Old man story time. Thirty-ish years ago someone from my grandfather’s church tried getting him in on the free energy crap. I was very much a computer nerd and a science nerd in general. It had some sort of perpetual motion thing going on.
He handed the literature to me to look over because he wasn’t a learned man, but he did respect people who were. I did and laughed. He said “That’s what I was afraid of. They’re always looking at some scam or other.”
It still blows my mind that 30 years later they’re peddling the same kind of shit in a new wrapper and people are still falling for it. These people used to be looked at as the morons falling for get rich quick schemes.
Common sense starts to become a lot less common when education systems start to fail.
IMO schools should have a subject like “media” which informs about how desinformation, conformation bias and social media algorithms work in creating filter bubbles and “alternate” facts.
Interestingly, when I was in high school some 15 years ago, we did have one week where we went over determining the reliability of a source and media literacy. (No social media algorithms though.)
Of course a bunch of the other kids in my class complained about it the whole time and said they would never need it. Judging from what I know of them now, they indeed never used those skills.
![New to the concept of free energy. [More in body. There is no bottom to the crazy here.]](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/17e701e8-6102-4a30-960e-7987d94ad4ed.png){kind=link}
Old man story time. Thirty-ish years ago someone from my grandfather’s church tried getting him in on the free energy crap. I was very much a computer nerd and a science nerd in general. It had some sort of perpetual motion thing going on.
He handed the literature to me to look over because he wasn’t a learned man, but he did respect people who were. I did and laughed. He said “That’s what I was afraid of. They’re always looking at some scam or other.”
It still blows my mind that 30 years later they’re peddling the same kind of shit in a new wrapper and people are still falling for it. These people used to be looked at as the morons falling for get rich quick schemes.
Common sense starts to become a lot less common when education systems start to fail.
IMO schools should have a subject like “media” which informs about how desinformation, conformation bias and social media algorithms work in creating filter bubbles and “alternate” facts.
Interestingly, when I was in high school some 15 years ago, we did have one week where we went over determining the reliability of a source and media literacy. (No social media algorithms though.)
Of course a bunch of the other kids in my class complained about it the whole time and said they would never need it. Judging from what I know of them now, they indeed never used those skills.