Dying from idiocy

My best friend works for a healthcare company. Doing so, she interacts with doctors on a regular basis. Here's a little anecdote she related to me:

I'll have a patient in the Valley and a patient in West LA. Both are prediabetic. I'll put them both on a diabetic drug, tell them to take it for a month, then come back in so that we can see where we are.

The patient in the Valley will take the medication, and her A1Cs have gone back to normal levels. At this point we can begin talking about lifestyle changes.

The patient from West LA didn't take the medication. His A1Cs are still horrible. When I see him again, I ask why he didn't proceed on the course of action I prescribed. "I talked to my herbalist, and she told me all the side effects, and how all I needed was what she prescribed. Why are you trying to pump me full of poison?"

I have my own anecdote. My neighbor's 17 year old son has gone down a YouTube rabbit hole. His family is vaccinated, and has been able to resume social engagements. He's convinced that the COVID vaccines will implant a chip in him to track him, and he refuses to get vaccinated. His father forbids him from going out or seeing his friends until he's protected. But, to no avail; he'd rather stay home than take the vaccine.

Both of these stories stem from the situation described in this tweet:

The problem isn’t that we live in an age of ignorance.

The problem is that we live in an age of aggressive, belligerant ignorance, an age of ignorance as a civic virtue, an age when not knowing what you’re talking about isn’t considered a reason not to talk about it.

— Victor Laszlo (@Impolitics) July 3, 2021

I remember internet idealism. I've been on the internet for decades. The internet was supposed to bring the world's knowledge into your home. No longer would you have to trek to a research library to pore through its archives. The library would come to you. We would be better informed, more rational, wiser. Good information was supposed to drive out bad information.

What we internet utopians disregarded was human nature. Ignorance has existed for the length of human history. It is woven into the human tapestry as much as command of fire and holiday fruitcakes. Like all utopians, we thought that this would be the game-changing technology which would catapult us into adulthood from our long adolescence, with no deleterious side effects.

The internet has brought a lot of good. But the way it has evolved, with social media powered by click-based advertising, has also energized the dark side of human nature. It has energized the ignorance, the vitriol, the hatred. Where before the internet you had to literally get on a soapbox to harangue a few passers-by, or stake out airport terminals to lull the gullible to your cult, now you can do so from the comfort of your home, and reach thousands, if not millions, of people searching for an explanation as to why their lives haven't turned out better. Good information has not driven out bad information. And it was folly to ever think it would. Unless we had put restrictions on the internet which limited the dissemination of misinformation, it was always going to run neck and neck with factual discourse, if not swamp it.

We now face the odd dichotomy that we are both better informed and subject to gross misinformation. I can choose to seek out reputable sources of data; or I can lose myself in conspiracy. And because of the spread of disinformation and misinformation, we now live in a world where we don't agree on basic facts, on basic rules of the road. Trolls like Louie Gohmert wouldn't have had the power they now have before the internet. Alex Jones would be screaming into the dark, silent night on a low-powered radio transmitter, like the ghostly broadcasts I would get while driving through the Central Valley on my road trips in the early 1990s. Truth doesn't matter; clicks and eyeballs do. If you can get people to go to your website and consume the advertising, the money rolls in. And who cares what you're selling? Truth is fungible.

Donald Trump and Q-Anon are direct products of this internet model, where everything is monetized, and outrageousness sells. Of course, that's always been the case; but we've never had the tools and technology before to turbocharge ignorance. An athlete can get on Twitter and say the earth is flat, and his opinion is as valid in the internet marketplace as that of an astronomer.

I don't have a solution. Maybe there isn't one. Maybe this is just another technology to which we have to adapt and find a way to minimize its harm. But right now the bad actors aren't going away. As a society we have to find a way to reestablish a common reality, a common set of accepted facts, or the technology will control us, rather than us using it as a tool.