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Brian Ross

Publisher & Editor-in-Chief , TheRossGroupFT LLC

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Ignorance Plagues Progress: Finding New Avenues to End It

Ignorance is the anchor that drags on progress. Technology's rapid advance in less than a handful of decades has created a social, religious and political backlash. Ignorance is not stupidity. Some of the most educated people in the world have been some of the most willfully ignorant. With 5 in 10 adult Americans barely able to read and write, and nearly 9 in 10 exhibiting varying degrees of difficulty in synthesizing information, 2 in 10 taking in any kind of non-entertainment news, how do those who propose to advance humanity "catch up" the vast majority of the planet to become broader, more rational thinkers?

Topics: american politics education future government politics religion technology
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    Fritzie Reisner 100+

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    Jul 5 2012: Kahneman says we, including the very educated among us, have an exaggerated idea of our rationality and self-knowledge. Still, education is surely a big piece of giving people practice in using data, asking questions to establish the validity of sources, and so forth.

    People would be better able to reason together with data if there were more trust that everyone at the table is thinking things through in good faith.
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      Brian Ross

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      Jul 17 2012: And how do you achieve that in a mass media where liberals distrust it because they believe its owners have an agenda of keeping stupid and complacent, and extreme conservatives don't trust anything other than Fox because they have been conditioned for 35 years to believe that the media holds a liberal bias?

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