breakfastmtn‘I Genuinely Am Upset That Your Kids Are Vaccinated’
https://piefed.ca/c/news/p/548748/i-genuinely-am-upset-that-your-kids-are-vaccinated
∟⊔⊤∦∣≶The amount of absolute stupidity these days is shocking.
Snot FlickermanIt 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.
vaultdweller013Yeah 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.
PiratBecause 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 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.
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.
A reminder that the human brain has not changed since modern humans emerged about 300,000 years ago.
Think about what that means.
The people who spent millennia throwing rocks at the moon, drawing stick figures on walls and hunting mammoths with pointy sticks? That’s just us. That is exactly what we would be doing in that time and place. The people that burned witches? That is us too. Those people had the exact same capacity for intelligence, compassion, and reason as we do.
What I am saying is that the capacity for human stupidity is boundless. It is our intelligence and civilization that defies our nature. We can always be dumber. We might not be able to get any smarter.
There’s this weird phenomenon that people tend to think those in the past were less intelligent than now, when really it was history being spun a certain way. For example: the witch burning thing, most people accusing witches, etc didn’t actually believe that shit. Its coming to light in modern times, that they realized they could grab land and money by accusing vulnerable people, and then just taking their land when they couldn’t defend themselves against a confession under torture.
Keep in mind all the advancements and progress humans have made in mathemathics and sciences over the last few thousand years. Those people weren’t stupid, if they were doing stupid things, its probably because they were evil (like burning witches for their own financial gain)
CharlesDarwinFor example: the witch burning thing, most people accusing witches, etc didn’t actually believe that shit. Its coming to light in modern times, that they realized they could grab land and money by accusing vulnerable people, and then just taking their land when they couldn’t defend themselves against a confession under torture.
Sounds like the people running today’s megachurches. They might not actually believe any of what they are spinning, as long as the rubes are giving them enough money to keep them farting through silk and flying around in private jets (and probably some hookers and blow on the DL, I bet, too).
HellsBelleA reminder that the human brain has not changed since modern humans emerged about 300,000 years ago.
It has changed in shape but not in size. Source
Always a good thing to check the data before posting.
xepRecent studies suggrst our brains have shrunk:
www.frontiersin.org/journals/…/full
That theory has been challenged.
Discussion
DeSilva et al. (2021) propose that human brain size has decreased, and offer innovative reasons why this may be so, primarily focusing on a model of “group level cognition.” Our analysis of these data fails to find a decrease in human brain size over the last few thousands of years. When the large sample sizes of the most recent human samples are adjusted for, the pattern disappears, and the arguments no longer need to be invoked.
We argue that, when examining questions of micro-evolutionary change, the analysis and data need to be appropriate for the specific scale of that hypothesis. Further, the data need to be otherwise relevant for the hypothesis being tested (see Houle et al., 2011). Given that the adoption of agriculture and the transition to complex societies occurred in different times at different places, the samples need to be specific enough to test the hypothesis across different times and populations, which does not appear to be the case in this instance.
Frontiers | Did the transition to complex societies in the Holocene drive a reduction in brain size? A reassessment of the DeSilva et al. (2021) hypothesis
Encephalization has long been understood to be a key adaptation in the human lineage, and over the last four million years species attributed to Australopith...