It's depressing, man

Yeah maybe, but that’s more to do with knowledge rather than intelligence.

IMO, for successful reasoning you need two things:

1. Correct assumptions - what you think
2. Correct reasoning - how you think

The former is tough, even scientific consensus changes often due to new better studies, sometimes due to externalities and the human element etc etc. It’s understandably impossible to know everything about everything.

But the latter is about how you think, whether you’re able to reason properly, your conclusions and steps actually logically flow from your premises which are based on your assumptions.

I think a lot of perceived stupidity isn’t misinformation, but the lack of this second ability to reason properly, and even an unwillingness to do so because the conclusions are unpleasant. It’s like people became (or always were) too comfortable with lying to themselves to avoid discomfort.

I wrote a paper for English in college, which I wouldn’t write the same way today.

I started with a shocking, racist statement that I held up as an example of things that aren’t acceptable. I spent the rest of the paper both refuting that and drawing parallels to other things that shouldn’t be acceptable.

My shocking statement was effectively taken at face value, and I was originally given a D on the paper. I went back and argued it into a B, because it really wasn’t what it seemed at first, if you just read it.

That attention getter sure got attention though. I don’t remember if that was part of the assignment.

I tend to have this writing style often enough that my super power is convincing people to do the opposite of whatever I’m advocating for. There’s at least one famous Lemmy example from me.

Yes because almost everyone in the planet agrees with the sentiment, even the people we consider stupid (who use a different metric).

When I had intense legal problems I found myself being stupid and then regretted decades ago judging all the kids at school who may have had horrific home lives.

Not true, because a fuckton of those stupid people erroneously believe they’re smarter than everyone else in the world. The number of times I have heard “if I were in charge, everything would be straightened out” from these troglodytes is too damn high. I’m actually smart enough to know how insanely demanding “being in charge” and “doing things right” actually fucking is so I god damned know I am not up for the challenge so, yeah, actually they’re still actually fucking stupid. Sorry, not sorry.

Yeah I know: Dunning-Kruger effect.

Emotional space is easier to navigate than semantic space, and people are lazy. The best LLMs have parameters in the multiple 100s of billions and they’re not able to parse at a human-level. That’s more neurons than’s in the human brain (~86B). I’m not even sure what my point is, too lazy to keep the thread. I’ma take a nap. You take care.

Yeah, emotional intelligence is hugely overlooked, too, when interpreting what others say, and to also not be swept up by every little thing, and that low eq breeds for resentment, which is rife for the brainwashing that propaganda is. We all need to be focusing on teaching the next Gen how to step outside their emotions, as an observer, and reflect on the message they are for oneself, not a cue for how to treat others, or define oneself by, and to look inside and heal, or self care, if those emotional messages are extreme. That’s your own little tamagotchi to care for. It’s not even iq, it’s eq (and eq can always be built as high as you want to go) , and the world would be a different place. It’s easy not to care, when you feel like you have been thrown out with the trash, and knee jerk to all your emotions, rather than be an entity that observes your emotions.

ETA, added words, because distraction.

Emotional intelligence?

I think you mean skepticism and critical thought. You mention both, but emotional intelligence isn’t what you’re after. Emotional intelligence is a skill that could be manipulated to get past someone’s skepticism. Emotion, “feels”, get in the way of critical thought.

Everyone feels emotions. Emotional intelligence means being capable of recognizing your own emotions (or other people’s) and not let them rule you, but to let you rule them, so they can help you when necessary and not damage you.

You only need to be of average intelligence to have 4 billion people dumber than you

I know someone that saying Steam Deck sucks because its running linux, that a Lenovo Legion is superior, because its running Windows, but also complain about Windows updates and disabled all updates. Like dude gets a new device and the first thing he does is turn off updates, and then stays on the stock rom. Well good luck running the 5 year old OS while you do online banking, dumbass, surely the cybercriminals would be nice to you.