Valuing how to properly research things and having critical thinking skills is an ideology. And it’s a dangerous one to those whose ideology is faith-based epistemology.
And I would’ve gotten away with it too if it weren’t for you meddling empiricists!
Sometimes it’s faith. Others, it’s misguided distrust.
We’re taught to take facts as truth in primary school, then taught to challenge those facts in higher education. As we mature, our desire to doubt naturally grows. Without education on how to properly research, those misguided feelings of doubt lead to anti-vax, flat Earth, and Egyptian alien conspiracy theories.
They’re right in thinking the government is corrupt. They just don’t understand why they shouldn’t trust Truth Social either.
In grade school, I can think of two specific examples where we were taught a lesson that was supposed to develop critical thinking skills. The infamous Tongue Map and the Mpemba Effect (hot water freezes faster than cold water)
Both of these are examples where an authority will confidently tell you a fact (which is bogus), then have you conduct an experiment which ought to disprove them.
I did the tongue map in kindergarten. It’s obvious that it doesn’t hold up, but when I told my teacher about it she said I must have been doing it wrong. Later in grade school I did the experiment to ‘confirm’ the Mpemba effect. Despite the evidence before me I still lied on report and said that the hot water froze faster because I thought that’s what the teacher wanted. Apparently so did half the class, and because we did the experiment we all got a passing grade and were never told that it was supposed to be false.
So I dunno. I guess they ought to teach critical thinking at a young age, but the instructors have to buy into it to.
There’s a great book called Lies My Teacher Told Me that explains how the tongue map was disproven over a century ago, yet it remains in textbooks today.
The reason you were taught that way is because the incorrect information is still part of today’s curriculum. They weren’t teaching you to challenge the information. They were teaching you to conform by accepting false information.
You and your fancy grade school. Here, in America, we did pasta art:
all hail the prophet of his noodley appendages!
Corruption is a spectrum and many faceted. We don’t have to bribe police or doctors here. In many ways we’re much less corrupt than average. I think most of the FBI and most federal agencies are really pretty clean. The FDA and EPA and IRS might have issues, but corruption isn’t really one of them.
In other ways, we have a Supreme Court to bring balance to that.
Do you sincerely believe the police is free from corruption? What about congressional influence through the lobbying power of large corporations?
Oh God no. Just that our police corruption is different. In some ways we do have less police corruption (primarily direct, individual bribes). But our police system is one of the most broken things in our country.
Corruption is a forever fight. It’s important to recognize it’s not binary, and to recognize the clean and good where you can.
We can’t just throw up our hands and say it’s all corrupt. That might even be more damaging than “both sides are the same”. We have to fight for specific fixes. This shit requires nuance and takes constant effort.
I totally agree. They’re right in assuming there is corruption, but yes, it takes curiosity and thorough investigation to determine the areas and types of corruption. A billionaire criminal rapist pedophile running for dictator isn’t necessarily the best resource.
I think it would be better to say “I trust the stated principles and mandate from the people for government organizations, but I don’t trust the people or groups in those organizations.”
On paper, the FBI, EPA, IRS…etc make sense. But each one of them is run by people, who have agendas. They should have to provide independent, verifiable information for their actions, instead of using the name or mandate of the organization to justify their actions.
But that’s not what I’m trying to say. In general, I do mostly trust the FBI, IRS, EPA, and FDA, including the people and processes to control corruption.
I absolutely don’t trust local or state police.
Do you actually trust them, or do you just agree with some of the more public things they’ve done recently?
Hey Time Traveller, welcome to 2024!
Now I know back in the 19th, ideology was just a term to denote a set of ideas.
And that’s cool and all. Viva la Renaissance!
But we kind of diverged from then and did some injustice to the etymology of the word. Now it’s more like a synonym for dogma and it has negative connotations of irrationality and an unwillingness to examine arguments critically.
Hope you enjoy your time in the 21st century and wait until you hear about what we did with the word “Gay”.
This is kinda true and of course oversimplified.
“Ideology” as a term was first popularized by, surprisingly, Napoleon, as a politically loaded set of ideas akin to a belief system.
Philosophers and economists worked the term over for refinement so that it built up quite a bit of nuance and academic controversy over the next century.
In common vernacular it trended towards simpler uses like a synonym for ‘worldview’ or ‘dogma’, but in scholars it’s been fractured into contentious specifics.
Terry Eagleton’s book Ideology is a good read as he’s both a great explainer of historical thought and fairly practical, and he settled on ‘a system of ideas and beliefs that allows the oppressed to participate in their own oppression,’ which is fairly summarized and useful.
Yeah, but I hope you realize my comment was more intended to be a humorous take, building on the humour of the comment I replied on.
On reddit, I eventually got used to adding a /s to every mild joke.
Up until now, I was pleasantly surprised that it isn’t needed on Lemmy.
Yes lol except your comment was correct not sarcastic! Just wry on ham. I was addressing the correct part because not enough people know that stuff.
Can you please elaborate on what you mean by how that’s dangerous? Do you mean that how we’re taught to apply critical thinking and proper research while being overconfident in those tools leads to poor beliefs because the methods may be flawed or based on a false premise? Or do you mean something else? I don’t think I understand completely.
(Please note I’m a bit sleepy but also intrigued.)
Zachariah’s saying that empiricism, cricical thinking, and scientific reasoning are seen as dangerous by people whose worldviews are based on faith rather than reality because questioning traditional and baseless narratives about the world causes cognitive dissonance. I think that the people who find it most dangerous are those in positions of power on the basis of those narratives who don’t want their followers or supporters to stop believing.
He means it’s hard to teach things like religion* and woke-ism and climate change denial if you know how to properly research.
*(Religion and science isn’t incompatible, if the religion is more principles based than made up facts based. Catholicism generally does okay.)
The left has a truth bias
Reality leans left.
I’d say more nature… since we (living beings) are chiral at the core
And also chiral everywhere else
Its more true for the left.
There are still truths the extreme left lies about for political reasons.
I just wish we had a political party where all truth was the priority.
Living in their goddamn cities, reading their goddamn books. I aint never not read nothing, and I’m fine!
Wait, that whole thing with schools indoctrinating woke – because they noticed that educated people tend to be left leaning? Seriously?
Eh. A shared set of cultural norms from the 1980s/90s were instilled in the Millennial population by the survivors of the Great Depression and WW2. But then the political zeitgeist changed, as we moved into a Reagan Era. Now millennials are using a 40 year old lens to look at a world governed by increasingly fascist Boomers and elder GenXers. And these post-Reagan fascists are upset that Millennials didn’t forget everything they accumulated over their adult lives.
Now we’ve got far-right authoritarians simultaneously tearing up the institutions of public education and churning out tons of news media and social media reactionary propaganda. So we’ve got a younger generation that’s scrambling to find any kind of education. They’re no longer getting a singular uniform neoliberal patriotism authored by a handful of pre-Reagan academics. Instead they’re getting whatever the mass media funnel spits out - TikTok dances about our long history of genocide, Ben Shapiro rants about how Jimmy Carter destroyed the housing market, PraegerU and ChapoTrapHouse podcasts about whether or not unions are good, whatever brain worms Joe Rogan and RFK Jr are smoking.
Its not so much that Millennials got a “Woke” education as they got a Uniform education that we could all kinda agree on. But this education no longer makes any sense to the Boomers who have been ingesting endless fascist propaganda or the Zoomers that have scattered to the for corners of the ideological compass.
As that old school education is dissolved by the corrosive forces of reactionary politics, AI gobblederemoved, and a fragmented modern educational landscape, we’re losing the shared educational foundation we all used to be able to draw from.
a world governed by increasingly fascist Boomers and elder GenXers
Hey hey, take it easy on us gen xers. We tried mightily to bring change in the nineties and almost succeeded but ultimately failed. Nobody ever cared about us and now we’re just waiting to exit this mortal coil. We’re on your side, but we’re so very very tired.
We tried mightily to bring change in the nineties and almost succeeded but ultimately failed.
I mean, you guys were hopelessly outnumbered and trapped in a real nightmare machine.
We millennials have the numbers, we’ve got a lot more of the money and the education. And what’s our excuse?
Millennials do NOT have more money. We are one of the poorest and most educated generations, and that alone terrifies our government. That’s a very bad recipe - educated and poor.
Boomers have the most wealth, followed by Gen X. Both have more wealth than Millennials, both present day and when they were our age. Our excuse is that we are extremely poor as a generation.
Gen Z, we’re well educated and often very tech literate while having no money whatsoever. Can we join the revolution?
None of us are as strong as all of us.
Definitely
Excellent summary and a good example of why Twitter is not a good platform for meaningful discussion. I’ll just add that A.I. has the potential to completely dismantle anything resembling a shared cultural landscape or public discourse. It also has the potential to knit the world together with a greater understanding of the deep patterns that govern our chaotic maps of meaning. Wonder which one we’ll try first.
The price of college loans and the resulting inability to get anywhere to live after leaving is the indoctrination.
College is still worth it for most people.
Now let’s all get a good laugh at the “irony” while I’m downvoted by a bunch of liberals in the comments section of a submission about how liberals just follow the facts and objective reasoning.
Well no. That’s what millennials have been trying to tell everyone for a couple decades now. It’s not that college is useless it’s that they’re forcing too much through the college system. When we were kids we were told it was college or pumping gas. As a result many of us were saddled with debt while we did jobs like driving taxis. So now what we want is for the system to figure itself out. Either a degree is that persuasive in your earnings and it should be little to no cost or it isn’t and we can stop trying to send literally everyone just to make some rich people richer.
The idea that college is useless is a conservative idea, not a liberal one.
You misunderstand; as far as the right is concerned, learning how to do things the right way is indoctrination. After all it’s not like they can win without cheating as hard as possible.
Facts and evidence have a notorious left-leaning bias 🙄
You can go to a right-leaning college and get plenty of right-leaning propaganda to go with it. The thing I was “indoctrinated” in was religious hypocrisy which is why I left in the first place.
My friend is a photojournalist who covers right wing extremists, and has been in many high profile situations interacting with them. He says they’re all just dumber than a bag of hammers, nothing more.
Yes, that coupled with tribalism makes them very easy to manipulate.
Like Carlin said, “50% of people have below-average intelligence.”
As Ekaterina Shulman says about members of Gosduma: “it’s better to observe them from afar”.
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Yep. He was into Christian Identity and those people are MORONS. I tricked Reddit into giving me their subreddit and then banned them all.
my own mom disproved her beliefs that college was an indoctrination camp, when she graduated with a Psych degree and proudly told everyone she never let the professor change her opinion on anything she already didn’t believe. she’s anti LGBT and other stuff… so yeah. college isn’t a brainwashing center. lmao
Sounds like a great psych /s
she never let the professor change her opinion on anything she already didn’t believe. she’s anti LGBT and other stuff…
I don’t care about last part, but first part is completely anti-scientific approach. Science is about understanding reality, not about keeping opinions. Religion is about keeping opinions.
i mean, you should care about the last part since she will likely be partially responsible for LGBT kid’s mental health… it freaks me out but there’s not much i can do.
If brainwashing/indoctrination was actually a thing and successful, logically it would have to be done by the opponents of the perceived indoctrination. Because the indoctrinating side would want you to disregard the truth as brainwashing.
The reality is pretty much everyone is lacking in critical thinking skills regardless of education level. We spend few classes over our lifetimes learning critical thinking if lucky (usually actual school courses are more about memorizing some information rather than thinking), the rest is being bombarded with emotion-laden misinformation by corporate and social media that’s more incentivized to get our attention by any means necessary than to actually inform us.
If brainwashing/indoctrination was actually a thing and successful, logically it would have to be done by the opponents of the perceived indoctrination.
It is. It’s called ‘religion’.
1/2 /s
Right wing should be thrilled with higher education. They’re all led by elitist millionaires sitting on huge endowments. Those leaders insist on paying their employees (teachers, professors and graduate students) poverty wages or nothing at all. All the while begging other rich bastards for handouts in exchange for naming buildings after them. What’s not to love for a Republican?
To be honest, I was taught a little bit of anti-rightwing knowledge in university mandated “elective” courses. Nothing as drastic as the conservatives make it out to be.
I had a class on privilege, Basically, how the system games minorities (less pay for women, higher chance for black men to run afoul of the police). The goal was to for graduates to never think “black people are poor because they want to be poor.”
My English 101 class also involved a textbook that was very image positive (involving trans identities, women covered in tattoos, etc.)
I went to an urban university in the same part of the county try I was born in.
lmao there is so many people who go to those school and are still far leaning and I’ve met so many idiots there too
Ah you correctly did your own research.
