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tankmayvin t1_j86asg0 wrote

Reply to comment by Switch4589 in [OC] More than 130 earthquakes rocked Turkey in 48 hours by MePiyush

This thread has been instructive to me on the lack of general math literacy....

I thought everyone graduated high school with an understanding of how logarithms work.

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Switch4589 t1_j86d427 wrote

Yea I’m with you there. I can understand if someone doesn’t realise that it’s a logarithmic scale, but people who do and then still get it wrong, blah.

Coming from a country which very routinely gets earthquakes, these numbers are very familiar to me, we learnt about them in school and often have “earthquake drills” similar to fire drills to practise what you are meant to do when one occurs.

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tankmayvin t1_j86dsnn wrote

I think the big problem is that humans have a general tendency towards intellectual lazyness.

The way we educate is increasingly promoting/enabling this sort of lazyness even though the hurdle of accessing the knowledge shrinks every year.

There is just literally zero excuse for not googling "Richter scale" at some point.

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Switch4589 t1_j86gne3 wrote

I have come to realise that effectively searching for information is actually a rare skill people have.

First off a lot of people don’t even bother taking it upon themselves to begin to search, they just copy/paste whatever other people are saying. And even when they do try and search for something, they barely know what to search for to find what they want. If it’s literally not the first ranked google result they just give up.

With social media there is absolutely no incentive to fact-check anything and you actually get rewarded for not doing so. Getting in early and spewing out an incorrect opinion often get you more engagement than taking your time and posting the often-boring truth.

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tankmayvin t1_j86i8sy wrote

Yup. I agree with everything you've said. The quality of discourse has rapidly declined in the social media age as well.

I'm not that old, but still old enough to remember a time period where the technical barriers to even accessing the internet kept a lot of the worse offenders off/out.

It's a sorry state of affairs now.

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