I’ve played Trivia in bars a few times. With a couple smart people, I can usually win.
At the same time, I don’t find it very entertaining, or useful. You either know facts or you don’t. Knowing a lot of facts is useful, but it is much more useful to know how to contextualize facts.
What would be interesting and useful to be would be not “name the four cities the Concord flew to”, but “what was the social and political significance, if any, of the Concord jet?”
Everyone could read their answers, and people could vote for the best one. That I would find entertaining.
As things stand, I was pondering the perhaps superficial and inaccurate observation I have that–based on the names of the groups that participate–that Trivia participants tend to be more to the left in their political tendencies.
I was thinking about it, and what I see is that leftists in general are quite educated. Virtually all academics and many professionals (albeit not business owners) are leftists, although many would not use that word. They know a lot of facts.
Yet as I see it, modern education is really not Liberal any more, in the sense that Scientism has coopted Rationalism, with the result that what is really taught is a uniform conformity to intellectual/knowledge Power Elites. Take global warming. We are expected to believe–because it comes from credentialed professionals–that global cooling is an outcome of global warming. Yet when I heat a pot of water, no cooling is generated thereby. Parts of the pot may heat faster–like the part directly over the burner–but it all evens out.
So who do I trust? The “experts”, or my own common sense? If I am properly “educated”, then I trust the experts.
This leads to a situation in which the educated are in possession of vast numbers of data points. Ask them about Vitamin E or the benefits of vegetarianism, or how CO2 acts as a Greenhouse Gas, and they are all over it.
What they don’t do is offer up narratives that rely firmly upon principles. For example, it can easily be shown that the net effect of their prescriptions for poverty actually increase poverty. If there were a principle in place, such as “we need to see to the care, feeding and shelter of the less fortunate among us”, then one could make a simple appeal to efficacy. That doesn’t happen. They just repeat themselves. They don’t adapt. They only adapt when someone TELLS them to adapt.
This is a cultural problem of the first order. We tend to think that if we were smarter the world would be just a bit better, but in my view the world should be RADICALLY different, and we have only just begun to plumb the depths of our collective stupidity.
End note: “tri-via” comes from the Latin word denoting the intersection of three roads. I looked it up, and thought I’d share it. Medieval educational curriculums were also called the Trivium, and consisted in three subjects, which I don’t have time to look up. I think they were Astronony, Rhetoric, and Math, but could be wrong.