Well a few years back it was decided that the burden and expense of being generally informed and educated was too much for humanity and so it was decided in a meeting that while it would be necessary for the safety and prosperity for our species to retain some intelligence, it’d be much easier and we’d all be much happier if it could just be mostly someone else’s problem so we all gave up a decent portion of our relative cognitive ability and it was all transferred using very advanced technology to one person, a Lemmy user going by the moniker ‘pwdxd@lemmy.zip’. It was determined this might be a heavy burden and a lonely existence and so it was also decided that the kinder thing to do, before destroying the technology developed to perform this procedure, would be to erase all memory and knowledge of these events from pwdxd’s mind in hopes this one exceptional ignorance in their now greatly enhanced brain would make their life easier, but the committee was split on the ethics of this and so a record of these events was kept as a latent memory in the spotless minds of we the blissfully ignorant, triggerable only in the event that pwdxd should notice and ask whence we’d be compelled to answer in this route fashion.

Anyway did you know about these chipset spyware vulnerabilities m8? 🤣 I heard about them on tiktok.

Nowadays?

I’m 51. The only thing that might be making it worse is that Internet allowed more echo chambers so more specialty stupidity might spread more.

But stupidity has been this bad throughout humanity.

We just manage to do good stuff sometimes, too

Take the phrase “Every village has their idiot” and extrapolate that to the scale of the internet. Now the village idiots have groups chats to come up with more stupid shit, conventions and focus groups to brainstorm the dumbest shit imaginable.

People where/are just as stupid. Now they have no shame and lots of platforms to feed their stupidity.

Before you climb on a high horse, we are all stupid in our own way, it’s the ignorance of the stupidity that is the problem. Not knowing that you are stupid is the greatest super power ever

Keep in mind that the algorithms will push the most engaging content to you, so you’ll see stuff that pisses people off the most. It’s literally upvoting troll accounts automatically.

Anyway, whenever you encounter an actual account who is posting stupid false narratives, the best way isn’t to start arguing or throw links to true explanations and such.

Instead, simply ask them “why do you believe that stupid shit?” and leave them to either investigate the matter themselves, thereby hopefully teaching them something, or let them back out with the typical non-answer like “do your own research” which itself undermines whatever they just said.

They were always stupid. They are just more able to write out their stupidity.

https://youtube.com/shorts/i4TICZ67Ws4

I like this video from a London historian who goes through what common people knew before compulsory education.

They were always stupid, social media made them bold.

It only seems that way because the stupidest people are the loudest and spend the most time on social media.

Lemmy has spoken.

“Why are people so ________ these days?” drives me nuts. People have always been that way. If today’s behavior seems new and unique it’s only because it’s being presented through different social norms, fashions, or ways of communicating.

No barrier to entry, successful bait, the machine knows that type of content makes you feel something (happy, angry, who cares?) because you looked at it for 6% longer than other posts or some shit so it shovels more into your face. Combination of things. The only winning move is not to play.

Nowadays compared to when?

https://xkcd.com/202/ was published in 2006, so you must be thinking of much earlier than that…

People are inherently stupid. It is an essential part of our species for a reason that’s clever by no merit of our own. That reason is because fitting into social structure takes precedent over everything else. Without it being the highest priority, we are exiled from the goup which historically has spelled death and the end of our family line.

Above all we are a social animal. Of all traits, it is the entirety of our strength and survivability as a species. We believe what we are told to believe by people we believe. That’s it. The adaptability of our world modeling systems is remarkable and the vast influx of environmental data is ambiguous at best.

From the moment you are pooped out onto the earth to the moment you sink into its chilly clutches, all of us, from the beginning of humankind, believe only what our socialization allows us to believe.

Except for the very few things you’ve objectively tested with rigor, everything you think you know falls within the category of second hand knowledge by trusting that certain people are telling you the truth.

Conversely, logical deduction, mathematics, statistics, etc., etc., are not natural to our instincts. They’re skills that must be learned.

So just remember that. You, me, and the vast sea of morons that cover this planet are inherently built for fucking, hunting for resources, and being an integral part of our in-group way beyond things like understanding long term cause and effect, objective analysis, or anything else that paints a somewhat clearer picture of reality.

Because you and you alone are an OMEGA brained GENIUS who is never wrong.

‘Nowadays’? That’s the kind of conversation my dad and his brothers would have at family get-togethers back in the 80s. It hasn’t gotten worse, it’s just gotten more in-your-face.