A call for a more educated society

I had written quite a long post earlier about how social media has caused a wrong perception about someone I know very well. But I decided to pause and continue later today or tomorrow. It may be timely to do today but I felt that my emotions were driving my write up. I want to write when I can put aside my emotions and write rationally.

Relating to that, I stumbled upon this tweet:

The last tweet speaks it all and I couldn’t agree more.

I get very annoyed and to a certain extent disappointed with the level of mindshare of the society in my country. People rely a lot on social media to find information. If that information gets a lot of likes or retweets, it’s as if there is a flux of confirmation to that piece of information, more than rejection. And just like that, people are already biased. It’s called the confirmation bias. And people tend to talk about the wrong information more than the right information.

It just shows the level of education of our people, and sometimes the so called influencers even. And by education I don’t mean you need the highest level of degree or the sophisticated/technical degree but a basic level of thinking to decipher for yourself which information is right and wrong. It’s more of logical sense to be honest.

We need a more educated society. We need our people to form their own opinion based on the information available. We also need an environment where it is ok for people to correct the wrong information and perceptions whereby it doesn’t look like they are being defensive or even worse – people view as “tunjuk pandai, just because you have a degree yadayadayada”. Why don’t they understand that people with degree don’t look down on people without. It’s just that we want to educate and correct your thinking so that we all become better.

It’s ego I tell you.

Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to explain, once people are fixated with their ego and that they think they are right, there is just no point of correcting them. The energy to correct can easily being blown by the energy to condemn. Why is that always the case?