At those rates you might as well be complaining about people who believe they are Jesus Christ reincarnated, or that they are trolling for the fun of it.
Why am seeing "brother" a lot recently?
When I was a teenager WWF came to my town. The day before the event a bunch of the wrestlers randomly showed up to my local gym to get a workout in. None of the guys, and especially Macho Man ever broke character the entire workout. They were super nice and after a bit of handshakes with us there we all just went back to our workouts.
But also, Warhammer 40K is popular.
If you grow up in a house in the woods with every math book known to man, but nothing else, you will eventually read them.
But if that house also has every comic book, porno mag, animal bloopers, etc, you’ll never pick one up.
Consider nutrition. Technological advancements mean that people have access to both higher-quality food and lower-quality food than their ancestors. In practice that seems to have resulted in some people eating healthier than their ancestors could have, and others worse.
We have the best medicines we’ve ever had, and yet life expectancy is down in many countries.
We have more wealth as a globe and yet we are fighting more wars than in generations.
We have more automation than ever and yet people are working harder for less.
We have more capability for democratization of knowledge and capital and yet inequality is higher than ever.
The list goes on. Technology/science are not ends in themselves, and the positive ends they allow are going in reverse.
Something or set of things must specifically be going wrong wherever you live. It would probably be interesting to identify what.
There is no way to “align” human brains to your preferences. The Soviets tried it, the Chinese tried it, the Americans tried it. Nobody succeeded. The best you can do is attempt to sway the masses, but you’d better rely on positive messaging, because mass culture’s failure modes are even scarier than small subcultures.
Attempting to stamp out competing worldviews leads a certain kind of (relatively common) person to dig even harder for forbidden knowledge. If you’re not careful this will lead people directly to the arms of your geopolitical enemies, as it’s not possible to fully stamp out their narratives—they have a big budget!
You can’t escape fringe beliefs, but admittedly it seems like there were fewer of them in the USSR. Or maybe they were just ignored, poorly documented, or still untranslated.
I'm talking mostly from a East German perspective in the late 70s and 80s (so quite late). I actually need to find out whether Lysenkoism was taken seriously in 1950's East Germany or whether it was silently ignored (open rebellion wouldn't have gone well with the 'Big Brother' in the East).
But the communists are smarter than the free world, at least the Americans, which I take it to represent the peak of capitalism and western liberal traditions. The PRC literacy rate is 96.67%, the USA is 79%. In 1937 the Soviet literacy rate was 75%, the USA appears to have been 97% literate then? [1] so somehow the Americans have become nearly as illiterate as a recently industrialized nation of peasants.
Ah, apparently late 70s literacy rate in the Soviet Union was 99.7%. [2].
> but nobody believed in communism either
I really recommend reading some Mao/Stalin era publications, not just from folks like Lenin but general notes from standing committees or national congresses. Even today the national congress of the PRC will get into all sorts of debates about communism. I don't believe their current system is socialist, but they sure do, and there's no doubt that there were a lot of true believers around Mao. I strongly doubt the cultural revolution or red guard could have happened without a lot of peasants genuinely believing in the cause.
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/naal/lit_history.asp#illiteracy
[2] https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/sem-2016...
Edit: Cuba's literacy rate is 98% lol https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?location...
This should be obvious if you’ve ever been to a restaurant or airport in the USA, do you really think 1 in 5 adults can’t read a menu?
Very few. They are louder online. I have never met one in real life.
Yes, the internet does spread misinformation, but I think its pessimistic to think it outweighs the benefits. A lot of the problems are economic and social at the core too.
And even more people believe there's an old man on a cloud judging everyone, so what?
Burden of proof is on the person making the assertion in both cases, but we can’t prove without a doubt that god doesn’t exist even if we don’t feel there’s enough evidence to suggest he is. There is, however, concrete evidence the earth isn’t flat, so no matter who the burden is on it’s demonstrably false.
Put another way: You can concretely observe without a doubt that not only is the earth not flat, but also that it can’t be flat. We can’t confidently say god can’t exist.
(a) "I can prove earth is not flat" (using this methodology) (b) I cannot prove there is no God, though I may believe the prevalence of evidence does not support the hypothesis, there's no scientific test that I can design.
This is essentially Descartes evil demon issue. If you can't disprove that an evil demon (with god-level powers) is deceiving you at everything you perceive, then how are you going to be sure about anything? (including that the Earth is not flat?)
It has always been a difficult philosophical issue about how much we can trust reality itself.
I can disprove that the Earth is flat with the incredibly varied, concrete, observable evidence that it is not. It comes in many forms and is undeniable, hence the lengths flat earthers have to go to to “prove” the evidence is all just a collection of lies that serve some nebulous, nefarious purpose (they don’t even agree on what that is) that serves some faceless evil group they prop up (usually “the deep state” or Jewish people). On the other hand, I do not have concrete, observable evidence that God does not exist. That’s the thrust of my point.
Perhaps you might think this is bullshit because *obviously* this world is real and not an illusion and there is *obviously* no evil demon to deceive us into thinking the Earth is spherical instead of flat.
And yes this is what philosophers do. Nobody here is arguing that such demon exists and is actually deceiving us, but since you've accepted you can't prove god doesn't exist (maybe mis-step for you since you're probably not the philosopher type), well, can you prove such demon doesn't exist? Seems to me the same thing.
No. Lots of knowledge is still behind paywalls or not yet digitized. Some models have been trained on books that we cannot search or download.
I'd take those over the people who want to shove AI down our throats any day of the week!