My opinions here are *gasp* mixed.
I think part of the problem is ingrained paranoia, simply put if someone presents an easy question a lot of people look for a trick to be involved, or at least an angle. A lot of people when presented with the obvious will choose the counter-intuitive selection to try and avoid being made to look like a fool and "biting" even if it has the opposite effect. I don't think it's trolling so much as how overpopulated societies have conditioned people. When something good seems about to happen, the first thing a lot of people do is look for the angle.
I'll also say that people tend to forget about anti-educational movements. Bill Cosby has done some rather brutal breakdowns of the relationship between black culture and education (he has a PHD in Children's Education). Among the things he's talked about is how for a lot of blacks education is seen as "selling out" with Black America squandering the opportunities it's been given. Rather than being part of society, you have the "git rich or die trying" attitude which basically amounts to how it's only 'okay' to be part of the 1% and if you can't make it there on innate ability, then it's more noble to become a criminal and thug, even if the odds are you'll wind up face down in a ghetto with a gun in your hand and drugs in your pocket... as at least you then tried to get to the top 1% without selling out to society where you likely wouldn't have amounted to anything anyway. In some cases it's even turned into a case where being a normal person like everyone else is equated with slavery, whether the guy has a bullwhip or a paycheck he's holding over your head, the bottom line is you take orders from someone else... forget that pretty much everyone in the civilized world lives this way and it's part of what makes a civilization. A lot of Black America will literally destroy textbooks, computers, and other things people have lined up to give them rather than "sell out" and use them. Bill Cosby ultimately articulates things far better than I do if you look his stuff up, I don't agree with a lot of what he says politically, but he really did a lot to form some of my opinions about education (and that goes beyond this particular issue).
Now before anyone misconstrues this, I will say intelligence and education are two entirely different things. Being uneducated does not make someone stupid (though it can make them seem stupid). While people are shocked that someone could get basic facts wrong (beyond the opinion based stuff others have pointed out) understand that there are plenty
of places in the US where I'd be shocked if it went beyond 50% (given that a guess on a yes/no question still means getting it right half the time).
Likewise I'm one of those people who will point fingers at some of the other countries that like to be touted as examples of US bashing. For example when you deal with places like China, India, and other countries where their societies literally range from having huge, modern, cities with everything you can conceive of, to abject poverty where some people live much like they did in The Middle Ages or even worse, it becomes hard to take comparisons seriously. For example when being told China "scores higher than the US in their educational system" understand that the people that get to be educated in China are something of an elite, representing the equivalent of a private school education. It's not accounting for the majority of the population that work in sweat shops and might share mats inside of stacked dog crates for sleeping space, or bust their backs every day knee deep in a rice paddy, and might have to share their living arrangements with their livestock (which is how SARS got started). India has similar problems, which actually harken back to their caste system (which hasn't been abolished as much as people might want to believe, recent articles about an Indian envoy in the US and the way she kept her servants kind of demonstrate this, especially with India itself defending her). The point being that when countries get to choose their own reps for studies, or control what outside studies get to survey, it leads to biased results. A lot of the "America Bashing" in comparisons (which people here have been concerned about) comes from the fact that the US tends to largely play by the rules in such comparisons. and doesn't generally put it's best forward to represent the country. All you need to do to make America look like a group of idiots is go to some poor area with a heavy black representation (due to the cultural issues I mention above) or where education isn't important to survival in general, and your going to score really low, indeed it's amazing how we DO score due to our public educational system, when you consider what we're actually up against. If the US wanted to it could produce highly educated people of any ethnicity to represent itself, but that isn't how we roll when we're doing these polls "fairly".
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Now to leave those who read this far with an odd question that has always kind of tormented poor uneducated Therumancer...
When it comes to making Cheese, a big part of doing it involves a substance called "Rennet" which is an enzyme that comes from inside the stomach (usually a cow's stomach). How the heck did anyone ever figure that out given how long people have been making cheese. I mean was some cave man or pre-Roman barbarian sitting there churning up random elements from slain cattle for lulz and somehow stumbled across this process?
At any rate, I've kind of wondered if anyone has a good answer to that one. Personally I've always thought that was ironically one of the better arguments for alien visitations because really I can't see how primitive man would have been able to figure out how to use one specific enzyme from inside a stomach to create cheese unless someone told them, with Cheese being a staple food that occurred though a lot of the world, meaning it seems a lot of people in a lot of different areas all managed to figure this out somehow and well...
I'm sure there is a better answer for that though. I mostly thought of it because of the whole "cheese is vegetable" (as opposed to dairy) thing someone mentioned. To be fair when you get down to it, it seems not many people know much about cheese. I asked this question at a few of the "Olde Historical villages/reinactments" where they go off about early cheese making and such and they mention how to make it, using the Enzymes, and even make cheese the old fashioned way themselves to demonstrate (and sell in the gift shops) but not one person could actually tell me this...
I think part of the problem is ingrained paranoia, simply put if someone presents an easy question a lot of people look for a trick to be involved, or at least an angle. A lot of people when presented with the obvious will choose the counter-intuitive selection to try and avoid being made to look like a fool and "biting" even if it has the opposite effect. I don't think it's trolling so much as how overpopulated societies have conditioned people. When something good seems about to happen, the first thing a lot of people do is look for the angle.
I'll also say that people tend to forget about anti-educational movements. Bill Cosby has done some rather brutal breakdowns of the relationship between black culture and education (he has a PHD in Children's Education). Among the things he's talked about is how for a lot of blacks education is seen as "selling out" with Black America squandering the opportunities it's been given. Rather than being part of society, you have the "git rich or die trying" attitude which basically amounts to how it's only 'okay' to be part of the 1% and if you can't make it there on innate ability, then it's more noble to become a criminal and thug, even if the odds are you'll wind up face down in a ghetto with a gun in your hand and drugs in your pocket... as at least you then tried to get to the top 1% without selling out to society where you likely wouldn't have amounted to anything anyway. In some cases it's even turned into a case where being a normal person like everyone else is equated with slavery, whether the guy has a bullwhip or a paycheck he's holding over your head, the bottom line is you take orders from someone else... forget that pretty much everyone in the civilized world lives this way and it's part of what makes a civilization. A lot of Black America will literally destroy textbooks, computers, and other things people have lined up to give them rather than "sell out" and use them. Bill Cosby ultimately articulates things far better than I do if you look his stuff up, I don't agree with a lot of what he says politically, but he really did a lot to form some of my opinions about education (and that goes beyond this particular issue).
Now before anyone misconstrues this, I will say intelligence and education are two entirely different things. Being uneducated does not make someone stupid (though it can make them seem stupid). While people are shocked that someone could get basic facts wrong (beyond the opinion based stuff others have pointed out) understand that there are plenty
of places in the US where I'd be shocked if it went beyond 50% (given that a guess on a yes/no question still means getting it right half the time).
Likewise I'm one of those people who will point fingers at some of the other countries that like to be touted as examples of US bashing. For example when you deal with places like China, India, and other countries where their societies literally range from having huge, modern, cities with everything you can conceive of, to abject poverty where some people live much like they did in The Middle Ages or even worse, it becomes hard to take comparisons seriously. For example when being told China "scores higher than the US in their educational system" understand that the people that get to be educated in China are something of an elite, representing the equivalent of a private school education. It's not accounting for the majority of the population that work in sweat shops and might share mats inside of stacked dog crates for sleeping space, or bust their backs every day knee deep in a rice paddy, and might have to share their living arrangements with their livestock (which is how SARS got started). India has similar problems, which actually harken back to their caste system (which hasn't been abolished as much as people might want to believe, recent articles about an Indian envoy in the US and the way she kept her servants kind of demonstrate this, especially with India itself defending her). The point being that when countries get to choose their own reps for studies, or control what outside studies get to survey, it leads to biased results. A lot of the "America Bashing" in comparisons (which people here have been concerned about) comes from the fact that the US tends to largely play by the rules in such comparisons. and doesn't generally put it's best forward to represent the country. All you need to do to make America look like a group of idiots is go to some poor area with a heavy black representation (due to the cultural issues I mention above) or where education isn't important to survival in general, and your going to score really low, indeed it's amazing how we DO score due to our public educational system, when you consider what we're actually up against. If the US wanted to it could produce highly educated people of any ethnicity to represent itself, but that isn't how we roll when we're doing these polls "fairly".
-
Now to leave those who read this far with an odd question that has always kind of tormented poor uneducated Therumancer...
When it comes to making Cheese, a big part of doing it involves a substance called "Rennet" which is an enzyme that comes from inside the stomach (usually a cow's stomach). How the heck did anyone ever figure that out given how long people have been making cheese. I mean was some cave man or pre-Roman barbarian sitting there churning up random elements from slain cattle for lulz and somehow stumbled across this process?
At any rate, I've kind of wondered if anyone has a good answer to that one. Personally I've always thought that was ironically one of the better arguments for alien visitations because really I can't see how primitive man would have been able to figure out how to use one specific enzyme from inside a stomach to create cheese unless someone told them, with Cheese being a staple food that occurred though a lot of the world, meaning it seems a lot of people in a lot of different areas all managed to figure this out somehow and well...
I'm sure there is a better answer for that though. I mostly thought of it because of the whole "cheese is vegetable" (as opposed to dairy) thing someone mentioned. To be fair when you get down to it, it seems not many people know much about cheese. I asked this question at a few of the "Olde Historical villages/reinactments" where they go off about early cheese making and such and they mention how to make it, using the Enzymes, and even make cheese the old fashioned way themselves to demonstrate (and sell in the gift shops) but not one person could actually tell me this...
