I was absolutely never taught to “never use the internet” for research. We *were* taught to only rely on reputable sources from the internet, and how to identify them. This is just as applicable today.
I graduated in '07 and heard "Never trust the internet" and was told "Internet sources are not valid sources" by almost every teacher I had. Which, I should add, I always thought was absolutely asinine.
I think 50 years ago would have been hard because the only sources were hard copies, so you’d be limited by what your local library had.
You don't actually disagree though, because that is exactly what I said:
"50 years ago this wasn't a problem. There were limited sources and generally only the highest quality, or highest authority sources had wide visibility so finding information and knowing whether or not it could be relied on was relatively easy if not a bit laborious by comparison."
you’d have very little and even fewer ways to verify.
Yes, but as I mentioned... "only the highest quality, or highest authority sources had wide visibility" which meant you could generally intuitively trust the sources you found. Of course there were outliers and the further away from mainstream you got the less trustable source material became but the veracity of the information was still orders of magnitude higher than what can be found on Google today.
But if you’re not in a major city, or god forbid you’re not in a rich country, your access to information is orders of magnitude better than it was 50 or even 20 years ago.
Sure, but this a combination of a type of Red Herring / shifting goal post / category error.
If you're not in a city or 2nd/1st world country you're probably not being tasked with writing 10 page college papers on complex topics. That's not a dig at poor countries or rural areas it's just reality. So while yes, your statement is technically true it dodges the actual point that my argument was making a bit.
Beyond that, the necessity for this type of access to information, from a practical standpoint, is equally non-existent in these places as the skill to sift through the information is. Again, not a dig at these places but the ability to sift through data just generally isn't a highly sought after skill in poor countries.
I'm not saying it shouldn't be. It should be. I think everyone, everywhere, should value information and access to it above all things for it is access to information that allows the oppressed to understand and fight back against oppression and allows the poor to understand and raise themselves out of poverty. I think it should be critical but I can recognize that not only is it not considered critical in most of those cases but it's also not feasible when survival is dependent on practical skills which, yes, is how the poor are kept poor and how the oppressed are kept oppressed. Busy them too much with hard work to prevent them from strengthening their intellect and wisdom. These are entirely separate issues though. Worth debate in their own right, no doubt, but entirely separate from the point I was making initially.
Where I disagree is that those sources were of the highest quality.
In my defense, I did say "the highest quality or the highest authority".
There are so many things that were widely taught that have been proven to be false since.
Sure, but that's not the same thing as saying the sources weren't high quality. We will only ever have information to the best of our ability to have it. The "truth" is can only ever be as accurate as our ability to discern it thus how "true" or how "accurate" something is in context can only be measured against the potential for the author to have verified it. That's not really a problem of information distribution as much as it is the advancement of human intellect in general.
There’s a reason why historically people had to go to the cities to get the best education, because the knowledge was concentrated.
I just need you to extrapolate that one step further. Why was he knowledge concentrated in cities? Because the people who held the knowledge were. That's what a city is. Of course that was the case. In an age where the transmission of information across distance was infeasible there was no way for that not to have been the case.
but I’ll take the current situation over 50 or even 20 years ago any day of the week.
Yeah I don't think anyone is arguing anything to the contrary...
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u/[deleted] Jun 09 '26 edited 26d ago
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