There are lots of incentives for politicians and executives (and anyone else holding the levers of power) to ignore information, intelligence, and advice. I think you're right to be skeptical that "free" intelligence is going to improve anything without first addressing the incentives of the people holding power.
> Even if you do not want to accept climate change is a thing, you can accept the current state of the world is affecting people
Or you could choose option three: do neither and go on Twitter to do some political point scoring: "The Democrat Party is going to use this three day Indian heatwave (they have one every summer) and their climate hoax to open our borders back up to illegal immigration! We must stop them! Vote against the Demonrats this November! MAGA!"
And the Twitter campaign will find even more suckers to convince, and they will vote yet another Trump if not worse.
The Internet was a mistake because it expected every person to become a paradigm of rationality, yet we are at the end of the day stupid hairless monkeys that can be easily swayed for the promise of a banana.
The mistake was not spending the first years of school teaching people to care about what is true, and also the tools for critical thinking to figure out what is real and how sure we are about it.
I thought that already when I was a kid and saw that people do not care at all if their beliefs are correct, and because of that don't care about learning any critical thinking skills, but I wasn't convinced and thought maybe adults just know something I don't, but today it is clear the same problem is even worse and the most important factor to why we are so screwed up as a species
The voting populations of the world, are opposed by experts of every stripe, whose job it is to figure out how to persuade or confuse them on critical issues.
Journalism has been decimated with advertising dollars moving to Google and Meta. This creates 2 camps of journalists, one who attempt to report as if the old standards hold, and others who are the media wings of political parties.
Educating people is always Good. However, no education will empower individuals enough to be competitive with people whose job it is to keep them ignorant.
But you don't need to convince every voter, just give a nudge to the right direction. Also, a ton of people are falling for really easy questions, like "is human caused climate change true", there really isn't much propaganda should matter in those cases if people had the tools to find even the simplest, most clear facts.
But I'm not even sure if it was possible - lots of people seem hellbent on believing what they want, I've thought that probably comes from evolution from time when we didn't really have ways to study reality that well, and group cohesion was more important than individual thinking. But we should have at least tried. It was quite clear people would get corrupted when they're sent out of school with a bag of knowledge but no real ways (or will) to really judge any future information
>The mistake was not spending the first years of school teaching people to care about what is true
I always love when people insist that schools should teach "Critical thinking"
Because they do. What did you learn in English class? What did you learn the days you were brought to the library in middle school to learn about how libraries worked?
If you took AP language and comp, you were given a very thorough education on how to construct a persuasive essay and therefore a pretty good education in how to evaluate a persuasive claim.
I learned this in bumbfuck nowhere that couldn't afford to heat the school.
It's like all the dumbasses who say "School should teach important skills like how to balance a checkbook or how to do your taxes" as if you don't learn addition, subtraction, and basic english literacy as part of your elementary school education.
You did learn those things, you are just expected to be able to read simple instructions and complete very simple tasks. You aren't supposed to need hand holding for filling out your check book and filling in 14 rows with data from another sheet for fucks sake.
The same people who whine about how school didn't teach them anything important sat next to me in precalc and learned how to calculate loans and interest and yet still sign up for absurd stupid car loans. They literally did not pay attention.
In reality, people don't learn those critical thinking skills because they ignore school. Their parents taught them that education is liberal brainwashing and that it shouldn't be trusted. Their experience is that school is useless because that's what parents and media told them so they didn't pay attention and now as adults they blame the schools and more media insists that it is the schools fault.
My basis for critical thinking is like 80% scientific method, splitting arguments in the smallest possible pieces to help avoid bias, testing them thoroughly, trying to destroy my own arguments until I can't.
In school the scientific method, maybe the most important invention of human kind, was pretty much skimmed over on some science classes on 5th-6th grade. People didn't learn how to apply it and do their own tests in everyday life, at all. Didn't even understand they should, it was just a part of science (subject that nobody cared about anyways).
Even those essays and other projects it's crazy how much weight was put on "books great, reliable magazines ok, tabloids bad, internet mostly bad but .fi domain is the most reliable.." and later down the road "wikipedia bad". That does not help much in current media landscape, where you can buy a book to confirm whatever you want to believe.
I learnt my own critical thinking skills from scientific books and my own curious neurodivergent mind that was obsessed with being as correct as I could. I saw in real time how lacking it was in school, how it affected my peers, and thought this is gonna be a problem in the future, and here we are.
> In reality, people don't learn those critical thinking skills because they ignore school. Their parents taught them that education is liberal brainwashing and that it shouldn't be trusted. Their experience is that school is useless because that's what parents and media told them so they didn't pay attention and now as adults they blame the schools and more media insists that it is the schools fault.
This was absolutely not something that meaningful in my community. Yes there were people like that, but they were just a tiny slice of all the people that didn't really learn to think critically but would probably have wanted to if we just taught them.
I'd call what was taught in school "vibe critical thinking", it seems good on the surface but it really is not even close to good enough. Sure if you get to university it gets better, but that doesn't help with majority of voters.
I don't really know much about education, but even having something like weekly session where we'd talk about how we applied scientific method and other tools in our life to test our claims, and would have judged the tests/methods used by others to see the problems in them to improve, would probably have mattered greatly. At least people would see that you can and should do that in real life, while learning a good intuition on what makes a test good. Honestly people hearing me testing my claims thoroughly made everyone look at me like I'm a crazy person obsessed with the thing I'm trying to prove, when I just understood that if I don't do that my beliefs are worthless.
Maybe it improves it? The truck has depreciated 7K since I bought it brand new, which works out to about 13% over 20 months. Most cars depreciate faster than that, so it seems having 0 tanks helps.
The 100B+ of hospice/daycare/and multiple other medicare related fraud schemes that is happening every year. Perpetrated by the people that keep saying things like "communism was never implemented right" or "make the rich pay their fair share".
But the reality is, if all the excess tax money that is collected does not go to where the problems are, and is just being boarded onto a plane in a bag with 2M dollars headed to Mogadishu - then you can't blame capitalism for the mess we're in.
I don't understand how this is a counterargument to the article's claim that capitalism is to blame for the declining birthrate around the world. Could you connect the fraud to the birthrate for me?
The opposite of capitalism is some form of socialism or communism. We know that it CAN'T work (at least in America) because all of the extra money to help people is stolen. So Capitalism is better than any other form of getting money in people's pockets. More money in pockets means more chances for babies.
The reality is we need to fix all the jobs being sent to people from other countries. The stat just came out that in the last 5 years 90% of the jobs went to foreign born people. We also need to reverse the climate doomerism that's pushing people to lose faith in life in general.
Can you ask both your questions at once instead? Also please argue in good faith, the 3rd or 4th most hit topic in the last 5 months has been the amount of Fraud we've been enveloped in. To ask your original question like that reeks of disingenuity.
Just a reminder that actual adult scientists at the ACS (American Chemical Society) have calculated (for all to see) that the excess heat being trapped just over the continental USA since 1750 is about 28 500 Hiroshima bombs.
I hope that most people would try to get their news from sources who endeavor to report with as much of an objective perspective as possible, but I expect that most are comfortable with getting an editorial or interpretation of the facts from a biased perspective. I can read Jacobin with the same interest as I read the National Review, but I would never trust either to give me an unobjective statement of facts.
I'm thinking about the future of programming as a skill like math or writing. I could never cut it as a professional mathematician nor writer, but both skills have improved my ability to write code. Similarly, I think that having a year's worth of CS instruction could help me if I'd majored and found a career in a different field than CS.
There are other areas that a STEM minded student could be interested in. Biology for example could benefit from a programming background. Knowing how to collect and groom data, analyze it, then export it as JSON or CSV is something you could pick up in a couple of classes and be useful to you for an entire career.
Yes, CS is a great program if you have a passion for computers, tech, and programming. If you truly have that passion, I suspect that you'd be targeting CS programs without concern for whether or not there are jobs for grads and would be willing to figure it out when you get a degree. If you don't have that passion for CS above all else, however, you might want to consider another degree with a CS minor.
If you're not headed directly into a 4 year bachelor's degree program after high school, I see that the local community colleges around me have maker programs where you learn a little programming, a little electronics, and a little 3D printing. That might be enough of a skillset to augment a degree in another field and let you differentiate yourself. You might check to see if you can get a certificate or AA in that if the market still looks uncertain after you graduate. Taking entry level courses in calculus, physics, and chem alongside a maker program for a couple of years might allow you to see the future of programming more clearly.
> Personally, I do not yet have a definitive answer
I don't think any of us do. Much of what I'm reading on this subject seems to be shifting so fast. Three months ago taste was going to be the big differentiator. Six months ago, OpenClaw was going to be the future. I'm afraid to say that my best advice is to wait and see like the rest of us.
Don't stop taking CS classes in high school, but be ready to pivot into a CS minor and a science or engineering major if you encounter headwinds either with the CS curriculum or you see that two or three successive graduating classes of CS majors are finding employment to be difficult or impossible.
LOL, what are you going to do? Sit at the end of Northrop field and fly a swarm of drones into the engines of a G6 traveling down the runway at over 100MPH? No way a handful of drones are going to get sucked into a jet engine at that speed. Or do you mean engage a PJ in a dogfight at 40000 feet? I suspect if drones could down a jet, we would have heard about it coming out of Ukraine by now.
The reason we don't do these things is because the jets would come crashing down onto someone's home or place of work. That UPS jet that crashed last year when the engine detached on takeoff killed a dozen on the ground. Nobody is going to drone attack a private jet because the innocent would get killed by the dozen.
The original comment was made in relation to guillotines, popping unoccupied jets on the ground isn't what the commenter I was replying to was referring to. Taking down an occupied jet without using a sidewinder missile is a different capability.
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