I thought it was just me.
Over the past few months, while reading some of the comments here at DI and at several forums that I frequent, I’ve been noticing that there seems to be LESS consensus on the hot topics of our time rather than more. 
[1]
That doesn’t seem right. With the wealth of information on the internet literally at our fingertips shouldn’t we all be better informed than ever before?
Not so, says Clive Thompson in a recent issue of Wired [2] magazine. In fact he has the stats to back it up!
Among Republicans, belief in anthropogenic global warming declined from 52 percent to 42 percent between 2003 and 2008. Just days before the election, nearly a quarter of respondents in one Texas poll were convinced that Obama is a Muslim. And the proportion of Americans who believe God did not guide evolution? It’s 14 percent today, a two-point decline since the ’90s, according to Gallup.
How can that be? According to Robert Proctor, a historian of science at Stanford, when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.
It sure seems that way sometimes!
Read the rest of the article here [3].
Print this post [4]
[5]