From The BBC 4 News Quiz:
About a survey on the belief in evolution and the age of the earth:
"I think what you need to do with a survey like that is that figures need to be adjusted like we seasonally adjust unemployment figures. We should adjust surveys for stupidity. Essentially, so, according to raw data, one in three Britains believes God created the world in the last ten thousand years. But adjusted for stupidity, noone believes that."
This got huge laughs on the BBC. I wonder how it would go over on an American quiz show.
My one argument with this clever joke is that I think the adjustment should be for ignorance as opposed to stupidity. In my opinion the vast majority of people that believe the earth is literally from 6,332 to 6,579 years old (timeline here) really are stupid but they are also ignorant of the facts and the vastness of the evidence that proves the earth is, in fact, incredibly ancient. Ancient as in the incomprehensibly vast time span of 4.5billion years give or take 1%. There is this other group of people who are not stupid, who have seen the facts, and who remain ignorant nonetheless. These people are willfully ignorant. More often than not this type of person uses this willful ingnorance to manipulate and control the actual stupid people, reinforcing the "us v. them" mindset that is essential to the control of a cult. The truly stupid ignorant people that believe the Bible is a literal history of life on earth are also told, by the willfully ignorant, that if they doubt the Bible they will go to hell.
Sorry to end a humor post on such a down note. I live in the state with the creationist museum so I am perpetually ashamed of my fellow Americans whose brains are so effectively controlled by the most evil, hateful, and willfully ignorant humans in the world. But for a smile, here's a picture from inside the creationist museum:
Parenting FAIL.
Sorry to end a humor post on such a down note. I live in the state with the creationist museum so I am perpetually ashamed of my fellow Americans whose brains are so effectively controlled by the most evil, hateful, and willfully ignorant humans in the world. But for a smile, here's a picture from inside the creationist museum:
Parenting FAIL.
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2 comments:
I completely and 100% understand exactly where you are coming from on Ignorance and stupidly. In fact I have spent a rather excessive amount of time considering stupidity and ignorance and how best to address them. I know - sounds stupid ;-)
Any way here is my conclusion on stupidity versus ignorance:
We are all born ignorant, ignorance is the default setting of the human mind. Ignorance is curable while stupidity is choice. A person that chooses to remain ignorant by any means is a stupid person. The goal in life should be to become less ignorant every day. Laziness, ideology, religiosity, or whatever are not excuses to remain ignorant. When a person has the opportunity to learn, and chooses to either not learn or ignore facts in order to retain an existing idea or concept or avoid the learning opportunity, that person then chooses to be stupid.
Stupidity is not just a weakness of mind, it is a weakness of character and an indicator of a person that seeks the opposite to self improvement. I can't necessarily say that stupidity defines a person as being a "bad person." However, I can emphatically say that stupidity is a contributing factor for what makes a "bad person."
Eh...
I think we're talking about similar things but our definitions are different.
For me, stupidity is a lack of ability. Something that our strange P.C. movements in this country (on both sides of the political spectrum) has brought us is an inability to acknowledge that some people are more intelligent than others. There are a lot of literally stupid people out there. Those stupid people are easily manipulated by those more intelligent and/or cunning than they. There are many intelligent people who are willfully ignorant because it helps with their cunning and dishonest goals. There are many cunning idiots that manipulate those more stupid and/or less cunning than they. There are intelligent people who wish to help those who are not smart and teach them to think better than they already do.
"All children can perform at high levels" was the mantra of the "No Child Left Behind" crowd and it simply is not true. For an education system to work as well as it should there should always be children who are held back and those who are advanced. To expect all children to be equally advanced is not only stupid, it's frighteningly totalitarian.