American Ignorance in 2020
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You can tell a lot about a civilization by how it treats its experts. This is America in 2020:
Nation’s top coronavirus expert Dr. Anthony Fauci forced to beef up security as death threats increase
I could dive deep on how we got to this point, but I’m pretty sure everyone knows the story by now. So instead, I’d like to propose a toast!
A toast to the morons underplaying the COVID-19 outbreak, whose self-centered behavior puts everyone at risk and increases the stress of our country’s health care system.
A toast to the imbeciles who panic-bought supplies during the COVID-19 outbreak, and amplified logistical problems caused by short-sighted capitalistic greed.
A toast to the flat-earthers, whose wholesale rejection of science and astronomy serves as a monument to the power of willful ignorance in our culture.
A toast to the anti-vaxxers, whose idiotic conspiracy theories ruin the lives of innocent children by infecting them with preventable illnesses.
A toast to the tools who insist there are only two sexes in humans, despite biology saying the exact opposite. Especially the TERFs. (You can read more about why those beliefs are wrong here.)
A toast to the History Channel for promoting conspiracy theories about ancient aliens to reinforce the racist beliefs held by old white people about what other (especially brown-skinned) civilizations were capable of, and then filling most of their air time with reality television instead of actual history.
A toast to the religious fundamentalists, whose wholesale bigotry against LGBTQIA+ people resulted in Idaho passing a law meant to harm transgender students on Trans Visibility Day, 2020.
A toast to the Republican Party, for standing up for all of the wrong things in our society since long before I was even born.
A toast to the Democratic Party, for being generally allergic to strategy and tacitly enabling the Republican Party’s evils.
A toast to the mainstream media, whose constant breaking news coverage of Donald Trump’s lies and general dishonesty under the guise of “fact-checking” keeps him in the spotlight and fails to persuade most Americans to stop supporting him out of spite of intellectualism.
A toast to all the idiots who still believe trickle-down economics works, despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary.
A toast to all the idiots who pile onto victims when they come forward with receipts about horrible experiences that happened to them, then describe their conduct as being skeptical or practicing “critical thinking”.
A toast to the social media outrage/call-out machine, which reinforces our society’s unhealthy addiction to blame and sets back any and all progress towards restorative justice.
A toast to the toxic gatekeepers, whose antics stoke the fires of impostor syndrome and depression in everyone and makes society poorer for it.
Congratulations, you have all collectively ruined any chance of progress and prosperity in our world.
Drink up, you selfish cunts!
There’s Simply Too Much Stupidity and Bullshit
The sarcastic toast above doesn’t even scratch the surface on all the ills of our society. I would quickly hit the Medium word count limit if I tried, and it would bury my point.
Most of the problems we live with are inherent to poorly-designed systems, rather than naturally occurring problems that the Universe imposed on us.
The ones I highlighted all have a common theme. Can you guess what it is?
How Do We Solve This?
At scale? We can’t.
There are too many people who are proud of being wrong.
There are too many people who reject science and reality in favor of whatever narrative suits their pre-existing biases and anger.
There are too many people whose self-interest ties their hands from correcting mistakes.
This problem will remain unsolved for the foreseeable future.
Can We Mitigate The Effects of Ignorance?
Yes! Citizen journalism and coordinated fact-checking goes a long way.
People who try to stand for the truth will often be the target of coordinated inauthentic behavior. Read the linked article for how platforms could mitigate those tactics at scale.
Alternatively, in 2019 I built a platform called FAQ Off to allow experts to build interactive online Q&A’s. (Check out a live demo here).
This bears emphasis: fact-checking and correcting ignorance should not be front-and-center on syndicated media. Spotlighting your fact-check of a compulsive liar on television just gives the liar an incentive to lie some more, which leads to more coverage of their lies. When you consider more media coverage generally wins votes, this creates a perverse incentive to lie loudly into a landslide.
Fact-checking should be something that happens peer-to-peer.
Check websites like Snopes, then do your own research to make sure they don’t become a single point of failure.
Patiently correct people’s ignorance when they spread it. This is much easier to do if they like you more than the person they heard the lie from. This is more of an art than a science, but you get better with practice. Don’t be a dick.
Be deliberately curious. The media doesn’t always get the story right, but they at least (generally) make an honest effort. The exception here is tabloid publications like FOX News and those magazines sold at the checkout counter in grocery stores that advertise “shocking” revelations about random celebrities’ personal lives that ultimately don’t matter.
Listen to the experts in a given field. They’re imperfect and fallible, just like the rest of us, but they’re most likely to be right in any given area.
