These are two sides of a dialog I've listened to, and sometimes been in, in many places around the world. Sometimes it helps to define "ignorance" precisely, as conscious deprivation of learning. Someone who is ignorant in this sense knows that she is illiterate, and wants to learn to read, for example. Some people also know that in addition to being deprived of learning they are intelligent: they are conscious of having minds that want to grow and are being starved.

Intentional ignorance, persistence in not wanting to learn, could by this approach be called "stupidity," but that produces judgmentality that isn't desirable.

It is correct that many people given opportunities to learn will be easily distracted by activity that substitutes for learning. Probably this trait is expressed in the preponderant majority of humankind. Every human being can learn, some better than others. But a few human beings enjoy learning particularly, are markedly good at some aspects of learning, and are determined not to be deprived. Exposing those people to anything they want to learn without regard to their economic or social circumstances will alter the social life of the rest of humankind, notwithstanding the ratio of such learners and thinkers, because culture immensely amplifies their value to the rest of humanity, as it has been doing since the onset of complex articulate speech, probably some 200,000 years ago.

I think the dialog is a useful stage in forming a different thought, by explaining two aspects of a complex phenomenon. I think the next draft here should be very much improved by going through, and perhaps coming out the other end, of the apparent opposition.

Certainly some people use “the internet” in the ways that you’ve described (seeking out false facts to confirm their own beliefs, and consuming content), but that doesn’t mean that giving other people access to the same wealth of information that we have access to won’t lead to an “ignorance free society”. I think that the idea of an ignorance free society is more about ensuring that no one is “ignorant” because of their circumstances (poverty & lack of access to information) and less about making sure that no one is willfully ignorant. There will always be people who choose to remain willfully ignorant to truth, but they should not be our focus. We should be more concerned with the people who want to learn, people with untapped potential, who are barred from realizing their full potential because they have no access to the things they want to study. Also, on the issue of content, surely some of the people who consume “pure entertainment”, will also occasionally decide to access some of the more educational resources available through net access. (Most college students in the U.S. are good examples of this…). Even if, after providing everyone with access to the net, some people choose to exclusively consume entertaining or smutty content, I wouldn’t call this “progress neutral”, because even if 90% of people behaved this way, it would still be worth it to give the remaining 10% access to the things that they wanted to learn about. Finally, there is a sort of paternalistic element here that I’m hesitant to address… but as people who have benefitted immensely from having net access it seems a bit disturbing to me that we find it morally acceptable to deny a large portion of the human race access to the sum of human knowledge accessible to us through the use of technology. This is particularly disturbing when you consider that access could be given to them at little to no cost to us. It almost seems as if we are trying to intentionally keep millions of people ignorant, which sort of reminds me of this ... but I digress.

Ignorance Will Outlive Us All

By BreeThompson - 04 Nov 2016

Introduction

Echo Chambers

Consider an extreme version of this: the alt-right. Up until this year, it seemed that the alt-right was primarily an internet phenomenon, growing on message boards, thriving in the comments, and generating propaganda/memes. Now it has burst forth fully formed armed with an arsenal of misinformation exalted as fact. While I grant that many if not most of those who ascribe to their beliefs are luxuriating in willful ignorance, I imagine that at least some (perhaps just one) of them is simply in too deep to escape the pull confirmation bias and human nature generally. Nonetheless, if access to the internet can foster this sort of pseudo-intellectual movement that is easily and quickly refuted by even a basic ability to compare sources and weigh their credibility can thrive and create barriers to correct information for themselves and unlucky, naive wanderers, then access is indifferent to knowledge.

Opium Dens

Conclusion

<--/commentPlugin-->

• #Set ALLOWTOPICVIEW = TWikiAdminGroup, BreeThompson
• #Set DENYTOPICVIEW = TWikiGuest

Note: TWiki has strict formatting rules for preference declarations. Make sure you preserve the three spaces, asterisk, and extra space at the beginning of these lines. If you wish to give access to any other users simply add them to the comma separated ALLOWTOPICVIEW list.