is the perfect analogy, he just has random people on that say some stuff to him and he is like damn that’s crazy and doesn’t even fact check it, and then what he likes he carries forward with him and what he doesn’t like hearing just ignores
Now instead of your aunt coming at you with misinfo she learned from her aunt, it’s your aunt coming at you with misinformation she learned from a russian bot farm.
Yes and to make it even worse, your aunt back in the day would tell 10 people some BS and maybe 3 would believe her. Not some Russian bot factory spits out BS to 10 million people and a lot more believe it.
I have the opposite problem. My mother doesn’t believe anything I tell her and thinks it is misinformation that I’ve been fed.
But at least you can counter it with misinformation from an AI bot :D
Did you spray for Russians under your bed before going to sleep? You really should, and check behind the sofa and in the dryer too. Russians can disguise themselves as Bounce dryer sheets, and the latest Russians can send themselves over Ethernet using the RoE protocol: Russian over Ethernet.
Russia! Quite an imaginary world you live in! Aunts and Russians and bots and misinformation and all these people targeting you! How exciting!
Can I send you my Moral Rearmament and John Birch Society fliers?
GOOD point.
The well documented Russian troll networks simply do not exist.
I’m oddly honored that I got a 3 paragraph troll with pictures in response to a comment that was barely even about russia.
