> It astounds me how many people will just make shit up rather than profess their ignorance.
Evolution almost guarantees this. It's a valid strategy right up until modern times:
1. The world's not sophisticated enough to expose your fucktardedness.
2. You can still milk some status and social credit from it, if used in moderation.
3. Most of the time you being wrong doesn't matter (even today).
It's only in the age of Wikipedia (or large 20th century libraries) that the circumstances have changed.
The lies/bullshit aren't the worst of it though: with the correct mental habits those are exposed and discarded quickly. It's that people like it so much that it seems to be their primary intellectual tool. The people who do this cannot seem to help themselves, and they're so loud and many that even if you're disinclined to be this way they can overwhelm any correction mechanism.
> ike a little tv in their head, power up and go.
This is insightful. There does seem to be such a mental faculty. But whether it's responsible for the bullshit phenomenon isn't very clear to me.
> So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!
The trouble is being a genius is a valuable status in many societies. So if one of the idiots learns that parroting "I don't know" in any of a few hundred variations, soon many are doing so (when convenient).
One gets the impression that everyone is dumb, and that we're all just bouncing around repeating minimally plausible bullshit.
Evolution almost guarantees this. It's a valid strategy right up until modern times:
1. The world's not sophisticated enough to expose your fucktardedness. 2. You can still milk some status and social credit from it, if used in moderation. 3. Most of the time you being wrong doesn't matter (even today).
It's only in the age of Wikipedia (or large 20th century libraries) that the circumstances have changed.
The lies/bullshit aren't the worst of it though: with the correct mental habits those are exposed and discarded quickly. It's that people like it so much that it seems to be their primary intellectual tool. The people who do this cannot seem to help themselves, and they're so loud and many that even if you're disinclined to be this way they can overwhelm any correction mechanism.
> ike a little tv in their head, power up and go.
This is insightful. There does seem to be such a mental faculty. But whether it's responsible for the bullshit phenomenon isn't very clear to me.
> So the next time someone says to you they don't know something, watch out, this person is probably a genius!
The trouble is being a genius is a valuable status in many societies. So if one of the idiots learns that parroting "I don't know" in any of a few hundred variations, soon many are doing so (when convenient).
One gets the impression that everyone is dumb, and that we're all just bouncing around repeating minimally plausible bullshit.