alt Hacker NewsPropaganda works very well on smart people too. Here's how it often works: smart people like to be well informed. They drink a steady drip of "news" covering a wide range of topics. They therefore have a wide but shallow understanding of current events.
The topics are usually chosen for them (editor or algorithm). The news is packaged up for them to form an opinion at a glance (headline/social media post). They lack a deep understanding and so most things pass as largely believable, if at times a bit of a stretch. Topics they know deeply are almost always "covered poorly," but not the topics they don't know deeply.
All you did was describe the fact that people who present as intelligent aren’t actually intelligent
I’m very well aware of a lot of people who are not subject to propaganda - you wouldn’t consider them particularly “fun “to be around because usually they are dedicated and focused on something that they actually believe in like being a monk
I know literally zero monks especially in the tibetan tradition that cannot clock propaganda immediately - you could make a strong argument that Buddhism itself is propaganda and I would actually largely concur with you there in the broad sense however in the sense that we’re describing it is a context that you find yourself overwhelmed by
Oh and then if you actually are that smart then you would have read the following quote:
“ If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you do, you’re misinformed.”
Your bar for “smart people” is probably way lower than it should be if you include people who can’t discriminate between measurable repeatible data and propaganda
https://marktwainstudies.com/the-apocryphal-twain/if-you-don...