I just got back from drowning my sorrows into a patty melt at a local bar I frequent. I normally go at night, so the daytime servers were new to me. Got a 40ish year-old lady server who was overworked because everywhere is understaffed now. I asked for some tea because I hadn’t had caffeine yet, and she looks at me puzzled and says, “like hot tea?” And I say “Yes! Black please, but green is ok too if you don’t have it.” And she looked at me, still confused, and said, “Well i don’t know what that is, but we have regular hot tea I can bring you with some hot water.” After she left to put in my order, I couldn’t stop thinking about this exchange.
This article gives me the same exact feeling. Whatever is happening that allows adult SERVERS to be unfamiliar with one of the most popular drinks on the planet. Whatever allowed it so so many people didn’t even realize Biden had dropped out…is the reason we lost to trump. It’s the reason Democrat weren’t able to break through on any issue. We were either talking to brick walls, or black holes. It’s no ones fault but that servers that she was unaware of black tea. You can’t force people to be intellectually curious or skeptical or even open minded. And these same people get to vote. And that’s why we can’t have nice things.
It’s an education system and culture problem. You can’t force a 40-year-old woman to be curious and critical, but you can plant the seed and encourage the growth of those skills and behaviors in children. That confusion at hearing something different followed by the attitude of putting it in a box and dismissing it (“I don’t know what that is, but we have regular hot tea”) comes from a lifetime of being told to accept whatever over simplified answer they are told and be quiet whenever they ask questions.
considering how stridently the Republican Party has been attacking public education for the past 50 years or so, this is a predictable result. They don’t need every American to be incurious and shallow, they just need enough to tilt elections in their favor.
Sitting here in Germany, looking at the shambles of our political landscape, looking over at you, reading this and remembering Trump saying to/about Musk that he’s “a genius” and America doesn’t have many of them left…i can only laugh at the utterly infuriating powerlessness against such kind of disregard for basically anything that has changed since the dark ages and the utter ignorance. My anger is slowly shifting to sorrow…
Right, it’s no surprise that the lesser educated religious tend to have larger families that go on to vote Republican bc that’s what Jesus would want.
And that’s exactly why Project 2025 states their desire to get rid of the Dept of Education.
Fostered and inculcated by the plethora of churches across the land, who also DON’T PAY TAXES. They are a cancer, rotting us from within.
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I mean, TECHNICALLY, if you’re a US Citizen in Africa, yeah, you can vote absentee for President.
One of my co-workers had to move to Algeria and was working remotely, pretty sure he still voted.
I honestly don’t know where we go from here as a nation, and I fear folks like that will be the first casualties if the worst comes to pass.
I mean, as deeply saddening as this sounds, the reality of it is…that issue will resolve it self. Ignorance is bliss…you won’t even know what hit you. And i’m beginning to think i should take that stance and just ignore everything and just carry on. Told a friend that, he immediately said, nope, you’re way too decent of a human being for that…so we’re going to suffer together.
No, we have to fight for our country, or else we’re the 1930s Nazi sympathizers. Volunteer. Donate. When the time comes, help marginalized people escape the camps. This is OUR country, don’t let them take it.
I was once teaching a student introductory programming when I was in my undergrad.
The problem was to draw two circles on the screen of different colours and detect when the mouse is inside of one.
I said, “So our goal is simple: Let’s draw a circle somewhere on the screen. Consider what you’d tell me as a human - I’ve got the pencil, and you want to tell me to draw a circle of a certain size somewhere on this paper. We have three functions. Calling a function will draw a shape. Each function draws a different shape. We have rect(), circle(), and line(). Which of these sounds like the one we want to use? Which would get me to draw the correct shape?”
“… Rect?” “Why?” “It draws a shape.” “What shape would rect draw?” “I don’t know.” “Guess.” “A circle?” “Why do you think that?” “We need to draw a circle.” “If I said that rect draws a rectangle, which of the three functions would we want to use then, to draw our picture?” “Rect?”
I’ve now been teaching for many years, and those situations still come up a lot. When I put up a poll in class, with the answer still written on the board, about 25% of people in a 100+ student class will get it wrong - of people who were not only admitted to a competitive university program, but have passed multiple prerequisite courses to be here.
Not only is it unknown gaps in knowledge, there is just a thought process I haven’t been able to crack through that some people really can’t see what is immediately before them.
Some people are apparently incapable of learning anything except by rote. To them, every problem or situation has one solution, and they have no answer for any situation that has not previously been explicitly spelled out to them and the solution memorized, and failing that they not only won’t know what to do but they flat out won’t even try. There is no such thing as figuring out a new solution to anything based on logic or deduction. In any process, they will refuse to understand how the result is actually derived from the actions taken, nor what each step does or why it is done.
I’ve had to work with several people like this over the years and it’s both exhausting and infuriating.
In my line of work I have also been forced to interact with people, mostly clients, who cannot understand hypotheticals. Any abstract or non-concrete concept is completely lost on them and worse, usually exposing them to one will make them irrationally angry in response – which they will immediately direct at you, you nerd.
These people are not only allowed to vote, but also drive cars, own firearms, and have children. It’s shocking.
Really great point - purely rote learning is definitely a major piece of this category, if not the category in itself. Basically an inability to move up Bloom’s taxonomy from the first level or two. I very recently spent hours with a student who had this exact issue - they tested well, but couldn’t even begin to do the applied work unless they were walked through it, precisely, step by step. Zero capability of generalizing, but fully capable of absorbing and recollecting facts… just no understanding associated with it. No connections.
That gave me something to think about, thank you!
I don’t know that i have the patience to do that more than once per person, i end up analyzing their thought patterns to sus out the root cause of the failure to adapt to new thinking. This kind of thing might be based on family culture or inappropriately reinforced assumptions about basic concepts that did not got caught by earlier educators. I will explore their cultural and family backgrounds to figure out how assumptions from there affect these failures to adapt to more dynamic environments.
A new model can be planted over inappropriate beliefs for the context of the new environment (here at work, generalizing is not only okay but necessary), and then it has to be reinforced over many months to keep the previously dominant mindset from reverting and help them build comfort with the new way of thinking.
The great part about this is that people who learn the adaptations this way will naturally teach others with the same maladaptions, and much more effectively. The terrible part is that it is slow and tedious and almost always includes religion or trauma
Yeah, this point about really needing time is pretty real. I recently came to the conclusion that some folks really just need to retake the core courses multiple times (and seeing if we can change this pattern) because it just takes them a long time to unlearn helplessness in the field and adapt.
And absolutely, as you’ve said, I find those who do adapt go from someone taking our most basic course three times to becoming a top student. Those who don’t adapt fall to cheating and/or dropping out. I usually have about 500-800 students per term, and with about 20-30% falling into this category with more each year, one-on-one interventions are rare and you usually only catch them on their second time around once they finally heed our requests to come talk to us.
I’d be curious what other fields work with this so I could go read some papers or other materials on these mindsets, it sounds like there is quite an overlap to what we’ve been experiencing, I appreciate these insights!
Edit: Oh, and adding that I’ve spoken to some researchers in trauma informed education and I imagine the overlap here is high in terms of approach - recognizing how different behaviours can be linked to trauma and considering the approaches that can be taken to ease them back into stronger academic habits. It’s been a while since my talks, but this could spark some more, as I hadn’t quite connected the rote memorizes to this. Seems quite feasible for at least a subset.
who cannot understand hypotheticals.
Ted talk on it https://youtu.be/9vpqilhW9uI
I struggle to think of what to call it and how to describe it, too. But it really is like a consistent quality. Some sort of reasoning blindness. It’s like listening to someone who is colorblind but doesn’t know critique a painting.
Yeah, you can feel it pretty quickly in an interaction. I like how the other comment put it, where it seems like they are stuck in rote memory mode. Having a list of facts in their head but no connections between them, no big picture capability. I recently had a student who seemingly refused to read the six bullet points describing a problem, and couldn’t comprehend that they described requirements, not step-by-step instructions. Without step-by-step instructions, this group flounders, and what should be insignificant details stand out as blockades they can’t get past because they can’t distinguish the roles of the details.
Reasoning blindness is an interesting term for it. Bloom’s taxonomy of learning, which has its controversies, stands out to me here; it’s like they are stuck at recall problems, maybe moving up to understanding a little bit but unable to get into using knowledge in new circumstances, connecting them, or being able to argue points. It works well for certain testing, it’s a great skill to be particularly astute in for many lines of work, but it really is a critical thinking nightmare.
Get rect. ;)
I got angry reading this. These people should not be allowed to vote on anything.
Agree in concept, as voting should mean actually thinking about what a person brings to the position and not just a name grab. However the danger of drawing a line for voting qualification is that the line can easily be moved around with any sort of parameters. Educating the public is the only real solution, but boy that’s difficult when the means of communication are loaded to enhance someone’s profit and not actually teach substance.
This election was a failure because of the lack of communication, in many different aspects. And now that will become even harder to do.
I can appreciate that. Arguably these folks might be more likely to vote because they aren’t stuck in the mud of nuance, answers they see are more clear and obvious and the other ones may as well not exist. Not contemplation of what they don’t know, in a way.
But - on the other hand, as mentioned we can’t really pick who votes without opening Pandora’s Box - and the best thing we can do is not to punish, but to rehabilitate. To model stronger behaviours, to identify why they behave in this way, and to try to help them build stronger critical thinking skills. Punishment is polarizing.
Fun, maybe related note: I’ve researched some more classical AI approaches and took classes with some greats in the field whom are now my colleagues. One of which has many children who are absurdly successful globally, every one of them. He mathematically proved that (at least this form of AI) when you reward good behaviour and punish bad behaviour (correct responses, incorrect responses), the AI takes much longer to learn and spends a long time stuck on certain correct points and fails to, or takes a long time to, develop a varied strategy. If you just reward correct responses and don’t punish incorrect responses, the AI builds a much stronger model for answering a variety of questions. He said he applied that thinking to his kids, too, to what he considered a great success.
I think there’s something to that, and I’ve seen it in my own teaching, but the difficulty now has been getting students with this mindset to even try to get something correct or incorrect in the first place, so they just… Give up, or only kick into action after it’s too late and they don’t know how to handle it at that stage because they didn’t learn. Inaction is often the worst action, as it kills any hope of learning or building the skills of learning.
I deal with adults like this every day at my workplace. Can’t think, can’t reason, can’t troubleshoot, can’t read documentation, can’t even frame their problem correctly- let alone come up with a solution. Its insanity.
Gods, I feel this so hard. I rose to a management position in a pretty short time for doing, like, what I consider to be the absolute bare minimum of learning how to do the job and solving problems on my own.
I have a worker under me now who has been doing that position for longer than I did at this point and still comes to ask me questions that are basic fundamentals of the job.
This makes me really appreciate my current employer, which actually vets people pretty stringently. It’s not 100% effective - nothing is - but by and large, I’m working with a lot of creative critical thinkers every day, many making me feel like a buffoon.
I have a coworker who has been with my company as long as I’ve been in this entire career that we are both in. Between the two of us, I am the expert, because if something goes one iota off the rails, she can’t handle/process it. This is a problem because shit goes off the rails ALL THE TIME in our business. How she hasn’t figured out how to handle that in 15 years, I don’t know
Is it potentially learned helplessness, and they are enabled in other aspects of life?
It’s possible, though I suspect it’s more a byproduct of rigidity - she’s fine at her job when everything is straightforward and/or predictable, but goes to pieces when choices aren’t binary.
You can’t force people to be intellectually curious, but you can absolutely foster it. The hierarchy of needs is probably totally relevant here; if you want people to be personally invested in developing their brains they need to be and feel physically secure. Unfortunately the USA’s ruling class knows they only have money to lose if more people are educated or desire to become more educated so the education system will continue to rot and we won’t get over that hump.
I need to know what happened after that exchange. Like, after you burned the place down, did the fire department piss on it while high-fiving each other?
It was a pretty bad visit. I ordered ranch with my fries, and my patty melt with only American cuz i don’t know why you’d want swiss on a patty melt. They brought me the melt with swiss, and I got blue cheese for my fries. And didn’t get a water until i was finished with my melt.
Tipped her 10$ cuz she was overworked and I used to be a server. Yay tip culture.
I was back of house, so I have difficulty with this. Forget tipping people with the IQ of a crayon for shit I don’t want.
I cooked at a bar for a year in college after i served, to this day i check for tip jars put out for cooks because you all deserve the real money. Only see them once in a while though, sadly
Cheers. One shop I worked at split tips with everyone, even the dish pit. That was fucking legit. I had to get out though, food stops being fun cooking for strangers.
american culture is such that polite conversations do not permit the topics of religion, sex and politics to be discussed. as a result: evangelicals dominate our political trajectory, abortion is now illegal again; and people didn’t know that biden dropped out.
there are also different levels of ignorance when it comes to each topic and it sounds like you’ve encountered one that’s at a slightly deeper level than that of your standard american voter.
Plain ignorance is part of it, but I really don’t think it’s the driving factor. You don’t vote for Trump because you lack some key knowledge, no matter how trivial that knowledge is. You vote for him because you’ve been inundated with conservative media for decades, and you have no grasp on reality anymore. You really believe Harris is going to hold you at gunpoint and replace your gas heaters with electric. You really believe she’s going to sell the United States to China for a hundred bucks. You might even believe there’s a war on men, a war on your religion, a war on everything that brings you meaning to your life. If I truly believed the things that conservative media was saying, I’d vote for him too.
It’s not just ignorance. It’s brainwashing.
A brain that’s been washed would qualify as ignorant, for me
Sort of, with the major distinction that you can just tell somebody water green tea is and they’ll know what green tea is. It’s a trivial fix. You can tell a Trump supporter that Harris is not a communist, and they won’t believe you for a million years, with all the facts in the world behind you.
That’s not the reason we lost. It’s because our party don’t do shit. That’s it. Everyone is afraid of what trump is going to do but what was done to prevent it? Nothing. We have a weak party with weak politicians.
So if the party did more, people wouldn’t be googling “is the current president running for president?” the day before election? I don’t really see how the party trying harder in the right way would fix people’s innate ignorance.
The DNC deserves a ton of blame, but 2024 has taught me there is no democracy without an educated population, and ours is not educated.
They don’t know because the party provides no tangible benefits to them. Nothing to improve their lives directly. Passing UBI would have won this election in a landslide because it reminds people monthly what the party did for them.
You think the people who didn’t even realize that Biden wasn’t running are adamantly keeping tabs on the status of UBI? Because even if it was passed in a legislative miracle, Republicans would take credit, and they would believe them. I don’t agree that this would sway the “wait, did biden drop out? What’s black tea?” voters.
This makes me wonder if people keep saying they were more prosperous under Trump because he “signed” the goddamn stimulus checks with his huge sharpie signature. It’s something I thought surely people wouldn’t be that stupid to fall for, but maybe I was wrong.
“Gas was cheap when Trump left office”
Yeah, because nobody was allowed to leave their fucking house.
I have literally heard someone say this exact thing. Wonder no more.
They don’t know because the party provides no tangible benefits to them
People are gonna realize pretty fucking quick just how wrong this is.
What would they need to do to prevent it?
No clue. But maybe try something. Instead Harris just ran on Trump ending democracy and vote for her because Trump is bad. And then everyone acted like he didn’t have a chance at winning (just like they did with Hillary). I saw this coming from a mile away. Glad I voted for de la Cruz this time.
So you couldn’t even be bothered to look up Harris’ platform
What are you talking about? I was definitely going to vote and there is no way in hell I was going to vote for someone complicit to funding genocide. Everyone that says they are against what Israel is doing and then voting for Harris or trump is complicit too.
Well congrats on helping Trump get in office to help stop genocide.
Dude Harris lost by so much it would not have made a difference. And did you see what you just wrote? I knew my candidate was going to lose. I knew yours was too. I won’t support genocide. Nazis support genocide.
… why would a server at a bar need to know about tea? is it part of required knowledge for her workplace? no, its a BAR. you know about black or green tea, probably because it was a common drink with family and/or friends. if somebody else was raised in a different, tea-free family, and without tea-guzzling friends, at what point would they have been like “woah, i have to look into this whole tea thing” before working at the bar (where tea definitely isnt part of the training).
lets be honest, the reason you know about tea and she doesnt has nothing to do with intellectual curiosity. so take that high horse behind the barn and shoot it in the head, you wont need it anymore.
Tea is a globally consumed drink that predates the country that made the country she’s from, so “let’s be honest” there’s no excuse. It’s nearly as severe as never having heard of pepper.
Pep-a-what now? Is that like ketchup?
It’s that pig cartoon the kids watch, right?
If you don’t know what black tea is, you go behind the barn and get shot.
ok ok, i give up. trump won because of public ignorance to tea
They serve breakfast? Long island iced teas?
I never you. I’ve had to force myself to be able to eat anything since Tuesday night. I’m so furious with my country.
Not to defend the American public, who does not deserve any defense in the slightest, but…
I have a friend in advertising who specializes in Google SEO, and he pointed out this will include searches that contain the phrase as a subset of the search, such as “When did Joe Biden drop out” or “Why did Joe Biden drop out”.
Right, “did Biden drop out” had a spike as seen in the first picture below. It’s hard to tell magnitude. When comparing to another phrase, it’s easy to see that the spike wasn’t even close to the spike for another election day phrase: ‘who is Kamala?’
To be fair “Who is Donald Trump” reaches just as high as Harris…
Hahaha I didn’t even think to check that. Wild
Also searches I wish voters had done at least 24 hours before the most important election in my lifetime
Also does not include amounts. It’s easy to cause a spike in results when there aren’t many to begin with.
The spike when you zoom out to the past year:
There are uninformed voters for sure, but always be suspicious of stories that confirm your biases a bit too much.
Going off the bars that’s roughly 1/8 or 12.5% of the peak. Not what I would consider small.
It’s not nothing for sure, but statistically it’s almost impossible that all of that represents uninformed voters. Children and people ineligible to vote can also do internet searches. So with that in mind, to my eye this doesn’t represent that a significant portion of the voting public had no idea Biden wasn’t running before Election Day.
Not to mention people that are just not American nor live in the US, but take an interest during the election, which is about true in the rest of the west.
Children and ineligible people are both the minority and don’t have as much reason to google it. To my eye that will be a small amount of the searches.
That’s in line with the Brexit vote in the UK.
“What is Brexit? What is the European Union?”
This is the country with the nukes, subs, carriers, and troops in everybody else’s backyard.
Europe and the rest of NATO, I think y’all need to figure your shit out without us. Make plans now.
This has to be the biggest fumble of all time lmfao
I mean short of running ads on football games that literally just said “Joe Biden, our current sitting president who took office after Donald Trump, has stepped down from running for a second term. Kamala Harris, our current VP is now the Democrat nominee”…actually…scratch that, maybe they should have done just that.
I think one of the problems with Harris was that she actually believes that the American people are smart, capable, pragmatic folks with a penchant for helping others. That may have been partially true about some subsection of Americans at some point in time in the past, but 40+ straight years of institutional rot and attention attacks from an increasingly shitty and incoherent media ecosystem have taken their toll.
That’s exactly what they should have done.
Everyone keeps writing up/sharing/posting this article, but no one has any actual numbers of search results. The 100 line is just a representation of when it was searched over the past thirty days. It’s not a representation of how many people actually searched it. That 100 mark could have just been 20 people for all we know.
You cannuse the Glimpse extension for Google Trends to see absolute values of search popularity.
11% of what it was the day he dropped out
Yeah, and how much was that day? Still a pretty meaningless percentage when there isn’t a real number to see. You can at least assume it was well over 20 people, based on that.
“Where’s Joe? Kamawho? Doh I guess I’ll just vote for Trump, I liked cheaper gas”
It’s not that uncommon for people to block all that stuff out for personal reasons. Lemmy itself has some users that intentionally filter out all political stuff from their feed. I don’t agree with it, but there’s a lot of people like that.
Some people call this ‘elaborate repression mechanism’ or ‘retirement into private life’.
I don’t like suppressing emotions because suppressed emotions happen to come back at unexpected times in weird places.
It’s not a good idea because at the end of the day even if you’re not interested in politics, politics is definitely interested in you. Thse people are just burying their head in the sand and ignoring the real world.
I’d be afraid that public opinion making isn’t the only topic or problem they ignore or repress.
Today for the first time in my life I’ve blocked keywords Trump and MAGA on Lemmy. Also took down my funny user handle. The world feels too real and too unsafe for funny monikers and constantly seeing the fuhrer’s face again for half a decade. I’m not ready.
“If it’s important someone will tell me about it” is such an infuriatingly common position.
Politics on lemmy is a boring circlejerk anyway. Mods are even more ban happy than r/politics on Reddit. No political discussion of substance is possible.
Which substance are we talkin?
The substance where opposing views can be presented and argued. An exchange of information, ideas, ideology, and facts.
I’ve got 12.6 tons of election denial, 3.78 grams of highly concentrated transphobia and 54 barrels of … what will you give me for it?
3 tons of salt, 200 barrels of voter disaffection, 47 pallets of polarization.
Unfortunately that is not how those graphs are plotted.
I kind of understand why they want to get rid of elections. It feels a bit futile with this crowd.
So that’s why I had to vote for Biden as a write-in candidate!
Most of those searches were Biden
Lmfao. America deserves this.
