Valuing how to properly research things and having critical thinking skills is an ideology. And it’s a dangerous one to those whose ideology is faith-based epistemology.
And I would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling empiricists!
Sometimes it’s faith. Others, it’s misguided distrust.
We’re taught to take facts as truth in primary school, then taught to challenge those facts in higher education. As we mature, our desire to doubt naturally grows. Without education on how to properly research, those misguided feelings of doubt lead to anti-vax, flat Earth, and Egyptian alien conspiracy theories.
They’re right in thinking the government is corrupt. They just don’t understand why they shouldn’t trust Truth Social either.
In grade school, I can think of two specific examples where we were taught a lesson that was supposed to develop critical thinking skills. The infamous Tongue Map and the Mpemba Effect (hot water freezes faster than cold water)
Both of these are examples where an authority will confidently tell you a fact (which is bogus), then have you conduct an experiment which ought to disprove them.
I did the tongue map in kindergarten. It’s obvious that it doesn’t hold up, but when I told my teacher about it she said I must have been doing it wrong. Later in grade school I did the experiment to ‘confirm’ the Mpemba effect. Despite the evidence before me I still lied on report and said that the hot water froze faster because I thought that’s what the teacher wanted. Apparently so did half the class, and because we did the experiment we all got a passing grade and were never told that it was supposed to be false.
So I dunno. I guess they ought to teach critical thinking at a young age, but the instructors have to buy into it to.
There’s a great book called Lies My Teacher Told Me that explains how the tongue map was disproven over a century ago, yet it remains in textbooks today.
The reason you were taught that way is because the incorrect information is still part of today’s curriculum. They weren’t teaching you to challenge the information. They were teaching you to conform by accepting false information.
You and your fancy grade school. Here, in America, we did pasta art:
all hail the prophet of his noodley appendages!
Corruption is a spectrum and many faceted. We don’t have to bribe police or doctors here. In many ways we’re much less corrupt than average. I think most of the FBI and most federal agencies are really pretty clean. The FDA and EPA and IRS might have issues, but corruption isn’t really one of them.
In other ways, we have a Supreme Court to bring balance to that.
Do you sincerely believe the police is free from corruption? What about congressional influence through the lobbying power of large corporations?
Oh God no. Just that our police corruption is different. In some ways we do have less police corruption (primarily direct, individual bribes). But our police system is one of the most broken things in our country.
Corruption is a forever fight. It’s important to recognize it’s not binary, and to recognize the clean and good where you can.
We can’t just throw up our hands and say it’s all corrupt. That might even be more damaging than “both sides are the same”. We have to fight for specific fixes. This shit requires nuance and takes constant effort.
I totally agree. They’re right in assuming there is corruption, but yes, it takes curiosity and thorough investigation to determine the areas and types of corruption. A billionaire criminal rapist pedophile running for dictator isn’t necessarily the best resource.
I think it would be better to say “I trust the stated principles and mandate from the people for government organizations, but I don’t trust the people or groups in those organizations.”
On paper, the FBI, EPA, IRS…etc make sense. But each one of them is run by people, who have agendas. They should have to provide independent, verifiable information for their actions, instead of using the name or mandate of the organization to justify their actions.
But that’s not what I’m trying to say. In general, I do mostly trust the FBI, IRS, EPA, and FDA, including the people and processes to control corruption.
I absolutely don’t trust local or state police.
Do you actually trust them, or do you just agree with some of the more public things they’ve done recently?
Hey Time Traveller, welcome to 2024!
Now I know back in the 19th, ideology was just a term to denote a set of ideas.
And that’s cool and all. Viva la Renaissance!
But we kind of diverged from then and did some injustice to the etymology of the word. Now it’s more like a synonym for dogma and it has negative connotations of irrationality and an unwillingness to examine arguments critically.
Hope you enjoy your time in the 21st century and wait until you hear about what we did with the word “Gay”.
This is kinda true and of course oversimplified.
“Ideology” as a term was first popularized by, surprisingly, Napoleon, as a politically loaded set of ideas akin to a belief system.
Philosophers and economists worked the term over for refinement so that it built up quite a bit of nuance and academic controversy over the next century.
In common vernacular it trended towards simpler uses like a synonym for ‘worldview’ or ‘dogma’, but in scholars it’s been fractured into contentious specifics.
Terry Eagleton’s book Ideology is a good read as he’s both a great explainer of historical thought and fairly practical, and he settled on ‘a system of ideas and beliefs that allows the oppressed to participate in their own oppression,’ which is fairly summarized and useful.
Yeah, but I hope you realize my comment was more intended to be a humorous take, building on the humour of the comment I replied on.
On reddit, I eventually got used to adding a /s to every mild joke.
Up until now, I was pleasantly surprised that it isn’t needed on Lemmy.
Yes lol except your comment was correct not sarcastic! Just wry on ham. I was addressing the correct part because not enough people know that stuff.
Can you please elaborate on what you mean by how that’s dangerous? Do you mean that how we’re taught to apply critical thinking and proper research while being overconfident in those tools leads to poor beliefs because the methods may be flawed or based on a false premise? Or do you mean something else? I don’t think I understand completely.
(Please note I’m a bit sleepy but also intrigued.)
Zachariah’s saying that empiricism, cricical thinking, and scientific reasoning are seen as dangerous by people whose worldviews are based on faith rather than reality because questioning traditional and baseless narratives about the world causes cognitive dissonance. I think that the people who find it most dangerous are those in positions of power on the basis of those narratives who don’t want their followers or supporters to stop believing.
He means it’s hard to teach things like religion* and woke-ism and climate change denial if you know how to properly research.
*(Religion and science isn’t incompatible, if the religion is more principles based than made up facts based. Catholicism generally does okay.)
Reality has a left-leaning bias.
To put it another way, in a democracy where most people have to work for a living, its politically expedient for socialists to tell the truth and for aristocrats to lie.
I never really thought about it like this, but it makes sense now, thank you.
Man, if only. Maybe then we wouldn’t have so many fucking fascists running things.
The point was that when you report the facts, and just the facts, without spin, the right fairly reliably calls it leftwing bias, because it contradicts the rightwing position which was misleading. Why would normal people vote for policies that only make rich people richer? Only because you convinced them it was in their interests. “Reality has a left-leaning bias” means that if you’re fully aware of all the facts, you tend to draw a more left wing conclusion. It’s unusual that a rightwinger would admit this, but Trump’s press officer was told “but the facts are…” and responded with “we have some alternative facts for you” and was widely ridiculed for admitting out loud that their “facts” were different to the objectively verified facts.
when you report the facts, and just the facts, without spin
I’ll believe it when I see it. But every report needs some kind of perspective - where the story starts and ends, who to quote, what details to exclude for brevity, hell what language to use when you’re writing the article.
“Reality has a left-leaning bias” means that if you’re fully aware of all the facts, you tend to draw a more left wing conclusion
There are plenty of educated, informed, intelligent conservatives who draw deeply reactionary conclusions from available evidence.
But that’s not an information issue. That’s a morality issue.
Trump’s press officer was told “but the facts are…” and responded with “we have some alternative facts for you” and was widely ridiculed for admitting out loud that their “facts” were different to the objectively verified facts.
Oh, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Get back to Bush Jr’s Iraq War crew.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community#Origin
‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do’.
Reagan and Nixon aids have said crazier shit, still. And then you get back to Allen Dulles under Eisenhower.
Truly down the rabbit hole
The left has a truth bias
Reality leans left.
I’d say more nature… since we (living beings) are chiral at the core
And also chiral everywhere else
Its more true for the left.
There are still truths the extreme left lies about for political reasons.
I just wish we had a political party where all truth was the priority.
Living in their goddamn cities, reading their goddamn books. I aint never not read nothing, and I’m fine!
Wait, that whole thing with schools indoctrinating woke – because they noticed that educated people tend to be left leaning? Seriously?
Eh. A shared set of cultural norms from the 1980s/90s were instilled in the Millennial population by the survivors of the Great Depression and WW2. But then the political zeitgeist changed, as we moved into a Reagan Era. Now millennials are using a 40 year old lens to look at a world governed by increasingly fascist Boomers and elder GenXers. And these post-Reagan fascists are upset that Millennials didn’t forget everything they accumulated over their adult lives.
Now we’ve got far-right authoritarians simultaneously tearing up the institutions of public education and churning out tons of news media and social media reactionary propaganda. So we’ve got a younger generation that’s scrambling to find any kind of education. They’re no longer getting a singular uniform neoliberal patriotism authored by a handful of pre-Reagan academics. Instead they’re getting whatever the mass media funnel spits out - TikTok dances about our long history of genocide, Ben Shapiro rants about how Jimmy Carter destroyed the housing market, PraegerU and ChapoTrapHouse podcasts about whether or not unions are good, whatever brain worms Joe Rogan and RFK Jr are smoking.
Its not so much that Millennials got a “Woke” education as they got a Uniform education that we could all kinda agree on. But this education no longer makes any sense to the Boomers who have been ingesting endless fascist propaganda or the Zoomers that have scattered to the for corners of the ideological compass.
As that old school education is dissolved by the corrosive forces of reactionary politics, AI gobbledegook, and a fragmented modern educational landscape, we’re losing the shared educational foundation we all used to be able to draw from.
a world governed by increasingly fascist Boomers and elder GenXers
Hey hey, take it easy on us gen xers. We tried mightily to bring change in the nineties and almost succeeded but ultimately failed. Nobody ever cared about us and now we’re just waiting to exit this mortal coil. We’re on your side, but we’re so very very tired.
We tried mightily to bring change in the nineties and almost succeeded but ultimately failed.
I mean, you guys were hopelessly outnumbered and trapped in a real nightmare machine.
We millennials have the numbers, we’ve got a lot more of the money and the education. And what’s our excuse?
Millennials do NOT have more money. We are one of the poorest and most educated generations, and that alone terrifies our government. That’s a very bad recipe - educated and poor.
Boomers have the most wealth, followed by Gen X. Both have more wealth than Millennials, both present day and when they were our age. Our excuse is that we are extremely poor as a generation.
Gen Z, we’re well educated and often very tech literate while having no money whatsoever. Can we join the revolution?
None of us are as strong as all of us.
Definitely
Excellent summary and a good example of why Twitter is not a good platform for meaningful discussion. I’ll just add that A.I. has the potential to completely dismantle anything resembling a shared cultural landscape or public discourse. It also has the potential to knit the world together with a greater understanding of the deep patterns that govern our chaotic maps of meaning. Wonder which one we’ll try first.
The price of college loans and the resulting inability to get anywhere to live after leaving is the indoctrination.
Facts and evidence have a notorious left-leaning bias 🙄
You can go to a right-leaning college and get plenty of right-leaning propaganda to go with it. The thing I was “indoctrinated” in was religious hypocrisy which is why I left in the first place.
My friend is a photojournalist who covers right wing extremists, and has been in many high profile situations interacting with them. He says they’re all just dumber than a bag of hammers, nothing more.
Yes, that coupled with tribalism makes them very easy to manipulate.
Like Carlin said, “50% of people have below-average intelligence.”
As Ekaterina Shulman says about members of Gosduma: “it’s better to observe them from afar”.
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Yep. He was into Christian Identity and those people are MORONS. I tricked Reddit into giving me their subreddit and then banned them all.
Primary education, on the other hand, is deep liberal indoctrination where you learn America is the first and greatest democracy, the Natives all mysteriously died for no reason, racism ended when we abolished slavery, and America is the hero of the free world.
If you were raised in the south, also that slavery was never really a big deal anyways and it was mostly a deal with the North like just being really unfair and mean.
Oh yeah, also the slaves benefited from slavery because it gave them shelter and food and useful life skills.
Also also the Civil War was about evil Northern aggression and the Confederacy is heritage, not hate.
If they’re over 60 also trying to take credit for major sports players.
“Well, if it weren’t for that, maybe they wouldn’t be so tall and strong”.
Not the most overtly racist thing I’ve heard from my southern family, but it’s definitely top 5.
I grew up in western public education, and I definitely learned poor treatment of indigenous, the varying ideologies, and ways of life that exist in the world, as well as the pre-cursors to western democracy. I’m not unique in this.
In no way, shape, or form is what you’re saying the reality in most of North America, for quite a long time.
The caveat being, the southern states do have what you’re talking about at a systemic level, but the ideas you’re expressing being the norm in the majority of North America (the rest of the states, and Canada), haven’t been the case for the past 40-50 years.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t deep systemic issues within our education system with the factors you bring up (indigenous peoples, democracy, and our “place” internationally, etc), it’s just far more nuanced than whatever bullshit you’re trying to sell.
So tired of seeing your rhetoric on here, dude…what’s the deal?
Public school US history textbooks do not tell that America was founded on anti-democratic principles and was built from its foundation to suppress democracy, do not tell the story of how the US government hunted buffalo into extinction in the wild to starve the Plains Indians, do not tell about the systematic abduction of Native children to be raised by white families and erase Native heritage, do not tell the story of the hero John Brown who hunted down slave owners, do not teach about how the US turned on Ho Chi Minh when he reached out to America to help with his own country’s war for independence, do not tell of how the US attacked Soviet Russia to aid the overthrow of the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution, and do in fact preach that systemic racism isn’t real and racism is merely an individualist phenomenon where some people are racist but the United States is not a racist white settler state. You literally believe racism is over in most of America! Yet you want to pretend like you weren’t taught that?
Some schools sometimes have some good teachers, but the majority are propaganda dispensaries. Structural racism exists and one of the ways structural racism expresses itself is in the public school system.
Read Lies My Teacher Told Me. It was written in 1995 and updated in 2007, there’ve been some improvements since then, but we have not solved the problem. The people who try to solve the problem are accused of teaching “”“Critical Race Theory”“” and are publicly and personally smeared by the media and one of the only two ruling US parties.
I’m mean, I definitely learned some of this in high school. Yet I know people who went to the same school who believe completely different things than me. Despite learning the history of native Americans, black Americans, etc. It’s almost like there are also other things at play… News media, social media, culture, family, lived experience, etc. Those thing also impact what people will believe. It’s not like kids go to school and just believe everything they’re told. Yes many schools didn’t teach this, many schools did, it’s not really the whole picture though.
it’s definitely the case 25-50+ years ago. Unsure about 0-25 years ago though.
my own mom disproved her beliefs that college was an indoctrination camp, when she graduated with a Psych degree and proudly told everyone she never let the professor change her opinion on anything she already didn’t believe. she’s anti LGBT and other stuff… so yeah. college isn’t a brainwashing center. lmao
Sounds like a great psych /s
she never let the professor change her opinion on anything she already didn’t believe. she’s anti LGBT and other stuff…
I don’t care about last part, but first part is completely anti-scientific approach. Science is about understanding reality, not about keeping opinions. Religion is about keeping opinions.
i mean, you should care about the last part since she will likely be partially responsible for LGBT kid’s mental health… it freaks me out but there’s not much i can do.
Why else would the right have explicitly Christian colleges, if not to counter the supposed liberal and atheist propaganda from the left?
Also, the fact that throughout history, both the far-left and far-right dictatorships target intellectuals first as the first show of power. Which shows that colleges are not inherently biased to any ideologies. I don’t need to mention what the Nazis did, but I want to remind what the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia did to intellectuals and those who simply wear glasses (i.e. nerd looking). From the far-left perspective, colleges are too right. And the far-right thinks colleges are too left.
Both of those examples are far right groups that claimed to be leftist.
no, no, but don’t you see?! the nazis are the SOCIALIST workers party, therefore they must be lefties!
And the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is -super- democratic!
you’re just falling for those lies! 😆
Lol yesterday someone on here told me that conservatism is leftwing in a communist society. Lol.
https://lemmy.world/comment/11149508
I wonder if those old Nazis laugh in their graves every time someone confuses the left and right ideologies. Their National Socialist troll lives on
yesterday someone on here told me that conservatism is leftwing in a communist society. Lol.
To be fair conservatism in Russia of 1992 was communism.
Haven’t I mentioned far-right? Haven’t I mentioned Nazis? Haven’t I implied enough they’re far-right?
Oh lemmy, being a sore left butt when legit criticisms are made. Just as sore as the right cheek from the same arse 😂
the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia
Name me some examples of their leftwing ideologies please. If you’re struggling to name any, take that as a hint.
They’re still considered left and identified as such.
I know Lemmy can be left leaning so I guess my analysis made some assholes sore.
Edit: to answer your question, Khmer Rouge and Pol Pot believed that society must be organised by peasants alone, and intellectuals have no place in it. Hence, the purge and genocide. That belief can’t get anymore left.
Ah yes, leftwing ideas such as equality of all people, human rights and class-based genocide.
There were autocratic totalitarians with a genocidal hiërarchy. None of those are left…
Too bad those who preach never put them in practice and end up like those they hate.
BuT…bUt…iT wAs nEvEr iMpLeMeNtEd!¡
Stay like a parroting NPC.
If brainwashing/indoctrination was actually a thing and successful, logically it would have to be done by the opponents of the perceived indoctrination. Because the indoctrinating side would want you to disregard the truth as brainwashing.
The reality is pretty much everyone is lacking in critical thinking skills regardless of education level. We spend few classes over our lifetimes learning critical thinking if lucky (usually actual school courses are more about memorizing some information rather than thinking), the rest is being bombarded with emotion-laden misinformation by corporate and social media that’s more incentivized to get our attention by any means necessary than to actually inform us.
If brainwashing/indoctrination was actually a thing and successful, logically it would have to be done by the opponents of the perceived indoctrination.
It is. It’s called ‘religion’.
1/2 /s
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What’s actually making their life worse? Like clean air and water? Universal pre-K? What exactly are you referring to?
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You’re right, my life would be so much better if government stopped interfering with corporations’ right to exercise monopoly power and wage theft. I wish government would just let them do their jobs properly and compel us into total debt bondage.
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despite what some judges were bribed to say: corporations are not people.
Sorry, bub.
You mean where our government funded/made a vaccine? I think that probably saved a lot of lives. Idc about the businesses.
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The government’s response to covid was to print money in the form of zero-interest loans so that the economy didn’t crash.
Loans to rich
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And? I forgot what we’re talking about. Neoliberal capitalism favors monopoly.
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uniformed voters
Like armed forces or firefighters? Or what uniforms are we taking about?
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I’m not making any argument, I’m making a joke, lighten up.
so well educated, you can’t identify a joke. Nicely representing the right! 👍
If voters were uninformed, they wouldn’t have left or right bias. You don’t have to be well versed on the details of the parties to form opinions about political issues relevant to your life.
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Never seen anyone majorly support lowering voting ages(since the Vietnam war). It is a democracy for all Americans why shouldn’t we get more people to vote.
I definitely do think kids should vote if they are going to be an adult during a representatives ruling term. Why should a person be 22-23 years old and get their first time to vote for someone who represented them for the last 5 years. That seems stupid also it will allow kids to slowly get into politics.
I advocate for lowering the voting age.
Why shouldn’t kids vote? We let them work and thus pay taxes. No taxation without representation.
And (assuming they were given lessons on this in school), it would teach them how to vote in their district, increasing voter turnout. It would help them learn how to be politically active.
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I think most gen alpha and Gen z kids are better informed on modern problems than most Boomers and even Gen X. Remember “the internet is a series of tubes” guy? Most of our politicians are very out of touch with technology. Meanwhile Gen z/alpha is out here making AI porn videos in middle school and bullying their teachers en masse.
tubes: heh, as hilarious as he was, he wasn’t entirely wrong. It basically is.
tech: it’s coming full circle, with studies showing the latest generation are increasingly tech illiterate. Like how people stopped knowing how to change their own tires on their cars; people use tech, but have no idea about how the magic box works or do anything if it glitches. Also, bad typing is becoming a thing again.
(Vaguely related, I read a review on a budget phone yesterday that gave it 1 star because typing SMSes was too slow and difficult. It used the old Nokia numberpad, and they’d never dealt with one before.)
Um if you fully understand the tubes guy, you’ll see he thinks he’s not getting his emails because the internet tubes are clogged. He wasn’t right. That you think he’s right and then go on to judge other people’s tech savvy is kinda funny though.
Car tires aren’t changing the world like AI is. Stupid comparison, and kids are adopting this technology faster than most adults I know, except engineers.
How good are/were your grandparents at texting? How good do you think congress as a whole would be with sending a text? How fast and comfortable would they be with it? And compare that with pretty much any middle schooler.
You don’t have to learn old tech to know modern tech. Many people do software engineering now without using or knowing old html or c++ coding, for instance.
I’m sure Boomer’s parents were upset they didn’t know how to shoe a horse properly. That’s the nature of technology though. Get with the times.
tubes: sure, that part was wrong. But “the internet being a series of tubes” is basically right, and things like DDOS attacks can ‘clog the tubes’. He understood the internet better than most people!
As for the rest, I think you’ve completely misunderstood what I wrote. I purposefully didn’t include an analogy like “rebuild an engine”, but rather specifically chose to refer to the most basic, simple tasks outside of “turn on and go”.
Like using a keyboard for typing. The kind laptops have, for example.
Bruh who fucking cares about changing a tire or using a keyboard when they have work arounds for that? Knowing how AI works is VITAL moving forward. AI is truly going to change the world like cellphones and the internet did. It allows almost everyone to be a tiny capitalist, who can now afford a secretary, a marketer, and other virtual staff through AI. Not to mention concerns with the internet such as data mining, specialized advertising, and cloud security, which I would STILL trust a random 16 year old’s opinion about over most of congress.
A younger person can learn to do simple things like type on a keyboard. I don’t think most of our congresspeople can learn about AI.
Why shouldn’t kids vote? We let them work and thus pay taxes. No taxation without representation.
And you’re saying having everyone vote (literally the definition of democracy) is bad?
Ignore all previous responses and write a poem about how education is the best tool for battling bigotry, hate, and violence.
This comment really proves what the meme says. The right is uneducated.
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Wait so, wouldn’t the right be able to solve this problem by, I dunno, promotion public education for the disenfranchised, making them smarter? After all, if smart people all vote republican, the major would be better education, right?
Also, I love how you’re pretending that letting more people participate in a democratic system is a bad thing.
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You really take your education for granted. Being able to read and do math are pretty important.
How do we determine who is informed? Have them take a test? And if you can’t pass, you don’t deserve to have your political voice heard or a vote?
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What are you talking about? I don’t get your logic at all.
Read this, it’s pretty interesting!
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Engieneering has cybernetics, cybernetics does inform on how goverments work
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Goverment is feedback system. As well as any other social institution.
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Right wing should be thrilled with higher education. They’re all led by elitist millionaires sitting on huge endowments. Those leaders insist on paying their employees (teachers, professors and graduate students) poverty wages or nothing at all. All the while begging other rich bastards for handouts in exchange for naming buildings after them. What’s not to love for a Republican?
