I don’t know about y’all, but if I grew up in a country that never has the news criticizing its leaders, I’d be very skepical and deduce that there is censorshop going on and the offical news could be exaggerated or entirely falsified. Do people in authoritarian countries actually just eat the propaganda? To what extent do they believe the propaganda?
Considering that critical thinking has to be thought to you, I think most people who skipped college may not have a good grasp on it.
Most school curriculums nowadays have critical thinking interwoven as important parts of the STEM classes, in both primary and high school. Its not exclusive to college graduates, however if you do a philosophy course then you will have learned the highest level of it - and I’m sure many school systems around the world have varying degrees of quality of education.
But agreed it is absolutely something that people are not born with and must (and should) be taught.
I would draw a distinct line between the critical thinking of engineering and the critical thinking of the humanities, but yes. Just in the sense that engineering alone is good, but definitely not sufficient.
There is a common archetype of person in stem who thinks that because they’re very good at programming that they’re also very good at everything, and so spends half of their college tenure in a fratboy flophouse reinventing basic philosophy ideas Isaac Asimov thought of 70 years ago as part of their mission to solve society’s problems with bitcoin.
My fiance has more critical thinking and political analysis of world events and history than anyone I’ve met, reads books just about every day, writes and communicates clearly. Just talking to him for a little bit you’ll get the impression that he’s very intelligent.
He’s a highschool dropout.
people who skipped college may not have a good grasp
Yes, but that’s not typical for a high school dropout; he’s exceptional. Highschool dropouts are not super well read, as a demographic, either. I’m was not being hostile towards people who didn’t go to college.
critical thinking
Seriously, if you are AWARE of propaganda, you are also aware that you have been influenced by it. Propaganda is pervasive in civilizations. It is simply manipulation. TV ads and guys trying to pick up chicks are everyday uses of propaganda.
I go on Reddit and come here and I nod along and I’m like yes, yes, and then I leave and sometimes it feels like coming up from being underwater. We are quite literally surrounded in propaganda. It has never been easier to disseminate opinions, especially when the majority of our communications (mine for sure) come via text on a screen. It is in every single facet of our lives.
And so I talk to my brother and he always tries to get me to think more, he’s a smart guy. He says things like “Who benefits the most” from whatever, opinion I’ve talked to him about, and so frequently it goes back to corporations. I don’t want to get overtly political, but personally the best way I try to think about things is linearly: this thing we are talking about, trace it to its logical end point and origin. And then feel helpless again.
It’s so nice of you to tell us what would you do and how you’d behave in an hypothetical situation that you have never been nurtured and raised on, and how good you’d do facing it under your current morals and mental framework that may or may not be available during that situation
Good times, critical thinking was had by all
Intelligent people in those countries do realize though…
Do you believe the propaganda in your own country? What a painfully ignorant comment
I find way too many people talking about “common sense” as if that was even a thing. It frustrates me to no end.
“common sense”
A set of assumptions(usually false) acquired before age 12.
I’m wondering how you are measuring “common sense” that arrives at “usually false.” Are you ignoring obviously common sense things, like “the sky is up” – since that’s just common sense?
If you are in North America and you draw a line straight up, will you reach the sky in Australia?
Well I didn’t say the sky isn’t also down. (Begrudging upvote.)
You know, you are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
I respect your technical smartass response to my technical smartass check attempt.
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People focus their energies on getting through the day for the most part of their lives. It is very hard for people to muster the time and energy to paying attention to politics, let alone ideologically political propaganda.
The vast majority flat ignore it entirely and remain in an apolitical state. This is a primary function of propaganda: insulating people from political action or thought that might alter the status quo.
Propaganda doesn’t necessarily need to convince people, but can instead attack the peoples ability to differentiate truth and lie by sowing mistrust about the most mundane and conventional things. When people stop believing their own eyes or following logic, they become easier to manipulate. A bit like gas-lighting, where you sort of turn the critical thinking against them, but on a large scale.
A lot of people don’t think. But a lot of people do think critically, and they just think differently from you or me.
If we believe nobody thinks critically, how can we even begin to effect change?
Do people in authoritarian countries actually just eat the propaganda? To what extent do they believe the propaganda?
Where I come from? Not much, but part of that is because the lies are so obvious and in conflict with people’s lived experience that you can’t even delude yourself into accepting them.
Critical thinking has been an increasingly rare skill, partially because people are focusing on conspiracy theories instead.
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I’ve recently gotten into BP debating and it teaches you a palette of skills useful in seeing through propaganda. (Seeing nuance in bad things, playing devil’s advocate, narrowing down disputes to very specific points of contention, explaining things with chains of cause and effect, putting facts into perspective, making sure to explicitly define words, …) I wish more people tried it – it would raise the quality of discourse in society so much.
I wish I was like that.
No one, including you, is immune to propaganda.
I try and explain this to people all the time but many don’t want to believe it.
There are 2 types of people in this world; those who are influenced by propaganda, and those who don’t know they are influenced by propaganda.
Most of hollywood is propaganda. It relies on getting revenue from other sources. If you’ve ever bought a star wars action figure or a marvel funko pop, you’ve fallen for the propaganda. Hollywood isn’t producing art for art’s sake. They’re producing commercials for merchandise.
There’s a third type. People like me see the propaganda everywhere, get a sad laugh out of it every time, and go about my day dodging rain drops and replacing alternators.
IDGAF
If you see propaganda everywhere, the it was successful on you. One purpose of propaganda is to erode the fundamental trust in society and sow distrust about anything and anyone, that way people become politically ineffective and easy to manipulate.
I don’t have any significant distrust in society in general, just a heavy distrust of the greedy oligarchs in positions of power.
Meanwhile, the orange turd posted an AI generated image of himself as the next pope…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5AvLxeTvivY
Go ahead and read some comments there, he done offended even the atheists out there!
I’m not a governor, attorney, judge, senator, etc in any position to directly do anything about the crooked powers in charge, but as a citizen, I guess this is the best I can do, share the news.
Toupee fallacy. Just because you can recognize some of the propaganda, it doesn’t mean you can recognize all of it. You’re not aware of what flies under the radar while still influencing you.
I don’t have anything influencing me except my roommate and my mom, and that’s usually just helping keep their vehicles running, carrying groceries, taking the trash out, and bathing the dog.
I see the politics and propaganda every day, I just don’t give a fuck. Nothing I can do about it anyways.
So you’ve been propagandized into thinking there’s nothing you can do, so you shouldn’t care.
Nah, I just don’t have the means to do anything.
I’m a repair tech, not a politician.
It’s working.
Ah so you’ve fallen for the propaganda that says you don’t have the power to change anything, that’s just what the small number of elites want the large number of masses to think
I’ve helped the NSA return stolen laptops, and risked my life putting out a forest fire with my hoodie before it got a chance to reach the dead grass field.
Of course there’s things I can and have done to help change the world, but politics ain’t quite my thing.
You’re contradicting yourself my dude. You give enough of a fuck to help people. Doing things for your community is a political action. Maybe you just haven’t gotten the chance to understand your political leanings
Bold of you to assume you recognize every piece of propaganda for what it truly is. And that you have a choice to just ignore it. It often feels like we are in control of what we give attention to and what we choose to retain as factual knowledge but we’re not.
The best we can do is try to recognize when some piece of information, or source, we believe may not be as valid as it once appeared and try to rectify our beliefs moving forward. It’s a never ending job. But if you want to actually have beliefs based in fact there’s no other option.
Yes. However believing all beliefs are equal because they are equally likely to be false which is what “everyone is influenced by propaganda” implies, is also an incorrect way to think and an intellectually dishonest shirking of responsibility. Kudos to you for not simply repeating the mantra but stating the right response to it.
I believe in mathematics and schematics. I also believe in the right to repair.
I do not believe in invisible deities and I don’t trust most politicians.
Edit: And I damn sure don’t trust AI!
Those are like the most superficial layer of propaganda. The real danger of propaganda is that it doesn’t look like it, it looks like other regular people making you support their interests without you realizing it.
Do you like engines? Do you dislike electric vehicles? Do you like guns? If so, when and where did those ideas come from? You weren’t born with them.
The real propaganda is money.
Like, whoever designed the idea of rent (which is basically a safe place to perform the biological function of sleep and store your stuff).
You don’t own a damn thing anymore, nor do I. But for real, whoever invented the concept of rent, invented the concept of taxing humans for the right to sleep in a safe space.
Edit: Do you own the dirt under your feet?
Didn’t think so.
Do you own the dirt under your feet?
The house around me, and the dirt under it, yes.
Up until recently, I thought carrots were good for seeing in the dark. It’s something my mother told me over and over as a kid. I never bothered to research it - I liked carrots after all.
How would a carrot help with seeing in the dark? All my carrots emit zero light not even a faint glow.
You need to bite off the end first
I mean, honestly, I’m questioning if anything my parents told me is even real, or is it just exaggerated to make themselves seem like great parents in order to diminish my view on their toxicity.
It’s hard to distinguish between what’s a genuine doubt from a conspiracy theory.
That’s the thing with people.
Some have zero skepticism, and believe everything they see.
Others are overly skeptical and distrusts everything, including science.
It’s hard to find the right balance.
I find the right balance (for me) to be actively seeking out conversations that challenge my beliefs and worldview, being open to being wrong, and developing a good bullshit detector. I guess growing up during the Cold War helped instill in me a fair amount of distrust for authority of any kind helped. Even still I believed the propaganda about the US being a beacon of freedom and democracy until I was exposed to the truth of the matter, but still, I sought out counter-narratives and listened to the weight of evidence and was willing to admit to being wrong and changing my views, so… shrug
Yes, but, how does one actually develop “a good bullshit detector”? We all think we have one of those. Especially people who don’t. And thinking that when it’s not true is the hook, line and sinker that gets people deeply into dangerous conspiracies.
The first step is not accepting everything you read at face value. Start investigating the claims you see on the news or social media and you will develop a sense for which ones tend to be bullshit and which ones tend not to be, you will learn to recognize the bullshit ideas not because they’re obviously bullshit at first, but because they’re surrounded by the kind of language that bullshit claims are often smuggled into. It’s just pattern-matching, it’s a skill like everything else and you can practice it and get better. One way to do this is to just find a news article, scroll to a random point in it, highlight a sentence that makes a truth claim about something, and go ‘That seems like bullshit, I’ll look for corroborating sources’ even if you’re sure it’s true. Then go do find 3-4 other sources that talk about the same thing and see how they shade things differently. Aside from learning to match the pattern you also learn which sources are more or less reliable, more or less biased, etc. A good tool for this specifically for news is GroundNews, every article they show includes ratings for how biased the source is, a list of other sources that also report on the same incident and what their biases are, etc. Plus it’s been my experience that looking at things from several angles is kind of like drawing a bunch of lines that pass near the point of truth - the more lines you draw, the narrower the space in which the truth must reside, so the easier it is to find the center.
The second and perhaps most important step is being willing to be wrong, especially in public. Be concerned not about whether or not you will look bad but whether or not you are putting good information out there. Develop the habit of stopping in the middle of your political rant or whatever and going ‘Wait, am I sure about this? I should check.’ In a similar vein, get into the habit of providing sources for your own claims, even if only because that reinforces the habit of checking yourself. I discuss politics a lot online and have often found myself going ‘Oh yeah, well <this> is how the world really works!’, then I go looking for a source to cite and discover that I was wrong. Don’t flee from that uncomfortable feeling, swallow your pride and embrace it. The more you get into the habit of checking yourself the easier it becomes to remember to check others too, and again, the more familiar you become with what truth and bullshit look like from the inside and from the outside. It will also help you develop a bit of humility, which is unrelated but still a good thing to have.
Also on the subject of sources, look for authoritative sources first. If you’re investigating a claim about vaccines making people sick, for example, don’t look for news articles about it; go straight to the CDC where they have data about adverse incident rates for vaccines that is publicly available. When you hear about something that happened in a particular place check the local newspapers first because they’re likely to have picked up the story before anyone else and are more committed to providing accurate information that’s relevant to locals than the national media, they tend to sensationalize stories less. This isolates you somewhat from some of the more egregious bias and spin out there.
