It's bandied about by the type of person that says "roastie" unironically, and it's probably safe to assume that's where it came from. (Sorry your divorce went so poorly, dude.) You can notice that it presents a peak from 13-18 and a drop-off around the time they describe as "the wall": after 25, the chart presents a precipitous fall and according to the chart, by the time a woman's 27, fewer than half of all men will find her attractive. That is, the data in the chart lines up perfectly with their talking points, and it doesn't resemble anything in the paper. Lately, I've seen it pushed around by the creepy pedo crowd to justify something or another (you people are unreadable), and then recently by someone on Spinster whose point was "All men are pedophiles! HERE'S A CHART!" (Sorry your divorce went so poorly, ma'am.) The chart gets shoved around the internet by people that think it'll bolster their point, and then either tacitly accepted by people they're arguing with or both of them are playing the same game and they didn't even look at the chart before responding with an infographic or an ad hominem or something.
The gullibility is mind-boggling. How does this happen?
The data's presented in a dry, somewhat professional-looking graph. It's easy to understand immediately. No one posting it appears to have read the paper in question: here's a chart! People wouldn't just make up a chart to lie on the internet! Look, it's got a citation! It's got the trappings of legitimacy, but it's completely illegitimate. So my suspicion is that the root cause is laziness, sloppy thinking (confirmation bias is a hell of a drug), and the Twitter Disease, where the goal of every post is to win a stupid political argument on the internet and they don't care if what they're doing is repeating someone else's agitprop because the people they talk to every day are actually Enemies and if you ever lose any ground in a stupid political argument on the internet, $bogeyman wins and all of humanity is plunged into a dark age.
I don't think there's an easy society-wide solution. I think people are going to continue to care about the *appearance* of legitimacy more than they care whether what they are saying is legitimate or not, and the distortion of every human interaction is not going to die off on its own. This is the major problem with totalizing political philosophies, essentially anything that says, in effect, "The personal is the political." (That stuff you can find in Marx and Stalin and Hitler and every other social catastrophe: if there's nothing outside the reach of politics in your view, if every conversation you have involves pushing politics, or if you cannot be friends with someone that doesn't share your politics, you've got the disease.)
That having been said, the possibility of solving the problem in society is a different question from the possibility of solving the problem yourself. That's completetly possible: you can stop being stupid. (Or, at least empirically, I can say that it's possible to successively approximate not being stupid.) You can check primary sources: if someone's point (even if it's your point) relies on a chunk of data, look at the data. Does it hold up? Does the point rely on ignoring any of the data? Where did the data come from? A lot of sociological data uses only people age 18-22, because it's easier to put up a flier outside the dorms and because you can much more easily get an undergrad to trade 2-4 hours of their time for $50 than an adult with kids: this is not exactly a representative sample for everything, as it's clamped to age, it implies an income bracket and a higher education level than a big chunk of the population has. (A somewhat famous series of studies on human sexuality used, for many of its studies, a pool of convicted sex offenders to get the data, probably farther removed from a representative sample than college students; I've touched enough third rails already, you probably know or can guess who it is. Why not go look at the primary sources yourself?)
absurd_data_falsely_citing_hall95.png
hall1995.pdf
I'm with you, and also guilty of spreading questionable click bait amongst closed groups with friends. Thankfully they give me a lot of shit for this so it keeps my feet on the ground in general.
On the flip side, and something that has become palpably worse with Corona, is the politicisation of authoritative sources of research. Hydrochloriquine and Ivermectin suppression are signal examples, although their efficacy is beside the point of this conversation. Both could be useless (something I personally doubt) but this fails to explain the lack of open, transparent scientific discourse on the subject.
This general trend of information control is, I suspect, the cause of the apparent upswing in conspiracy theory and other bullshit. My own view is that such theories and viral social media takes give a noise floor and counterweight to viewpoints with vast marketing and public relations departments. The average bloke on the street might not be able to tell you *why* he believes Covid is a vast global conspiracy to inject 5G into his arm, but his actions generally form a solid bulwark against the most egregious crimes of the state and it's cadres. These conspiracy theories are often symbolically close enough to the powers in play that they can serve as a decent enough risk aversion strategies.
To your point, I think most self aware males who look at the above graph can quickly intuit that it's bullshit - what stories pedos conconct to justify themselves needn't occupy too much thought - although I appreciate that you'll have to deal with far more of this crap than most people, p, so kudos and, frankly, sympathies.
What bothers me is how susceptible our societies are to the "higher" swindles - who really believes that tiktok conspiracy theorists are more of a threat than journals like Nature being selective about what they publish in the name of political expediency? In educated circles if it's not published in a highly ranked journal then it's not worthy of consideration. There is zero willingness to engage in critical thinking beyond googling the counter of a non-published claim.
I've had masters students in molecular biology send me papers about deaths caused by ivermectin, clearly showing that such risks are only caused by extremely high exposure to the tropical parasites it is used to treat. These are intelligent, well meaning friends and they simply don't have the skills/desire to move beyond the walled garden and think critically about the information they are given. These are the people who develop the technologies and run the businesses of tomorrow - and you're telling me that Sharon from the estate sharing dodgy anti-vax memes is a problem?
The appearance of legitimacy indeed.
To be clear, we could all do with being far more circumspect with the data we consume and the care with which we draw conclusions. Yet my concern is the ready willingness of our educated class to be spoonfed it's opinions, rather than the fairly heartening tendency of the less educated to be a little trigger happy calling bullshit on the official line.
> the politicisation of authoritative sources of research
That's another entire can of worms. I'm hopeful that this blows over at some point and the politicization of science goes back to normal levels: still too high but at least tolerable. On the other hand, that would entail reversing a trend that has pushed it to the wrong side of the line for maybe two decades, so please don't confuse "hope" with "expectation".
> This general trend of information control is, I suspect, the cause of the apparent upswing in conspiracy theory
That plus everyone's stuck at home, slowly losing it. Like, you spend a week without going outside, you get a little twitchy and paranoid, or at least I do. Try a year or two of stay-at-home orders (apparently Strayans are only allowed to leave their house for an hour a day); if 0.1% of the population gets really distressed (like, well past a little twitchy) by a week at home, that's several million people globally going full-lunatic.
Here's another thing, you know, the FBI and CIA have admitted running controlled opposition campaigns to discredit opponents. It's difficult not to suspect there are plenty of cases that we just haven't noticed yet. (For example, if someone starts talking about Epstein's island, they get lumped in with the Pizzagate crowd, and this is somewhat suspect.) I wouldn't be surprised if they're the point of origin¹ for a lot of conspiracy theories. (And if not them, there's always the FSB, the 0.50RMB Army, the YCL, and probably a handful of Her Majesty's something-or-another or EU organizations or whoever.)
> what stories pedos conconct to justify themselves needn't occupy too much thought
In this case, it's just an example; I've seen that graph around a lot. I'm more bothered by the tendency to just toss bad information around than about any given piece of bad information.
> who really believes that tiktok conspiracy theorists are more of a threat than journals like Nature being selective about what they publish in the name of political expediency?
This is a useful question. I think, on a personal level, there's people you talk to that are pushing bad information, whereas you don't often interact publicly with the peer review boards or editors of scientific journals, so it's perhaps not as big a threat as a bad scientific journal, but it is more visible. (Obviously, the people that are in favor of political bias in scientific publications actually do believe conspiracy theorists are a bigger threat, as they don't view bias in Nature as a threat at all.)
> my concern is the ready willingness of our educated class to be spoonfed it's opinions
This is my concern; if you make it look credible, supposedly educated people will treat it as if it is.
¹ I kind of want that job but I also think I'd have difficulty with the ethical implications.
>The average bloke on the street might not be able to tell you *why* he believes Covid is a vast global conspiracy to inject 5G into his arm
Replace "5G" with a global digital identity system, social credit system and other satanic tech.
A lot of people bundled together with "normals"(conformists) know perfectly well what is happening, they just lack the vocabulary to express it, talk about it, think about it.
>educated, intelligent
They are bioleninist conformist cultists that know perfectly well they wouldn't have the status their position offers them if the aforementioned 5G bloke was able to compete with them on equal footing. The education system is selecting for these attributes from very early on.
@laurel @p there's a party making noises in the EU called Volt, seeking to elect in separate countries (including the UK) to push for closer union of the EU.
Thought I'd give them a hearing - one of their policies was to push for a "digital revolution" which caught my interest. without breaking stride, they described this revolution as basically a phone app with governance, identity and medical aspects all rolled into one.
Largely funded by Soros ofc.
Regarding education, I've been reading a bit around the subject and - from a first pass, not a rigorous examination - you can trace a good deal of cultural decay and malaise to Prussian education reforms after their defeat by Napoleon. These were taken up largely in America towards the end of the 19th century and it's likely bled through to the rest of the west.
The focus was explicitly upon teaching to obey orders and not to think critically beyond the bounds of the specialisation they were being educated for. I think you can make a case that a lot of the concerns Nietzsche had stemmed from this change that was happening around him during his lifetime. There's a shift away from holistic, philosophically founded critical thinking as the core skill, towards the learning of subjects.
The idea that Germans are rule obsessed seems to be precisely an outcome from this education system - before they were seen as much more reflective, philosophical and enthusiastic.
I think the problem was that the elites ended up beholden to their own system really - in devaluing their subjects they eventually devalued and undermined their own skills. Now all we're left with are sorry looking corporate suits and the scarred geniuses that do break through - think Musk and Jobs, men with vision but who paid a price for clawing their way to the top.
Life has always been tough but I don't think the average person has been quite so intellectually maimed since the Dark Ages, perhaps ever. The irony is that we're almost certainly one of the most "educated" eras of history.
@p meant to respond more closely to your point but basically just ranted on my bugbears lol, my bad