[Shaun @ Tru6]

Originally Posted by speeder

I thought that the article was very good and said several things, none of them contradictory. One of my favorite paragraphs was this:

One of several corollaries to the cultural brain hypothesis is that larger, more interconnected populations amass cumulative cultural know-how at a faster rate. Evidence for this idea is abundant. Henrich cites studies of traditional tool technology in Polynesia and Oceania, which have found that larger, more populous islands (those with a bigger collective brain) had more sophisticated tools for marine foraging and fishing. Similarly, in the United Kingdom, when the government simplified the postal system in 1840 so that anyone could mail a letter for a penny, “There was a spike in innovation, because a lot more letters were zooming around.” In the early 20th century in the United States, IQ scores in rural towns “increased dramatically” whenever investment in schools, roads, and railroads connected these communities to the larger national “cultural brain.” Prohibition provides a counterexample: the shuttering of saloons led to a drop in innovation. That discovery was “non-intuitive,” Henrich notes, because one might expect that people would be “cognitively healthier without alcohol. But people were swapping ideas” and conceiving new ones in the saloons, leading to “a lot of innovation.”

The place where this theory hits the wall is with the advent of the internet, where in theory, everyone on earth has access to all information at the click of a mouse. The problem is that the web created communities within the larger community of country or town where people with similar pre-formed ideas were able to reinforce each other, no matter how factually challenged or ignorant those ideas might be. A large portion of the world actually got dumber watching cable news and sharing their crazy ideas online. It was a hotbed for bigotry and conspiracy theories that persist to this day. No one seems to seek out verification or contrary opinion to their pre-formed ideas, regardless of which end of the political spectrum they land on.

It's like the old joke; "I have a device in my pocket with all of the accumulated knowledge in the history of the world on it and I use it to watch cat videos and argue with strangers."

I guess I should get an honorary Ph.D. from Harvard, they are just down the street so that would make it easy. A brief synopsis of what I have posted here 10-15 years ago, and on a regular basis. Have about 20 pages more of notes that someday I'll put together into a proper thesis:

Stupid people are one of the greatest threats the U.S. faces today. Back when we were young, stupid people were harmless. Generally, they kept themselves and had zero impact on society and culture.

The Internet changed that. The effect of the web, specifically online forums and social media in general, allows stupid people to have a voice, one with near unlimited volume. And they can build communities of like-minded stupid people that self-reinforce stupidity through conspiracy theory mythology, pretty much the same as early Man creating myths to explain things they didn't understand like the sun rising every day. Their "facts" are authenticated by sheer volume alone.

The Web as welfare for stupid people applies in the same way a government handout does for lazy people. It makes you feel intelligent and your opinion valued without ever having to do the work/research/reading to earn those qualities. In the process, truth is marginalized in favor of artificial self-esteem, so you have a positive reinforcement for negative qualities.

Opinion media has turbocharged this effect exploiting stupid people for massive profits. Talking heads create entire soap opera style narratives and storylines that allow stupid people to be part of a distinct Us vs. Them community and culture. It mixes reality TV with soap opera with news creating a groupthink culture where like-minded people fit in and feel comfortable in their echo chamber. It's more participatory, which is really a key attribute, than as portrayed in the movie Idiocracy relying on a continuous cycle of peer reinforcement that makes a group think it is one thing (intelligent with a significant depth and breadth of knowledge matched with critical thinking abilities) that it clearly is not.