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Does the Internet Really Make Dumb People Dumber?

by DixieHarden Posted on January 26, 2015

Mother Jones

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I don’t normally get to hear what Bill Gates thinks of one of my ideas, but today’s the exception. Because Ezra Klein asked him:

Ezra Klein: ….Kevin Drum, who writes for Mother Jones, has a line I’ve always thought was interesting, which is that the internet makes dumb people dumber, and smart people smarter. Do you worry about the possibility that the vast resources the internet gives the motivated, including online education, will give rise o a big increase in, for lack of a better tterm, cognitive or knowledge inequality that leads to further rises in global inequality?

Bill Gates: Well, you always have the challenge that when you create a tool to make activity X easier, like the internet makes it easier to find out facts or to learn new things, that there are some outliers who use that thing extremely well. It’s way easier to be polymathic today than it was in the past because your access to materials and your ability if you ever get stuck to find people that you can engage with is so strong.

But to say that there’s actually some negative side, that there actually will be people that are dumber, I disagree with that. I mean, I’m as upset as anyone at the wrong stuff about vaccination that’s out there on the internet that actually confuses some small number of people. There’s a communications challenge to get past.

But look at IQ test capability over time. Or even take a TV show today and how complex it is — that’s responding to the marketplace. You take Breaking Bad versus, I don’t know, Leave it to Beaver, or Combat!, or The Wild, Wild West. You know, yeah, take Combat! because that was sort of pushing the edge of should kids be allowed to watch it.

The interest and complexity really does say that, broadly, these tools have meant that market-driven people are turning out more complex things. Now, you can say, “Why hasn’t that mapped to more sophistication in politics or something like that?” That’s very complicated. But I don’t see a counter trend where there’s some group of people who are less curious or less informed because of the internet.

I’m sure that was said when the printing press came along and people saw romance novels and thought people would stay indoors and read all the time. But I just don’t see there being a big negative to the empowerment.

Unsurprisingly, Gates agrees that the internet can make smart people smarter. By analogy, the printing press also made smart people smarter because it gave them cheap, easy access to far more information. Since they were capable of processing the information, they were effectively smarter than they used to be.

It’s equally unsurprisingly that he disagrees about the internet making dumb people dumber. It’s a pretty anti-tech opinion, after all, and that’s not the business Bill Gates is in. But I think his answer actually belies his disagreement, since he immediately acknowledges an example of precisely this phenomenon: the anti-vax movement, something that happens to be close to his heart. Unfortunately, to call this merely a “communications challenge” discounts the problem. Sure, it’s a communications challenge, but that’s the whole point. The internet is all about communication, and it does two things in this case. First, it empower the anti-vax nutballs, giving them a far more powerful medium for spreading their nonsense. On the flip side, it makes a lot more people vulnerable to bad information. If you lack the context to evaluate arguments about vaccination, the internet is much more likely to make you dumber about vaccinating your kids than any previous medium in history.

The rest of Gates’ argument doesn’t really hold water either. Sure, IQ scores have been rising. But they’ve been rising for a long time. This long predates the internet and has nothing to do with it. As for TV shows, he picked the wrong example. It’s true that Breaking Bad is far more sophisticated than Leave it to Beaver, but Breaking Bad was always a niche show, averaging 1-2 million viewers for nearly its entire run. Instead, you should compare Leave it to Beaver with, say, The Big Bang Theory, which gets 10-20 million viewers per episode. Is Big Bang the more sophisticated show? Maybe. But if so, it’s not by much.

In any case, the heart of Gates’ response is this: “I don’t see a counter trend where there’s some group of people who are less curious or less informed because of the internet.” I won’t pretend that I have ironclad evidence one way or the other, but I wouldn’t dismiss the problem so blithely. I’m not trying to make a broad claim that the internet is making us generally stupider or anything like that. But it’s a far more powerful medium for spreading conspiracy theories and other assorted crap than anything we’ve had before. If you lack the background and context to evaluate information about a particular subject, you’re highly likely to be misinformed if you do a simple Google search and just start reading whatever comes up first. And that describes an awful lot of people.

Obviously this has been a problem for as long humans have been able to communicate. The anti-fluoridation nutballs did just fine with only dead-tree technology. Still, I think the internet makes this a more widespread problem, simply because it’s a more widespread medium, and it’s one that’s especially difficult to navigate wisely. Hopefully that will change in the future, but for now it is what it is. It doesn’t have to make dumb people dumber, but in practice, I think it very often does.

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Does the Internet Really Make Dumb People Dumber?

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Mickey Mouse Exposed to Measles, Thanks to the Anti-Vaxxers

by AugustDreyer Posted on January 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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Yesterday, instead of cherishing freshly made memories of mouse ears or trying to get the song “A Pirate’s Life for Me” to stop looping in their heads, nine Disneyland visitors were left battling a potentially deadly disease. As The LA Times reports, the California Department of Public Health has confirmed and is investigating 12 likely Measles cases in California and Utah (nine are confirmed), after families visited the California theme park late in December.

The highly infectious disease, which is transmitted through the air, can lead to pneumonia, encephalitis, and sometimes death in children. In 2000, the US Centers for Disease Control declared it eliminated in the United States, thanks in large part to an effective vaccine. But because of anti-vaccination hysteria, fueled by discredited claims about links between vaccines and autism, many parents have opted out of vaccinating their kids, leaving them—and others, including children too young to be vaccinated—vulnerable. And while some children do react badly to vaccines, it’s important to remember that the diseases we vaccinate against are killers. The vaccines save countless lives.

Of the seven California cases, six hadn’t been vaccinated—two because they were underage. (Doctors administer the vaccine twice after the child is 12 months old.)

This outbreak is part of an ongoing trend. Measles rates have risen dramatically over the past few years. As my colleague Julia Lurie pointed out last May, the CDC reported record numbers in 2014, due in large part to gaps in vaccinations. According to a CDC press release, “90 percent of all measles cases in the United States were in people who were not vaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown. Among the U.S. residents who were not vaccinated, 85 percent were religious, philosophical or personal reasons.”

In the following video, my colleague Kiera Butler interviews a Marin County pediatrician who caters to anti-vaxxer parents:

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Mickey Mouse Exposed to Measles, Thanks to the Anti-Vaxxers

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Australia is so hot even the grapes wear sunscreen

by PercyTarpley Posted on January 8, 2015

Notes of cherry, oak, and Coppertone

Australia is so hot even the grapes wear sunscreen

By on 8 Jan 2015 7:48 amcommentsShare

I may not have absorbed a lot of the good advice I got when I was younger (floss every day; sit up straight; don’t make that face or it’ll stick), but I did absorb a lot of one thing: sunscreen. As someone who loathes sunburn but loves being outside, my only real choices were a) wear a lot of sunscreen or b) move to the Pacific Northwest (spoiler: I did both).

Faced with the record-breaking heatwaves of a Down Under summer, Australian grape vines are as at-risk as a Urry on an average day at the beach. But while Aussie vintners don’t have the luxury of following me to Cascadia, they CAN take a hint from camp counselors everywhere and liberally apply SPF to their crop. At least one vineyard is doing just that, according to the BBC:

The quality of the vintage depends not only on the sun and the soil, but the temperature. Very hot weather can inflict serious damage, and too much heat can cause the berries to shrivel or suffer sunburn.

“You put sunscreen on your kids when they go out in the sun, so we put it on our grapevines. That just goes on like a normal spray,” says Bruce Tyrrell, the chief executive of Tyrrell’s Wines.

Australian grapes could use all the zinc oxide they can get. Temperatures in wine-growing regions of Oz already reach 113 degrees, and climate change brings the promise of even hotter days. All that leaves only one question: Would you prefer your Yellowtail in Coppertone Cabernet or Sauvignon Banana Boat?

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Why Australians are using sunblock to protect grape crops

, BBC.

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Australia is so hot even the grapes wear sunscreen

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How (And Why) To Be A Mean Green Mom

by DollieBrigstock Posted on December 30, 2014

earth911

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How (And Why) To Be A Mean Green Mom

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Republicans Are Far More Critical of American Schools Than Democrats

by LeilaniOgden Posted on October 13, 2014

Mother Jones

Over at Vox, Libby Nelson interviews Jack Schneider, a history professor at College of the Holy Cross, about why Americans think schools are in decline despite the evidence that they’re actually better than they used to be. Here’s Schneider:

The first reason that people think schools are in decline is because they hear it all the time. If you hear something often enough, it becomes received wisdom, even if you can’t identify the source. That rhetoric is coming from a policy machine where savvy policy leaders have figured out that the way that you get momentum is to scare the hell out of people. So reformers have gotten really good at this sky is falling rhetoric….The rhetoric there is the schools are in crisis, we are competing against nations that are going to somehow destroy us if our test scores aren’t high enough, and lo and behold, policymakers have a solution.

Schneider points to a couple of pieces of evidence to back up his contention that schools today are better than in the past. The first is NAEP test scores, which have been generally rising, not falling, over the past few decades. The second is the well-known fact that people tend to think their own neighborhood schools are fine but that schools nationally are terrible. A Gallup/PDK poll confirms this perception gap.

But here’s an interesting thing. Although it’s true that this gap in perceptions is widespread, it’s far more widespread among Republicans than Democrats. Take a look at the chart on the right, constructed from the poll numbers. When it comes to rating local schools, there’s barely any difference between Democrats and Republicans. Only a small number give their local schools a poor grade. But nationally it’s a whole different story. Republicans are far more likely to rate schools as disaster areas nationally.

I’m reluctant to draw too many conclusions about this without giving it some serious thought. Still, there’s at least one thing we can say. This difference doesn’t seem to arise from different personal perceptions of education. Both groups have similar perceptions of their own schools.1 So why are Republicans so much more likely to think that other schools are terrible? If it doesn’t come from personal experience, then the most likely culprit is the media, which suggests that conservative media does far more scaremongering about education than liberal or mainstream media. That’s pretty unsettling given the fact that, as near as I can tell, the mainstream media is almost unrelentingly hostile toward education.

But the truth is that I don’t watch enough Fox or listen to enough Limbaugh to really know how they treat education. Is this where the partisan divide comes from? Or is it from Christian Right newsletter circuit? Or the home school lobby? Or what?

In any case, there’s more interesting stuff at the link, and Neerav Kingsland has a response here, including the basic NAEP data that shows steadily positive trends in American education since 1971.

1Or so it seems. One other possibility is that far more Republicans than Democrats send their kids to private schools. They rate these schools highly when Gallup asks, but rate other schools poorly because those are the schools they pulled their kids out of. A more detailed dive into the poll numbers might shed some light on this.

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Republicans Are Far More Critical of American Schools Than Democrats

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How Should the NFL Handle Domestic Violence Cases in the Future?

by XMSEfrenxt Posted on September 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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I was browsing the paper this morning and came across an op-ed by sports writer Jeff Benedict about Ray Rice and the NFL’s problem with domestic violence. After the usual review of the league’s egregious mishandling of the Rice incident over the past few months, we get this:

So this nagging truth remains: It should not take a graphic video to get the NFL to do the right thing. For too long the NFL has had an antiquated playbook when it comes to players who commit domestic violence.

….NFL players aren’t like men in the general population, especially in the eyes of children. Rather, NFL players are seen as action heroes who epitomize strength, athleticism and toughness. That’s why so many kids emulate them. And that’s why one instance of a celebrated player using his muscle to harm a woman is too many.

Etc.

I read to the end, but that was about it. And it occurred to me that this piece was representative of nearly everything I’ve read about the Rice affair. There was lots of moral outrage, of course. That’s a pretty cheap commodity when you have stomach-turning video of a pro football player battering a woman unconscious in an elevator. But somehow, at the end, there was nothing. No recommendation about what the NFL’s rule on domestic violence should be.

So I’m curious: what should it be? Forget Rice for a moment, since we need a rule that applies to everyone. What should be the league’s response to a player who commits an act of domestic violence? Should it be a one-strike rule, or should it matter if you have no prior history of violence? Should it depend on a criminal conviction, or merely on credible evidence against the player? Should it matter how severe the violence is? (Plenty of domestic violence cases are much more brutal than Rice’s.) Or should there be zero tolerance no matter what the circumstances? How about acts of violence that aren’t domestic? Should they be held to the same standard, or treated differently? And finally, is Benedict right that NFL players should be sanctioned more heavily than ordinary folks because they act as role models for millions of kids? Or should we stick to a standard that says we punish everyone equally, regardless of their occupation?

Last month the NFL rushed out new punishment guidelines regarding domestic violence after enduring a tsunami of criticism for the way it handled Rice’s suspension. Details here. Are these guidelines reasonable? Laughable? Too punitive? I think we’ve discussed the bill of particulars of the Ray Rice case to exhaustion at this point, so how about if we talk about something more concrete?

Given the circumstances and the evidence it had in hand, how should the NFL have handled the Ray Rice case? And more importantly, how should they handle domestic violence cases in general? I’d be interested in hearing some specific proposals.

Continued here – 

How Should the NFL Handle Domestic Violence Cases in the Future?

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These Israeli and Palestinian Kids Would Rather Sing Than Fight

by LanPridham Posted on August 25, 2014

Mother Jones

They come to the Jerusalem Youth Chorus from as far away as Ramallah (a Palestinian outlook in the occupied West Bank) and a moshav (a Jewish settlement) outside of Jerusalem. They speak Arabic, Hebrew, and often a bit of English. They are five tenors, eight sopranos, six altos, and seven basses. They are 13 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, all high school students. Some are friends of friends with Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel, and Eyal Yifrach, the Israeli teens whose kidnapping and killing sparked the latest round of clashes; others grew up around the corner from Muhammad Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy who was murdered in the wake of those kidnappings.

For the past two years, the chorus—the only mixed Israeli-Palestinian choral group in the Holy City—has met weekly in Jerusalem to sing at the international YMCA, one of the few places Arabs and Jews can meet comfortably. This summer, they’ve rehearsed several times a week—despite the rocket launches and airstrikes—in a flurry of preparations for their first international singing tour. It took them last week to Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan, where they could enjoy a break from the troubles at home.

Here the kids perform “Adinu,” based on a poem by the Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arahi: “I believe in the religion of love, wherever love is found.”

Micah Hendler, the chorus’ founder and director, didn’t know whether anyone would show up for rehearsal on the day after Khdeir was killed, especially anyone from Palestinian East Jerusalem, in whose Shu’fat neighborhood the boy’s body was discovered. “Don’t risk your safety,” he recalls telling them. But half of the kids made it anyway—including half of the Palestinians.

“Then this girl comes in from Shu’fat,” Hendler says.

“How did you even get here?” he recalls asking her. “Like physically. How did you get here?”

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These Israeli and Palestinian Kids Would Rather Sing Than Fight

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Badger Balm SPF 30 Kids Sunscreen Cream – 2.9 oz

by Myrna Posted on August 8, 2014

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Jason Kids Only All Natural Shampoo, Daily Detangling, 8 Ounce

by Myrna Posted on August 6, 2014

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Alba Botanica Natural Protection Kids Spray SPF 40 Very Emollient Sunscreen, 4 Ounce Spray Bottle (2 pack)

by Myrna Posted on August 5, 2014

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