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.
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
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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.
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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".
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Reality has a left-leaning bias.
To put it another way, in a democracy where most people have to work for a living, its politically expedient for socialists to tell the truth and for aristocrats to lie.
I never really thought about it like this, but it makes sense now, thank you.
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The left has a truth bias
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 gobbledegook, 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.
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The price of college loans and the resulting inability to get anywhere to live after leaving is the indoctrination.
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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.
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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
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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.
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