the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it
The irony of the Slashdot article next to the ads screaming, "12 celebrities you didn't know were dead", with a photo of a celebrity who is most certainly not dead.
It didn't say they were dead, just that you do not know that they were dead. That happens a lot, when they are actually not dead.
What is all this sudden bullcrap about "fake news" in a country where it is LEGAL to fictional ALL news (thanks to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation's multiple lawsuits in federal court) and where the Koch brothers are responsible for most of the "content" on NPR, and everything on PBS and Frontline?
I mean, WTF is all this Prof. Elizabeth Sindars/Merrimack College (WTF that is????) bullcrap about???? This is the Land of Fake News, and has been during my lifetime.
And now . . . for some Non-Fake News . . ..
And for American News, the rest of the world pretty much doesn't exist.
Even those who work as editors at Slashdot, they tend not to correct awkward grammar. At Slashdot, it's hard to say that anyone here will not be able to parse needlessly complex sentences.
Let's eat, grandma.
Let's eat grandma.
Punctuation is your friend.
The problem is the mass of morons that think they have what it takes to judge the quality of a scientific result, when that actually takes at least a PhD in a not too remote field.
And yet, in a free and self-governing country, you have to convince these people too... (Hint, calling them names is not helping.)
Of course these people are then easy to manipulate because they are clueless about how extremely clueless they are.
Absolutely true. The vast majority of people can not judge the quality of the the climate-related arguments themselves — and must trust someone else. Trust to be a) sincere; b) competent... Politicians are generally the best at making themselves appear to possess these qualities...
Which is why one of the societal rules which is not universal but pretty common among societies is to love your neighbors, fellow countrymen, etc ; patriotism as love of your fellows, etc. Not necessarily love of all mankind. Because you can't know for sure whether the guy telling you the news is lying or not, and the guy describing new medical treatments, and the guy printing new recipes. You have to assume benevolence as a default and assume that all about you are as devoted to the general welfare as you yourself are. Because once the default flips the other way, there is no way to achieve societal cohesion
This is some random joker with a blog who simply listed all major news organizations as fake because they "told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction". He provides no sources to back up this claim. These news sites did not, in reality, tell us this; they told us that this was claimed by the US government, which was true.
538 simply performed a statistical analysis of the polls. They gave Trump around a 30% chance of winning and wrote multiple stories emphasizing that it wasn't a done deal. They were not "wrong".
The funny part is that there is a pretty big overlap between the folks who still believe Iraq had WMD, and the folks who would cite this list (which does indeed cite "told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction" as one criterium).
Adding to the humor, the folks who believe that Iraq sent their WMD to Syria for safekeeping, and also believe that we need to join with Putin and Syria in the fight against ISIS.
Them rightwingers is comical. Who can look at old movies of Hitler and not giggle?
Ron Paul compiled a list of fake news from mainstream/big media based on the Wikileaks emails from John Podesta. There was amazing collaboration between the Clinton campaign and major media outlets, and spin perpetrated on the world. It is shameful.
Offenders include ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, CNN, Daily Beast, Huff Po, MSNBC, NBC, NY Times, Politico, Washington Post and more.
Polls were rigged by oversampling democrats vs. republicans/independents so many were flat wrong. Aggregate sites like 538 were wrong. "Legitimate" news sites pushed a common agenda and it was fake. Your only hope is to read multiple outlets, traditional and non-traditional news, with very different points of view, focus on facts, know that the EVERY reporter is biased, take that into account, and draw your own conclusions.
"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past."
-- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
And the list from Ron Paul comes without being cluttered by any underlying data or such; that's how we know it's not "opinion".
"Your only hope is to read multiple outlets, traditional and non-traditional news, with very different points of view, focus on facts, know that the EVERY reporter is biased, take that into account, and draw your own conclusions." You just figured that out? That's pretty much the starting point for analytical thinkers.
The real problem is that many people simply have no inbuilt way to evaluate the truthiness of an article. They do not even know where to start. And so label anything they disagree with as fake, and everything they agree with as truth. Their is as much, if not more, of a problem with real legit news being considered fake as their is fake storied being believed.
Some people "live in their head". some people "live in their gut". Actually, obviously everybody does some of both, but people do tend to be polarized more into one or the other direction. Means that some people assemble as much evidence as they can and go over it analytically and make their decisions that way, and others decide by a rapid unconscious process which bypasses conscious rational analysis.
Lately there's been attention paid to this, by the folks who do rigorous analytical thinking, and it's apparent that these are two subgroups who do not get along because they cannot reproduce each others' thought processes and decisions and therefore mistrust each others' motives and POV and conclusions, and trying to build bridges between the two doesn't work very well.
And: since the Enlightenment, society has skewed more and more to the analytical, rational, judgmental, side, and as technology has become more powerful and successful, that type of person has become more highly valued and rewarded, at least in the industrialized world.
Which means that the people left out, are the very ones who are least capable of evaluating the truth or falsity of what is presented to them on any other basis than it feels true, based on what they're already decided.
Why did many of the students misjudge the authenticity of a story? They were fixated on the appearance of legitimacy, rather than the quality of information.
This is the same reason people get nailed by spear phishing.
Con men in general. You get a badly spelled email offering you a share of a Nigerian prince's inheritance, and you toss it with a sneer. You get a notice of an investment opportunity from Bernie Madoff and you at least consider it. Or you get an offer to "Make America Great" from somebody in the middle.
If you want a better populace, you're going to need a better public school system that teaches students more than just numbers and facts. We need to teach them how to think critically, how to examine the world around them, and how to leverage the internet as a nearly unlimited resource, while being wary of the ability for any random jack-hole to post some spurious shit on their blog.
Our public school system was NEVER designed to do such things. As someone who has actually taught within it, I know the history. It was designed to train obedient factory workers -- seriously, timed classes with students responding to bells? Look back at some sources from the early 1900s, and you'll see people explicitly talking about how the system was designed to imitate factories. Real in-depth learning doesn't take place in neatly managed 45-minute blocks, sounded to an end by a buzzer.
At first, this sort of thing was just about primary education -- train kids with basic reading and math skills; enough to survive as a basic factory worker. (The huge influx of immigrants in the late 1800s, many of whom didn't have the tradition of going to grammar schools that was already in place in the U.S. even in the early 1800s, led to these reforms.)
But then it spread to secondary schools. Why? Because of the problem of dangerous "young radicals." Kids back in the early 1900s, like teenagers in any era, tend to be more rebellious. You had a LOT of young folks taking up with socialist causes, unions, etc. in the 1910s and 1920s, so suddenly we had compulsory education laws requiring kids to attend school beyond primary level. (Before the 1930s or so, it was pretty common in most of the U.S. for working-class kids to leave school at somewhere between 4th and 6th grade.) And the Great Depression that followed led a bunch of kids to "stay in school" in an attempt to get better educational credentials for jobs -- sound familiar??
So, what do we do with these "young radicals"? Increasing child labor laws and protections for young workers forced them out of jobs even before the Depression, so you end up with a bunch of idle teenagers who are bound to get up to all sorts of mischief. So, we get them off the streets and force them into classrooms, where we can indoctrinate them with good social values like civil obedience. Around this time, we also see the proliferation of alternative high school curricula -- for vocational or technical tracks. Previously, almost all secondary schools in the U.S. had been centered around "deeper learning" as part of a college-prep curriculum.
Oh yeah, there were other goals in educational reform too... some quite noble. But we tend to forget that the design of public education was never about "advanced learning." Take a look at the high-school curricula from the late 1800s sometime, before the movement for mass secondary ed. The standards were a LOT higher, and they continued to be high in the 20th century in private academies and such. The new PUBLIC schools were mostly designed to get the rest of the riff-raff off the streets and get them to submit to authority.
Now, in that context, you can understand why all of the rhetoric about "teaching critical thinking" in public schools has been an uphill battle. The whole system was originally rigged against that... it wasn't designed to promote "free thinking," because that's antithetical to many of the primary goals of the system.
We're still overthinking the topic, I believe; the major single basic purpose of school is essentially day care for the kids so the parents can do factory work and housework. Stamping them into replacement parts for when their parents wear out is just gravy.
Our school system is really only designed to enable rote memorization:... Memorize your multiplication tables.
I don't think that's true. Twenty years ago kids were taught to do long multiplication, long division etc. as a straightforward set of rote instructions that they had to memorize and apply blindly.
More recently as part of "new maths" they're told to solve these problems differently -- with techniques that are no longer the rote application of instructions, but instead require creativity and understanding of what the numbers represent. http://www.nbcwashington.com/n...
I'm in two minds about this. As a computer scientist, I loved that kids were learning ALGORITHMs, and they're missing out on that now. But as someone who cares about maths, I'm happy that they're understanding numbers better. (even if it leaves their less mentally agile parents dismayed, like in the above link).
On another note, one of the worst failings of my schooling, back in the days of dinosaurs, was that the boys all got shop and the girls all got home economics. Now I thought shop was great, in all the manifestations we were taught, and I bet a lot of women would have benefited; but in the end, everybody needs to learn some home ec if they intend to move out of their parents' basements.
Our School system isn't designed to memorize rote. It is designed to produce Factory Workers, from a style that is 120 years old. Instead of highly customized and accelerated learning for those that want education, we end up with "lowest common denominator" drag to the bottom.
What we don't do any more is require Mastery or even Competency in subjects. Everyone is given participation grades and then we wonder why our kids can't do basic math. We throw good money after bad money trying to solve problems that money doesn't fix. We have entire weeks dedicated to "testing" our kids every year, and no actual results to show for it. Our system is broken because we have people educating from the top down, and not from the students up.
In an effort to have "No Child Left Behind" we spend inordinate amounts of efforts trying to educate kids who do not want, or otherwise cant be educated, while ignoring the best and brightest, leaving them to be "bored" and hate school. We are afraid to allow excellence, because that makes others have low self esteem if they cannot measure up. We end up Punishing success, rewarding failure, and wonder why.
I work in education. I see the results of this top down approach to industrial education, and it can no longer work. But we are too damn scared to actually let people free to find out better ways, and instead are continuing to listen to people who do not know anything to tell the rest of us how enlightened they are.
My fix is quite simple. Vouchers for everyone. We'll get teachers that can teach, teaching kids who want to learn, with parents involved because they can actively participate in the education of their children. The only people who complain about such a system are the once more concerned about other people's kdis than they are about educating their own.
The First Rule of School is: sit in one place for 8 hours (except when directed to move elsewhere by a Designated Authority) and do not make any noises or large movements, except when directed to by a Designated Authority. Everything else is optional. If you can manage that, you've got a future in the Adult World of Work. If you can't, you're screwed.
Hell, even my generation lacked in critical thought training. I think like most public schools we covered some basic logic at one point, circular logic and simple stuff. Those things take continual training and updates. It's easier not to think about an appeal to emotion that it is to question it, especially if it fits your particular bias.
Socrates stated in the Republic that it was necessary for the public to ensure all citizens were trained in rhetoric. Up until the US move to Prussian education system it was taught as part of the Classical education system. Today, it's barely touched in public schools unless you are on the debate team. Due to budget cuts most schools don't even have debate teams, so...
There was something in the paper the other month; when given a word problem to which the final question was something like "Is it more likely that the person is a feminist, or a feminist and a woman?" the majority of the students tested (I cam't remember if it was high school or college) picked "feminist and a woman" even though that is obviously mathematically impossible, even without advanced set theory.
This clearly illustrates the one area where schools lack: critical thinking
Our school system is really only designed to enable rote memorization:
Memorize your multiplication tables.
Memorize the dates of the Egyptian empire
Memorize the themes in To Kill a Mockingbird
Memorize that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
They are given a book, told "this book is truth, memorize this book," and so yeah, seeing an article with ulterior motives would throw them for a loop.
If you want better politicians, you need a better populace. If you want a better populace, you're going to need a better public school system that teaches students more than just numbers and facts. We need to teach them how to think critically, how to examine the world around them, and how to leverage the internet as a nearly unlimited resource, while being wary of the ability for any random jack-hole to post some spurious shit on their blog.
That's part of it, of course; but also there is a sorting system which selects a minority to be entered into the ruling class. The criteria for said selection do not have to be precise nor explicit, the point is that you have to create a small sumpopulation somehow. Like bees selecting a particular larva to develop into a queen.
What do you expect when you do not emphasize critical thinking and analysis? The American school system has never been about teaching kids how to think, just what to think, to accept the corporate American mindset. This makes for the best workers who will do their jobs but never question the overall system.
American manufacturing became dominant when it learned to convert from individual fitting and adjusting and tweaking of unique parts to make a finished device, to starting with identical interchangeable parts and subassemblies that can be assembled mass production style. Naturally, the principle spread to white collar work and the individual units that go into it. We're not very good at it yet, though; our "educational" industry has a rate of production products which fail usability which would never be acceptable for any other industry. Worse yet, they seem to be able to self-assemble into contraptions which gum up the works.
No, every time a new generation discovers sarcasm they treat it like it is the greatest invention of all time.
There's a sarcasm gene that kicks in when you hit puberty, so that your parents will get fed up with you and kick you out of the cave so you can reproduce.
People who followed the Clintons during the 90s - when Trump was one of their fanbois - know all the things that you pretend don't exist. The Rose Law Firm, Hilary's Cattle Futures, Whitewater, her attempt to take over US healthcare, et al. Those were done fully utilizing the fact that her husband ran things. Then after Bill's term ended, Hilary became a senator, a role in which she achieved squat, then ran for president and thankfully got pummelled by Obama. Then became Secretary of State and managed to totally mismanage the Arab Spring crises that followed, as well as violating government rules on handling government information. Crimes that sent other people to jail.
Quit being a shill for her. The Dems could have won this election had they played fair and let Bernie beat her. I actually disagree w/ Bernie on most things, but I'll say this for him: he drew bigger crowds than Trump, and had he been the nominee, any GOP candidate - be it Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich,... would have lost in a landslide. Similar to Obama's win over Romney
Yes, of course, those not quite 50% of the voters who make up more than 50% of the electoral votes and want to roll back the Muslim Kenyan's Rule of Terror and Hillary's determination to steal our guns so that Muslims can give us all abortions and force us to marry people of our same sex, are just dying to vote for somebody labeled "socialist".
Hillary lost to a despicable loud-mouthed clown because the electorate looked at her and found a lying, unscrupulous, corrupt, unlikable, arrogant harpy whose only accomplishment is marrying Bill Clinton.
Quit trying to excuse Hillary's loss. It's all on the Democrats who selected her to run for President.
"The media lies! And Hillary is a lying, unscrupulous, corrupt, unlikable, arrogant harpy whose only accomplishment is marrying Bill Clinton! I don't actually know her, but that's what the media tells me!"
"At Slashdot, it's hard to say that anyone here will not be able to tell fake news from a real one."
This is blatantly untrue. If you're sure you can spot fake news, odds are you can't. (Or at least, that you can only spot some of it.)
Spot it is one thing. Do some homework and research the primary source(s) is another. Not as difficult these days given the ubiquity of Google and the propensity for ignoring everything that does not exist on the web.
If I have to hear global warming without scientific evidence one more time...
*What would you do, Daddy?*
Smother my daughter in chocolate syrup,
And strap her on again, *Oh baby!*
Smother that girl in chocolate syrup,
And strap her on again!
She's a *Teenage Baby,* and she turns me on,
I'd like to make Her do a *nasty*
On the White House Lawn!
Going to smother that daughter in chocolate syrup,
And boogie till the cows come home!
The politicians (in Europe) declared wood pellets to be green renewable energy.
The "greens" think it's stupid.
Yes, "greens" like Steve Goreham, Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book "The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania"
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/09/wood-burning-power-plants-misguided-climate-change-solution/
A major issue is that everyone is talking about "the" problem. There is no "the" problem...there's an entire ecosystem that includes entities that are wont to do bad things, economic and social drivers that incentivize them to do these bad things, and technological functionality that empowers them to do these bad things. Social media sites and apps...in their current incarnation (including the entire ecosystem of supporting back-end processes, business arrangements, etc.)...fall into the latter. Social media is a valid place to go after the problem, even though it's not the only one; like most significant problems, what works best is a multi-pronged effort to address as much of the end-to-end chain as possible.
The problem is humans, who are operating way outside their zone of competence as defined by the slow, trial and error process of evolution. For instance, humanity's risk/threat assessment routine, which is reasonably accurate when confronted with a tiger or similar, seems to be poorly calibrated to deal with ecological catastrophes or humans of different ethnicity.
Slashdot Mirror
What good man were they rude to, and what's Mike Pence doing in that statement?
As far as I can tell, John Goodman must have been insulted at the show, and Trump's just telling Pence, like Hey, this happened, Mike Pence!
the link between an unsourced photo and the claims attached to it
The irony of the Slashdot article next to the ads screaming, "12 celebrities you didn't know were dead", with a photo of a celebrity who is most certainly not dead.
It didn't say they were dead, just that you do not know that they were dead. That happens a lot, when they are actually not dead.
What is all this sudden bullcrap about "fake news" in a country where it is LEGAL to fictional ALL news (thanks to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation's multiple lawsuits in federal court) and where the Koch brothers are responsible for most of the "content" on NPR, and everything on PBS and Frontline? I mean, WTF is all this Prof. Elizabeth Sindars/Merrimack College (WTF that is????) bullcrap about???? This is the Land of Fake News, and has been during my lifetime. And now . . . for some Non-Fake News . . . .
And for American News, the rest of the world pretty much doesn't exist.
"The problem with quotes on the internet is it is hard to validate their authenticity" - Abraham Lincoln
"I cannot tell a lie. All I know is what's on the internet." - George Washington
Even those who work as editors at Slashdot, they tend not to correct awkward grammar. At Slashdot, it's hard to say that anyone here will not be able to parse needlessly complex sentences.
Let's eat, grandma.
Let's eat grandma.
Punctuation is your friend.
And yet, in a free and self-governing country, you have to convince these people too... (Hint, calling them names is not helping.)
Absolutely true. The vast majority of people can not judge the quality of the the climate-related arguments themselves — and must trust someone else. Trust to be a) sincere; b) competent... Politicians are generally the best at making themselves appear to possess these qualities...
Which is why one of the societal rules which is not universal but pretty common among societies is to love your neighbors, fellow countrymen, etc ; patriotism as love of your fellows, etc. Not necessarily love of all mankind. Because you can't know for sure whether the guy telling you the news is lying or not, and the guy describing new medical treatments, and the guy printing new recipes. You have to assume benevolence as a default and assume that all about you are as devoted to the general welfare as you yourself are. Because once the default flips the other way, there is no way to achieve societal cohesion
This is some random joker with a blog who simply listed all major news organizations as fake because they "told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction". He provides no sources to back up this claim. These news sites did not, in reality, tell us this; they told us that this was claimed by the US government, which was true.
538 simply performed a statistical analysis of the polls. They gave Trump around a 30% chance of winning and wrote multiple stories emphasizing that it wasn't a done deal. They were not "wrong".
The funny part is that there is a pretty big overlap between the folks who still believe Iraq had WMD, and the folks who would cite this list (which does indeed cite "told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction" as one criterium). Adding to the humor, the folks who believe that Iraq sent their WMD to Syria for safekeeping, and also believe that we need to join with Putin and Syria in the fight against ISIS. Them rightwingers is comical. Who can look at old movies of Hitler and not giggle?
Ron Paul compiled a list of fake news from mainstream/big media based on the Wikileaks emails from John Podesta. There was amazing collaboration between the Clinton campaign and major media outlets, and spin perpetrated on the world. It is shameful.
http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/revealed-the-real-fake-news-list
Offenders include ABC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNBC, CNN, Daily Beast, Huff Po, MSNBC, NBC, NY Times, Politico, Washington Post and more.
Polls were rigged by oversampling democrats vs. republicans/independents so many were flat wrong. Aggregate sites like 538 were wrong. "Legitimate" news sites pushed a common agenda and it was fake. Your only hope is to read multiple outlets, traditional and non-traditional news, with very different points of view, focus on facts, know that the EVERY reporter is biased, take that into account, and draw your own conclusions.
"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." -- George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
And the list from Ron Paul comes without being cluttered by any underlying data or such; that's how we know it's not "opinion". "Your only hope is to read multiple outlets, traditional and non-traditional news, with very different points of view, focus on facts, know that the EVERY reporter is biased, take that into account, and draw your own conclusions." You just figured that out? That's pretty much the starting point for analytical thinkers.
The real problem is that many people simply have no inbuilt way to evaluate the truthiness of an article. They do not even know where to start. And so label anything they disagree with as fake, and everything they agree with as truth. Their is as much, if not more, of a problem with real legit news being considered fake as their is fake storied being believed.
Some people "live in their head". some people "live in their gut". Actually, obviously everybody does some of both, but people do tend to be polarized more into one or the other direction. Means that some people assemble as much evidence as they can and go over it analytically and make their decisions that way, and others decide by a rapid unconscious process which bypasses conscious rational analysis. Lately there's been attention paid to this, by the folks who do rigorous analytical thinking, and it's apparent that these are two subgroups who do not get along because they cannot reproduce each others' thought processes and decisions and therefore mistrust each others' motives and POV and conclusions, and trying to build bridges between the two doesn't work very well. And: since the Enlightenment, society has skewed more and more to the analytical, rational, judgmental, side, and as technology has become more powerful and successful, that type of person has become more highly valued and rewarded, at least in the industrialized world. Which means that the people left out, are the very ones who are least capable of evaluating the truth or falsity of what is presented to them on any other basis than it feels true, based on what they're already decided.
Why did many of the students misjudge the authenticity of a story? They were fixated on the appearance of legitimacy, rather than the quality of information.
This is the same reason people get nailed by spear phishing.
Con men in general. You get a badly spelled email offering you a share of a Nigerian prince's inheritance, and you toss it with a sneer. You get a notice of an investment opportunity from Bernie Madoff and you at least consider it. Or you get an offer to "Make America Great" from somebody in the middle.
If you want a better populace, you're going to need a better public school system that teaches students more than just numbers and facts. We need to teach them how to think critically, how to examine the world around them, and how to leverage the internet as a nearly unlimited resource, while being wary of the ability for any random jack-hole to post some spurious shit on their blog.
Our public school system was NEVER designed to do such things. As someone who has actually taught within it, I know the history. It was designed to train obedient factory workers -- seriously, timed classes with students responding to bells? Look back at some sources from the early 1900s, and you'll see people explicitly talking about how the system was designed to imitate factories. Real in-depth learning doesn't take place in neatly managed 45-minute blocks, sounded to an end by a buzzer.
At first, this sort of thing was just about primary education -- train kids with basic reading and math skills; enough to survive as a basic factory worker. (The huge influx of immigrants in the late 1800s, many of whom didn't have the tradition of going to grammar schools that was already in place in the U.S. even in the early 1800s, led to these reforms.)
But then it spread to secondary schools. Why? Because of the problem of dangerous "young radicals." Kids back in the early 1900s, like teenagers in any era, tend to be more rebellious. You had a LOT of young folks taking up with socialist causes, unions, etc. in the 1910s and 1920s, so suddenly we had compulsory education laws requiring kids to attend school beyond primary level. (Before the 1930s or so, it was pretty common in most of the U.S. for working-class kids to leave school at somewhere between 4th and 6th grade.) And the Great Depression that followed led a bunch of kids to "stay in school" in an attempt to get better educational credentials for jobs -- sound familiar??
So, what do we do with these "young radicals"? Increasing child labor laws and protections for young workers forced them out of jobs even before the Depression, so you end up with a bunch of idle teenagers who are bound to get up to all sorts of mischief. So, we get them off the streets and force them into classrooms, where we can indoctrinate them with good social values like civil obedience. Around this time, we also see the proliferation of alternative high school curricula -- for vocational or technical tracks. Previously, almost all secondary schools in the U.S. had been centered around "deeper learning" as part of a college-prep curriculum.
Oh yeah, there were other goals in educational reform too... some quite noble. But we tend to forget that the design of public education was never about "advanced learning." Take a look at the high-school curricula from the late 1800s sometime, before the movement for mass secondary ed. The standards were a LOT higher, and they continued to be high in the 20th century in private academies and such. The new PUBLIC schools were mostly designed to get the rest of the riff-raff off the streets and get them to submit to authority.
Now, in that context, you can understand why all of the rhetoric about "teaching critical thinking" in public schools has been an uphill battle. The whole system was originally rigged against that... it wasn't designed to promote "free thinking," because that's antithetical to many of the primary goals of the system.
We're still overthinking the topic, I believe; the major single basic purpose of school is essentially day care for the kids so the parents can do factory work and housework. Stamping them into replacement parts for when their parents wear out is just gravy.
Our school system is really only designed to enable rote memorization: ... Memorize your multiplication tables.
I don't think that's true. Twenty years ago kids were taught to do long multiplication, long division etc. as a straightforward set of rote instructions that they had to memorize and apply blindly.
More recently as part of "new maths" they're told to solve these problems differently -- with techniques that are no longer the rote application of instructions, but instead require creativity and understanding of what the numbers represent. http://www.nbcwashington.com/n...
I'm in two minds about this. As a computer scientist, I loved that kids were learning ALGORITHMs, and they're missing out on that now. But as someone who cares about maths, I'm happy that they're understanding numbers better. (even if it leaves their less mentally agile parents dismayed, like in the above link).
On another note, one of the worst failings of my schooling, back in the days of dinosaurs, was that the boys all got shop and the girls all got home economics. Now I thought shop was great, in all the manifestations we were taught, and I bet a lot of women would have benefited; but in the end, everybody needs to learn some home ec if they intend to move out of their parents' basements.
Our School system isn't designed to memorize rote. It is designed to produce Factory Workers, from a style that is 120 years old. Instead of highly customized and accelerated learning for those that want education, we end up with "lowest common denominator" drag to the bottom.
What we don't do any more is require Mastery or even Competency in subjects. Everyone is given participation grades and then we wonder why our kids can't do basic math. We throw good money after bad money trying to solve problems that money doesn't fix. We have entire weeks dedicated to "testing" our kids every year, and no actual results to show for it. Our system is broken because we have people educating from the top down, and not from the students up.
In an effort to have "No Child Left Behind" we spend inordinate amounts of efforts trying to educate kids who do not want, or otherwise cant be educated, while ignoring the best and brightest, leaving them to be "bored" and hate school. We are afraid to allow excellence, because that makes others have low self esteem if they cannot measure up. We end up Punishing success, rewarding failure, and wonder why.
I work in education. I see the results of this top down approach to industrial education, and it can no longer work. But we are too damn scared to actually let people free to find out better ways, and instead are continuing to listen to people who do not know anything to tell the rest of us how enlightened they are.
My fix is quite simple. Vouchers for everyone. We'll get teachers that can teach, teaching kids who want to learn, with parents involved because they can actively participate in the education of their children. The only people who complain about such a system are the once more concerned about other people's kdis than they are about educating their own.
The First Rule of School is: sit in one place for 8 hours (except when directed to move elsewhere by a Designated Authority) and do not make any noises or large movements, except when directed to by a Designated Authority. Everything else is optional. If you can manage that, you've got a future in the Adult World of Work. If you can't, you're screwed.
Education.
Hell, even my generation lacked in critical thought training. I think like most public schools we covered some basic logic at one point, circular logic and simple stuff. Those things take continual training and updates. It's easier not to think about an appeal to emotion that it is to question it, especially if it fits your particular bias.
Socrates stated in the Republic that it was necessary for the public to ensure all citizens were trained in rhetoric. Up until the US move to Prussian education system it was taught as part of the Classical education system. Today, it's barely touched in public schools unless you are on the debate team. Due to budget cuts most schools don't even have debate teams, so...
There was something in the paper the other month; when given a word problem to which the final question was something like "Is it more likely that the person is a feminist, or a feminist and a woman?" the majority of the students tested (I cam't remember if it was high school or college) picked "feminist and a woman" even though that is obviously mathematically impossible, even without advanced set theory.
This clearly illustrates the one area where schools lack: critical thinking
Our school system is really only designed to enable rote memorization: Memorize your multiplication tables. Memorize the dates of the Egyptian empire Memorize the themes in To Kill a Mockingbird Memorize that mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell
They are given a book, told "this book is truth, memorize this book," and so yeah, seeing an article with ulterior motives would throw them for a loop.
If you want better politicians, you need a better populace. If you want a better populace, you're going to need a better public school system that teaches students more than just numbers and facts. We need to teach them how to think critically, how to examine the world around them, and how to leverage the internet as a nearly unlimited resource, while being wary of the ability for any random jack-hole to post some spurious shit on their blog.
That's part of it, of course; but also there is a sorting system which selects a minority to be entered into the ruling class. The criteria for said selection do not have to be precise nor explicit, the point is that you have to create a small sumpopulation somehow. Like bees selecting a particular larva to develop into a queen.
What do you expect when you do not emphasize critical thinking and analysis? The American school system has never been about teaching kids how to think, just what to think, to accept the corporate American mindset. This makes for the best workers who will do their jobs but never question the overall system.
American manufacturing became dominant when it learned to convert from individual fitting and adjusting and tweaking of unique parts to make a finished device, to starting with identical interchangeable parts and subassemblies that can be assembled mass production style. Naturally, the principle spread to white collar work and the individual units that go into it. We're not very good at it yet, though; our "educational" industry has a rate of production products which fail usability which would never be acceptable for any other industry. Worse yet, they seem to be able to self-assemble into contraptions which gum up the works.
No, every time a new generation discovers sarcasm they treat it like it is the greatest invention of all time.
There's a sarcasm gene that kicks in when you hit puberty, so that your parents will get fed up with you and kick you out of the cave so you can reproduce.
People who followed the Clintons during the 90s - when Trump was one of their fanbois - know all the things that you pretend don't exist. The Rose Law Firm, Hilary's Cattle Futures, Whitewater, her attempt to take over US healthcare, et al. Those were done fully utilizing the fact that her husband ran things. Then after Bill's term ended, Hilary became a senator, a role in which she achieved squat, then ran for president and thankfully got pummelled by Obama. Then became Secretary of State and managed to totally mismanage the Arab Spring crises that followed, as well as violating government rules on handling government information. Crimes that sent other people to jail.
Quit being a shill for her. The Dems could have won this election had they played fair and let Bernie beat her. I actually disagree w/ Bernie on most things, but I'll say this for him: he drew bigger crowds than Trump, and had he been the nominee, any GOP candidate - be it Trump, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich,... would have lost in a landslide. Similar to Obama's win over Romney
Yes, of course, those not quite 50% of the voters who make up more than 50% of the electoral votes and want to roll back the Muslim Kenyan's Rule of Terror and Hillary's determination to steal our guns so that Muslims can give us all abortions and force us to marry people of our same sex, are just dying to vote for somebody labeled "socialist".
Hillary lost to a despicable loud-mouthed clown because the electorate looked at her and found a lying, unscrupulous, corrupt, unlikable, arrogant harpy whose only accomplishment is marrying Bill Clinton.
Quit trying to excuse Hillary's loss. It's all on the Democrats who selected her to run for President.
"The media lies! And Hillary is a lying, unscrupulous, corrupt, unlikable, arrogant harpy whose only accomplishment is marrying Bill Clinton! I don't actually know her, but that's what the media tells me!"
"At Slashdot, it's hard to say that anyone here will not be able to tell fake news from a real one."
This is blatantly untrue. If you're sure you can spot fake news, odds are you can't. (Or at least, that you can only spot some of it.)
Spot it is one thing. Do some homework and research the primary source(s) is another. Not as difficult these days given the ubiquity of Google and the propensity for ignoring everything that does not exist on the web.
If I have to hear global warming without scientific evidence one more time...
*What would you do, Daddy?*
Smother my daughter in chocolate syrup,
And strap her on again, *Oh baby!*
Smother that girl in chocolate syrup,
And strap her on again!
She's a *Teenage Baby,* and she turns me on,
I'd like to make Her do a *nasty*
On the White House Lawn!
Going to smother that daughter in chocolate syrup,
And boogie till the cows come home!
The politicians (in Europe) declared wood pellets to be green renewable energy. The "greens" think it's stupid.
Yes, "greens" like Steve Goreham, Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book "The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania"
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/11/09/wood-burning-power-plants-misguided-climate-change-solution/
you need a " the walking dead trees" tv show.
A major issue is that everyone is talking about "the" problem. There is no "the" problem...there's an entire ecosystem that includes entities that are wont to do bad things, economic and social drivers that incentivize them to do these bad things, and technological functionality that empowers them to do these bad things. Social media sites and apps...in their current incarnation (including the entire ecosystem of supporting back-end processes, business arrangements, etc.)...fall into the latter. Social media is a valid place to go after the problem, even though it's not the only one; like most significant problems, what works best is a multi-pronged effort to address as much of the end-to-end chain as possible.
The problem is humans, who are operating way outside their zone of competence as defined by the slow, trial and error process of evolution. For instance, humanity's risk/threat assessment routine, which is reasonably accurate when confronted with a tiger or similar, seems to be poorly calibrated to deal with ecological catastrophes or humans of different ethnicity.
and you know this by having researched stuff...?