Are real median incomes in the USA rising or falling? Are household sizes getting larger, or smaller? Is poverty in countries other than China rising, falling or stagnant? Do high poverty levels in 1820 remain high prior to that? These are questions for which google can rapidly supply answers!
Google isn't providing much of anything useful anymore
And I suppose I have been trained - I mean, this is a pretty important part of being a historian - to first check to see if a fact is knowable with a high degree of certainty before trying to instead use inductive reasoning or analogy to arrive at a *probable* result.
The same people will talk about how the academy has given up pursuit of truth because of woke.
This is not exclusive to people on the right. I wish it was.
Fair, I probably ignore it from others...
But I sound smarter if I argue with vibes (Also, vibes are more immediately compelling to our fundamentally ape brains, but that's a discussion for a different thread I think)
“Well, everyone knows Custer died at Little Bighorn. What this book presupposes is... maybe he didn't?”
I look at what true, genuine geniuses in ancient Greece came up with using those methods--Euclid believing that the eye projected radar-like rays, for example--and quickly realize I should probably stick to relying on empiricism, because I doubt I'm drastically smarter than Euclid.
i think this is the biggest difference most people are *not* trained and google is not by any means guaranteed to give any given Joe Dunning-Kruger Public the actually most reliable source rather than some crank with an axe to grind (which may be a very well-funded org with great SEO)
The belief that there are a limited amount of good things in the world, and therefore one individual or group's gains must come at the expense of someone else, is a deep-seated cultural belief. Not surprised it resists empirical evidence.
on the one hand, nearly all of our modern non-zero-sum value had been dug out of the earth at great *environmental* cost on the other, we can definitely be making better use of that stuff if we stop treating it as zero-sum *against each other*
sites.nd.edu/world-politi...
That paper title has me thinking about how this tracks with people's feeling that their life is becoming more peasant-like. (Yes, it's mostly vibes, and also the source of the feeling is too long to fit in the second half of this.)
It's vibes, and I'm not quite sure which parts of it contribute most, but I'm pretty sure the feeling of peasantification has something to do with highly-visible people at the top of apparently untouchable orgs making incomprehensible decisions.
I dont think its entirely vibes tbh. Atleast Part of it is changes to the terms of highly central aspects of live (employment, education, housing, especially the latter two).
Does google actually supply an answer? Google is not a search engine. It never was. It's not concerned with truth or even orthodoxy. It's a confirmation engine. Answering real questions as you pose requires data that isn't conveniently packaged to be in a google search.
It supplies links to research papers, census data, studies, etc. It doesn’t directly answer your question, it helps you find the right resources to get an answer
And yet “just google it” and “a simple google search” are used to insult, minimize & shame people.
It’s neither an onerous task, nor a complicated one Plus, they teach you how to find factual sources and do research in the school library and as part of English class, history class, etc. If you can’t “just google it” you might deserve being shamed
Add to the fact that past searches influence future results, and that the same search is almost guaranteed not to return the same results to different people?
If you search for something factual like “is the real median income in the us growing” there are obvious data based reputable sources vs obvious non-data editorialized think pieces. Regardless of how the search engine works, it is not a complicated task for someone to differentiate sources
Do you have the chart you’ve posted before on war deaths handy?
the last time we had an argument with a friend about wages in the US she used google and supposedly found countervailing evidence 🙃
It's always shocking to remember that there are a ton of people who've never had to critically evaluate the accuracy of sources. I think this is a big part of why so many people are so bad at arguing on the Internet.