People have always been stupid. With social media, they can organise and seem more important than they are.
I don't have a high opinion of humanity.
EDIT:
Because this has been heavily discussed. I don't claim that I am a paragon of intelligence, even though I will have a master's degree I also suffer from being stupid in certain cases.
I believe that we as humans are hardwired to dislike the feeling of not knowing, while this would seem to be a good thing it manifests in quite unfortunate ways. Because (I believe) we are lazy thinkers we tend to find explanations that are either easy to grasp or fit within our own preconceptions. We are generally unwilling to challenge ourselves intellectually. We also tend to take shortcuts in our reasoning. An example can be seen in how some people answer the below question.
Feel free to answer this without looking it up. No calculator should be necessary even with poor math skills.
If someone buys a bat and ball for $1.10 and the bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much did the ball cost?
This is worsened by another condition, the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is where people tend to almost universally overestimate their understanding of a particular subject. It is especially prevalent in those at the lower end of the "knowledge spectrum". This creates a false sense of confidence which makes it hard to get that person to reconsider their views.
How do we change this? Education is the first step. We must put all possible resources and research into education. Beyond that, I cannot be sure. However, on Reddit I have noticed that on certain subs (r/sino for example) mods are clearly able to ban people for having a different opinion. This is a problem and encourages group-think.
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