Now instead of your aunt coming at you with misinfo she learned from her aunt, it's your aunt coming at you with misinformation she learned from a russian bot farm.
Yes and to make it even worse, your aunt back in the day would tell 10 people some BS and maybe 3 would believe her. Not some Russian bot factory spits out BS to 10 million people and a lot more believe it.
Did you spray for Russians under your bed before going to sleep? You really should, and check behind the sofa and in the dryer too. Russians can disguise themselves as Bounce dryer sheets, and the latest Russians can send themselves over Ethernet using the RoE protocol: Russian over Ethernet.
Russia! Quite an imaginary world you live in! Aunts and Russians and bots and misinformation and all these people targeting you! How exciting!
Can I send you my Moral Rearmament and John Birch Society fliers?
Yep. The mark of a stupid Westerner is how much they blame Russia for their country's problems (the exception being Ukraine obviously). Meanwhile the US literally has a billion+ dollar anti-China propaganda budget (taxpayer funded) and a decentralized, private network of pro-Israel propagandists backed by the richest people in the country, buying up entire media companies for that purpose.
I have a gen-z friend who unjokingly does that. He's like "I asked grok if it was true and it confirmed it."
I wish at least he followed up with the logic or sources behind it... but no he was like "grok said so. I asked it." he was dead serious. and I wanted to hit my head into a fucking wall
Sadly, I gotta disagree. Searching used to be easier, back when search engines prioritized finding useful information. Now they are vehicles for delivering ads and collecting user data.
Google of the early-2000s era was an entirely different site. I used to be able to find almost anything I needed to search for. As far as I’ve seen, there is nothing comparable to that early-Google out there today. (Though I’d be ecstatic to be proven wrong on that!)
Unfortunately Google is still the king of search engines. Try searching for most technical facts or most common issues or anything else on most search engines and you really can't find it. You might find some things but you won't find the amount of information you can find on Google. The problem with the internet nowadays is not that searching has gotten worse, it's that there is such a plethora of information out there that you have to have the right skill set to be able to go through it. The reason you were able to find everything in the olden days was that there was so few websites out there that it was very very simple to search all of them. And the counterpoint to saying that there is a plethora of misinformation now when you're looking at your phone simply means that you're visiting websites and looking at sources that have a plethora of misinformation. It is very very simple to cross reference and find the correct information pretty much anywhere.
Just disable AI slop from you search engine or stop using google and such, learn how to make un-biased searches, start to understand how to spot a fake information and start questioning what you read
I never said that it's a justification lol, anyway, biased search is when you search something like "Is X better than Y" or something like this, which is wrong to do because it's biased and so it will give biased results too
Example:
If i search "is tomato more healty than potatoes?" Instead of "The pros and cons of eating tomatoes and potatoes" i will get biased results that will mostly say "you should eat only tomatos!!!"
All the people replying to you arguing that you can't trust the internet because of AI and Algorithims... this too is a skill issue.
Stop going to Google or MSN or Yahoo
There are search engines that don't use algorithms or AI, and others that don't use algorithms and you can turn off the AI.
It also helps to understand WHERE you are getting your information from and use watchdog sites that can tell you if a site is a reputable source or not. Heading over to I'Mright.com isn't going to help you unless you're looking for confirmation bias.
Who defines the "right information"? The algorithms? The information conforms to what your peer group is saying is the "right information"? It's consistent with what government agencies are saying?
We really aren't any better off than just believing what aunt Marge said since you can find the exact same thing she said and things the exact opposite and which one you believe is just down to what feels right. It's just believing what aunt Marge said with more steps.
If you had a question that nobody could answer, you’d go down to the library, open up a drawer with a bunch of note cards in it, look to see if any of the note cards had a word about a concept you wanted to learn about, hope that the card existed, was in the right place, and listed a book that would actually give you the information you wanted.
Or you wouldn't go through the effort, you'd ask a trusted elder or a friend, they would lie to you, and you'd peddle that misinformation for decades while refusing that you might be wrong. Guess which one was more likely
The first step would be opening an encyclopedia. A lot of households actually had an encyclopedia on their shelves for this very reason. Something which these "pre-internet" rumination threads always seems to neglect.
Honestly I only ever knew one household with an encyclopedia set, I’m sure it depends on the location but where I lived that was more of an upper middle class thing.
People like to live within their comfort zones. I remember a study being referenced that claimed to show introducing facts contrary to a person’s existing viewpoint don’t get them to change, it just made them double-down and be more defensive.
Oh look, misinformation, lol. The study was about how science communication is based on outdated ideas and that simply presenting facts is not as effective as whole-person education. The media seems to have just read the title and maybe abstract, and ran with "you can't change minds, stop trying", when that's not what it concluded.
Facts will not always change minds, but there is promise that other things will, including creating spaces for group dialogue and debate, targeting emotions and embodied knowledge, embracing multiple perspectives, altering environments to create new behaviors, and being strategic about whom we seek to target with our message. We need to provide training for our students in cognitive and behavioral science, as human attitudes and actions are both the primary cause of and the solution to the current conservation crisis (Nielsen et al., 2021).
I remember a study being referenced that claimed to show introducing facts contrary to a person’s existing viewpoint don’t get them to change, it just made them double-down and be more defensive.
To be fair, this is exactly what they said. Facts alone are not enough - you need rhetoric. So, not misinformation.
That is not what the study said though. OP said that introducing facts causes people to double down and doesn't get them to change, when the study says that introducing facts only works a percentage of the time.
Facts alone sometimes works, but it's more effective when combined with other strategies. Saying facts alone doesn't work, is misinfo.
Fair enough. However, I was under the interpretation that evidence remains the same either way; it is the way it is presented that affects the likelihood of someone changing their mind. Presenting the evidence by itself may have a small chance at a positive effect, while including proper rhetoric lowers the negative and increases positive chance.
Therefore evidence should always be presented “correctly” to avoid setbacks, and the takeaways are thus functionally identical.
I mean I get your point, and I’m sure it’s more nuanced than this and depends on a whole host of other factors like whether it’s a politically charged topic (deoxygenated blood being blue vs HRT actually working), emotional state, connection to other core beliefs (like religious ones), etc. some or all of which are mentioned in the study.
Like I’m sure for topics that aren’t really important, just presenting the correct fact is enough to adjust most people’s view, unless they are particularly stubborn. Like saying “peeing on a jellyfish sting doesn’t really help actually” will usually be met with “oh, huh, I didn’t know that”. But even something as simple as saying “the earth isn’t flat” will make some people very angry. Start listing facts for a more complex topic like climate change, economics, or sociology and people will absolutely double down on whatever black-and-white viewpoint they already hold.
But yeah sure enough, they shouldn’t have used an absolute qualifier I guess.
Therefore evidence should always be presented “correctly” to avoid setbacks, and the takeaways are thus functionally identical.
The problem that you're running into here, is that there is no "correct" method to avoid setbacks. It is not possible to have a 100% rate of efficacy when dealing with such a diverse group as the entirety of the human race. Even the study mentions that methods will need to vary depending on who you're talking to, and it's likely that methods will need to be changed or adapted as demographics change or new knowledge is reached.
I had a fantastic working class education at the local library and our home encyclopedia. I definitely carry around 40 year old random factoids and such just like everybody else, but I still love researching things to this day.
I remember that one time when I was around eight, a neighbor put the entire 1976 World Book encyclopedia at the end of his driveway. I ran home, grabbed a wheelbarrow and carted that knowledge back to my house. It was about twenty years out of date at the time but still the basic concepts were valid enough that I kept referring to it until I left for university.
Yeah, I haven't really seen a huge shift in the volume of misinformation. Sure, the topics and delivery methods have changed, but it has been a firehose this entire time.
The volume has increased exponentially.
With generative AI, there are thousands of "news" sites with landing pages that look better than many real local news organizations.
These sites have agendas and are able to post the same story across the web, written differently each time, to look like events are taking place across the country/world and all being reported on by local news orgs. It's all astroturf, as far as the eye can see.
And this doesn't even touch on the amount of bullshit real news orgs publish without proper investigation thanks to the 24 hour news cycle and the rush to be the first to cover a story.
Yeah, there used to be misinformation published by news organizations and people with agendas. But that used to take significant effort. Now, I can set up a fake news website and fill it with stories in an afternoon.
There were tons of misinformation sites in place the moment the web existed. I was there, 6,000 years ago...
Seriously though, Fox News and all the other Murdoch owned media has been a firehouse for decades. Magazines and print media like the Weekly World News as well. On the internet the misinformation spreader set up shop early, and it was mainly the search engines that directed people to the better sources.
The main change is that the people are choosing to consume the firehose of social media.
I was born in 1982 and we didn’t get the internet until 1998. Which means I was a kid and teen in a mostly analog world.
Your day to day knowledge was formed by things you were taught in school, the things you saw on the news and the people you were surrounded by. That gave you a fairly broad understanding of the world.
If you really NEEDED a correct answer, you’d use an encyclopedia at school or the library, or any specific book on the topic. But you had to be motivated to do that. And even those resources might be limited in scope or unavailable. My local library in the Netherlands would’ve had some books on US history for example, but you wouldn’t really find say, a biography of Jimmy Carter. So at some point, you’d reach the maximum depth of knowledge to be gained in your particular situation.
The internet really helps us drill down way, WAY deeper than what we could find in the 80’s and 90’s. I can now have in-depth knowledge on the most obscure topic and drill down as far as I want.
It’s unfortunate that a lot of people don’t use the web for that. Or end up actually misinformed because of it.
My high school in NZ was pretty poor, so even in the early 00s, we still had Cold War-era maps of Europe in textbooks and on the wall, and no access to the internet (computers were taught to us as glorified typewriters). It took until I was older than I care to admit to learn that Czechoslovakia was no longer a thing.
When I graduated HS, the map on the wall in our history class still had "French West Africa" on it (textbooks were at least more up to date :-)) "French West Africa" hadn't existed for . . . looks it up . . . about a quarter century before then.
My 4th grade science teacher genuinely taught us that "blood is blue before it leaves your body and turns red due to oxidation from contacting the air"
Even as a kid I thought that was stupid. If blood is blue in the body and only turns red when it touches oxygen, then why is it red in the water?
I was told that's only in the movies. In real life it would be blue.
But then again I got a detention for arguing that the moon is visible during the day. The detention was because I pointed out to the window and said look, and she was embarrassed.
Ohh yes, classic detention for proving the teacher wrong. There’s a depressing amount of teachers who rule by their ego instead of by science. It’s why I now consider my school discipline record as a source of pride instead of shame.
One if my brothers teachers sent over half of her class to detention one day and the vice principal brought them all back like "you cant just send your whole class, get a grip"
It's not like it doesn't have some logic to it. Blood carries oxygen throughout the body and then cycles back through the lungs to get more oxygen. So when you look at your arms and see the blue veins we just thought that was obviously the deoxygenated blood returning to the heart.
It made basic sense, so no one was running down to the library to check out a medical textbook to disprove it.
Ever see a blood draw? Blood comes out of a vein, into a non-O2 environment.
I think we just don't do as much critical introspection as we like to think. Its easier to imagine maybe there was a tiny amount of O2 or something than that the thing we were taught was entirely false.
I think we just don’t do as much critical introspection as we like to think.
It's definitely true, and it shows that the stuff you learn as kids is even more ingrained than we even notice most of the time. Kids don't normally have blood drawn, so it's not like elementary schools were filled with a bunch of kids saying "wait a minute, that didn't happen with my last blood draw."
Veins appear blue because the skin and veins refract the light to permeating the skin causing the wavelenths to appear blue. It was well known in the early 2000s. She was just stupid and had no business teaching science.
Whenever I would ask a question I would be told to go look it up. I was never sure if I was surrounded by people who didn't know anything or if they just wanted to get me out of the house by sending me to the library for a few hours.
Actually fucking Joe Rogan is the perfect analogy, he just has random people on that say some stuff to him and he is like damn that's crazy and doesn't even fact check it, and then what he likes he carries forward with him and what he doesn't like hearing just ignores
no, thats disinformation. disinformation is willful malicious intent to spread misinformation, knowing that its wrong info in order to achieve a certain result(such as propaganda by russia, or giving wrong intel to an enemy). misinfo is just saying potential info that may or may not be true, and no fact checking, and just ignorant to the info.
It's better than what we have now though, which is going "I think elephants are actually seals that got lost on the way to the south pole" and then going on the internet and searching until you find exactly what you already believe, and then forming a social group around that, then voting in politicians who think that until that stupid belief becomes mainstream and there are politicians debating in congress whether to invade Kenya to transport all the elephants to Antarctica.
My parents got me this set of the Childcraft children’s encyclopaedias when I was like 6? I inhaled those things for knowledge back in the pre-internet days!
Am considering getting one for my own kiddo when they get old enough, but like most things from my childhood - they look to have been discontinued.
Honestly surprisingly inexpensive given that about what a set of encyclopedias would cost you 35+ years ago. Not sure about World Book specifically but I know Britannicas were over $1k in 1990 because I remember a door-to-door salesmen trying to sell them to me. Can't imagine anyone other than a library buying these now, and even there they're probably all collecting dust.
Regarding to the diamond ring thing: Most "old traditions" or "old traditional things" aren't actually old at all. In most cases, something that has been done for longer than you are alive counts as "old tradition", because we don't experience the past through history books and facts, but through our experience and through what adults told us when we grew up.
There have definitely been studies linking breakfast to various positive lifestyle outcomes, but that doesn't mean you need 9 grapefruits and 4 bowls of kelloggs flakes. I don't eat breakfast much myself but most of what I've run across has shown that it's beneficial.
I had people arguing with me about blue blood long after the internet was available to everyone. I wouldn't ever tell them they were stupid, but I would say, "I don't think that's right" and they would usually say they learned it in biology or a science class in high school and I would say, "that still doesn't sound right. We should look that up later when get home to our computers" and then They would look at me like I was the idiot for suggesting they were misinformed in school... because you know... school teachers NEVER misinform their students... like ever 🙄
Speaking of misinforming your students; shout out to Miss O'Leary for saying Russia could Invade Canada with Tanks because we were landlocked during the colder months via the arctic.
Speaking of misinforming your students; shout out to Miss O’Leary for saying Russia could Invade Canada with Tanks because we were landlocked during the colder months via the arctic.
For anyone wondering, no it doesn't freeze over in winter but there are chunks of ice you can hop across that might eventually get you to the firmer ice along the respective shores:
And encyclopedias before wikipedia had a whole pile of wrong garbage information in them. Because they were compiled quickly by people with little knowledge about the field they were compiling the information for.
Might be. Classic Encyclopedias were worse. Don't know if you ever used one and looked up stuff for a subject where you have above average expertise. They only contained very surface-level information, rarely more than a paragraph or two, and what they contained was riddled with errors.
The problem with internet is,it didn't made people any smarter.earlier they were victim of misinformation ,now they are victim of propaganda and all sort of fake shit.honestly a undergrad book would surpass internet any day for most part
The literal Nazis might have a word to say about propaganda not existing before the internet. Fake news too.
Yes, it's now easier to publish fake crap to a wide audience, but fake crap being published has been an issue since before the invention of the printing press.
Even the original crusades have been organized via fake news propaganda.
The internet gives you access to huge amounts of information, and you need to have the media literacy to figure out what is sensible and what is not. But that has always been an issue.
Growing up, my grandma had a huge library in her house. We once tried counting them as kids and gave up after 4000 books. Almost all of that is pure crap. Almost all of the books are non-fiction, most of them are books on alternative health and new age spiritualism. It's mostly just weird stuff, but literally none of that is worth the time to even read the cover.
The things is state,nazi,brahmins or whatever ,these people commands lots of power of flow of information on internet ,you cannot stop their propaganda online.when i was kid i learned that fasting is healthy for us and kill cancer or whatever after reading many article and post on internet ,but now i am grown i realised it was all bs,and how do i got to know all that ? Pure logic and books.
I think surely internet is good thing when complimented with books,when i say books i mean like campbell biology,jd clayden chemistry,feynnman physics like these,we have plan ,but on internet everything is random,i can bet no one who rely on the social media,and popular edzy video would be able to do 1 percent what a nerd is capable of,isnt it?
Entire reddit is filled with pseudo intellectual garbage,we have twitter pure filth,then other platform like insta facebook. You cannot learn much from it other than general facts which can be wrong as well.see long story short internet doesn't teach you temperament. Its just a bad place for learning tbh
I think surely internet is good thing when complimented with books,when i say books i mean like campbell biology,jd clayden chemistry,feynnman physics like these,we have plan ,but on internet everything is random,i can bet no one who rely on the social media,and popular edzy video would be able to do 1 percent what a nerd is capable of,isnt it?
You are applying an unfair filter here. As I said above, there are millions of garbage books out there too. You can find books on any subject that say anything, including that fasting is healthy and kills cancer.
But you only count good books as books, but you don't apply the same filter to the internet. Same as with books, there's garbage on the internet, but there's also great sources on the internet. Media literacy is required for any medium to discern garbage from decent content, and anyone needs to know how to find good sources and how to do proper research no matter which medium you use.
On the internet, finding sources is at least much easier than in books. If a book cites some other book as a source, you need to go to the next university library and hope they happen to have that book in store, otherwise you are often SOL. On the internet, most sources are readily available or at worst behind archive.org.
The things is state,nazi,brahmins or whatever ,these people commands lots of power of flow of information on internet ,you cannot stop their propaganda online.
Yeah, but that's again the same with any media, including books. Remember, the literal nazis had very advanced and very successful propaganda, and there was no internet in sight back then. "Mein Kampf" was a book and it was everywhere in Nazi Germany. "Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind" was a parenting guide book that was given to every mother in Nazi Germany, and the horrific parenting "tips" in there messed up multiple generations of Germans. Books can do just as much harm as any other media.
Entire reddit is filled with pseudo intellectual garbage,we have twitter pure filth,then other platform like insta facebook. You cannot learn much from it other than general facts which can be wrong as well.see long story short internet doesn’t teach you temperament. Its just a bad place for learning tbh
Wikipedia has baseline knowledge for pretty much any topic. University websites freely share research papers. Tutorials on pretty much any topic are all over Youtube, blogs and other sites.
Want to know how to repair your washing machine? Good look on finding a book on that, but there's a Youtube video for your exact model right there.
Want to know the specifics for some obscure camera control protocol? Sure, right there on some random blog, or you can just download the original specification.
People don't imagine what it was like then. It was wild. Wild in a sort of you're all alone all the time, except when you physically is hanging out or at home, and no one knows what's going on. At all. Some people have theories but they are insane. School teaches you things that are compley useless for living right now.
four sneezes means someone's thinking of you
five sneezes means someone's cutting peppers
six sneezes is anthrax
seven sneezes is the absolute physical maximum
Nine sneezes means you are in Hell, unfortunately. You have already been dead this whole time, and your torture for this moment of eternity has been temporary amnesia and experiencing the sudden terror of realizing you are sneezing yourself to death. That price of darkness can be a rascal like that.
I've never heard of that, but I've kind of used it for children. If it's winter and you hear you kid sneeze, do not worry. If they sneeze again, they are probably barefoot some something, go check on them. 3 times they are either already sick, or allergies
Before there was the Internet there were libraries. Your main reference books were dictionaries for looking up proper definitions of unknown words. Then you had encyclopedias for general topics. To get really specialized you had to consult the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. That was an index organized by topic of magazine articles, including scientific ones like Nature. Reference librarians were very helpful in finding specific information in a hurry, and there were some books that couldn't leave the library.
I feel this may be an American thing. Many millennials have a shared experience of being told by our parents that we can't have the dome light on in the car at night because it is illegal. In reality, it reduces visibility on a dark road for the driver so it is a little dangerous to do but certainly not illegal.
I just wanted to play my Gameboy Advance on the drive home!
Thank all the medical and educational texts that chose blue to identify veins returning to the heart with a blue color and arteries away from the heart as red. A simple color choice to differentiate and somehow someone decided that this was the color of blood.
Why is this such a common thing!? Who were these woods porn fairies? Mine was just a few ripped pages me and a friend found while digging randomly in the woods as kids, but still - boobs.
Same here! In hindsight, it's so incredibly random to stumble across hustler and some other more hard-core magazines in the woods. My 8-9 year old brain wasn't able to process all that very well...
My biology teacher taught me that peanut oil causes cancer. Can't get that out of my brain 30+ years later.
Encyclopaedia sets were expensive but there were all sorts of things you could subscribe to for facts. My parents subscribed me to an animal fact thing where i got some sheets to collect in a folder every month. I'd read the hell out of it and eagerly wait for the next issue. It allowed me to memorise a lot of information about animals.
I also visited the library a lot more before the internet, and there was also Encarta which died as soon as the internet became mainstream.
Lol no that's not true! If you did that, the teacher or the school nerd about this subject would challenge you. He will come to your house, ring your doorbell, and you'll go together to your city library. Unlike the internet, you could not just source some shit some-nobody made up and spread online. You had to prove it with hard-text published sourced papers.
We used to pay higher cost in money, time and effort in order to learn any topic. As a result, once you learn it, you hold it for life, and spread it and proudly challenge others about its truth everywhere you go, which pushes you to seek further.
Each room of our house still has a large bookshelf library. I never left any of the books which I personally bought untouched including those large expensive hard-cover multi-series encylopedias about physics, chemistry, mathetics, history, philosophy, language, geology, politics and everything. I had to read them at least once to learn their topics otherwise I would've lost that money.
Btw I'm not talking about school textbooks; no those we used to burn in celebration at the end of each year's graudation outside the parking lots!
Lol we really grew up in different times
My family had a full encyclopedia that they bought one book at a time right around when I was born in the 80s. By the time I was 10 it moved into my bedroom and I'd often stay up too late reading random things.
Downside was that it was already out of date geopolitically by the time I started thinking about politics.
There was also that one guy who was 3 years older than you but hanged out with your friend group on occasion and told you things like where kids come from.
Now instead of your aunt coming at you with misinfo she learned from her aunt, it's your aunt coming at you with misinformation she learned from a russian bot farm.
But at least you can counter it with misinformation from an AI bot :D
I have the opposite problem. My mother doesn't believe anything I tell her and thinks it is misinformation that I've been fed.
Have you ever tried to out crazy the crazy and force them to try to take the reasonable stance? It's cathartic.
Yes and to make it even worse, your aunt back in the day would tell 10 people some BS and maybe 3 would believe her. Not some Russian bot factory spits out BS to 10 million people and a lot more believe it.
Did you spray for Russians under your bed before going to sleep? You really should, and check behind the sofa and in the dryer too. Russians can disguise themselves as Bounce dryer sheets, and the latest Russians can send themselves over Ethernet using the RoE protocol: Russian over Ethernet.
Russia! Quite an imaginary world you live in! Aunts and Russians and bots and misinformation and all these people targeting you! How exciting!
Can I send you my Moral Rearmament and John Birch Society fliers?
https://imgur.com/a/john-birch-society-satire-1965-YkVs2mK
I'm oddly honored that I got a 3 paragraph troll with pictures in response to a comment that was barely even about russia.
"I don't like what you say therefore you are a troll." Classic shitlib behaviour.
GOOD point.
The well documented Russian troll networks simply do not exist.
Yep. The mark of a stupid Westerner is how much they blame Russia for their country's problems (the exception being Ukraine obviously). Meanwhile the US literally has a billion+ dollar anti-China propaganda budget (taxpayer funded) and a decentralized, private network of pro-Israel propagandists backed by the richest people in the country, buying up entire media companies for that purpose.
And now instead of Marge, it’s ChatGPT.
It uses megawatts of electricity and is somehow wronger.
You're grammar is the wrongerest.
*grandma
Also you're an asshole for attacking his lineage.
/s
I have a gen-z friend who unjokingly does that. He's like "I asked grok if it was true and it confirmed it."
I wish at least he followed up with the logic or sources behind it... but no he was like "grok said so. I asked it." he was dead serious. and I wanted to hit my head into a fucking wall
If you can't find the right information from the internet then skill issue
Sadly, I gotta disagree. Searching used to be easier, back when search engines prioritized finding useful information. Now they are vehicles for delivering ads and collecting user data.
Google of the early-2000s era was an entirely different site. I used to be able to find almost anything I needed to search for. As far as I’ve seen, there is nothing comparable to that early-Google out there today. (Though I’d be ecstatic to be proven wrong on that!)
Yeah I would agree with the other person 20 years ago. If you couldn't find it online it probably didn't exist
Said like someone that only looks at the "sponsored" results and thinks search doesn't work. Exercise that scroll finger some more
Searx is my way to go when i need to do research, it's a search engine, that takes results from others
Unfortunately Google is still the king of search engines. Try searching for most technical facts or most common issues or anything else on most search engines and you really can't find it. You might find some things but you won't find the amount of information you can find on Google. The problem with the internet nowadays is not that searching has gotten worse, it's that there is such a plethora of information out there that you have to have the right skill set to be able to go through it. The reason you were able to find everything in the olden days was that there was so few websites out there that it was very very simple to search all of them. And the counterpoint to saying that there is a plethora of misinformation now when you're looking at your phone simply means that you're visiting websites and looking at sources that have a plethora of misinformation. It is very very simple to cross reference and find the correct information pretty much anywhere.
Just disable AI slop from you search engine or stop using google and such, learn how to make un-biased searches, start to understand how to spot a fake information and start questioning what you read
I never said that it's a justification lol, anyway, biased search is when you search something like "Is X better than Y" or something like this, which is wrong to do because it's biased and so it will give biased results too
Example:
If i search "is tomato more healty than potatoes?" Instead of "The pros and cons of eating tomatoes and potatoes" i will get biased results that will mostly say "you should eat only tomatos!!!"
This is called a bias query because it will give you biased results
You say this as though AI is only poisoning search tools.
What do you mean? Just use alternatives like Searx or remove AI from duckduckgo, for results just read, AIs are easy to spot
Right, those are all search tools.
All the people replying to you arguing that you can't trust the internet because of AI and Algorithims... this too is a skill issue. Stop going to Google or MSN or Yahoo There are search engines that don't use algorithms or AI, and others that don't use algorithms and you can turn off the AI.
It also helps to understand WHERE you are getting your information from and use watchdog sites that can tell you if a site is a reputable source or not. Heading over to I'Mright.com isn't going to help you unless you're looking for confirmation bias.
Exactly!
Who defines the "right information"? The algorithms? The information conforms to what your peer group is saying is the "right information"? It's consistent with what government agencies are saying?
We really aren't any better off than just believing what aunt Marge said since you can find the exact same thing she said and things the exact opposite and which one you believe is just down to what feels right. It's just believing what aunt Marge said with more steps.
If you had a question that nobody could answer, you’d go down to the library, open up a drawer with a bunch of note cards in it, look to see if any of the note cards had a word about a concept you wanted to learn about, hope that the card existed, was in the right place, and listed a book that would actually give you the information you wanted.
Or you wouldn't go through the effort, you'd ask a trusted elder or a friend, they would lie to you, and you'd peddle that misinformation for decades while refusing that you might be wrong. Guess which one was more likely
The first step would be opening an encyclopedia. A lot of households actually had an encyclopedia on their shelves for this very reason. Something which these "pre-internet" rumination threads always seems to neglect.
Honestly I only ever knew one household with an encyclopedia set, I’m sure it depends on the location but where I lived that was more of an upper middle class thing.
I still have an encyclopaedia on my shelf. I have to admit it’s the small edition though.
I also still have a bunch of dictionaries (different languages), and a very outdated atlas.
You'd ask the librarian about where to find books about stuff and get a 3 hour lecture about the Dewey system
And also the books surrounding that book
Always pick a book to the left and one to the right! Is it useful? Likely not, but you’ll never know if you don’t!
Most people in my life still don't fact check. I'm constantly chasing the truth while the convo runs away full of misinfo
I honestly have no idea how people can live like that. Yet I see it so often that I'm convinced it's the norm.
People like to live within their comfort zones. I remember a study being referenced that claimed to show introducing facts contrary to a person’s existing viewpoint don’t get them to change, it just made them double-down and be more defensive.
Oh look, misinformation, lol. The study was about how science communication is based on outdated ideas and that simply presenting facts is not as effective as whole-person education. The media seems to have just read the title and maybe abstract, and ran with "you can't change minds, stop trying", when that's not what it concluded.
To quote from the conclusion of the study itself:
To be fair, this is exactly what they said. Facts alone are not enough - you need rhetoric. So, not misinformation.
That is not what the study said though. OP said that introducing facts causes people to double down and doesn't get them to change, when the study says that introducing facts only works a percentage of the time.
Facts alone sometimes works, but it's more effective when combined with other strategies. Saying facts alone doesn't work, is misinfo.
Edit: clarifying pronouns
Fair enough. However, I was under the interpretation that evidence remains the same either way; it is the way it is presented that affects the likelihood of someone changing their mind. Presenting the evidence by itself may have a small chance at a positive effect, while including proper rhetoric lowers the negative and increases positive chance.
Therefore evidence should always be presented “correctly” to avoid setbacks, and the takeaways are thus functionally identical.
I mean I get your point, and I’m sure it’s more nuanced than this and depends on a whole host of other factors like whether it’s a politically charged topic (deoxygenated blood being blue vs HRT actually working), emotional state, connection to other core beliefs (like religious ones), etc. some or all of which are mentioned in the study.
Like I’m sure for topics that aren’t really important, just presenting the correct fact is enough to adjust most people’s view, unless they are particularly stubborn. Like saying “peeing on a jellyfish sting doesn’t really help actually” will usually be met with “oh, huh, I didn’t know that”. But even something as simple as saying “the earth isn’t flat” will make some people very angry. Start listing facts for a more complex topic like climate change, economics, or sociology and people will absolutely double down on whatever black-and-white viewpoint they already hold.
But yeah sure enough, they shouldn’t have used an absolute qualifier I guess.
The problem that you're running into here, is that there is no "correct" method to avoid setbacks. It is not possible to have a 100% rate of efficacy when dealing with such a diverse group as the entirety of the human race. Even the study mentions that methods will need to vary depending on who you're talking to, and it's likely that methods will need to be changed or adapted as demographics change or new knowledge is reached.
You went to a library and read a couple of encyclopedias.
I had a fantastic working class education at the local library and our home encyclopedia. I definitely carry around 40 year old random factoids and such just like everybody else, but I still love researching things to this day.
I remember that one time when I was around eight, a neighbor put the entire 1976 World Book encyclopedia at the end of his driveway. I ran home, grabbed a wheelbarrow and carted that knowledge back to my house. It was about twenty years out of date at the time but still the basic concepts were valid enough that I kept referring to it until I left for university.
Glad AI is finally taking us back to an era of disinformation
Back?
Yeah, I haven't really seen a huge shift in the volume of misinformation. Sure, the topics and delivery methods have changed, but it has been a firehose this entire time.
The volume has increased exponentially. With generative AI, there are thousands of "news" sites with landing pages that look better than many real local news organizations.
These sites have agendas and are able to post the same story across the web, written differently each time, to look like events are taking place across the country/world and all being reported on by local news orgs. It's all astroturf, as far as the eye can see.
This list from Wikipedia just barely scratches the surface: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fake_news_websites
And this doesn't even touch on the amount of bullshit real news orgs publish without proper investigation thanks to the 24 hour news cycle and the rush to be the first to cover a story.
Yeah, there used to be misinformation published by news organizations and people with agendas. But that used to take significant effort. Now, I can set up a fake news website and fill it with stories in an afternoon.
There were tons of misinformation sites in place the moment the web existed. I was there, 6,000 years ago...
Seriously though, Fox News and all the other Murdoch owned media has been a firehouse for decades. Magazines and print media like the Weekly World News as well. On the internet the misinformation spreader set up shop early, and it was mainly the search engines that directed people to the better sources.
The main change is that the people are choosing to consume the firehose of social media.
“Why is the sky blue?”
“Because it’s reflecting the colour of the ocean.”
Because it’s reflecting the colour of the sky.
why does it hurt when i pee?
It's reflecting the colour of life.
Red pee means you have sinned.
Damn
This is actually a pretty interesting topic.
I was born in 1982 and we didn’t get the internet until 1998. Which means I was a kid and teen in a mostly analog world.
Your day to day knowledge was formed by things you were taught in school, the things you saw on the news and the people you were surrounded by. That gave you a fairly broad understanding of the world.
If you really NEEDED a correct answer, you’d use an encyclopedia at school or the library, or any specific book on the topic. But you had to be motivated to do that. And even those resources might be limited in scope or unavailable. My local library in the Netherlands would’ve had some books on US history for example, but you wouldn’t really find say, a biography of Jimmy Carter. So at some point, you’d reach the maximum depth of knowledge to be gained in your particular situation.
The internet really helps us drill down way, WAY deeper than what we could find in the 80’s and 90’s. I can now have in-depth knowledge on the most obscure topic and drill down as far as I want.
It’s unfortunate that a lot of people don’t use the web for that. Or end up actually misinformed because of it.
My high school in NZ was pretty poor, so even in the early 00s, we still had Cold War-era maps of Europe in textbooks and on the wall, and no access to the internet (computers were taught to us as glorified typewriters). It took until I was older than I care to admit to learn that Czechoslovakia was no longer a thing.
When I graduated HS, the map on the wall in our history class still had "French West Africa" on it (textbooks were at least more up to date :-)) "French West Africa" hadn't existed for . . . looks it up . . . about a quarter century before then.
Damn, before I was even born!
@FinishingDutch Wow, small world. I had a similar situation, too.
My 4th grade science teacher genuinely taught us that "blood is blue before it leaves your body and turns red due to oxidation from contacting the air"
Even as a kid I thought that was stupid. If blood is blue in the body and only turns red when it touches oxygen, then why is it red in the water?
I was told that's only in the movies. In real life it would be blue.
But then again I got a detention for arguing that the moon is visible during the day. The detention was because I pointed out to the window and said look, and she was embarrassed.
The answer is obvious, dissolved oxygen in the water--duh!
Because there's oxygen in water. That's what fish breathe!
Ohh yes, classic detention for proving the teacher wrong. There’s a depressing amount of teachers who rule by their ego instead of by science. It’s why I now consider my school discipline record as a source of pride instead of shame.
One if my brothers teachers sent over half of her class to detention one day and the vice principal brought them all back like "you cant just send your whole class, get a grip"
That's wild to me cos like... We didn't need internet to tell us this was incorrect.
It's not like it doesn't have some logic to it. Blood carries oxygen throughout the body and then cycles back through the lungs to get more oxygen. So when you look at your arms and see the blue veins we just thought that was obviously the deoxygenated blood returning to the heart.
It made basic sense, so no one was running down to the library to check out a medical textbook to disprove it.
Ever see a blood draw? Blood comes out of a vein, into a non-O2 environment.
I think we just don't do as much critical introspection as we like to think. Its easier to imagine maybe there was a tiny amount of O2 or something than that the thing we were taught was entirely false.
It's definitely true, and it shows that the stuff you learn as kids is even more ingrained than we even notice most of the time. Kids don't normally have blood drawn, so it's not like elementary schools were filled with a bunch of kids saying "wait a minute, that didn't happen with my last blood draw."
There were actually about 5 of us that contested it and she tried to say "they drew that blood from your arteries"
You look when they draw blood?
Yes. Its neat. You dont?
My first thought was how ears and noses look red when sunlight shines through them. If blood was blue, wouldn't they be blue or purple?
Veins appear blue because the skin and veins refract the light to permeating the skin causing the wavelenths to appear blue. It was well known in the early 2000s. She was just stupid and had no business teaching science.
We had the internet and a handful of us tried to contest it. She said "look at your textbooks, they clearly drew that blood from your arteries"
Whenever I would ask a question I would be told to go look it up. I was never sure if I was surrounded by people who didn't know anything or if they just wanted to get me out of the house by sending me to the library for a few hours.
Not mutually exclusive options fwiw 😅
This is why encyclopedia salesmen was even a thing.
If you didn't have that, go to a library.
Eventually there was encyclopedia britannica which was basically one of the coolest things you could have for free on your computer in that era.
Funnily even the usage was pretty similar to doom-browsing Wikipedia:
And there was a friend's older brother or cousin, who said some unbelievable horseshit, you thought was true for many years. And you didn't even ask.
Joe Rogan
Actually fucking Joe Rogan is the perfect analogy, he just has random people on that say some stuff to him and he is like damn that's crazy and doesn't even fact check it, and then what he likes he carries forward with him and what he doesn't like hearing just ignores
That still holds true even with the internet around
We got misinformed at a much slower rate though. The newspapers could only tell us so many lies at a time.
Back in ye olde days peasants did not even need an excuse to be sent off to a war. Nor who they were even fighting. And war far fun and cool
Doesn't misinformation involve intent? Aunt Marge probably thought she was right.
no, thats disinformation. disinformation is willful malicious intent to spread misinformation, knowing that its wrong info in order to achieve a certain result(such as propaganda by russia, or giving wrong intel to an enemy). misinfo is just saying potential info that may or may not be true, and no fact checking, and just ignorant to the info.
The reporters who propagated lies about WMDs in Iraq or beheaded babies in Israel probably think they're telling the truth or something close.
aunt Marge has been replaced by AI now
It's better than what we have now though, which is going "I think elephants are actually seals that got lost on the way to the south pole" and then going on the internet and searching until you find exactly what you already believe, and then forming a social group around that, then voting in politicians who think that until that stupid belief becomes mainstream and there are politicians debating in congress whether to invade Kenya to transport all the elephants to Antarctica.
Well-fucking-said
Its not a coincidence that flat earthers have had their greatest recruitment numbers in the modern era
Fun fact: You can still order a current print volume of World Book Encyclopedia for the low price of $1,349.00
proof
My parents got me this set of the Childcraft children’s encyclopaedias when I was like 6? I inhaled those things for knowledge back in the pre-internet days!
Am considering getting one for my own kiddo when they get old enough, but like most things from my childhood - they look to have been discontinued.
Just print all of Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Print_Wikipedia
Honestly surprisingly inexpensive given that about what a set of encyclopedias would cost you 35+ years ago. Not sure about World Book specifically but I know Britannicas were over $1k in 1990 because I remember a door-to-door salesmen trying to sell them to me. Can't imagine anyone other than a library buying these now, and even there they're probably all collecting dust.
I'm willing to bet it's cheaper than ever, (inflation adjusted)
I’d buy it if I had it.
I remember looking up "dirty" words in the dictionary as a real young one with a gaggle of friends
We only use 10% of our brains.
We only use 10% of our brain at a time. Because using 100% of your brain is called a seizure.
Source: Once used 100% of my brain.
Or a really good orgasm.
Or a really bad shit.
Yep. The rebuttal that stuck with me was "We only use 33% of traffic lights."
Tbf, they might have been right about themselves at the time they thought that.
My theory is they were sitting at around 5% usage.
Even that is a common misconception. Our brains are working fully, all the time.
Hey, speak for yourself
Not if you're MAGA.
Regarding to the diamond ring thing: Most "old traditions" or "old traditional things" aren't actually old at all. In most cases, something that has been done for longer than you are alive counts as "old tradition", because we don't experience the past through history books and facts, but through our experience and through what adults told us when we grew up.
There have definitely been studies linking breakfast to various positive lifestyle outcomes, but that doesn't mean you need 9 grapefruits and 4 bowls of kelloggs flakes. I don't eat breakfast much myself but most of what I've run across has shown that it's beneficial.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3737458/
I had people arguing with me about blue blood long after the internet was available to everyone. I wouldn't ever tell them they were stupid, but I would say, "I don't think that's right" and they would usually say they learned it in biology or a science class in high school and I would say, "that still doesn't sound right. We should look that up later when get home to our computers" and then They would look at me like I was the idiot for suggesting they were misinformed in school... because you know... school teachers NEVER misinform their students... like ever 🙄
Speaking of misinforming your students; shout out to Miss O'Leary for saying Russia could Invade Canada with Tanks because we were landlocked during the colder months via the arctic.
Fuuuuck. I need to have a look online. I still thought that was true.
45 - UK - sometimes acts like an adult. Obviously has a lot of garbage stuck in my brain.
Edit. FUCK. Yup, not blue. Optical illusion.
For anyone wondering, no it doesn't freeze over in winter but there are chunks of ice you can hop across that might eventually get you to the firmer ice along the respective shores:
https://angusadventures.com/adventurer-handbook/beringstrait/
People made a living selling encyclopedias door to door. Just saying.
And encyclopedias before wikipedia had a whole pile of wrong garbage information in them. Because they were compiled quickly by people with little knowledge about the field they were compiling the information for.
Wikipedia is garbage as well when it comes to topic from third class country
Might be. Classic Encyclopedias were worse. Don't know if you ever used one and looked up stuff for a subject where you have above average expertise. They only contained very surface-level information, rarely more than a paragraph or two, and what they contained was riddled with errors.
The problem with internet is,it didn't made people any smarter.earlier they were victim of misinformation ,now they are victim of propaganda and all sort of fake shit.honestly a undergrad book would surpass internet any day for most part
The literal Nazis might have a word to say about propaganda not existing before the internet. Fake news too.
Yes, it's now easier to publish fake crap to a wide audience, but fake crap being published has been an issue since before the invention of the printing press.
Even the original crusades have been organized via fake news propaganda.
The internet gives you access to huge amounts of information, and you need to have the media literacy to figure out what is sensible and what is not. But that has always been an issue.
Growing up, my grandma had a huge library in her house. We once tried counting them as kids and gave up after 4000 books. Almost all of that is pure crap. Almost all of the books are non-fiction, most of them are books on alternative health and new age spiritualism. It's mostly just weird stuff, but literally none of that is worth the time to even read the cover.
The things is state,nazi,brahmins or whatever ,these people commands lots of power of flow of information on internet ,you cannot stop their propaganda online.when i was kid i learned that fasting is healthy for us and kill cancer or whatever after reading many article and post on internet ,but now i am grown i realised it was all bs,and how do i got to know all that ? Pure logic and books.
I think surely internet is good thing when complimented with books,when i say books i mean like campbell biology,jd clayden chemistry,feynnman physics like these,we have plan ,but on internet everything is random,i can bet no one who rely on the social media,and popular edzy video would be able to do 1 percent what a nerd is capable of,isnt it?
Entire reddit is filled with pseudo intellectual garbage,we have twitter pure filth,then other platform like insta facebook. You cannot learn much from it other than general facts which can be wrong as well.see long story short internet doesn't teach you temperament. Its just a bad place for learning tbh
You are applying an unfair filter here. As I said above, there are millions of garbage books out there too. You can find books on any subject that say anything, including that fasting is healthy and kills cancer.
But you only count good books as books, but you don't apply the same filter to the internet. Same as with books, there's garbage on the internet, but there's also great sources on the internet. Media literacy is required for any medium to discern garbage from decent content, and anyone needs to know how to find good sources and how to do proper research no matter which medium you use.
On the internet, finding sources is at least much easier than in books. If a book cites some other book as a source, you need to go to the next university library and hope they happen to have that book in store, otherwise you are often SOL. On the internet, most sources are readily available or at worst behind archive.org.
Yeah, but that's again the same with any media, including books. Remember, the literal nazis had very advanced and very successful propaganda, and there was no internet in sight back then. "Mein Kampf" was a book and it was everywhere in Nazi Germany. "Die deutsche Mutter und ihr erstes Kind" was a parenting guide book that was given to every mother in Nazi Germany, and the horrific parenting "tips" in there messed up multiple generations of Germans. Books can do just as much harm as any other media.
Wikipedia has baseline knowledge for pretty much any topic. University websites freely share research papers. Tutorials on pretty much any topic are all over Youtube, blogs and other sites.
Want to know how to repair your washing machine? Good look on finding a book on that, but there's a Youtube video for your exact model right there.
Want to know the specifics for some obscure camera control protocol? Sure, right there on some random blog, or you can just download the original specification.
People don't imagine what it was like then. It was wild. Wild in a sort of you're all alone all the time, except when you physically is hanging out or at home, and no one knows what's going on. At all. Some people have theories but they are insane. School teaches you things that are compley useless for living right now.
shit I still remember a primary school classmate explaining to me:
one sneeze is from dust
two sneezes in quick succession are from cold
three sneezes in quick succession are from allergies
It's been 30+ years, someone pls remove this nonsense from my brain 😩
four sneezes means someone's thinking of you
five sneezes means someone's cutting peppers
six sneezes is anthrax
seven sneezes is the absolute physical maximum
Eight sneezes is instant death.
Common misconception. Actually 7.99999... is instant death.
You can't reach 8.
Nine sneezes means you are in Hell, unfortunately. You have already been dead this whole time, and your torture for this moment of eternity has been temporary amnesia and experiencing the sudden terror of realizing you are sneezing yourself to death. That price of darkness can be a rascal like that.
I had a professor that gave a student $100 for reaching 7 sneezes. His previous student record was 6.
Did anyone try to fake sneezing after that was known?
Ha. Yes. But then Prof called them out on it after the 2nd sneeze.
Didn't happen again after the first $100 went out.
I saw a video of a dog sneezing 30 times in a row
Edit: found it! Glorious video of dogs sneezing https://youtube.com/shorts/4UoFDUbWFHQ
that dog is a prophet now
I've never heard of that, but I've kind of used it for children. If it's winter and you hear you kid sneeze, do not worry. If they sneeze again, they are probably barefoot some something, go check on them. 3 times they are either already sick, or allergies
Before there was the Internet there were libraries. Your main reference books were dictionaries for looking up proper definitions of unknown words. Then you had encyclopedias for general topics. To get really specialized you had to consult the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature. That was an index organized by topic of magazine articles, including scientific ones like Nature. Reference librarians were very helpful in finding specific information in a hurry, and there were some books that couldn't leave the library.
Your face will not get stuck like that.
It is not illegal to turn on the light in the car while driving.
Bears do not sleep all winter long.
Bats are not blind.
Cinco de Mayo is not Mexican Independence Day.
Searing a steak does not seal in moisture.
Waking a sleepwalker is not dangerous to their health.
:)
Washing the literal chicken shit off of mushrooms does not make them absorb water.
Seriously, wash your fucking mushrooms.
Wtf is this idea xDD Are you supposed to stop the car at the side of the road to turn on the lights? 😂
I feel this may be an American thing. Many millennials have a shared experience of being told by our parents that we can't have the dome light on in the car at night because it is illegal. In reality, it reduces visibility on a dark road for the driver so it is a little dangerous to do but certainly not illegal.
I just wanted to play my Gameboy Advance on the drive home!
Ah I missed the "in the car" part, I thought car lights in general. It makes a bit more sense this way, thanks for the explanation :)
Masturbating won’t make you go blind.
Correct, it makes you grow hair on your palms.
Then when they look at their palms you laugh and make fun of them for masturbating. My grandad got me with that classic.
This one had me freaking the fuck out as a kid lol
You won't get cramps if you jump in the pool soon after eating.
But they may as well be. So many midair collisions cause they're absolutely bonkers flyers
Now its just some 14 year old from a reddit thread
Thank all the medical and educational texts that chose blue to identify veins returning to the heart with a blue color and arteries away from the heart as red. A simple color choice to differentiate and somehow someone decided that this was the color of blood.
It doesn't help that some blood vessels close enough to the surface of the skin can appear blue.
Fair point.
red blood is a myth. all the homies have neon purple blood
According to my color-blind friend, purple isn’t a real color - our blood is actually green.
sounds like your color-blind friend ain't one of the homies. i'm sorry for your loss
And don't even ask us where we found porn.
We found it in the woods, naturally
Why is this such a common thing!? Who were these woods porn fairies? Mine was just a few ripped pages me and a friend found while digging randomly in the woods as kids, but still - boobs.
Same here! In hindsight, it's so incredibly random to stumble across hustler and some other more hard-core magazines in the woods. My 8-9 year old brain wasn't able to process all that very well...
We got it from Reggie. Don't ask us where Reggie got it
My biology teacher taught me that peanut oil causes cancer. Can't get that out of my brain 30+ years later.
Encyclopaedia sets were expensive but there were all sorts of things you could subscribe to for facts. My parents subscribed me to an animal fact thing where i got some sheets to collect in a folder every month. I'd read the hell out of it and eagerly wait for the next issue. It allowed me to memorise a lot of information about animals.
I also visited the library a lot more before the internet, and there was also Encarta which died as soon as the internet became mainstream.
This is the reason a lot of people have got fat, and also died.
Develop extreme philosophy that resembles Stoicism, but is actually a really disfunctional version of it, apparently.
Dad: "I don't want to be in a club that would have me as its member", Karl Marx said that
A reminder of https://yourschoolgotwrong.com/
Originally posted by https://lemmy.world/u/MiraLazine
Edit: looks like its down. Archive.
Github
Lol no that's not true! If you did that, the teacher or the school nerd about this subject would challenge you. He will come to your house, ring your doorbell, and you'll go together to your city library. Unlike the internet, you could not just source some shit some-nobody made up and spread online. You had to prove it with hard-text published sourced papers.
We used to pay higher cost in money, time and effort in order to learn any topic. As a result, once you learn it, you hold it for life, and spread it and proudly challenge others about its truth everywhere you go, which pushes you to seek further.
Each room of our house still has a large bookshelf library. I never left any of the books which I personally bought untouched including those large expensive hard-cover multi-series encylopedias about physics, chemistry, mathetics, history, philosophy, language, geology, politics and everything. I had to read them at least once to learn their topics otherwise I would've lost that money.
Btw I'm not talking about school textbooks; no those we used to burn in celebration at the end of each year's graudation outside the parking lots!
Lol we really grew up in different times
Coughs in crippling student loan debt that no prior generation has ever known
lmao... not that type of cost! you're right dammit
My family had a full encyclopedia that they bought one book at a time right around when I was born in the 80s. By the time I was 10 it moved into my bedroom and I'd often stay up too late reading random things.
Downside was that it was already out of date geopolitically by the time I started thinking about politics.
Aunt Marge now lives in the Whatsapp family chat.
There was also that one guy who was 3 years older than you but hanged out with your friend group on occasion and told you things like where kids come from.
Brainrot so high that i thought it was moon is blue smh