No it isn't. There people are not clueless ignoramuses, they're paranoid assholes who have chosen to weaponize their dislike of anything 'official' for political ends. There is a market for propaganda and it is thriving, because many people want their biases reinforced.

Thinking the issue is a lack of education is a kind of procrastination, as if we can just fix this over a 20 year span. Ignorance is not the problem here, malice is. There are plenty of ignorant people who are uninformed or believe silly things without being assholes about it.

There's an unwillingness on HN to engage with the fact that the amplification effect of the broadcast/internet/social media selects for liars and propagandists and fraudsters absent countering mechanisms. That's why spamming and scamming are ubiquitous in our super high tech civilization.

America spends $15k per child for education. That is a ridiculous amount of funding. I think most teachers are of the opinion that the educational decline is due to NCLB, Common Core, and other top-down initiatives that give them less power yet more responsibilities. Many teachers complain that 1-2 students disrupt a class of 25-30 students, but they can't do anything about it.

I don't think it's (entirely) that. Did you see the recent story about how college entrants at even highly selective schools, entrants coming from highly regarded private prep schools, are struggling to read books? That seems to me to be indicative of a problem different from what you're pointing out.

Education does not automatically make the person getting it wiser, nor less prone to manipulation or cognitive errors. And remember that one of the effects of propaganda bombardment is to destroy judgement.

I've hired students who graduated with a low "C" average in their area of study, who were D- at the parts of their job that required that study, and had no personal interest or accurate knowledge to share about their study.

I don't think this is about education, but I suspect rather something more akin to "intellectual revenge". Let me explain : In my experience, people who are into conspiracy theories are usually people who have been intellectually marginalised or disparaged during their life. It's not about being stupid - I think that's besides the point - but it's about being called and made feel stupid, literally or metaphorically.

People don't want to believe they are stupid, and they especially don't want to believe the people (or institutions) who call them stupid are superior to them. So they find a way out, by believing something that not only makes them feel important (they know but other people don't), but also superior to those who ostracised them in the first place.

I've been thinking about this for a while, but somehow never came across any similar ideas anywhere, anybody got references (or comments) ?

This has little to do with education.

It's just political polarization. Conservatives (of a certain variety) in the US are polarized against the establishment (the media, science, colleges, etc), and this is the result. Better education might save some of them, but not many. The smarter ones retain the same core beliefs without the abject silliness.

Then why is the problem worst among Boomers [1]?

Alternate Theory:

This is purely the result of "too much news". Breathless coverage of every little detail means every little mis-step blows up to infinity, quickly eroding trust.

The 24hr + internet news cycle is basically a reaction maximization optimization machine with a dt ~ 0. Fox News walked so Facebook could run and now Twitter is sprinting. Insert long form podcasts in the mix for a constant hum of algorithmic misinformation and this result is inevitable.

tl;dr: more people need to go out and touch some grass.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7505057/#:~:tex....

Another factor is that lies or misrepresentations have been thoroughly normalized. Almost all media products have a spin in some way, objectivity even became a bad word in modern "journalism". I think this is an example of education not working correctly.

Readers only have superficial means to reward or punish journalism, which is much more focused on getting attention and clicks these days. Advertising always has been their main income, but the economy thoroughly changed in recent years.

All these issues undermine trust and in the end more arcane conspiracy theories serve as an explanation, why we read so much shit left and right.

> That is what you get when you stop funding general education...

These people are likely predominantly over 50 and were in high school in the 60s/70s/80s.

They've just been deliberately choosing to stew themselves for the past decade or three in right wing and fringe media.

conspiracy isn't arrived at via some logical process. the outcome is decided and the steps to get there are hallucinated. it's all post-hoc rationalization.

> That is what you get when you stop funding general education because you think people should pay for it themselves. People lose the ability to separate fact from fiction, lack the ability for critical thinking.

On the other hand, this sounds like something you just made up and decided to connect to the current topic. Is this fact or fiction?

I actually disagree.

This is what you get when scandal after scandal happens to public institutions. People go flat earth most often, not because of the "science," but because they do not trust the government for honesty.

This also happens whenever there is an apparent "win" even if it isn't quite so. For example, when a judge last week ordered federal Fluoride standards to be re-examined. It doesn't need to be a total vindication of the conspiracy theorists, for trust to be substantially damaged. Same for the Iraq war, with "weapons of mass destruction" - imagine if your child died from that lie. Repeat this every year, in multiple institutions, for 20+ years straight; and yes, observant people might well think that everything the government has ever said is a hoax. It's not about the science, or their ability to track truth from falsehood, but their reactionary hate of anything the institutions say.

James Spann has also claimed that climate change isn't happening and it's just scientists chasing funding that explains their findings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Spann#Global_warming

So a bit of a "first they came for the climate scientists and I did nothing" vibe.

Yes! James Spann was and is an excellent source of meteorological information. I remember him coming to our school and talking to kids about his job and encouraging us to take an interest in science and the world around us. Alabama needs more people like him and fewer people who are likely to encourage conspiratorial thinking for political points at the potential cost of human life.

Also, appreciate the username - great game.

This is actually the result of Facebook, youtube the hyper focus on surfacing a topic a post you see share or like to keep you engaged. You see a post share it with your friends Facebook algo see your interest shows your a hundred and keeps taking deeper down the rabbit whole. So the main reason for this is social media. A few years ago I used to argue with family and friends over such stupid topics to tell them it is wrong but mostly keep quite or ignore as my mental health is more important to me.

That seems unlikely, but if we accept it's true, that's only 5% dumber for someone with an average IQ, and that doesn't seem like nearly enough to account for believing something obviously implausible like controlling hurricanes. If people had basic scientific literacy they should be able to see the amounts of energy needed would be staggering.

This was going full force well before COVID. Before 2016, though that was when it became a lot more overt.

Did you leave out the /s? Or are you seriously implying the crazy conspiracy garbage we're seeing recently is a result of COVID? Because that sounds just as deranged as <waves hands at all the other dumb shit on the internet>.

Between covid brain, ipad kids, heavy metal poisoning, and decades of attacks on the education system the US is dropping IQ points while mental illness is on the rise.

Maybe, but people were going like this before COVID.

- We can't measure "IQ" accurately enough to 2 or 3 points.

- People have been dumb for decades, the modern internet + social media has just weaponized it.

- It didn't remotely start in 2020 unless COVID caused a time loop that caused Trump to get elected in 2016.

I already take the IQ test with a big grain of salt. Now there were some small studies done on IQ in relation to COVID? And it supposedly decreases IQ by a few points? Yeah, right, I believe it right away man.

And the vaccine increases your IQ?

It's a global phenomenon but it's only crazy in the US, like most things

I read an Atlantic article the other day where a lit professor from Columbia University said that he has students nowadays who admit to having never read a book cover to cover. Ones that have tend to say their favorite book is something like Percy Jackson. They also can't focus on a small poem. This confirms what a teacher I know has been saying for a long time: highschool kids since around the class of 2010 are getting very noticably stupider.

I'm beginning to wonder if social media really has caused kids to miss key developmental stages. Parents being on their phones has led to kids hearing a substantially reduced vocabulary, these kids also receive less interaction from their parents and interact less with their environments and other kids. This stuff is really important for brain development, and we've replaced it with an iPhone.

I don't think social media started this, just accelerated the trend. I do think commercialized media for decades now has really been a driver of insipid banality.

There's always been nutcases (apologies to people with actual mental illness). The problem is that politicians (worldwide) have figured out how to utilize them for their own benefit.

I agree that at times it does seem like a very bad premonition.

> trolling

this implies that its just a few folks talking shit on a lark, when it is actually a concerted, aggressive, multi-billion dollar effort across all-channels, with the goal of degrading civil institutions and hopefully causing a civil war.

that the average American rube can't figure that out is also part of the problem

I think many other cultures are crippled by pervasive conspiracies that re-enforce views of having no agency. And their rulers like it that way.

In street drug circles today there are widespread complaints about the quality of fentanyl, withdrawal effects and treatment. OD's are apparently dropping. For those that live in some semblance of reality, I think many there's withdrawal going on. For those that don't get out and call in threats like this, they don't really believe anything persistently, they just believe whatever is the rage of the day. They'll OD someday, you just won't see it in the obits.

The lunacy is definitely worse in the Anglosphere. I moved to Eastern Europe a few years ago and it's way more sane (and yes, I speak the local languages here).

See this article about Emmanuel Todd forecasting the collapse of the West using the same methodology he used to successfully predict the collapse of the Soviet Union: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/09/opinion/emmanuel-todd-dec...

I can’t imagine this kind of stuff happens in the PRC.

The upside to a tightly-controlled “infosphere” is that people who are at the controls and have rational thought can jump right in and quench the idiocy fires right away.

It turns out that "The remedy for bad speech is more speech" doesn't actually scale globally.

You can blame this on Russian and/or Chinese disinformation ops and tik-tok, etc, but the problem is more general than that. One of the assumptions around free speech ideals is that the people who are speaking or publishing are citizens of the community in which they are speaking or publishing, and now a large part of the content on the internet is produced by people who are crossing national boundaries, or not even produced by people at all.

You used to be able to assume that the vast majority of the content you're exposed to is produced by people who live in your community or country and would not like to see it destroyed, and now, in fact, you should probably assume the opposite. You should assume that most content on the internet is produced by bad actors trying to rip the fabric of your society apart, particularly if you're reading something that enrages you.

The especially insidious part of this is that most of the rage bait stuff plays on widespread personal biases so it's self sustaining after a while. People start to hate each other, so then they do stuff to each other to make each other hate each other more and so on and so on until you've got Rwanda.

It is global. I was just in Poland. Literally same thing as in the US just a bit different flavor. Mainstream media bad, covid fake just a little flu and used to control society, proud for not wearing masks, did not vaccinate because some crazy reasons.

Not everyone obviously, but I was visiting smaller cities where I grew up. I always thought I could go back one day but I don't think I would be able to deal with people there. The customer service is non existent and when you are shopping/getting services you are an inconvenience. Crazy.

> I suspect the problem is larger than that.

My take is that this is a symptom of something else. Populism has existed for a long time, but it feels to me that the environment we created also created the perfect target audience for it on a scale that never existed before. Observing the alt-right and conspiracy bubbles collapse into one over the last five years, it feels like it's the result of a sort of mental defense mechanism for a group of people that is growing every day. As I see it, we have built a world around us that is very complex and abstract, and hostile to the mind in a way that enables this sort of ideology immensely.

In it, it is very hard to feel a sort of purpose, and it is very easy to be overwhelmed. On average, the work people do has little to no effect on themselves or their direct peers. All day, every day is spent shuffling around numbers on a spreadsheet, or doing work to aid someone who shuffles around numbers on a spreadsheet. Then you clock out having a net zero benefit on your life, or that of people that matter. Other than, of course, a number that goes up in a different spreadsheet. And while you do your shuffling about to scrape by another month, you get bombarded with a flood of information about this war or that catastrophe or those disasters.

It leaves people numb, overwhelmed, frustrated, angry, helpless, purposeless, etc.

Keep that up long enough, and what happens is something like a narcissistic collapse, except that it's not narcissists it happens to, but normal, healthy but vulnerable minds whose mental health can no longer be reconciled with a toxic reality.

In comes an ideology that does three things: It simplifies. It gives purpose. It provides an outlet.

Once you subscribe to it, everything returns from countless shades of gray to black and white. If you're not one of the good guys, you're one of the bad guys. If a bad guy says a thing, it's a bad thing. If you say a bad thing, you're a bad guy. The simple prescriptive labels of what counts as good and bad are delivered to you, on the house. Takes away all the nuance, all the complexity and all the mental burden that came with it.

Then, it gives purpose. If you fall into this hole, you end up seeing yourself as two things: A victim, and a savior. You see what others don't, and you suffer for it. "They" - the bad guys - are out to get you, to destroy everything. Every confrontation is thus someone attacking you, the victim, or defying you, the savior. It provides a narrative in a chaotic world where bad things happen for no reason and without explanation.

Last, it creates a target for all your bottled up frustration and anger. The bad guys are responsible for all the bad things, and it is made clear how very okay it is to channel all your negative emotions into hate towards some group. Be it Jewish people, immigrants, scientists, democrats or some imaginary lizard people. Hate is fine.

The end result is a full abdication of responsibility, and a return of control at the low, low price of a divorce from reality. To the mind that slips into this rabbit hole it is not so much a choice as it is a lifeline. That is why it is so incredibly hard to get people out of it, as well.

Russian disinformation is itself a conspiracy theory. Trump was investigated for the last decade, they essentially found nothing.

A few people say or do something completely nutty and the 'country is suffering this lunacy'. At what golden period in history were there no nutcases pitching some irrational extremes into the public sphere?

On the other hand maybe I'm quite wrong about all this. Someone has estimated (an open calculation) the payback time for the US debt burden at 90,000 years if it was paid back at the rate of $1,000,000 per day. Some might argue there's lunacy at work over many decades to achieve this result.

(from a comment on this blog) - -https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/10/08/the-smartest-pe...

This is what happens when you coopt science as cover for political decisions - people stop trusting all "science" including real science. From what I've seen I more associate the issue with Democrats than Republicans, especially in the COVID lockdown days.

we are mostly unable to process the fact that science lied to us

what's worse, it became an authoritative tool of (often foreign) powers; at least in most of America (as science came from Europe, ...they brought us "culture" when they colonized us in the south; the north did not get colonized but replaced)

but of course science lied, but it's not that it lied, it is that it changes. newer truth comes along and fights the old truth until it dies ("the pace of scientific funerals")

turns out, breaking people's trust is much easier than gaining it.

but my hill to die on, is the old truth of material scarcity and media (or licensing) content versus the new truth of digital abundance and freely sharing things without the license to do so. why do I need permission from some faceless corporate owner to copy cultural assets that I love and wish to share?

I'm not so sure about this explanation; people believed in conspiracy theories in the past. Witch-hunts for example are fundamentally not that different from Q-Anon and all of that bollocks: "mysterious dark forces do evil stuff when we're not looking".

The whole "they're abusing our children" is also a trope that goes back a long time, most recently during the 80s with the whole "Satanic Ritual Abuse" stuff. That was much worse, because innocent people's lives were complete wrecked over what was complete bollocks. Pizzagate is near-identical, with s/daycare/pizzahut/.

More examples can be found throughout history – they're typically not called "conspiracy theories", but often they're not that different at its core.

I think what social media has done is allowing people to reach a wider audience. That person outside the grocery store reaches what, maybe a few hundred people with several hours of work? On the internet you can reach about 1.5 billion English speaking people with a minute of work. And that person outside the grocery store has no real way to organise a meaningful community, even if they do manage to gain 2 or 3 acolytes. On the internet you just create a Facebook group, or reddit sub, or whatever.

And all of that is including only the "crazy people". Add bad faith actors to the mix spreading misinformation simply to cause chaos and things quickly become well fucked.

This is why I never believe a tweet that I can’t confirm myself. I only pay attention to sciencey/CS people on twitter. Talking heads and political sources there are always nearly extremely biased and most are flat out untruthful.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is a Representative, not Senator. Even for the Republican party she’s a weirdo and she’s only able to win due to the “unique” demographics of her district. She’s unlikely to be able to win a statewide race anywhere, and Senators in general tend to be less radical.

Not that it makes her insanity any less insane…

I think sadly there are some people that simply will not be able to understand the material. For them it is much easier to believe in fairy tales and giant egg beaters that cause hurricanes than it is to study science. They certainly are concerned about a reproducibility crisis in academia. If I've learned anything by occasionally listening to Joe Rogan is that people (men I guess?) demand to be heard - even if they have no idea what they're talking about. The fact that exist means they should have a say in matters they have no understanding off in the slightest.

I can't explain it either, but maybe prophesies of impending collapse are a bit premature. The world has never been particularly rational, even in places that have near 100% literacy. Just look at the number of people who believe in astrology or homeopathy, not to mention that one guy who created the Earth and its inhabitants some 4000 years ago, in six days no less.

> And yet, I still don't think that explains what's going on with people. And the frank truth is, I don't have an explanation.

Humans are social creatures and feel the need to align with those around them. Combine this natural inclination with social media algorithms that show you more and more of whatever they have determined to be "engaging content", and you get a feedback loop that spreads viral content and drives people insane.

You've got to look at rates. I'd place a substantial bet that the percentage of professors, or even just college grads, who believe that is lower than in the general population. (Though you have to be specific about the question. We can control the weather in some very limited ways, but we can't, for example, trigger a hurricane. Or prevent one.)

yeah, idiots fall for more misinformation, but lots of very well educated people still fall for conspiracy theories. I feel like it's more of a lack of trust than a lack of education.

There is also left wing violence, more often from the right but not zero from the left.

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To get clicks, or to keep people alive after a few storms in the not-that-distant past were not recognized for the monsters they were until it was too late for people to evacuate?

There is certainly a risk that people will take the next warnings less seriously. And then an unexpectedly large number of people will die, and we will cycle again.

> the patents for weather technologies are very real

Would you cite some of them, then? Especially ones that are not just "weather technologies" but are capable of creating, amplifying, and/or steering hurricanes?

One doesn't need to be able to build the thing they patent. I've seen conspiracy theorist link to weather technology patents but they are things like "create a fog", which I think we'll both agree is SLIGHTLY less energetic than the current extreme weather, so if you know of a patent for and evidence of a working hurricane machine I'd like to see it. We can't just say "well they seed rain, therefore they have a hurricane machine".