11-30-2020, 12:10 AM
(11-29-2020, 06:30 PM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 29-Nov-2020 World View: Ignoramuses
(11-29-2020, 03:35 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: > In any event, Hollywood screenwriters are an erudite lot, and the
> one thing that most of us can say about Donald Trump is that he
> did a splendid job of reaching out to the "low-information" white
> voters particularly gullible. Yes, an ignoramus' vote counts as
> much as that of a PhD in astrophysics, and there are far more
> people who clerk at convenience stores than who teach Plato at the
> University. Still, I can't understand why so many Americans could
> vote for someone who disparaged formal learning and
> well-documented science, someone who is more grossly ignorant than
> many high-school students headed for the University, someone
> dripping with bigotry, a serial adulterer whose business acumen is
> best described as chiseling suppliers and contractors.
Really? Trump voters are ignoramuses? You're a complete jackass.
This time and last time ignoramuses were more likely to vote for Trump because he did a far better job pandering to them than did Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.
The solution is to make people less likely to become ignoramuses, for which I have a solution. Change the norm of educational expectation from K-12 to K-14, with '13' and '14' being to a large extent the coursework typical of an old-fashioned liberal-arts education with courses in philosophy (much emphasis on formal logic and tests of truth... and some start on asking the question of what the meaning of life is), economics (so that people learn the lesson that there is no such thing as a free lunch), psychology (to become less vulnerable to exploitative manipulation), comparative political systems (so that people know what fascism and Marxism are when they encounter the numbing bromides of propagandists), and some literature, music appreciation, and art appreciation so that they will have some idea of something to do in their spare time other than to watch the idiot screen for for schlock programming for lack of anything else to do.
Nobody says that the educated are reliably more right than the simpletons. Some incredibly stupid ideas have come from brilliant people who in their arrogance thought that their pronouncements are so self-evidently true that they need no tests. This said, people can learn much by reading selectively. I have known people with eighth-grade educations far wiser than some college grads today. Of course those people with eighth-grade educations would now be past a hundred years in age today... and we have some surprisingly-dull people getting BA degrees now at "Kegger State".
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
