Remember the original post about epistemic learned helplessness: making people literate in some things may be bad, because the fact that they don’t understand things prevents them from doing good in those areas, but it also prevents them from falling prey to scams and fallacies in the same areas.
You might want the average person to fail to get excited about a 6% increase in battery energy density, because if too many people get excited about such things, the politicians, media machines, and advertisers will do their best to exploit this little bit of knowledge to extract momey from the general public while producing as few actual improvements to energy density as possible. I’m sure you could name plenty of issues where the public understands that they are important without having the breadth of knowledge to not fall for “we have to do omething, it’s important!”
Remember the original post about epistemic learned helplessness: making people literate in some things may be bad, because the fact that they don’t understand things prevents them from doing good in those areas, but it also prevents them from falling prey to scams and fallacies in the same areas.
You might want the average person to fail to get excited about a 6% increase in battery energy density, because if too many people get excited about such things, the politicians, media machines, and advertisers will do their best to exploit this little bit of knowledge to extract momey from the general public while producing as few actual improvements to energy density as possible. I’m sure you could name plenty of issues where the public understands that they are important without having the breadth of knowledge to not fall for “we have to do omething, it’s important!”