A Real Puzzler
For the past few election cycles I have heard talk of “lowinformation voters,” meaning voters who are “poorly informed about issues,” according to Wikipedia. The same article goes on to say that low information voters tend to vote for the candidate they find most physically appealing. I will leave that right there and get to what I really came here to say, which is that it seems we have a lot of generally low-information people out in the world. This has nothing to do with intelligence but more a lack of willingness or desire to be well-informed. The opportunity to be well informed is ever-present for nearly everyone these days, with us carrying around a portal to all human knowledge in our hands or pockets all the time.
Of course something in particular set me to thinking about this topic. Recently someone posted on a Facebook page lamenting that the disposable plastic mechanical pencils they had used for years had changed and no longer were the heavenly writing instrument they had been. Predictably, his ignited a flurry of comments about how people who use disposable plastic pencils are destroying the planet and why couldn’t they just use regular wooden pencils? I commented that there are all-metal mechanical pencils that are practically indestructible while being heavenly writing instruments, and one of the commenters informed me that I was no better than the plastic pencil person because the refills for my metal pencil came in plastic containers. This is true, and the replacement erasers come in a plastic bag. However, wooden pencils are almost all coated in plastic and also come packaged in at least partially plastic packaging. I can promise the anti-plastic people have not thought about this. They have probably also not considered that most of the clothing they wear is plastic, as are the computers and phones they type comments on, as are the vehicles that they drive or ride in.
This is a particularly maddening version of low-information where a person latches onto a corner of an issue without thinking it all the way through or investigating the larger story, then goes about “correcting” everyone else. This brings to mind the saying, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.” Who said that? It is usually attributed to either Abraham Lincoln or Mark Twain, and I am sure both men said something similar, but the main idea appears to have originated with King Solomon, who wrote most of Proverbs in the Bible. It took me about one minute to look up, read, and digest that information.
Another example … I recently read a really good novel and found myself looking at the comments on the book in Goodreads—the app for people who like to read. There was a vigorous discussion of the paternity of one of the characters, even though the novel had clearly resolved this issue in multiple places within the story. I was left wondering how many of these supposedly avid readers actually read the book. How can you read a book and miss something that obvious?
I am stumped. I am very low-information on how and why so many people are lowinformation. Can anyone explain this to me?