this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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I get the point, but often the answer to "what did you do before ___ was invented?" Is "we suffered and died". Like vaccines for example.
"before tv was invented? Well we went out with other kids, where adults weren't around, and got into trouble. As we got older we started fucking, and drinking, and getting into more serious trouble."
I did all that after TV was invented.
Same, also after the internet, and social media. However a lot less people are compared to when I was a child.
Some of those things are pretty double-edged though. I grew up pre-Internet. Today, if a group of friends are standing around and someone says, "I heard that platypus eat bats," someone will whip out their phone and say that's bullshit in 30 seconds. Back in the day, we could ride our bikes to the library and find out, or maybe someone's parents had encyclopedias, but we usually just didn't care that much. On the other hand, because stuff wasn't right at our fingertips, we had to reason a lot more things out. I feel like our critical thinking skills were better. Someone was bound to say, "Bats? How would that work? They live in the water and bats fly around eating bugs. I'm not buying it."
And then there were those who had less good critical thinking skills and believed in lots of let's say interesting things.
Yep, those folks have always been around. There was a weird thing when email became widespread. It turns out that there are (at least were) people who will reject a stupid thing if someone says it to them, but will believe the same stupid thing if they see it written. A giant number of early viral emails were things like "According to the New York Times, gangs are targeting people who wear people shoes." Of course, the NYT never said that, it was all bullshit, but all sorts of people would swear it was true because papers were reporting it.