The 5g conspiracy craziness are but the latest example showing that a civilization's technological progress is hard-limited at any given time by the quality of education a median member of the society has received.
@rysiek
>median
I see what you did here!
@rysiek
So how do we educate 51% of the society?
@wolf480pl well. We should educate them well.
The problem is that education needs to work on different levels. There's baseline education provided by schools, and there's education on particular topics. The former is pretty good, the latter has been abandoned completely, at least in UK and Poland. There were no public campaigns in either country on any of the controversial topics for decades. This battle was lost by walkover.
They don't, authority is 100% subjective. If a government has already started prostituting their authority for short-term gains then they've lost their authority already and are screwed by their own will.
In reality this is probably a bit more optimistic: people confronted with all kind of conspiracy bullshit do wait for public authorities statements on controversial topics. If there's none then... it's lost by walkover.
To speak of a concrete example: in Poland I found myself in a company of doctors who were complaining about the anti-vaxx movement. I asked them when there was the last public campaign on vaccinations - you know, like we saw in 50's with posters, TV programs, articles etc.
The answer was silence.
And there's a dozen of institutions that have funds just for that: ministry of health, public insurer, all kind of medical associations etc.
@wolf480pl @kravietz@social.privacytools.io what one is exposed to through a curriculum, and what one actually learns, are two different things.
So what you end up with is a society where a kid can sing historic variants of washing powder ad songs because they see it 10x per day in all communication channels. But all their knowledge about vaccines is based on hearsay they mom discussed at home because she read it on Facebook... because nobody else wanted to tell her more about it.
Recently Nature published an angry rant against pseudo-science here https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01266-z which is 100% correct in the diagnosis. But then they're calling for - wait for it - scientists to come up with "shareable content" to combat the pseudo-science!
So on one side you've got professional scammers, PR experts who don't care about any credibility, and you want to put a bunch of scientists with "shareable content" against it...
@kravietz
How does a median citizen tell the difference between an education campaign on a controversial topic and propaganda?
@rysiek