Critical Thinking v Tedious Dribble

An underrated factor in how we got ourselves into this mess is that Americans are increasingly relying on computers and the internet instead of their own critical thinking faculties (AI is making this even worse), and as a result are uninformed and easy to manipulate.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 6, 2025

I have three liberal arts degrees (I’m educated beyond my station in life; that’s all it is), and spent over 20 years teaching English, which is fundamentally all about critical thinking. Believe me: computers and the internet did not blunt critical thinking skills among the populace or the college educated. Critical thinking is damned hard. Most people don’t have the energy, or the bandwidth, to engage in it.

I remember a lawyer telling me, when I was merely a paralegal with an MA, that other lawyers in the firm envied me. I had time to read something besides law cases and contracts. They were quite capable of critical thinking; but their time was not their own. Their critical thinking had to have a focus.

It’s always a scarce commodity.  And it can’t really work in the presence of sheer ignorance:

Which also can’t be blamed on computers and AI. I mean, you can find answers to that question very easily.  There’s never an excuse for stone-proud ignorance. (The better vanilla is Mexican. Tahitian is also nice; but both are more expensive than Madagascar.  And if you don’t know what it’s used in, educate yourself, or stay out of the conversation. It’s possible that’s an actual question. But this is the internet, and trolls are the default setting. You can blame that on the internet; or at least how it’s used.)

This is no small part of the problem, and it was true long before cable television (believe me; I remember the arguments, such as they were, over Vietnam (which always meant the war) and the civil rights movement):

Pundits hate simplicity. If something is simple you don’t have to have pundit expertise to explain it.

Trump Cabinet now has a public record as the stupidest Cabinet in history.

This isn’t complicated. They are stupid rich people. Any analysis that doesn’t begin with their stupidity is stupid.

Pundits also hate accountability. Keeping things abstract keeps people out of them. Discussing ideas is far safer than discussing people. Public discussions must assume those in charge are competent, and merely mistaken, at worst. “Stupid” is a judgment that cannot be indulged. But then, punditry is not really worth all that much, either. It insisted King was wrong about Vietnam. And insisted it for a very long time. It took a long time to turn on “the best and the brightest.”

People don’t like critical thinking because it requires being…critical.

OTOH, maybe we can use the internet to spread this information around:

Trump’s team just admitted it: his tariffs won’t bring back jobs for people—they’ll bring in robots for automated labor.

Dems passed the CHIPS Act to bring 125,000+ real jobs home. And Trump wants to undo it.

Guess “America First” didn’t include American workers. https://t.co/8NTASeIlUj

— Rep. Jimmy Gomez (@RepJimmyGomez) April 6, 2025

Donald Trump implores you to look away:

What does it say about your policies that you can only defend them by telling easily disprovable lies? https://t.co/KDviMkUeNl

— Tom Malinowski (@Malinowski) April 6, 2025

How else does he get you to ignore reality?

If this is a boom, I'd like to know what a bust is," Enten said. "I mean, my goodness gracious. We'll talk about, I mean, talk about the S&P 500 – it's dropped 15 percent under Donald Trump's presidency. The S&P 500 has been collecting data essentially since 1957, it's been an index. I went back and I looked for drops of 15 percent with a president who was inheriting a bull market. There's only one dude on your screen, it's Donald John Trump. He is the only one to see a drop of 15 percent this soon into his presidency in the S&P 500 after inheriting a bull market. In fact, there's only only one other president who has had seen a drop of 15 percent this early on in his presidency, and that was George W. Bush back in 2001. But, of course, he was, in fact inheriting the dot-com bubble bust, and so this is truly unique where you come in with a bull market and then boom, right through the floor – Donald Trump, the S&P 500 dropping already 15 percent."

"You look at these numbers, you wouldn't be surprised to see Donald Trump's net approval rating," Enten said. "Compare it now to where it was at this point in the first term, and the first term he was above water at plus-five points. Where is he now? He's way underwater, he is swimming with the fishes. Look at this: He is the worst ever for a president at this point in a term on record at negative-12 points. I just never thought I would see the day because, as we were hinting at at the beginning, Trump promised an economic boom. Voters bought into it, but so far they ain't liking what they're seeing."

I’m sure critical thinking will still save him. He’s always relied on it before.