the issue with becoming more knowledgable about the world is you feel less special.

and people are desperate to feel special. our entire consumer economy is built around exploiting folks insecurities and convincing them that their purchases make them better than other people.

before chat gpt we called that using google.

whether you got it from chagpt or saw it on a site that gpt got it from… you still had to read it or watch a video of it.

the individual matters more than the education. i know several st johns graduates whose personality is yes-men. i have a liberal arts education from an ivy and 95% of my peers at uni thought it was stupid and just wanted job skills. they didn’t give a fuck about learning or education, they just went there so they could get a job at goldman or similar and get rich or because their parents told them had to. they thought i was mentally ill for valuing liberal arts and focusing on education rather than getting a big fat paycheck after graduating.

a Socratic education only works if you already inclined towards skeptical inquiry. you can’t educate people into skepticism, it’s really an emotional disposition. normal people do not want to think anyone than they want to run marathons. only a small percentage of people are inclined to such activities.

i taught philosophy for 3 years, about 500 students. maybe a dozen of them actually learned anything… the other 490 were just there for a requirement/grade/elective and did absolutely did not give a fuck other than thinking quoting Plato make them sound smart and win arguments, or help them further entrench themselves in their delusional conspiracy mindset. had about 50% of my students actively argued for exploiting slaves for business profits, because all that mattered was their own wealth.

for every liberal atheist skeptic linux genius here on lemmy, there about a 100+ people who believe the opposite out there in the real world.

garbage in, garbage out

I don’t know. My entire life people have more or less told me the truth is stupid and worthless. Pretty sure were never were a truth society. It’s just that now we have given up the pretense and pretext that it even exists and have decided bullshit is what really makes us happy.

anyone with 1/4 of a brain knows this.

but the vast majority of the population, including our leadership, are mostly brainless hype drunk monkeys.

AI really isn’t that useful.

speak for yourself.

I live in Cambridge MA. one of the smartest/richest places on the planet. Lots of people are stupid here and anxious and exhausted even making 300-400K a year and living lives of luxury and privilege.

the crux of it is they are just selfish jerks who don’t care about anyone else and are supremely overconfident about how genius they are… and that arrogance makes them incredibly gullible and stupid when a charming personality tries to convince them that vaccines cause autism. and their biggest complaint about their lives is that they don’t have more luxury and privledge and that they are actually ‘struggling’ in life because they can’t afford to charter jets and have to ‘suffer’ first class plane travel.

it’s not about smart vs stupid. it’s about skeptical vs gullible.

plenty of very smart people are gullible. and most people are gullible because it’s ‘nice’.

most of us who are skeptical are see as cold, mean, and anti-social. hence to be pro-social you have to be ‘stupid’ and believe in the nonsense everyone else is going on about.