That's great but it's a slow cultural change. Well-educated countries can still fall into extremism, which is driven by emotional and atavistic factors as well as economic and political ones, and can't simply be dispelled with doses of Rationality (tm). Arguably, the failure of rational utilitarianism to engage with this aspect of humanity and to simply dismiss everything that can't be quantified as irrationality exacerbates the growth of toxicity.
On a more practical level, the US is a country where part of the population rejects the theory of evolution on religious grounds, historical narratives are intensely contested, and political life is objectively and increasingly polarized. Educational change happens over generational timescales, and if it were as simple as making it available all our social ills would have been dispelled long ago.
Of course education and critical thinking skills are essential for a healthy social body, but when I see people saying 'we just need better education' I feel like I'm on a bus that's headed towards a cliff edge and well-meaning people are suggesting that the solution to this is better driving lessons.
My intent was to describe the system (social media is a hyper-efficient anarchic consensus-based information exchange), and a root-cause for undesirable output...
There may not be a solution that preserves the open internet, if this system is fundamentally incompatible with social realities.
That's great but it's a slow cultural change. Well-educated countries can still fall into extremism, which is driven by emotional and atavistic factors as well as economic and political ones, and can't simply be dispelled with doses of Rationality (tm). Arguably, the failure of rational utilitarianism to engage with this aspect of humanity and to simply dismiss everything that can't be quantified as irrationality exacerbates the growth of toxicity.
On a more practical level, the US is a country where part of the population rejects the theory of evolution on religious grounds, historical narratives are intensely contested, and political life is objectively and increasingly polarized. Educational change happens over generational timescales, and if it were as simple as making it available all our social ills would have been dispelled long ago.
Of course education and critical thinking skills are essential for a healthy social body, but when I see people saying 'we just need better education' I feel like I'm on a bus that's headed towards a cliff edge and well-meaning people are suggesting that the solution to this is better driving lessons.