Ignorant morons and thinking.

I can take any side of an issue.  If I can't, I really don't believe I have a right to an opinion.  Most people don't, because most people don't think.

Thinking is a developed skill.  Puzzles, especially story problems, can help.  Most people avoid story problems and they do cross word puzzles or word searches, or whatever.  Yeah, those can be useful in developing specific skills in language relating, but, they don't help thinking.

So, thinking...what is the most important part of thinking?  The truth is, the most important part of thinking is knowing what one does and does not know.

Suppose I write a blog or a discussion board post discussing a psychiatric paper from the early 1900s on homosexuality.  I do that a lot, take a position in a discussion and occasionally people help me learn stuff.  More often, some moron without any thinking skills just becomes angry and goes off on a rant, or sometimes I piss of a moronic fascist hacker who has taken it upon himself to become a "New Age Inquisitor".

The world is filled with morons, and guess, what?  You can't avoid them so don't even try.

There is an old saying, "steel sharpens steel", and occasionally I find someone with a brain who can discuss an issue and then I might learn something.

Over the years, I have watched as the Internet has become less and less a place to exchange ideas and more and more of a place where ideology is monitored by fascists of one kind or another.   Discussion is one of the great learning tools and people don't use it, instead, people make assumptions about what they know, anything that conflicts with what they "know" is "wrong" and anyone who disagrees with what they "know" is a horrible person.

Then there are people with concepts of "respect", or "honesty" in discussion and if someone violates these rules, usually, once again by disagreeing with the "moderator", the ability to learn is compromised.

I believe this is because people go to schools and listen to idiots lecture and those idiots chastise whoever disagrees with them, so people never learn how to use discussion as a learning tool.  All people know how to do is regurgitate what they have consumed from lecturers.  This is true of reading as well.

See, the lecture or the reading is a story problem.  Generally a single perspective in a world of perspectives.  The listener or reader needs to place the information in context with other perspectives to develop an opinion or understanding.

Instead, people don't care about understanding, they just champion whatever opinion someone told them to have, then they think anyone with a different opinion is "wrong".

The thing is, people are more than a single opinion or even a group of opinions.  people are hopes and dreams and opinions and fears and thoughts.

So, our "learning" process destroys the ability to learn to think.  We can't discuss or become better at what we do.  Instead, we are building an idiocracy, and have been for hundreds of years.