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BreeThompsonFirstEssay 3 - 24 Nov 2016 - Main.WhitneyLee
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| META TOPICPARENT | name="FirstEssay" |
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Ignorance Will Outlive Us All | | |
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< | 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. | >
> | 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, but they probably 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. I think that this is perhaps what Eben meant when he wrote about "a world in which every Einstein is allowed to learn physics, regardless of whether she is rich or poor". | | | 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. |
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