@Wetrix
I disagree, things go far far worse when you have a system which attempts to dictate what information a person has access to or not. Much worse than where someone has access to all information, good and bad. We only have to look to vultures that ban certain books or worse yet resort to book burning to see why.

@freemo true. That's not quite what I meant.

Having access to fake news for example is a bad thing. It's just propaganda that warps reality to manipulate people.

I agree with having access to all info though because you can't learn from the past if you don't know it or how it happened. But you need to know the right version, not the mein kempf version.

@Wetrix
That is what i suspected you meant when i replied. Let me explain my response better.

If at a societal level you wish to block or prevent access to incorrect information then you require some oracle capable of correctly, objectively, and without agenda, determine which information is correct.

As well meaning as that approach may be any such oracle will ultimately fail since we have no way of creating or sustainable ng such an oracle.

In addition there is the second fact that nearly all factual information must be born out of ideas which have not yet been proven to be true, or i. Some cases may have been wrongly assumed yo be false. If we eliminated access to everything except the truth then all you will get is stagnation.

I need access to the flatearth wikipedia, with all its incorrect information, if i wish to be able to understand the way they think and therefore engage with them in a way that might be fruitful as well.

@freemo @Wetrix these days it's like nobody has even heard of Areopagitica.

@freemo taken to extreme, you may say that people, for however long time they existed and now, were and are really stupid for not immediately discovering laws of gravity, electromagnetism, quantum mechanics or even 42, cause all of it was and is clearly available to them as reality, if they spend some indeterminate amount of time to look around and do some research.

@namark Send a flat earther to university and he will only fail out and still think the earth is flat. Its not the information, its how people are taught to rationalize.

@freemo @namark bad axioms and bad methods lead to bad conclusions

almost no one actually believes the world is flat except complete retards. and theres no fixing retard.

@freemo When an adult would be able to go to a public school, to study 1st grade material of their choosing (taught by a voluntary 2nd grader), without a hint of shame, I'll also be puzzled by stupidity.

Opportunity to study by yourself doesn't count without motivation, which primarily comes from the approval and support of your peers. These days I don't think "go back to primary school" is often said as anything but mockery, even by people who might not have mastered the material themselves.

@namark I agree, there is a huge problem in much of the world with access to education, stigmas, and shame. /It isnt helping.

But that is not an example of lack of access but rather how we treat these people socially on many aspects (generally we shame exploration of facts). The issue is less so the access to education for the bilk of stupidity.

@freemo Yes I went on a bit of a tangent there. The part that is related to access(in which I think presentation really matters) is the voluntary 2nd grader. If I'm correct that peer approval is primary motivation, then
more teachers = more chance for a person to see one as a peer,
voluntary higher grader as teacher = more teachers.

Not that any of this is easy to do. The only initiative I know of (and admittedly was greatly influenced by) is khanacademy, though it seems to be in a stalemate.

@namark I generally agree with peer teaching as a technique. But as i said its a small part of the problem that largely begins with how people are raised as well.

But for the most part I agree that the problem is a social one, not an access to education one for the most part.

@freemo I guess my sole point was, that in context of reasoning about existence of stupidity fundamentally, the notion of access to information should be treated fundamentally as well, in which case these complexities arise. From that point of view access is the issue.
In other words, in this kind of general context, for any useful definition of access to information, I think there is some obvious lack of access.