Highly-Educated Americans Are By Far The Most Closed-Minded; Gallup

[yerrag]

Finally, a poll to confirm what I've suspected all along.

Highly-Educated Americans Are By Far The Most Closed-Minded; Gallup

• The most-educated Americans are the most-manipulable (the most closed-minded) Americans.
• Those who identify as liberal (80%) are more concerned than conservatives (68%) and moderates (65%) with other people’s media bias.
• While 58% of Black adults are more concerned about bias in others’ news than in their own, fully 73% of Asian Americans and 72% of White adults say the same.

Furthermore, since the less-educated persons aspire to be more-educated, they are — even without knowing it — aspiring to become less open to contrary views, instead of to become more open to such views. One bad consequence of this is: it strangulates imaginativeness, openness, and creativity, in favor of being rote, rigid, and bureaucratic.

Another bad consequence of it is that the authority-figures, in such a society, are, in some important ways, actually inferior to the rest of the population. Moreover, America’s colleges and universities are not increasing their students’ open-mindedness (as they should) but the exact opposite — they are reducing their students’ open-mindedness.

Even if professors are teaching some truths, the professors are training their students to be authoritarian, instead of to be open to a more truthful, comprehensive, and deeper understanding, which encompasses those truths...

This is a perverse situation, which bodes ill for the future of the entire nation. Any country which is like this is not only an aristocracy instead of a democracy, but it is greatly disadvantaged, going forward. It will be disadvantaged both in the arts and in the sciences. Its future will be stultifying, instead of dynamic. Aristocracies tend to be this way. Also, because it will remain highly polarized, its internal ideological frictions will waste a large proportion of the nation’s efforts. As a nation, its forward-motion, its progress, will thus largely be crippled, by its internal discord and distrust, between the two warring factions of its aristocracy — and friction between the respective followers on each side.

This describes a declining culture — a nation that is in decline.

 

[yerrag]

Does this apply to the US only?

 

[S-VV]

Highly educated Americans are a distinct social class (much like the priest strata of gone civilisations) Usually having high paying and respected professions, lots of social contacts, gated communities, private security, legal structures to avoid paying taxes etc...

Their belief system (liberalism, democrat, left-wing “social” policies etc...) is suited to benefit them at the cost of the lower classes with the benefit of moral justification.

College is just the final maturation place of the soon to be members of this upper class.

 

[yerrag]

And the media would talk with the air of pretension and superiority as it looks down upon other learning centers in the world such as Islamic madrassas.

And the fact is the universities here are just as guilty of brainwashing as what they claim the Islamic madrassas are doing.

 

[Ableton]

Thank you for educating us completely unbiased on this bias.
Personally, I think that studies don’t mean much today, but I will nevertheless believe in this one because it fits my worldview

 

[yerrag]

Thank you for educating us completely unbiased on this bias.
Personally, I think that studies don’t mean much today, but I will nevertheless believe in this one because it fits my worldview

Just follow my worldview and you'll be fine. Trust me on this one lol

 

[Drareg]

People should spin some of the extremist rhetoric of everything being a cultural construct, how about "highly educated" is culturally defined, intelligence is not.

 

[yerrag]

People should spin some of the extremist rhetoric of everything being a cultural construct, how about "highly educated" is culturally defined, intelligence is not.

Like the cutural construct of biological sex, you say?

 

[Ableton]

Like the cutural construct of biological sex, you say?

Biology is a cultural construct, as are the words you are using to make sense of the world etc

 

[yerrag]

Biology is a cultural construct, as are the words you are using to make sense of the world etc

Tell us why you think biology is a cultural construct.

 

[Nebula]

I’m overall glad I didn’t continue academia past a bachelors degree while younger. I wouldn’t mind more formal education now, but I don’t think I was self aware enough at the time to not just assimilate into the dogmatic worldview of mainstream academia and corporate work culture.

 

[Ableton]

Tell us why you think biology is a cultural construct.

I have never gone into nature seeing biologies growing on a tree.
It’s a knowledge system made up and created by men to decipher an aspect of nature.
This knowledge system works in doing that - to a certain extent. Just because we are able to translate „laws of nature“ to some extent into our knowledge systems, doesn’t mean we get to the core of it ever.
The way science works is like this: it‘s about accumulating credibility (as a form of capital), not truth, through constant retranslation of abstract experiments and existing literature, relying on pre established measurable categories and instruments that can measure them, relying on getting wuoted by professor X, relying on not contradicting said professor ever, relying on not contradicting major paradigms that led to fundings under which are researched etc.
You cannot think anything that has happened in the last 10k years without culture. There is nothing natural about biology
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you dive into language, it only gets more complicated. There are studies out there showing that the way a language is shaped effects behaviour. E.G. in some countries they only have „going to do“, not „will do“, and those people are more likely to stick to long term plans etc
It’s really never ending. You have to see science as constant reiteration and translation shaped by culture. This forum too
Biology is a cultural way to look into nature

 

[PxD]

I have never gone into nature seeing biologies growing on a tree.
It’s a knowledge system made up and created by men to decipher an aspect of nature.
This knowledge system works in doing that - to a certain extent. Just because we are able to translate „laws of nature“ to some extent into our knowledge systems, doesn’t mean we get to the core of it ever.
The way science works is like this: it‘s about accumulating credibility (as a form of capital), not truth, through constant retranslation of abstract experiments and existing literature, relying on pre established measurable categories and instruments that can measure them, relying on getting wuoted by professor X, relying on not contradicting said professor ever, relying on not contradicting major paradigms that led to fundings under which are researched etc.
You cannot think anything that has happened in the last 10k years without culture. There is nothing natural about biology
And this is just the tip of the iceberg. If you dive into language, it only gets more complicated. There are studies out there showing that the way a language is shaped effects behaviour. E.G. in some countries they only have „going to do“, not „will do“, and those people are more likely to stick to long term plans etc
It’s really never ending. You have to see science as constant reiteration and translation shaped by culture. This forum too
Biology is a cultural way to look into nature

A petri dish expirement that yields result X and that result X can be replicated from that same experiment in any country, at any time, by men or women, by any race, etc. is not a cultural construct. It's an objective reality.

Your post reads like post-modernist sophistry.

 

[lvysaur]

Tell us why you think biology is a cultural construct.

Well this forum is just proof of that. That heaps of what is taught as "fact" in biology, or geography, or history, and arguably even physics is just a cultural construct, an imperfect understanding of reality, which is often (actually usually) perverted by the prejudices of society, the interests of powerful individuals, etc.

That said of course biological sex is one of the most perfect and inarguable discrete traits in the natural world. You're either genetically male or female, 99.9999% of the time.

 

[Ableton]

A petri dish expirement that yields result X and that result X can be replicated from that same experiment in any country, at any time, by men or women, by any race, etc. is not a cultural construct. It's an objective reality.

Your post reads like post-modernist sophistry.

well the whole experiment and setup is a cultural construct revealing that objective reality (which only makes sense in a culturally established knowledge system). So idk what your point is. Biology is still a cultural construct. No culture = no knowledge about nature (even before written language some forms of oral culture had to be established to pass on knowledge). This is hardly debatable imo

 

[Ableton]

Well this forum is just proof of that. That heaps of what is taught as "fact" in biology, or geography, or history, and arguably even physics is just a cultural construct, an imperfect understanding of reality, which is often (actually usually) perverted by the prejudices of society, the interests of powerful individuals, etc.

That said of course biological sex is one of the most perfect and inarguable discrete traits in the natural world. You're either genetically male or female, 99.9999% of the time.

Correct, but even that duality is being challenged by epigentics altering estrogens in our environment etc, and biology can proof that. The Y chromosome is slowly disappearing
One point of postmodernism is that facts are cultural constructs. This is a perfect example actually. Long established meta narratives such as gender are being challenged by our kafkaesque late capitalist reality.
Lots of peoples do not understand pm, or simply hate it for ideological reasons (conservative—> jordan peterson non sense etc).

 

[yerrag]

Correct, but even that duality is being challenged by epigentics altering estrogens in our environment etc, and biology can proof that. The Y chromosome is slowly disappearing
One point of postmodernism is that facts are cultural constructs. This is a perfect example actually. Long established meta narratives such as gender are being challenged by our kafkaesque late capitalist reality.
Lots of peoples do not understand pm, or simply hate it for ideological reasons (conservative—> jordan peterson non sense etc).

Using estrogen intoxication as an example of enabling gender fluidity is the most artificial construct and you are using it to justify your ideas that the binary concept of sex does not exist.

 

[Drareg]

Like the cutural construct of biological sex, you say?

Exactly, I’m a bird and I intend to fly from the top of a building soon.

 

[Ableton]

Using estrogen intoxication as an example of enabling gender fluidity is the most artificial construct and you are using it to justify your ideas that the binary concept of sex does not exist.

i don’t understand your point tbh. You do not seem to be able to grasp that races are fluid. Ever heard of evolution? We evolved from mammals without any sex chromosomes, got some in the course of millions of years, and will likely lose them again over the course of the next million of years. Nature does not care that we have established a category called human to call ourselves. Everything is fluid, it just takes millions of years to have effect.
Also, how often has your processor read out a 2? Correct, 0 times. It’s binary. Gender is not binary. It’s close to it statistically at the moment, but it’s just not, even if you would like it to be.
What I do not get about your point, considering you are on this forum, is that you do not seem to acknowledge the effect of our environment (that is becoming increasingly cultural and less natural) on our bodies. I am using an artificial construct to explain gender, which you deem to be completely nature? Well yes, thats the whole argument

 

[Recoen]

Many think we more stumble on things vs "construct" them.