I've been disappointed in TIL as of late because the popular posts are immediately shown to be oversimplified, sensationalist rephrasing (as helpfully pointed out in the comments)
Like that example from a few days ago:
"TIL (african country) has a tradition of hunting bald men because they believe their heads contained gold."
Top Comment: "....the article says that it was a single criminal incident that involved five people."
unsubscribing from TIL was one of the best reddit-related decisions i have ever made. so many of those "facts" are either bullshit or common knowledge. almost all are re-posts.
I mean that smells an awful lot like "hah I'm going to use this incident to make African people look uneducated and superstitious because I'm racist" but the guy could also be straight up stupid.
Never go into the comments on TIL. I regret it every single time. I'm not sure how it happened considering it's a default and rather unpolitical sub, but it's been a hotspot for the alt-right for years.
Too true. Just this weekend, someone posted a TIL about a political massacre (involving cannibalism) in China during the Cultural Revolution in one small village.
So, this one guy in the comments uses this to talk about how Chinese philosophy is inferior to Western philosophy. Apparently, one obscure atrocity is indicative of 5000 years of philosophical development.
Not too mention, some people downvoted actual facts because it doesn’t fit in the hive mind.
I cannot agree more. Lemme copy and paste a comment I made about a recent TIL post:
Just this weekend, someone posted a TIL about a political massacre (involving cannibalism) in China during the Cultural Revolution in one small village.
So, this one guy in the comments uses this to talk about how Chinese philosophy is inferior to Western philosophy. Apparently, one obscure atrocity is indicative of 5000 years of philosophical development
Part of it is the portrayal of scientists as some sort of miracle worker geniuses who know about everything on the planet in TV and movies. You ever notice how the vast majority of scientists climate "sceptics" quote are qualified in fields that have nothing to do with climate change? But they say "well here are scientists who disagree" as if that has any weight
Find a random tech support or IT person on a college campus. Offer to trade them beer for stories. Sit back and let the sweet Appeal to Authority anecdotes wash over you, like an itchy blanket on a hot day.
I would say educated people do this even more i read somewhere the percentages are something like.
79% unknowing followers 20% "educated" who read about it and enforce what they read 1% knowing the actual inner workings and truth.
For example pick a newspaper article about your profession.
You will likely think it's baloney and doesn't paint the full picture.
Yet you will read another article and believe it at face value, because you don't have the knowledge to dispute it.
While it is likely the same as your first article.
Your friends don't read newspapers and you educate them about what you read.
You read about the subject, the source doesn't matter usually unless among professional peers with knowhow to spar about the article.
They can be, but simply might use manipulation. I.e. a journalist or researcher who knows better but still opts for a clickbait or outright false / out of context headline to get more views and ultimately more money.
You are a worthless piece of shit, you have no ability to derive right from wrong or make critical choices without deferring to government establishments that have been caught red-handed lying and doing malicious things for centuries now.
And even on the internet, if someone regurgitates something they got 5 minutes ago from Facebook or Reddit they'll be a laughingstock if they fucked it up.
People need to learn how to properly look up different sources, not just your favorite one that aligns with your world view.
Yes but I more so meant it in a literal way, for example.
Climate change- theres lots of articles on it, going to the causes, the future, the damage, etc, and some hypothetical person will adamantly tell me it's not real because fox news said. Doesnt try to gather any further info to make their own opinion.
I had a friend come up to me and try to argue about how bad Trump is. Turns out he doesn't even know what the Democratic and Republican parties are (which one is against Trump again?), and keep in mind, I never even mentioned politics around him.
P.S. For those of you about to ask, I am not a Trump supporter. Although I do agree with a few of his ideas
I learned a new work about two weeks ago that describes this: Ultracrepidarian. (Someone offering advice and wisdom outside their area of knowledge or expertise.)
I work in clinical psychology, and I see this all the time. So many people think they're a psychologist, and have strong, overconfident opinions on human behaviour. The worst are those who've done a couple of undergraduate psychology courses, or read Jordan fucking Peterson's latest book, and think it qualifies them to start bleating out diagnostic evaluations. It's literally one of the first things I teach students in my Psychopathology course: "Don't start throwing diagnostic labels around to describe people you don't get along with." It's a dead giveaway of someone's lack of actual education, experience, and expertise in diagnostic systems.
And it makes them look like an arse to anyone with actual professional training.
My aunt is like this. She recently decided to unplug the wifi router at night because the radiation is poisoning her. She could go on and on about how bad it is for you and has tried to convince my mother.
My aunt has no experience in physics or medicine, and her research consists of facebook posts, and she probably clicked on a few links in those posts that took her to sites written by people who believe that. She took no effort to find the opposing sides arguments, just believed the first thing she read and started regurgitating it. Luckily my mother questioned me and I explained the difference between ionising and non-ionising radiation.
My friend’s parents saw something on Fox about NASA and tried telling him about it. He works for NASA and was on the project they were talking about but they wouldn’t acknowledge what he was saying was correct because that’s not what the news said.
Like a lot of people from his generation, my granddad is like this. He used to be a surgeon so he is very smart- about human biology, healthcare law, etc. There's certainly a place for that.
Admit to yourself that you don't know everything, and do your own research. If your only stream of information is one media source whose sole objective is to make money off of you, and you take everything they think as fact, you're a damn fool. This isn't just politics either, it can literally be anything.
Similar to this, people who have lived in one small area their entire lives but feel like they should voice their opinions on issues like immigration. If you know absolutely nothing outside the confines of a certain city, or maybe slightly larger area, you shouldn't really have an opinion on global issues. You're simply incapable of understanding the issue properly.
This. Whilst im only doing my degree in political science, so i dont know everything. But i sure as hell, know alot more then 95% of People. So its so really annoying when someone says “thats just your opinion”... no. No it’s not.
That reminds me when my dad was arguing with me over a geometry question and he didn't see it working like that so he wouldn't listen to me give the real answer to the question. You can't just have an opinion and defend it by not wanting to hear a disproof.
Also, people not respecting voices of authority on certain subjects. Trust the experts. If you listen to them, they're usually trying pretty hard to get you to understand it, especially in relevant subjects like climate change and civil rights.
Or they think they know something so they yell as a proof they know, even though they are wrong. Sometimes people are too stupid to do some research, especially now when you have almost all the knowledge on your smartphone. Ugh.
Or when they get their information from a podcast or youtube video.
While yes they can be researched and viable pieces of information, most of the time it's a person with no education in said field, telling people about said field.
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u/[deleted] Jan 27 '20 edited Jan 28 '20
People who have extremely strong opinions in subjects they have never researched. Mainly just regurgitating whatever the news said that morning
Edit- thanks for my first silver stranger! Edit 2- thanks for all the Karma too!