Re: [DIYbio] Re: Science literacy

I feel like it's kind of dangerous that the conversation switched so quickly toward assuming some kind of evolutionary component, here.

People are only as rational or clever or politically-incisive as the information they are provided with.

Your ancestors were as thick as muck, and believed in things that would put you in fits of laughter. It wasn't because their "genes" were inferior, it was because belief in those things was often the only option presented.

Today, most people are corralled into information farms where they are presented with facets of the real world through a 'personalised' lens. The marketing matter for this process makes it sound like it's a refinement that shows people what they are most 'interested' in, but all evidence suggests otherwise. These algorithms are trained end-to-end to do one thing: keep people using these services as much as possible. And even Youtube staff were warning executives there that the algorithms were displaying videos in such as way as to radically misinform viewers, pushing people to political extremes and presenting conspiracy theories alongside fact.

All these science-advocates on Youtube, Facebook, and blogging to the abstract SEO-network of Google Search won't achieve much if the viewers they are trying to reach are not being shown factual content.

People don't believe in this crap because they are genetically inferior. They believe it because their Facebook feed filters out 'boring' scientific content, because Google Search knows they're more likely to click on clickbait results, and because Silicon Valley make more money when people start to align with the models they have built to shape them.

Put it like this: these massive statistical models to decide what bucket to put people in, can only have N categories because of comptuational constraints. But if you keep guessing which bucket to put people in, they start to conform into their nearest bucket until most people actually start to fit into N categories. As long as thsoe are the N information-environments that are possible to inhabit, most people will inhabit those environments.

If you're in one of the buckets with access to factual content, congratulations. Your odds of ending up in the 'right' buckets is higher if you were born into a family with enough money for education, food, and shelter, so the usual inequalities still get a look in on this information-dystopia, but maybe you lucked out. But then again, if you've started taking an interest in modern-nerd stereotypes like Eugenics, are you sure you're in the 'good' bucket?

Is there a 'good' bucket? There's no market incentive for one - tolerantly-rational, emotionally-secure, communally-connected people are less likely to spend hours watching videos, or making click-through impulse buys, or click on ads, or making angry posts on social media..

If people thing vaccines cause autism, or that GMOs cause cancer, or that Bill Gates is using microchipped vaccines to oust Trump, or whatever... those ideas didn't come from nowhere. The values underneath them didn't come from nowhere. The emotional impetus didn't come from nowhere.

But it certainly didn't come from their genes.