Board Thread:Off-Topic Discussion/@comment-9605025-20150328164912/@comment-9890645-20150405210159

My comment regarding ignorance breaks down like this:

- We have a segment of the population (and a substantial one at that) that willfully eschews new knowledge that goes against their current knowledge and beliefs, even when the new knowledge is provable and correct. In general, these people have, at most, a minimal college education or less. They tend to not think critically about much outside of their personal sphere, and sometimes they don't think critically about things inside it, either. In the past, these people would have died off due to natural selection, but we have supermarkets now, so even the lowest common denominator can find his way to sustenance if he can find his way to money.

- College-educated people have a broader swath of knowledge and tend to be more open to new ideas, but they're also trained to be specialists in their field. Due to the pressures of a society attempting to grow in profit and knowledge, it is becoming increasingly difficult to grow in all the ways society demands; something suffers.

We live in a country, remember, where we voted for "the guy we'd most like to have a beer with" over "the intellectual guy" TWICE (argue about stolen elections another time, LOL) because the "beer" guy made it seem effete and ineffectual to be intelligent. That would not have succeeded were the country not already steering itself in that direction; if anything, such things end up reinforcing that quality.

All this is not to say that there aren't people who buck those trends. The problem is that that group of people represents an ever-dwindling segment of our society; however, due to some natural human biases, we have a tendency to associate with people who share similar qualities to ourselves, and sometimes we can't picture things being that bad outside our spheres.

The rest of your points are incredibly valid and where I would have gone if I were a bit more in touch with popular culture. (I recognized "99 Problems" but not much else LOL.) There is an absolute tendency towards these things being the self-fulfilling prophecy you speak of, which is why ignorance and self-centeredness is a burgeoning issue with society, and more and more people who buck that trend notice it.

The irony of this discussion, of course, is in its implications to the Star Trek future, much of which is virtually ignored in the reboot. After all the massive conflicts on Earth itself (Eugenics Wars, the nuclear WW3, the post-atomic horror, etc.) and "first contact," humans restructured their whole society into one that is practically a 180-degree opposite of where we're headed (and where they seem to have been). They value the expansion of knowledge (both personal and societal) and one's contribution to society over one's standing in society and gains in areas that are socially isolating.

There are many people who believe that society will never reach that point until that "first contact" point, where we come face-to-face with a species that is clearly more technologically advanced than we are... when the human race must unite against a force that may not have the best interests of our species at heart. ;)