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Like Alice's Restaurant in the Arlo Guthrie song, the Internet lets you get anything you want -- from views on politics or science and technology or religion to recipes and gossip. Oh, and of course, news. However, few people do more than skim the surface -- and as they do with newspapers, most people tend to read only what interests them. Add to that the democratization of the power to publish, where anyone with access to the Web can put up a blog on any topic whatsoever, and you have a veritable Tower of Babel.
I know more than a few people that never touch a computer. You know what they do with their time? They read books written by people that believe the same conspiracies they do, they hand pick magazine that look like they have articles on the stupid stuff they believe, etc. They are like me when I didn't even "skim" news papers (mostly because I didn't give a frak whose horse got out of a corral that week, or other dumb BS), and just read the comics. The problem is, people are not **taught** to think critically *every*. They are certainly not taught to do so in church, they are not taught to do it in classes like English, which is just memorizing rules and words, they barely learn it in things like Mathematics, and then only as it applies to solving math problems, more than 90% don't take science. In my highschool, and this was 10+ years ago, it was "college prep". If you where not planning on college, you didn't need to take it, and the closest thing to science "prior" to that was in grade 1. And, guess what?! Even before Bush's stupid, "All Children Left Behind", program, funding for, equipment for, and time for, sciences where either a) being lost, b) being determined *unsafe for kids*, and c) being cut back. Now... Now you are expected to cram as much worthless "information" into the kids head as possible, so they can pass the tests needed to keep the school funded, and what ever time might have still been spent on teaching the why and how of science has been buried under more memorization.
So.. Where is anyone, unless they are naturally contrary and learn it on their own, supposed to get taught how to evaluate the validity of information, question their own positions on subjects, or critically examine other people's claims? Well, the answer for people realizing this happens is, "Not any place in the public I know". For the clueless who are stupid, but don't know why, well.. they don't know they are clueless either, so rush to the nearest thing that makes them feel good. And, the worst thing is, there are groups actively involved in undermining what little both public and private schools "do" manage to teach about evaluating information, because a) having your political motivations questioned kind of makes it hard to build large groups of people obsessed about the validity of your political position and b) some faiths/sub-faiths find a disturbing tendency for people that "can" think to run away from them like sheep from a pack of wolves, and you can't grow a flock if the sheep can tell the difference between wolves and shepherds.
In short. The internet didn't create this problem. The internet just gave it a more convenient place to live, and tools to shut up, censor and ban people that dare to show up and say anything that doesn't support the local despots "position" on a subject. Its allowed tin pot dictatorships to move out of people's basements and rented meeting halls, where someone *could* walk in and yell, "You people are all idiots!", without them being able to pretend it wasn't happening, and create a tin pot reality, where nothing they ever do is wrong, because the people telling them its all wrong **are** censored by the local club/dictator that runs things.
Plato would have probably been running one of them, or posting on one. And, he would have *still* failed to grasp the concept that the best way to progress towards a rational world is to let the idiots a) isolate themselves from the people living in the real one, and b) let them have every opportunity to prove how confused, clueless, or just plain nuts, they are. When you find one of these groups in the net, they exist not because they are popular, but because they are desperate, and that isn't enough to sustain a movement, or they wouldn't be trying to win converts with alternative realities on the internet.
So.. Where is anyone, unless they are naturally contrary and learn it on their own, supposed to get taught how to evaluate the validity of information, question their own positions on subjects, or critically examine other people's claims? Well, the answer for people realizing this happens is, "Not any place in the public I know". For the clueless who are stupid, but don't know why, well.. they don't know they are clueless either, so rush to the nearest thing that makes them feel good. And, the worst thing is, there are groups actively involved in undermining what little both public and private schools "do" manage to teach about evaluating information, because a) having your political motivations questioned kind of makes it hard to build large groups of people obsessed about the validity of your political position and b) some faiths/sub-faiths find a disturbing tendency for people that "can" think to run away from them like sheep from a pack of wolves, and you can't grow a flock if the sheep can tell the difference between wolves and shepherds.
In short. The internet didn't create this problem. The internet just gave it a more convenient place to live, and tools to shut up, censor and ban people that dare to show up and say anything that doesn't support the local despots "position" on a subject. Its allowed tin pot dictatorships to move out of people's basements and rented meeting halls, where someone *could* walk in and yell, "You people are all idiots!", without them being able to pretend it wasn't happening, and create a tin pot reality, where nothing they ever do is wrong, because the people telling them its all wrong **are** censored by the local club/dictator that runs things.
Plato would have probably been running one of them, or posting on one. And, he would have *still* failed to grasp the concept that the best way to progress towards a rational world is to let the idiots a) isolate themselves from the people living in the real one, and b) let them have every opportunity to prove how confused, clueless, or just plain nuts, they are. When you find one of these groups in the net, they exist not because they are popular, but because they are desperate, and that isn't enough to sustain a movement, or they wouldn't be trying to win converts with alternative realities on the internet.
