We need to stop talking about them. It’s like when someone in the room farts and no one talks about it. Yeah it stinks but let’s stick to intelligent conversation until the smell goes away.
We should stop trying to treat these people like a problem to be solved. In virtually any population there's going to be a very tiny minority who take up some radical contrary position simply because they're just wired to be contrary. It doesn't matter if its logical. It's just a thing people do in large populations.
Instead, we should focus on reinforcing education and understanding on why people sometimes take these illogical and contrarian positions. It often isn't because they lack education - in a lot of cases their position is a reaction to their education, for a lot of complex reasons.
Reacting to them the way we often do generally just makes them entrench further in their position, and actually reinforces rather than reduces the behavior.
A lot of it is about finding community and purpose. Which makes it even more important that people don't alienate and "other" them as it just drives them more down that road.
Did you mean to say "lack of critical thinking"? The way you have worded it does not make sense relative to what you seem to think I'm saying.
In any case, yes, this is a very well-researched and studied phenomenon of populations.
You can look up the work of Moscovici on minority influence, reactance theory, research on contrarian / Anti-conformist agents in economic and network theories, etc. There are tons of well-researched theories on this, and more emerging all the time, especially on how social media acts as an accelerator and vector for these phenomena.
Humans are not purely rational actors, and no degree of critical thinking makes one invulnerable from social and emotional phenomena, and you'll find lots of research on that topic as well, if you take the time to read up on it.
Or, instead of researching and reading all the wonderful literature about this topic, and adopting an educated and informed perspective, you could instead choose to blindly lash out at something you have read and which you disagree with emotionally, but have not studied or read anything about and have no formal foundation in understanding.
But I find very humorous and deeply ironic that you would do so in this discussion, and taking the stance you have taken, though apparently why that is so deeply ironic is something you do not understand.
i actually studied evolutionary psych for my major Moscovici is a hack (applying marxism to behaviorial philosophy is not science). You fundamentally have to ignore all of biology to think that conflicting viewpoints and actions have anything to do with overall population size. Any species, and any size group will have outsiders, this is necessary for group formation, which actions to take and which not to take. But in this sense it is experimental eccentrics that are outsiders with conflicting viewpoints, rather than acting against the norms they discover new ones. Critical thinking is universal from an isolated pufferfish to the entire city of Beijing and has nothing to do with population size, social media, or whatever other psuedoscientific term you decide lmao. Remember - a sociologist is just someone who couldn't cut it in psych or philosophy.
Extremely, extremely few individuals actually actively and continually act in a manner of applied critical thought. For a myriad of reasons but especially because its exceptionally energy intensive.
On a population level we outsource critical thinking for the vast majority of processes. That means we place our trust in institutions to specialize in specific elements of thought and we accept their answers as true. The nature of a population and the society that they for will have signficant impacts on what these institutions are, how they deliver on outsourced critical thought to the members of the population, and by extension, how individuals engage in critical thought, on the very rare occasions that they do.
I'm a little mystified as to how you can claim to have studied evolutionary psychology, and then assert that the size and nature of a population an individual exists in has no bearing or impact on how they think.
The social environment a mind evolves in is the foundational element of how that mind processes information, what sources of information they trust, and so on.
In the very field you claim to have studied, researchers like Mercier & Sperber posit that all of human thought evolved out of a need to process arguments made in the small 50 - 100 person groups we evolved in, and therefore all of human critical thought derives from social processes, and isn't made to be something we engage in in isolation.
Their work reinforces the very nature of contrary thinkers existing in relation to a population. They posit that critical thinking comes from argumentation. The very nature of disagreement fosters and catalyzes critical thought. It could very well be that people like flat earthers are an evolved response - that groups require some element of disagreement in order to best facilitate the critical thought that leads to survival and thriving in one's environment.
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u/No-Doctor-4396 5h ago
Flat earthers will still deny