I saw a clip of Terence Tao on Dwarkesh's podcast narrating how we came to discover heliocentrism and it got me thinking about a topic that had somehow slipped out of my mind over the years, namely information overdose and it's numbing effects, and I'm sure many of you have as well but I want to write about it as a kind of reunion with the thought.
What I want to focus on in this post are some observations regarding how the general ignorance of people, particularly the youth, regarding such accounts can be mitigated.
The internet
This was a big deal. all of a sudden people had vast amounts of information at their fingertips, as more and more websites were made, more and more knowledge began to accumulate, the price and effort needed to access knowledge decreased... and so did the desire for it.
People developed a numbness to the sudden influx of information, prevalent in young kids today (their plastic brains were exposed to it as soon as they popped out, in comparison to the adults at the time).
You see a relative with their kid, who has an iPad and access to the internet, consuming slop. Now I'm of course not saying the kid should consciously try to throw the iPad away and pickup a textbook, it's really not the kids fault. It's the environment that they grew up in, and that fault concentrates on whoever could do the most about that situation, the parents.
Additionally I would like to point out that the kid consuming slop has a better chance of developing interest in the world than the kid consuming "educational content".
The reason for this is when you see videos on youtube titled 'Top 10 Fun Science Facts' pair facts like "Did you know that any color can be made from red, blue and green?" with ones like "The universe is actually infinite and is currently expanding", the kid subconsciously assumes those two sentences to be of comparable importance or value. I mean the guy in the video said both sentences with the same tone and paired them together in the video, how can you blame the kids?
But this is plain wrong, it's a literal fucking mindrape. How can someone do something like that without realizing the atrocity they are committing? The amount of pain and suffering. Tens if not hundreds or thousands of lives that devoted themselves just for an increment of progress towards the 'fun fact' you see on youtube, they have no idea, no fucking idea.
From the ancient Greeks even considering to ponder upon the true nature of reality instead of continuing to believe in their Hellenism, overcoming the the authority of the church, Gutenberg, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton in the renaissance, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie, Einstein, all these people who had to perform incredibly arduous feats that they simply could have given up on, just to tell the people about the world they were living in. Centuries upon fucking centuries of painstaking observation, calculation, observation, calculation, rinse and fucking repeat all just in the hopes that maybe, just maybe somebody after them, somebody, anybody, just somebody could figure it out.
Okay, calm down. DON'T PANIC.
Final thoughts
The example given was that of astronomy, but there are several other crucial fields that have been refined this way and define the world we all experience everyday. And it's not just most people, I, along with many of you ignore much of this core, sentimental and inspiring history of our world in our day to day lives and I just think that's wrong. To expand my knowledge on this sort of epic history, I looked for a book on the internet (I mean it's awesome if you can use it properly), and I found this, I read a bit and it looks good, any more suggestions are welcome.
I think I might make a videogame with the purpose of reversing these psychological effects, particularly in the youth, once I start college. So yeah, that's what I hope to do about it.
Also this was my first post on here, I didn't want to read any guidelines about how to write. I prefer learning this way so any feedback (on both writing and the thoughts) would be appreciated, thank you for reading.
I saw a clip of Terence Tao on Dwarkesh's podcast narrating how we came to discover heliocentrism and it got me thinking about a topic that had somehow slipped out of my mind over the years, namely information overdose and it's numbing effects, and I'm sure many of you have as well but I want to write about it as a kind of reunion with the thought.
Now the story Terence tells is a fascinating one, I first heard it from him when Grant Sanderson (3b1b) asked him for a video idea and then proceeded to post 2 videos about how humans managed to deduce astronomical distances from seemingly small amounts of information.
What I want to focus on in this post are some observations regarding how the general ignorance of people, particularly the youth, regarding such accounts can be mitigated.
The internet
This was a big deal. all of a sudden people had vast amounts of information at their fingertips, as more and more websites were made, more and more knowledge began to accumulate, the price and effort needed to access knowledge decreased... and so did the desire for it.
People developed a numbness to the sudden influx of information, prevalent in young kids today (their plastic brains were exposed to it as soon as they popped out, in comparison to the adults at the time).
You see a relative with their kid, who has an iPad and access to the internet, consuming slop. Now I'm of course not saying the kid should consciously try to throw the iPad away and pickup a textbook, it's really not the kids fault. It's the environment that they grew up in, and that fault concentrates on whoever could do the most about that situation, the parents.
Additionally I would like to point out that the kid consuming slop has a better chance of developing interest in the world than the kid consuming "educational content".
The reason for this is when you see videos on youtube titled 'Top 10 Fun Science Facts' pair facts like "Did you know that any color can be made from red, blue and green?" with ones like "The universe is actually infinite and is currently expanding", the kid subconsciously assumes those two sentences to be of comparable importance or value. I mean the guy in the video said both sentences with the same tone and paired them together in the video, how can you blame the kids?
But this is plain wrong, it's a literal fucking mindrape. How can someone do something like that without realizing the atrocity they are committing? The amount of pain and suffering. Tens if not hundreds or thousands of lives that devoted themselves just for an increment of progress towards the 'fun fact' you see on youtube, they have no idea, no fucking idea.
From the ancient Greeks even considering to ponder upon the true nature of reality instead of continuing to believe in their Hellenism, overcoming the the authority of the church, Gutenberg, Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton in the renaissance, Benjamin Franklin, Marie Curie, Einstein, all these people who had to perform incredibly arduous feats that they simply could have given up on, just to tell the people about the world they were living in. Centuries upon fucking centuries of painstaking observation, calculation, observation, calculation, rinse and fucking repeat all just in the hopes that maybe, just maybe somebody after them, somebody, anybody, just somebody could figure it out.
Okay, calm down. DON'T PANIC.
Final thoughts
The example given was that of astronomy, but there are several other crucial fields that have been refined this way and define the world we all experience everyday. And it's not just most people, I, along with many of you ignore much of this core, sentimental and inspiring history of our world in our day to day lives and I just think that's wrong. To expand my knowledge on this sort of epic history, I looked for a book on the internet (I mean it's awesome if you can use it properly), and I found this, I read a bit and it looks good, any more suggestions are welcome.
I think I might make a videogame with the purpose of reversing these psychological effects, particularly in the youth, once I start college. So yeah, that's what I hope to do about it.
Also this was my first post on here, I didn't want to read any guidelines about how to write. I prefer learning this way so any feedback (on both writing and the thoughts) would be appreciated, thank you for reading.