It's always been amazing to me that in the post-internet, pre-enshittification era of the Information age that people could go around confidently spouting bullshit facts like "gum stays in your body for 7 years" when a few swipes of a thumb can tell anyone with an internet connection otherwise.
Nowadays this doesn't hold as true, because search results / LLM's tend to give you the information it thinks that you want rather than what is actually the result. Have seen a lot of people getting into dumb, easily disprovable arguments and using a copy pasted google summary as evidence to whatever absurd claim they are making.
Given the prompt "Why does swallowing gum result in the gum staying in your body for 7 years?" Claude explains that that story is a myth, so maybe search is dead but GenAI isn't totally useless. Wikipedia also comments on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewing_gum#Choking_and_excret...
There are vast hundreds of millions to billions of people who don't watch the news and don't read books, get their information from social media and rumors, and don't know about authoritative primary sources or critical thinking.
After all, what else would explain populist authoritarians being so wildly popular almost globally at this time?
And maybe we need a social media platform that forbids plaintext and only allows fixed patterns of statements backed by citations from reputable sources only? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
About 750 million people are entirely illiterate as well (in any language). I think the actual number may be higher because I’ve worked with a surprising number of them across global oilfields.
Nowadays this doesn't hold as true, because search results / LLM's tend to give you the information it thinks that you want rather than what is actually the result. Have seen a lot of people getting into dumb, easily disprovable arguments and using a copy pasted google summary as evidence to whatever absurd claim they are making.