What made so many of them flip their skepticism?
Once they saw content on the internet that confirmed their biases and preconceived notions, the internet became a reliable source of media
because the internet was telling their kids things they didn't like. You know, things like "gay people are just normal people" or "the earth is not 6,000 years old". So it can't be believed. But then the internet said things like "Hillary Clinton drinks the blood of children", and they WANT that to be true so it is.
Thousands of Haitian, Libyan, and other children are victims of Killary regardless of whether she does anything with their blood, so they're right, but for the wrong stupid culture war reasons
Yeah but those are brown children so the Boomers are fine with it.
Use of scapegoats to deflect attention from the evils of capitalism :very-smart:
It never flipped, they were always gullible. They were just making up reasons why a new technology wad bad.
It's this, the tech was new and boomers as a group tend to be more skeptical of new things (this is not a unique quality either, older people tend to be more resistant to radical change). As the years went by though it became an entrenched form of media supplanting all other traditional news media, they have been immersed in an environment where internet is the dominant form of media distribution and it has become legitimized.
They still have the contrarian "skeptic" brainworms just now there's a million grifters peddling shit online and the algorithm loves a good scheme that appeals to bias/emotion.
I think it is possible that boomers going on about "never believing anything you read on the internet" has actually made them more gullible. The phrase was always meant as a condescending message to younger people with the implied understanding that the boomer saying it was above falling for this sort of misinformation. As any con artist will tell you, fooling people who think they can't be fooled because they are smarter than everyone else is extremely easy.
Never believe anything you read on the internet, but if the nice man on the color TV set says it, it must be true. Also, you are important, so if someone from the IRS calls you and says you need to pay them with iTunes gift cards, it's automatically legit.
Also, a pretty big part of it was they discovered that they could be racist online. So much of Boomer psychology don't really make sense until you look at it through a lense of "does this confirm my opinions on black/brown people, and can I get punished for saying them out loud?". Thats also why they like Trump so much, because despite being a queeny bitch for his entire life, he was allowed to be racist in public, and so he was a real man's man.
No one has any critical thinking skills, people just fall for everything they see. It's not exclusive to certain generations either, it's just a normal human thing. Thinking "wait, maybe this part isn't true" is something you have to learn and maintain, aint nobody got time for that.
People like hearing shit that reinforces their opinions, no one ever thinks "this sounds too good to be true, I better double check the sources".
Confirmation bias has nothing to do with technology, it's just something everyone has in their brain.
Here's the thing: those people have been saying the same "crankery" for 30 years. Facebook "radical fascists" were normal discourse in 2006.
"Haha, silly kids believe in some obviously fake thing on the internet."
"Haha, silly kids believe in something I found was fake using the internet."
It was always a way to mock younger people for not being as smart and amazing as their generation.
In summary: this
Kaputnik already covered it, but it's called Confirmation Bias and you're not immune
Yes, very important to note we're not immune. At the same time, white American boomers in particular have lived a coddled, privileged existence. I think tends to lower the mental barriers these biases operate under.
i think the lead poisoning joke is funny but honestly it doesn't seem very convincing to me
Not familiar with them beyond knowing Cronkite was a TV anchor, can you elaborate?
they were seen as the "adults in the room" and the authoritative last word on current events. they were/are revered
They were reputable and trustworthy radio and TV journalists (insofar as mainstream American media types ever could be). Boomer kids imprinted on them like baby ducklings, and now, as adults, they extend that level of implicit trust to the likes of :live-tucker-reaction:
Edit: Murrow was a fucking legend because he sacrificed his whole career to dunk on Joe McCarthy.
Being talked to and told they are smart for listening to the talker (very old and successful marketing trick) made them change their minds.
Ayn Rand's giant pile of fascist vomit smeared on paper has a foreword about the reader being very smart for buying and reading it, for example.
Similarly, the foreword to one of Milton Friedman's earlier books complains about how the NYT silenced him by not putting him on the bestselling list like other authors and a lot of self-victimization about being silenced.
The man who was in charge of 80s neoliberalism and got to run Chile after the coup.
I used to hear that a lot more in the general internet public, with no pushback and no negative reaction, not long after the turn of the century. It was the same time when it was super cool and nearly universally praised to be "socially liberal and fiscally conservative." :disgost:
So many people on Reddit used to define their politics that way. And what's funny is that the democrats have been chasing these people since 1992, and somehow haven't realised yet that these people are literally never gonna vote democrat ever. Fiscal policy will always trump social policy, especially when the social policy is largely cultural and not dictated by anything other than media-consumption.
It really does seem as if the late 90s never ended for some people, especially the aging ruling class and their petite bourgeoisie enablers.
The end of history and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race etc etc etc
Clinton-era neoliberals must have had such a dopamine flood from the collapse of the Soviet Union that they've been chasing that dragon ever since.
Honestly I think it kind of hurt them. They lost their big boogeyman, and suddenly half of them had no reason to exist. That's also why they kept trying to pin Iran and Iraq as these boogeymen who were working with Cuba and North Korea to destroy America. Besides, a lot of them had degrees and experience in Anti-soviet operations, and suddenly that wasn't as needed. And nobody, not even neolibs, really believe that you can just uproot yourself from the skills you've been training for your entire career. So they scrambled to find another foe, and lucky for them, they have finally landed on China.
What used to really baffle me was when my mother would say things like "how can you know what to trust on the news?" (She is like this after moving to and living in a very conservative area for a long time). I never knew how to respond, simply because I would have thought she would be able to think through information and be able to decipher what is bullshit. It usually isn't that hard for me at least, and now I realize what it is.
It's basic reading comprehension.
Americans are illiterate and can't deduce anything further than what something literally says. They don't have critical thinking skills about inferring anything like "spin" on news articles. They have just been told to trust certain news sources by the people around them that they already trust. It is actually rather alarming when you realize they are all mentally 6 year olds that have been taught to read but not think. Because of this it is an accepted fact of our culture that news has to be dispensed from something they have decided is a trustworthy source and follow it unquestioningly. The very idea of critical thinking is something that is alien, or not considered as realistic.
Had a distant friend try to send me the Joe Rogan interview with some discredited scientist about mRNA vaccines and I told him I wasn't going to watch that trash. I didn't discuss it further and I think he took my refusal as proof that mRNA vaccines are a matter of opinion (As far as I know I think he is anti-vax himself). The fact that he takes a Joe Rogan interview as medical advice or evidence is further indication of basically how fucked the American brain really is, and he isn't even a boomer.
Really looking forward to Lysenkoism with American Characteristics brought to you by Fox News (Sponsored by Gatorade- Taste the Electrolytes!) in 10 years.
Honestly what is horse-paste and sheep-dewormer and piss-drinking if not American Lysenkoism.
Yes I can't believe there will possibly be zoomers getting scammed online far in the future perhaps by something wild like buying jpgs of monkeys
Zoomers are kind of getting scammed now by influencers claiming that they "love" them and have personal connections with anyone that pays them.
Nothing changed, it was always a "rule for thee but not for me" cause they're smart enough to know whats true when they read it obviously lol
Advertising ruins our brains. It's my pet theory. You get told about emotions, you see bright lights, colors, they flash at you, zoom past the screen, and its all over in seconds. And then another hits you. 3-4 more times this happens over the course of as many minutes. Finally you can watch your show again after being bombarded.
And this will happen four times every hour.
Rupert Murdoch and the Koch brothers are probably my first bet. Also, hogs drop their arbitrary skepticism when someone tells them exactly what they want to hear.
