the internet fosters madness

Submitted by skeptic on Fri, 2015-05-01 22:33
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The world (epicentre USA) needs to address the madness promulgated by the internet.

Examples:

  • Sandy Hook “truthers”: the government staged or faked the shootings to usher in gun control laws
  • NASA are geo-engineering the weather
  • anti-vaxxers who call vaccination "a form of rape" and deny the science
  • chemtrail conspiracists who think "the government" is spraying from aircraft
  • creationism
  • Fukushima radiation hysteria
    bleach enemas cure autism in children

My grandma believes that the President of the United States is trying to remove ‘In God We Trust’ from US currency.

I blame post-modernism, which preaches - as I understand it - that every opinion is valid, that truth is relative, that there is no objective observation and hence no identifiable objective truth. This twaddle has turned the liberal arts into brain mush, has crippled education (most teachers are liberal arts graduates), and severely undermined science in society. The opinion of an expert is now no more important than the opinion of a drug-addled musician or some airhead actor.

There’s a not-insignificant difference between saying 'you have no *business* challenging scientific experts' and 'you have no *right* to challenge scientific experts.' The first is a warning to lay people and people without the appropriate expertise about why they should be very careful challenging a scientific consensus without saying that they have no right to make such challenges. ... there is such a thing as expertise and challenging it requires more than just a Google education

I started out saying the epicenter is the USA. Most of the internet madness is US-centred. (and Fox News is the fulfilment of dystopian sci-fi stories about the debasement of media). America is becoming an international laughing stock over its religious and ideological repression of science and promotion of pseudo-science.

BBC presenter Justin Webb asked Mr Walker about his views on evolution following a speech at Chatham House. His response: "I'm going to punt on that one", adding that he thinks it is a question politicians "shouldn't be involved in one way or another".

[British Medical Journal:] For recommendations in The Dr Oz Show, evidence supported 46%, contradicted 15%, and was not found for 39%.

For sure there are plenty of brave scientists and skeptics trying to hold the line in the USA. But this poison spreads world-wide. The internet is an instrument of good but also of evil: society needs to create mechanisms to prevent the mind-rot it promulgates. If you can believe in creationism or chemical-spraying-747s or aliens-in-Roswell, you can believe anything. Like Scientology. Or homeopathy. Or denying climate change. We're creating a community of uncritical superstitious peasants, and at their core a coterie of insane anti-science paranoid-delusional conspiracists, feeding off each other in the internet echo-chambers* of like-(un)minded lunatics.

YouTube video are likely to be recommended further ER content, leading to immersion in an ideological bubble in just a few short clicks. The evidence presented in this article supports a shift of the almost exclusive focus on users as content creators and protagonists in extremist cyberspaces to also consider online platform providers as important actors in these same spaces.

* (so called not because they are alone but became they hear their ideas echoed back)

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