Quote:
Originally Posted by cromag
Speaking as someone who has a presence on Facebook and "likes" folks like NASA, Space.com, Science News, etc., you'd be amazed at the folks pushing the Flat Earth concept and insisting (INSISTING!!!) that we sheep must spend our time researching it!
I have remarked on more than one occasion that bandwidth is too cheap!
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I almost missed this one. YES, that's the boggling part. I cannot believe the adamancy around this, that we're all just Sheeples, and that they are "in the know." It's...gasp-worthy.
I think I've said this before, but...for most of my career, I was
incredibly lucky. I worked with a ton of gifted, highly-successful people. (Of course, truth be told, in RE Development, only the gifted, hard-working survive. The mediocre sink to the bottom and go bankrupt quickly.) That includes amazing architects, engineers, even landscape architects, you name it. On Fridays, when other folks would go out drinking, we'd all hang out at charettes, coming up with creative solutions for various development-related problems. We enjoyed problem-solving--that was recreation for us.
So...even though I always knew that not
everyone in the world was a genius, I think that I truly underestimated just how bad it is "out here" in the rest of the world, and the advent of the Net has increasingly brought it home to me. And the more I see it, the more upset I get about it. I realize it's dumb--there's nothing to be done, and god knows, you can't force education or even any type of rational or logical thinking onto people, but I do believe that in a mere 15 years, it's gotten much, much worse--and that, I think, is largely down to smartphones.
I recall reading that one of the forums that I used to find amusing to read, TVWOP (TV Without Pity), which used to host these hilarious TV episode recaps, was nuked by Bravo (which was the final owner), because that sort of "long form communication isn't done any longer." I mean...
what?
It's not bad enough that people think that they can
actually communicate, in 140 characters, or enjoy the banality of Facebook; that a blog post longer than 300 words is nowadays too long for the typical person's attention span; that SAT scores are
routinely in the 300's, but now,
a bloody forum post is considered "long form communication?"
Christ, no wonder people can't think and that it's easy for the easily-swayed to find like-minded groups of dolts, to inculcate into FE theories and other faux "science."
I realize, there's no going back, but I often wonder now if anyone is noticing the serious slippery slope of "dumbing down" that seems to be accelerating like a giant damn Downhill Racer snowball. Is it me? I mean, really, have I reached that point where I'm officially old, and have started yammering about the "good old days?" I don't think that is it, but...what I see is
truly scary.
I keep hoping that I was just insulated. That my luck also kept me from seeing it everywhere before, and that the Net has indeed become the great electonic melting pot, and so, I'm able/forced to see the hordes of Sheeples that don't think about anything. That don't think beyond 140 characters, or what a Kardashian is wearing, or what game is on the TV tonight, and so forth. I guess that IRL, we only hang out with people who are largely our intellectual equivalents--it just sort of happens that way--but on the Net, we see
everything. We're exposed to it all. I hope that's right, and that it's not genuinely getting so much worse.
I really do.
FLAT EARTH. Man, I still can't even type it without thinking that somehow, I'm being punked and pranked. How can that be real? I mean, the movement, obviously, not the bloody FLAT EARTH.
Jesus.
Sorry for going on at such length. TY for putting up with it.
/rant
Hitch