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.

Corruption is a spectrum and many faceted. We don’t have to bribe police or doctors here. In many ways we’re much less corrupt than average. I think most of the FBI and most federal agencies are really pretty clean. The FDA and EPA and IRS might have issues, but corruption isn’t really one of them.

In other ways, we have a Supreme Court to bring balance to that.

This is kinda true and of course oversimplified.

“Ideology” as a term was first popularized by, surprisingly, Napoleon, as a politically loaded set of ideas akin to a belief system.

Philosophers and economists worked the term over for refinement so that it built up quite a bit of nuance and academic controversy over the next century.

In common vernacular it trended towards simpler uses like a synonym for ‘worldview’ or ‘dogma’, but in scholars it’s been fractured into contentious specifics.

Terry Eagleton’s book Ideology is a good read as he’s both a great explainer of historical thought and fairly practical, and he settled on ‘a system of ideas and beliefs that allows the oppressed to participate in their own oppression,’ which is fairly summarized and useful.

Zachariah’s saying that empiricism, cricical thinking, and scientific reasoning are seen as dangerous by people whose worldviews are based on faith rather than reality because questioning traditional and baseless narratives about the world causes cognitive dissonance. I think that the people who find it most dangerous are those in positions of power on the basis of those narratives who don’t want their followers or supporters to stop believing.

He means it’s hard to teach things like religion* and woke-ism and climate change denial if you know how to properly research.

*(Religion and science isn’t incompatible, if the religion is more principles based than made up facts based. Catholicism generally does okay.)

I never really thought about it like this, but it makes sense now, thank you.

The point was that when you report the facts, and just the facts, without spin, the right fairly reliably calls it leftwing bias, because it contradicts the rightwing position which was misleading. Why would normal people vote for policies that only make rich people richer? Only because you convinced them it was in their interests. “Reality has a left-leaning bias” means that if you’re fully aware of all the facts, you tend to draw a more left wing conclusion. It’s unusual that a rightwinger would admit this, but Trump’s press officer was told “but the facts are…” and responded with “we have some alternative facts for you” and was widely ridiculed for admitting out loud that their “facts” were different to the objectively verified facts.

I’d say more nature… since we (living beings) are chiral at the core

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.

Excellent summary and a good example of why Twitter is not a good platform for meaningful discussion. I’ll just add that A.I. has the potential to completely dismantle anything resembling a shared cultural landscape or public discourse. It also has the potential to knit the world together with a greater understanding of the deep patterns that govern our chaotic maps of meaning. Wonder which one we’ll try first.

Well no. That’s what millennials have been trying to tell everyone for a couple decades now. It’s not that college is useless it’s that they’re forcing too much through the college system. When we were kids we were told it was college or pumping gas. As a result many of us were saddled with debt while we did jobs like driving taxis. So now what we want is for the system to figure itself out. Either a degree is that persuasive in your earnings and it should be little to no cost or it isn’t and we can stop trying to send literally everyone just to make some rich people richer.

The idea that college is useless is a conservative idea, not a liberal one.

Yep. He was into Christian Identity and those people are MORONS. I tricked Reddit into giving me their subreddit and then banned them all.

i mean, you should care about the last part since she will likely be partially responsible for LGBT kid’s mental health… it freaks me out but there’s not much i can do.