Here’s the quadruple whammy:
A) Confirmation Bias,
B) Availability Heuristic and
C) the Focussing Illusion and
D) In-group loyalties.
These add up to an extremely dangerous personal hubris that we have no blindspots, that we know everything we need to know, and that our ideas are fully tested whereas we have simply enshrined them in our own brains, surrounding them with mental electrified fences. We need THIS daily vitamin: Our ideas need to be repeatedly tested by numerous uninterested or antagonistic OTHERS. We often commit medical malpractice when we pretend we are world-class doctors who can adequately diagnose our own thought processes.
I am fatiguing from meeting people who never ever doubt their mental hygiene and never worry about the need to run meaningful real-world tests on their own ideas. I’m getting worn out watching people bark at each other on FB instead of showing humility and a willingness to learn from each other. I want to ask so many people on FB: “Why are you here? To learn something new or merely to strut around looking for fully cooked allies?”
Or heaven forbid, see another point of yours and adapt your thoughts ideas and beliefs accordingly. Great read.
The internet isn’t to blame, it just makes intellectual laziness easier. People demand citations because we’ve forgotten how to do original research. I will never regain the hours I spent in Federal Government archives reviewing congressional committee records. They’re the closest you’ll get to truth in government. Unless someone before you has done the research, put it on the internet and tied a bow around it, it doesn’t count.
The real problem is an inability to craft a useful.search query. I see the results every day of queries that could only have been “Trump’s lies” or perhaps “Democrats arrested for (fill in the blank).” When one does that, it’s GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out. This leads to seeing only confirmation bias. If one believes that information cannot possibly exist that contradicts one’s existing biases, one will never find it. That was the key difference between the Jurassic Park novel and the movie. In the novel someone asks for a computer census of dinosaurs, it equals precisely the number predicted. Then the individual removes a line of code that directs the system to stop counting when the predicted number is reached. THAT is how it was discovered that the animals were mating.
Search engines are biased in ranking returns because the most popular responses are returned first. Thank God we didn’t have search engines in the thirteenth century, because we’d have undeniable proof of a flat earth. Three people reading a sensational false claim is ranked higher than one person reading truthful information.
Another issue is that there is no vast conspiracy, there is merely a confluence of interests. It is why government employee unions are the principal backers of Democrats, who are the party of government. It is why the surest route to becoming rich is to have government tilt the playing field in your favor. Both major parties do it, there are no clean hands. Couple tribalism and the internet, and you have a disaster.
The people I admire most are usually entrepreneurs who start with nothing and then create. They are the overlooked heroes. Immigrants outpace native-born citizens in inventions, having nearly 38% more patents and citations per population than the native-born. Immigrants create new entrepreneurial jobs than the native-born by 79% on a per-population basis, (figures calculated from data in https://behavioralscientist.org/how-immigrants-drive-entrepreneurship-invention-innovation/ ) Our inane dialog about immigration isn’t even asking the right questions.,
The same is true of other areas of disagreement, such as federal spending, police brutality, civil rights, the role of welfare, reliance on “science,” hate speech, free speech, freedom of religion, race, the role of religion, foreign relations and the list goes on. We don’t ask the right questions, we allow terms to be hijacked, and the most hateful, destructive and loud mobs win.
We are almost all a parody of a 1950s popular music group: The Insufferably Self-Righteous Brothers.