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It was always there, the internet just gave them leverage to find each other and make professional sounding networks of absolutely rock stupid fucking people.
It's honestly the biggest downside of the internet.
Because pro-asbestos and anti-seatbelt people existed, but they didn't have megaphones to reach the whole world.
Here's the question: Idiots and wise people both have this megaphone to reach the world. Why do the idiots seem to succeed much more often?
because people find confidence attractive and appealing. for most people, blind faith and never admitting you are wrong is seen as confident.
and wise people don't seem confident because they acknowledge their limits and that they might be wrong.
human psychology is full of this stuff. it is not optimized to be truth seeking, it's optimized to look for the easiest explanation and the one that unifies the tribe.
For the same reason people think Kent Hovind and Ben Shapiro are smart, it takes time and energy to explain why someone is wrong whereas the claim that oneself is right takes less energy. Compare say a Miniminuteman or Stefan Milo to the average pseudoscience video, the pseudoscience video can throw out 20 claims in the time it takes for someone to explain something that is actually correct.
Also the natural social defenses against this type of shit are effectively bypassed by the ability for idiots to communicate and propagate their ideas. Historically communities had the learned, the experienced, and the wise who could generally call bullshit or otherwise deal with the problem directly, nowadays shaming, beating, and killing are notable less effective.
Because most people, even including people who aren't complete idiots, want to be told what they want to hear more than they want to be faced with hard truths. Simple as.
they have done studies.
truth is more cognitively difficult to obtain and it is not emotionally rewarding.
fiction and fantasy is easy to process, and it's much more emotionally rewarding.
Just like our bodies want to get fat and lazy unless we otherwise force them not to, our brains are the same way.
People can become smarter and value good mental work, just like they can get fitter and start feeling the rewards of fitness. But there is a massive gulf you have to overcome to get there where it is incredibly painful and difficult and most people give up rather than push through the pain and difficulty.
Yeah you start to see this stupidity increase in size with every major information transmission breakthrough. A lot of these people would probably be hit with a big stick for being stupid and causing problems historically.
That’s insulting to rocks.