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Does being well educated make you more or less likely to recognize bull****?

Does being educated make you more or less likely to recognize BS?

  • More

    Votes: 45 80.4%

  • Less

    Votes: 11 19.6%
  • Total voters
    56
MrWonka said:
*learned.

Do liberal arts colleges not have Math and Statistics classes? Is philosophy an art? A four-year degree generally requires you to take gen eds which would require you to learn something other than painting don't you think?



You do understand that Computer Scientists do basically nothing but logic all day long right?
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In my experience the type of peole who learn art/humanity subjects find that they are not up to the job when actual complex discrete problems with definate wrong possible answers pop up. They are faced with the situation of having to either admit to beimng think and go and work for a living or fake it. Given that they have been finding ways through for all of their accademic careers they go with the faking. Gnerally.

The curse of an Oxbridge arts degree is legendary. I have an uncle who's life has been destroyed by one.

The computer scientists do logic sort of. In that they learn a language and work out how to get the box to do the stuff they want it to do. The level of experimentation with the outside world is nill. Thus the thinking encoraged can be very self contained.

In Uk English, I think, the word learnt exists. At least it did when I learnt to speak this language.
 
Superfly said:
Again - I said math is, for the most part, use it or lose it. Algebra does not help unless you use it in every day life, which most people do not. The rest, though - it stays with you. You learn about history, and learn about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and how it changed working conditions for garment workers. You learn bio, and how body functions work. You take labs and remember your experiments. You remember the stories you read in American Lit, and chose favorite writers, which broadened your horizons and took you from reading Stephen King or Danielle Steel to reading Faulkner, or Hemingway, or Toni Morrison. Math? Maybe not. But the rest of my classes increased my learning base a great deal, and helped me to be able to understand things, and, well.... recognize bull****, which is the reason for the OP.
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See, the only reason why you would lose Algebra, is because you never understood it... you just memorized it. This actually works the opposite way xD

History/Bio/etc. do not work like math.... they are not derivable.... If you were born on the moon, and never saw another human in your life.... you would NEVER know anything about history or literature.... but you can know and figure out EVERYTHING from math. Because Math is 100% derivative of logic and critical thinking. But people, like you I suspect, treat math like they treat every other subject... a memorization game. You can start from 1+1=2 and end with Einsteins Theory of relativity all in your head.
 
People of color aren't overly educated (thanks largely to structural racism) and they largely voted against Trump.
 
celticwar17 said:
I would disagree with you... basic algebra and bio classes requires three brain cells... precisely lol. And most people, all they do is memorize things to pass, they have no actual understanding of the material. I actually hesitate to put bio on the list... there is a lot of raw mindless memorization going on in that profession.
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Basic algebra is taught in the 8th grade. The issue at here is about college graduates. Have you ever taken a college math course? You can't memorize the answers. I would suggest there are very few college courses that you can get through just because you memorize things. Most college professors want you to demonstrate command of the subject matter, not short term retention of facts.

Mach said:
LOL, asking the uneducated to give their educated-guess about sociological phenomenon.

Computer scientists don't problem solve!
Humanities require no critical thinking!

Funny if it wasn't so depressing.
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I would also argue that you are far more likely to develop critical thinking skills in the soft sciences and the humanities than math and hard sciences. The soft sciences and humanities are about the human condition. From English Lit to Philosophy to History to Political Science to Economics, these disciplines are about why man does what he does; the struggle of man against a society; the conflict and cooperation between societies. The science exists BECAUSE its about critical thinking..... there are often conflicting prevailing theories that must be debated and supported. These are thinking (maybe even overthinking disciplines, like sociology).
 
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MrWonka said:
Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump | FiveThirtyEight

Does being well educated make you more or less likely to fall for bull****? Turns out Clinton actually improved the margin of victory over Obama in the most highly educated counties in the country whereas she lost votes in the less educated counties.

Donald Trump has a 32% approval rating much of which comes from racists, religious zealots, and the type of people that will vote almost exclusively to prevent any form of gun control to the point where they would vote for a pedephile in order to insure they don't have to wait 5 days to buy a gun.

I was told by a Trump supporter that with all the negative information being spread about Trump it shouldn't be a surprise that only 32% of Americans support him. As if it is just lie after lie after bull**** lie that's being told about him which makes foolish people assume he must be bad. How is this possible when the people most likely to support him are the least educated?

How is it possible that people who've actually taken classes in statistics are susceptible to people lying with statistics? How is it possible that people who've actually taken a critical thinking coiurse could be worse at critical thinking?

Religion is drilled into your head by your parents from the time you are a child. Liberal College professors don't get access to you until you're at least 18 years old and have already formed a great many of your beliefs and opinions about the world. How is that they're so successful at brainwashing that they can overcome your parents and the church you've been attending since you were in diapers?

What makes journalists so different from the rest of Americans that they'd be willing to outright lie in order to hurt a leader who is Making America Great? Why don't they want America to be Great? Aren't most journalists White people? Aren't most of them men? Aren't most of them Christians just like the rest of us? The have families don't they? They pay taxes just like the rest of us right? Don't they have to pay for health insurance as well as the rest of us?

Can a country actually be Great if only 32% of the people living in it like the "improvements?"
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51% of college educated whites voted for Roy Moore.

Seems we have two issues with lying. Political lies, for the most part, are protected speech (which can be extremely lucrative in and out of office). Yellow Dog Journalism is alive and well because Journalism has basically turned into tabloidism, which creates a highly competitive market between various media outlets. Consequently, both politicians and media are driven by greed. In other words, lies sell.
 
celticwar17 said:
See, the only reason why you would lose Algebra, is because you never understood it... you just memorized it.
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Algebra is a process. You can't memorize answers. You can memorize which parts of the process are legal and which ones aren't, but everyone does that, and you can absolutely forget it.
 
Superfly said:
Yes, they do. I am finishing up my undergrad and I have taken many, many classes that have absolutely nothing to do with my major, and everything to do with basic critical thinking skills.
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Interesting....do you allow other points of view into your critical thinking process?
 
celticwar17 said:
I would disagree with you... basic algebra and bio classes requires three brain cells... precisely lol. And most people, all they do is memorize things to pass, they have no actual understanding of the material. I actually hesitate to put bio on the list... there is a lot of raw mindless memorization going on in that profession.
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If you or your kid are passing classes by wrote memorization, I'd suggest you find a better institution of learning.

A big problem is there's too many B.S. schools, pushing kids through too easily, diluting the value of a degree. While I would offer having a degree is almost always better than not having a degree, for me and my family I'd try to only go for schools in the top 15-20 percentile - unless there's some compelling reason otherwise.

I do agree with you somewhat on BIO, though I believe everyone should have one good BIO class. There's still some important principles presented in BIO, worth learning. Actually, I believe everyone should have one good science class of the major sciences - BIO CHEM PHY - and also take MATH through the first CALCULUS class, along with a bunch of non-science stuff. There's just certain things we need to know about the world, if we want to navigate it efficiently making informed decisions.

EDIT: I just caught the following,

"Algebra requires three brain cells"? What?

You needed a more challenging class for sure. And algebra is a foundation math class that's critical, and it's applicable to a great many endeavors.
 
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MrWonka said:
Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump | FiveThirtyEight

Does being well educated make you more or less likely to fall for bull****? Turns out Clinton actually improved the margin of victory over Obama in the most highly educated counties in the country whereas she lost votes in the less educated counties.

Donald Trump has a 32% approval rating much of which comes from racists, religious zealots, and the type of people that will vote almost exclusively to prevent any form of gun control to the point where they would vote for a pedephile in order to insure they don't have to wait 5 days to buy a gun.

I was told by a Trump supporter that with all the negative information being spread about Trump it shouldn't be a surprise that only 32% of Americans support him. As if it is just lie after lie after bull**** lie that's being told about him which makes foolish people assume he must be bad. How is this possible when the people most likely to support him are the least educated?

How is it possible that people who've actually taken classes in statistics are susceptible to people lying with statistics? How is it possible that people who've actually taken a critical thinking course could be worse at critical thinking?

Religion is drilled into your head by your parents from the time you are a child. Liberal College professors don't get access to you until you're at least 18 years old and have already formed a great many of your beliefs and opinions about the world. How is that they're so successful at brainwashing that they can overcome your parents and the church you've been attending since you were in diapers?

What makes journalists so different from the rest of Americans that they'd be willing to outright lie in order to hurt a leader who is Making America Great? Why don't they want America to be Great? Aren't most journalists White people? Aren't most of them men? Aren't most of them Christians just like the rest of us? The have families don't they? They pay taxes just like the rest of us right? Don't they have to pay for health insurance as well as the rest of us?

Can a country actually be Great if only 32% of the people living in it like the "improvements?"
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It depends on how you define smart. If a group of people had less education but made more money would they be smarter than the "educated" group that was less successful?
 
MrWonka said:
How do you memorize the answer to a math or algebra question you've never even seen?
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It seems to me his response was a bit formulaic! :mrgreen:
 
MrWonka said:
Does being well educated make you more or less likely to fall for bull****?
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I voted “more” in the poll but it comes with a big caveat as it would very much depend on the type of BS being spun.

If we talking the used car-sales men who tries to put a positive spin on a lemon in the lot, a style I could agree trump often uses in his marketing. I most certainly agree educated people are far more likely to be able to filter it out. Many marketing are targeting at the more common less educated demographic.

If however we are talking about actual fraud, real deception, the type of BS that is not trivial but often part of criminal or underhanded motives. An educated person shows up far more in the victim data. The factors are many from a specialized expertise being conflated with general expertise to time etc, but it real boil down to “street smarts”. Educated demographics are in general lower in street smarts (ability to spot criminals/scams/etc).

So your inference that Trump supporters are taken by his version of political BS rather than genuinely responding to more underlaying problems within the landscape of our political realm I think is very off base. I am not sure even sure what you think it accomplishes minus demonizing supporters of an opposing political view based on very shaky grounds, loose connections and a lot of stretched assumptions. In other words, your peddling educated BS and likely yourself are attempting to deceive rather than investigate a real connection between voting patterns and intelligence.

In fact, the personality factor of "openness" directly associated with seeking education and liberal attitudes also puts one at a much higher risk of being pulled into a fraud or scam.
 
Mach said:
LOL, asking the uneducated to give their educated-guess about sociological phenomenon.

Computer scientists don't problem solve!
Humanities require no critical thinking!

Funny if it wasn't so depressing.
Click to expand...
Yes, it's shocking!

And the party of the uneducated is controlling the country. It's the blind leading the blind. When you don't know the truth, you can be convinced anything and everything is fake! We see it in front of our very eyes.

And then they source the Bible ...
 
MrWonka said:
Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump | FiveThirtyEight

Does being well educated make you more or less likely to fall for bull****? Turns out Clinton actually improved the margin of victory over Obama in the most highly educated counties in the country whereas she lost votes in the less educated counties.

Donald Trump has a 32% approval rating much of which comes from racists, religious zealots, and the type of people that will vote almost exclusively to prevent any form of gun control to the point where they would vote for a pedephile in order to insure they don't have to wait 5 days to buy a gun.

I was told by a Trump supporter that with all the negative information being spread about Trump it shouldn't be a surprise that only 32% of Americans support him. As if it is just lie after lie after bull**** lie that's being told about him which makes foolish people assume he must be bad. How is this possible when the people most likely to support him are the least educated?

How is it possible that people who've actually taken classes in statistics are susceptible to people lying with statistics? How is it possible that people who've actually taken a critical thinking course could be worse at critical thinking?

Religion is drilled into your head by your parents from the time you are a child. Liberal College professors don't get access to you until you're at least 18 years old and have already formed a great many of your beliefs and opinions about the world. How is that they're so successful at brainwashing that they can overcome your parents and the church you've been attending since you were in diapers?

What makes journalists so different from the rest of Americans that they'd be willing to outright lie in order to hurt a leader who is Making America Great? Why don't they want America to be Great? Aren't most journalists White people? Aren't most of them men? Aren't most of them Christians just like the rest of us? The have families don't they? They pay taxes just like the rest of us right? Don't they have to pay for health insurance as well as the rest of us?

Can a country actually be Great if only 32% of the people living in it like the "improvements?"
Click to expand...

I would more believe the approval rating has more to do with the ridiculous media thrashing about than with anything Trump has actually done.
 
Rosie1 said:
IDK, some extremely educated people have no good sense, and that effects beliefs. I've been told my husband is brilliant. He is, with numbers, but his people skills are not the best. It's all related.
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No offense to your husband, because I'm sure he's not in this class, but an education will not give intelligence or good sense to those lacking it! They're separate issues!
 
AtlantaAdonis said:
People of color aren't overly educated (thanks largely to structural racism) and they largely voted against Trump.
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Might that be because people of color largely vote Democratic all the time?
 
PleasantValley said:
The right leaning people tend to fall for anything with..."Hello, Patriots"!, or....Are YOU a PATRIOT? Then send me money.
I can't give an example for a lefty. I am not that immersed in their though processes.
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The left fall for anything regarding victims. Everyone is a victim, except white males and they're all Nazis. The extremes on both sides have the same problem, an over-reliance on emotion and an inability to rationally think through their ideology rather than just emotionally react to it. When feels become more important than reals, you've got a problem.
 
Gaius46 said:
Might that be because people of color largely vote Democratic all the time?
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It's also interesting that the more educated blacks become, the more they tend to be conservative and vote Republican. The Democrats purposely keep minorities poor and on the public dole so they can buy their votes with welfare and social services. Keeping them uneducated just ensures they don't figure this scam out.
 
Cephus said:
It's also interesting that the more educated blacks become, the more they tend to be conservative and vote Republican. The Democrats purposely keep minorities poor and on the public dole so they can buy their votes with welfare and social services. Keeping them uneducated just ensures they don't figure this scam out.
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That's been my somewhat limited experience as well. The African American engineers, managers and lawyers I work with tend to be more conservative especially when it comes to fiscal matters.
 
Tim the plumber said:
In my experience the type of peole who learn art/humanity subjects find that they are not up to the job when actual complex discrete problems with definate wrong possible answers pop up. They are faced with the situation of having to either admit to beimng think and go and work for a living or fake it. Given that they have been finding ways through for all of their accademic careers they go with the faking. Gnerally.

The curse of an Oxbridge arts degree is legendary. I have an uncle who's life has been destroyed by one.

The computer scientists do logic sort of. In that they learn a language and work out how to get the box to do the stuff they want it to do. The level of experimentation with the outside world is nill. Thus the thinking encoraged can be very self contained.

In Uk English, I think, the word learnt exists. At least it did when I learnt to speak this language.
Click to expand...
Interesting.

So are you saying that arts students become so immersed in the creative ambiguous world of art, with no rules or definition, that they can't act or think definitively or decisively?

That's an interesting thought. And I'm not sure if that quality is perhaps intrinsic to the student before their education, or instilled by their education, or enhanced by their education?
 
Chomsky said:
Yes, it's shocking!

And the party of the uneducated is controlling the country. It's the blind leading the blind. When you don't know the truth, you can be convinced anything and everything is fake! We see it in front of our very eyes.

And then they source the Bible ...
Click to expand...

It is horrible. Definitely horrid, in fact! It was so much better, when the educated ones were driving us into the dot.com bubble or deepening the divisiveness and discontent in our society to the point that the déplorables could defeat the unbelievable intelligencia.
 
celticwar17 said:
See, the only reason why you would lose Algebra, is because you never understood it... you just memorized it. This actually works the opposite way xD

History/Bio/etc. do not work like math.... they are not derivable.... If you were born on the moon, and never saw another human in your life.... you would NEVER know anything about history or literature.... but you can know and figure out EVERYTHING from math. Because Math is 100% derivative of logic and critical thinking. But people, like you I suspect, treat math like they treat every other subject... a memorization game. You can start from 1+1=2 and end with Einsteins Theory of relativity all in your head.
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Great post.

I see math as the "purist" science.
 
MrWonka said:
I'll grant you that. There are studies which demonstrate that when a well-educated person is wrong about something their ability to come up with all sorts of creative defenses of their foolish belief. It is certainly possible, but I don't think you could make the argument that this type of problem would cause the majority of well educated people to be on the completely wrong side of the debate in the first place.
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Certainly, education is better than ignorance. The issue is that the confidence from an education should be considered on the basis of the scope of that education. A business major isn't necessarily going to understand climate change well enough to address the issue.

Said another way, having critical thinking skills doesn't necessarily mean that you are consistently applying those critical thinking skills.
 
Removable Mind said:
51% of college educated whites voted for Roy Moore.

Seems we have two issues with lying. Political lies, for the most part, are protected speech (which can be extremely lucrative in and out of office). Yellow Dog Journalism is alive and well because Journalism has basically turned into tabloidism, which creates a highly competitive market between various media outlets. Consequently, both politicians and media are driven by greed. In other words, lies sell.
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Education doesn't nescesarrily instill values. The educated can still be hateful, racist, xenophobic, etc., etc.

We need to use Alabama as the reference for that 51% number. Because the non-college educated Alabamans voted overwhelmingly for Moore by a huge margin!

In Alabama, Moore held a small edge among white women with college degrees and a roughly 25-point lead among white men with college degrees. Moore led by almost 50 points among white women without degrees and by 60 points among white men without college degrees.
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Source: Wapo: How Different Groups Voted in Alabama
 
Chomsky said:
Interesting.

So are you saying that arts students become so immersed in the creative ambiguous world of art, with no rules or definition, that they can't act or think definitively or decisively?

That's an interesting thought. And I'm not sure if that quality is perhaps intrinsic to the student before their education, or instilled by their education, or enhanced by their education?
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What is clear is that art students do not learn the fundamentals required to explain how public goods work, how group decision making methods alter probable outcomes or why the Catagorical Imperative applies to abortion. But it helps, when you want to apply the Golden Rule to The Kiss.

;)
 
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