The mistake was not spending the first years of school teaching people to care about what is true, and also the tools for critical thinking to figure out what is real and how sure we are about it.

I thought that already when I was a kid and saw that people do not care at all if their beliefs are correct, and because of that don't care about learning any critical thinking skills, but I wasn't convinced and thought maybe adults just know something I don't, but today it is clear the same problem is even worse and the most important factor to why we are so screwed up as a species

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intended 3 hours ago | parent [-]

The voting populations of the world, are opposed by experts of every stripe, whose job it is to figure out how to persuade or confuse them on critical issues.

Journalism has been decimated with advertising dollars moving to Google and Meta. This creates 2 camps of journalists, one who attempt to report as if the old standards hold, and others who are the media wings of political parties.

Educating people is always Good. However, no education will empower individuals enough to be competitive with people whose job it is to keep them ignorant.

	▲	bayesianbot 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		But you don't need to convince every voter, just give a nudge to the right direction. Also, a ton of people are falling for really easy questions, like "is human caused climate change true", there really isn't much propaganda should matter in those cases if people had the tools to find even the simplest, most clear facts. But I'm not even sure if it was possible - lots of people seem hellbent on believing what they want, I've thought that probably comes from evolution from time when we didn't really have ways to study reality that well, and group cohesion was more important than individual thinking. But we should have at least tried. It was quite clear people would get corrupted when they're sent out of school with a bag of knowledge but no real ways (or will) to really judge any future information