I don't think the person that believes Bill Gates is trying to insert microchips into people is going to listen to rational thought from you or anyone else.

Most normal people don't want to even see this kind of crap in their social feeds. There is just too much other interesting stuff to read on a daily basis. If Twitter doesn't remove this crap and decides to show it to me (because having an audience is a constitutionally protected right or something) I'm leaving Twitter and going somewhere else.

Censorship is a competitive advantage.

well there's two answers to that question. Either the society you're talking about is in fact not the 'most modern' society on the planet, or having evidence at the tip of your fingers doesn't make you more informed.

Spoiler alert, it's both. American society has a knack for conspiracy theories, rugged individualism and responding to expert recommendations with contrarianism. I've seen no other place whose response to climate change is not just mere indifference, but coal rolling.

Secondly, and this is not America's fault, people don't do that well with a surplus of information. Even smart people don't. Experiments have shown that the mathematical intuition of statisticians is not much better than a laypersons, and modern behavioural science has highlighted the extreme cost of choice.

Achen and Bartels in their most recent book have shown that folk theory of democracy is largely a myth. People are not naturally enlightened. Being more engaged and higher educated actually leads people to hold more false opinions on politically charged factual matters. (Highly educated Democrats tend to overestimate how homophobic Republicans are, highly educated republicans are climate deniers more often than working class ones).

Reason is indeed slave to the passions as Hume had already figured out and trying to cure motivated and psychologically biased reasoning with more information is going to make the problem worse, not better.

Yes, like the picture of the Italian ICU which was dishonestly placed in reports by US journalists to show overcrowded, chaotic American ICUs.

> Americans have suffered far more during the pandemic than any other country

4.2% of the global population and a 20% share of the world's infections and deaths. How does that add up, especially when compared to countries like India and Nigeria which have higher squalor and population density (not to be demeaning) but much lower incidents of infection and death? The US has not implemented fewer precautions than the rest of the world (indeed some states have instituted some of the most onerous mitigation tactics) yet it is faring the worst? The numbers and tactics do not add up.

> How is it possible for the most modern society in the world, with all the evidence right at our fingertips, to be so misinformed?

Because so much of this 'most modern society' gets its information from the same 6 corporations through a telescreen instead of walking out and experiencing it firsthand.

> In the case of Bill Gates, he came out as a vocal supporter of public safety measures that were especially loathed by Americans who felt it encroached on their civil liberties.

Bill Gates is unaffected by government forced shutdowns of private industry. He can slink away and live for the rest of his life on what he has in the bank and market. The average American can't come up with $400 to cover an emergency expense, and you wonder why so many people don't like being told they aren't essential? They get a $600 pittance while the vast majority of the CARES act got routed to corporations to keep up their bottom line.

I could pick this misinformation apart further, but it's not worth my time and keystrokes to piss into the wind.

Wat je zegt ben je zelf met je kop door de helft.

Talks about people that he disagrees with as "dark cave creatures" and "weak intellectual immunity" - and we wonder why half the country is defensive and angered by the "educated" and "elite"?

He talks about Dr. Fauci in such high regard even though Fauci has admitted he deliberately lied to the American people in order to try to shape their behavior. Yet, won't even use the honorifics for Dr. Atlas or the President of the United States. What about Dr. Jill Biden, Mr. DataScientist - does she deserve her honorific according to your standard because her Ph.D is "only" in Education?

Good grief - incendiary, partisan trash like this does not belong on HN.

Has the free expression of all ideas through current means allowed rational minds to prevail? It seems that the status quo has failed to facilitate rational discussion.

And what sort of metric would we use to evaluate the success of a community to have rational discussion?