@Garwboy Well, unless you have a healthy dose of common-or-garden cynicism in you that makes you wonder why somebody is trying to add something to your brain.

Adverts actively put me off products when they trigger the 'Why is somebody dressed as a doctor in an obviously staged medical environment saying this ?' - you might argue that the information is lodged in me whether I like it or not by virtue of me just having seen it, but it's up to me whether there's a negative connotation attached to it that will make me avoid that product; and the same applies to the-bleedin-obvious or the-highly-dubious presented as profundity.

@davidrevoy A powerful image that, this account is my very first foray into any kind of 'social media'.

I'm a retired, long-time, grey-haired IT consultant so no luddite, but have always steered clear of the all-powerful corporate behemoths and yearned for the 'good old days' when thousands of individual subject-specific forums were independently run by moderators for zero renumeration.

I know they still exist of course, and use some, but when the non-techies of the world found the internet they were almost entirely charmed into the more sinister alternatives, which have captured folk for way too long.

The open/decentralised nature of ActivityPub and particularly Mastodon has been pinging on my radar for a while now and is the thing that's finally.. cautiously.. tentatively.. brought me into the fold.

Here's hoping this or something like it can be the way forward, and the Zuckerbergs of this world will eventually lose their shrivelled-claw-like grip on how the world communicates.

@analogfusion @Garwboy Indeed, I did have a paragraph about there always being a proportion of the population who will be a standard deviation or two below the mean of 'reasonably aware' but sacrificed it to other text :)

And yes, religion is a classic case, we can try to instill the idea that it's good to make up your own mind about things in your own time but 'Give me the child for the first seven years...' and the like effectively heads that off at the pass before the child can develop those skills.

The worrying thing is, zealous proponents of more recent non-spiritual 'belief systems' seem to be using this tactic to hard-code their own beliefs into other people's kids as it's proven mighty effective.

@analogfusion @Garwboy One would hope any reasonably aware human would read or hear a proposition and think, consciously or otherwise, 'Does that fit in with my understanding of the subject, why might this person be saying that for dishonest reasons, how do they know what they are saying is true anyway, do I know enough about the subject to evaluate it properly, what might I consult to compare it with ?' etc etc. before filing it away as a possible fact, or even being worthy of further thought, regardless of how confidently or attractively it's presented.

Perhaps encouragement of this sort of analytical thinking is lacking in modern education and like almost everything it's a natural/instinctive process that individuals will be better or worse at, but is certainly something that should very much be fostered by parents and teachers, especially in this era of information overload and easy self-publishing.