I mean, I suppose you can find examples of this of course. But you can just as easily find examples that portray the heroes entirely opposite of that (Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Tony Stark, Professor X, etc.).
I’m not entirely disagreeing with your point in general, but this does not present a particularly convincing example in my mind.
edited to add: there is even a trope about the genius hero! (The Genius Hero | Epic Heroism for the 21st Century: a Multimedia Web Resource)
Also, that ties in to the distrust for expertise; many people don’t think they need expert knowledge to understand or do something. Then they screw up, because they do. The flood of misinformation makes it worse but even without that people who “do their own research” would do a bad job because they don’t actually know what they are doing.
Heck, we see the same thing happen when an expert in one field decides they are automatically an expert in some other and falls into some pseudoscientific rabbithole. Raw intelligence doesn’t make up for ignorance.
There is a meme going around social media about how Trump is brilliant, thinks ten moves ahead and did the right thing with Zelenskyy. It starts with the author explaining that they have been a martial arts instructor for over a decade. They never explain how that qualifies them to lecture about politics.
“Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.”
–MLK
I have a cousin that I love, but from whom I had to disconnect. During COVID, she got the virus and was hospitalized. She told me that the mere ‘fact’ that there were (allegedly) vaccinated COVID patients in the hospital where she was proved that the vaccination was ineffective.
I told her that she could probably also find motorcycle riders who had been in an accident but who were wearing a helmet in the Emergency Room, but that this wouldn’t tell her how many helmet-wearing motorcycle riders who were wearing a helmet but crashed … were fortunate enough to sleep in their own beds that night.
Cousin Kathy … “did her own research.”
:rolleyes:
Apparently the only ding against Farmer’s Dog is the lack of feeding trials and that they don’t actually own their facilities. Doing co-packing and contract manufacturing is a no-no according to the standards bodies, presumably due to lack of control.
Still, it’s a lot closer than most boutique dog foods. I’m lucky that my dog will happily wolf down plain old bog standard green-bag Purina Dog Chow like it’s the most delicious thing on earth.
“You think Einstein walked around thinking everyone was a bunch of dumb-shits? Now you know why he built that bomb.”
–Rita from Idiocracy
A lot of people are simply uneducated and stupid. Not like “I don’t know much about the dogfood industry” stupid but stupid like you could explain it to them forever and it would be like trying to teach a chicken to find the square root of pi.
I guess the way I look at is that I’m a pretty smart and educated guy - degrees in engineering and business with lots of real world experience working in one of the most competitive cities in the world with really smart people often doing really complex shit. But I’m not smart enough to invent something like the atomic bomb like Einstein or Oppenheimer did. I’m also not on the internet proclaiming intensely that I have better ideas about building a nuclear reactor than the nuclear energy industry. So I’m smart enough to know that I don’t know everything.
So really the question is why are there so many uneducated, uninformed, and simply stupid people who are so unwilling to have their beliefs challenged
I’ve learned a lot observing my wife’s family, who I largely regard as “stupid”. They aren’t particularly well educated. They aren’t well travelled. They’ve spent most of their lives within an hours drive of the rural town they live in. Most of them are also super old at this point (then again, so is my dad but he doesn’t act like this).
What I’ve observed is that they are not really capable of much critical thinking. They don’t like doing anything that bucks convention or alters the status quo. In fact, they are so incurious about the world as to almost be agoraphobic. They don’t even really like to be questioned about why they believe what they believe, usually snapping back with hostility or insipid banalities.
People like this are easy to manipulate because they don’t have the self-awareness to understand that the reason they feel the way they feel is because that is what they are being shown so they will feel that way. We’re starting with people with limited experience and educational context who are already at an age where the world is very different from what they grew up with. Then they spend all day watching Fox News that is a constant loop of clean cut men and women in business suits talking about illegals murdering people, transvestites in the elementary schools dunking on your daughter on the basketball court, and all the government waste found in places other than defence contractors and energy industry subsidies. So that’s what their small minds glom onto.
Also it doesn’t help the sheer volume of “information” being generated by marketers, politicians, influencers, and other parties design to make people “feel” a certain way to drive them towards some desired action (ie buy this, vote that, hate these people).
But at the end of the day, people are mostly just dumb. No one reads 1984 and thinks they are the mindless Proles or the compliant, enabling Inner Party members screaming in outrage at the telescreen, not really remembering if they are at war with Eastasia or Eurasia. That is assuming they read it at all and have more than a vague understanding it’s about “Big Brother watching everyone”.
As they say; consider how dumb the average person is, and then consider that half the population is dumber than that.
And mostly unwilling to admit that they are even to themselves; not many people want to think of themselves as stupid and/or ignorant, after all.
A friend on Facebook invited people to have a polite discussion on what Trump was doing in his second term. One of them, a woman I will refer to as L, was very much in support of Trump. When she made factual claims, I asked for evidence supporting them. She responded with insults and attacks. The friend whose page it was explained to L that I was not being rude and that it was L’s job to provide evidence. L linked to an article about how USAID in Haiti was a failure. I read it. Despite an obvious pro Trump slant, even the article admitted that they didn’t have anywhere near enough data to prove that USAID was actually a failure in Haiti. I pointed that out with a quote from the article. I also pointed out that the article only talked about Haiti and said nothing about USAID in all the other countries. L responded to my comment with a laughing emoji and more insults.
I kept asking for evidence. L kept insulting me. Eventually our mutual friend told us to just drop it. I stopped commenting on the post. L insulted me again and said ‘You want evidence? Here it is!’ She then posted three screenshots from Musk’s X feed where listed all the programs he had cut, how miuch they were wasting and how much money he had saved taxpayers. So, her ‘evidence’ were Musk’s words alone- not backed by proof or evidence of any kind.
No critical thinking skills at all. L did not even understand that if she posted a claim made by Musk, instead of just making the claim herself, it still needed actual proof.
You have to realize that this is the normal way people think. Most of our thinking is based on believing what an authority figure tells us. This the way we learned things back when we were living in hunter/gatherer tribes. This the way we learn things growing up with parents and older siblings and teachers. And it’s the way we get through our daily lives.
Scientific thinking is when we look at the evidence and draw our conclusions of what is true based on the evidence. And scientific thinking is the exception.
If you did a Doper poll on which they’d depend on for evaluating a health intervention, systematic reviews published in quality science journals vs. their own or others’ compelling-sounding anecdotes, at least one third would pick anecdotes if they were answering honestly.
It’s the way a lot of us are wired, whether religious or not.
I have the same problem with my wife’s family. I don’t like to engage any of them in political discussions, except sometimes when they say something stupid in front of my kids. Usually I’ll just ask questions for them to clarify like:
Me: What do you mean by “woke”?
Crazy Aunt: You know “woke”. You don’t know what woke means?
Me: I’m familiar with the term but everyone seems to have their own version. What do you think it means?
Usually it means something deplorable.
Same Crazy Aunt got bent out of shape about something I said (some part of an inane conversation my wife started about the ingredients in yogurt).
Crazy Aunt: Not everyone had the benefit of coming from money
Me: I didn’t “come from money”. My parents worked for a living, just like I do.
Crazy Aunt: Well some places don’t have the same opportunities.
At this point I just sort of tuned them out but I’m thinking to myself "You’re like 90 minutes from NYC, two hours from Philly, with a dozen mid-sized cities within that radius. At any point during the past 80s years you could have been like “I’m going to try so seek my fortune elsewhere in the Tri-State Area.”
But they never do because that would require risk and with risk comes failure.
I almost consider it a “peasant mentality”. Like there’s nothing going on upstairs in terms of critical thinking or even some larger morality. It’s like as long as someone shows sufficient authority and confidence, that is who they follow.
They’re just a whole bunch of "bless your heart-style iron filings.
In a protracted and pathetic search for a magnet.
Also see: ““When the magnetic elevators – think of it – magnets. Now, all I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets,” Trump said at his rally in Mason City.”
Just out of curiosity, do they hail from a region like the Pine Barrens or bog-standard suburbia?
No, the Barrens are further south and all the ISO Standard NJ Suburban Communities are to the east. It’s more like the Pennsyltucky region of Western NJ.
True. A lot of people seem to put stock in the level of presented emphasis they saw, as opposed to any assessment of the truth or factuality or evidence basis for the thing being said; clickbaity pseudo-news articles titled “THESE 9 FOODS WILL KILL YOU! Doctors say if you have these things in your kitchen THROW THEM OUT! Number 5 will SHOCK YOU!” are just begging for credulous people to mindlessly repeat them.
Nuance doesn’t get clicks, so the internet doesn’t like it.
For most of human history, finding safe foods and avoiding poisonous ones, and processing poisonous foods to make them safe to eat were matters of life and death, and relying on tradition a far better bet than trying things out for yourself or listening to what some guy claiming to be an expert says. The time since we’ve had mostly-reliable science is an eye-blink in comparison.
Plus nutrition science has been one of the most visibly unreliable, with experts frequently changing their minds about what is good and bad for us. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to take their recommendations on dog nutrition with a pinch of salt.
Well i think that applies to modern history as well. Most people find safety, security, and success in following their local customs and traditions and career paths. And when coupled to things like religion, nationality, and ideology, those things become integral to a person’s identity. Any attempt to question those beliefs and customs becomes an existential threat.
Most people are not driven by science and factual information. They are driven by feelings. For example:
Last summer the pump for our swimming pool broke (because it’s 20 years old). There are a couple of options:
I go with the least expensive option because I have a degree in engineering and like fixing things. And with a few YouTube videos and trips to the pool supply store, it’s pretty intuitive how it works.
So in my mind, I’m going through an iterative scientific process to resolve the issues as I discover them:
My wife OTOH has no scientific background. Plus she was raised in the woods by The Stupids so her learned reaction is that when something breaks one of two things happens:
So the entire time I have to deal with my wife nagging me about the damn pool pump and paying someone else twice as much to replace it because she has no idea how it works and is afraid I’ll irreparably break it, Which doesn’t even make logical sense as worse thing that happens is I pay someone to fix it and we’re out a couple hundred bucks on the parts I ordered.
But that’s how most people are. Most people don’t understand science or how to discern factual information with a critical eye. So they just go with their feelings. Which is really just a nice way of saying they are morons.
When you say science-based information there is almost always science-based information that can counter the same thing. People tend to share the aspects of information that reinforce their particular agenda without showing aspects that would leave things up to questioning. This lowers the overall confidence in information we receive.
Many people assume that a higher price means better quality, often using cost as a shortcut to judge value. In luxury markets, steep prices can add to a product’s prestige. Interestingly, increasing the price of a slow-selling item can sometimes boost demand—especially if consumers equate expense with excellence. However, this strategy isn’t always reliable, particularly in competitive, price-conscious industries.
Personally, I prefer to find the most affordable option that meets my needs and provides good-quality ingredients—for both me and my pets. With the money I save, I’ll buy my cats a fun toy.
Al Roker?
John Oliver did a segment on this several years ago:
Scientific Studies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
18,010,837 views May 9, 2016
John Oliver discusses how and why media outlets so often report untrue or incomplete information as science.
Around the 14:40 minute mark there’s a clip of Roker on the Today Show saying ~“The way to live your life is to find a study that sounds best to you and go with that.”
Um…No.