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Is ignorance a problem in the world today?

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Debate.org is a dynamic social community where you can voice your opinion on today's hottest issues.

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Annually, the holiday season claims plenty of lives due to road accidents.

Before you hit the road, detect, address and manage your bad driving habits warns Arrive Alive.

Bad driving habits have two main causes, ignorance and apathy.

Luckily for motorists, ignorance can be rectified by training.

Apathy, however, is a little bit more complex but arises over time when drivers have continually taken risks without experiencing any negative consequences, making the short-cutting of proper procedure an established routine.

Over-confidence is a common outcome of apathy.

Therefore, all motorists should have refresher training at least every two to three years according to Arrive Alive.

The training will help point out any areas in which you've lost your edge and ensure that innate human apathy does not lead to short-cutting of procedures which might eventually kill someone.

Over-confidence in driving allows for the platform for potential danger.

This is a major contributing factor in accidents.

Many drivers have the attitude that they know everything and would not need to be trained or checked up on.

This may lead to other bad habits like insufficient following distances.

Thinking that a vehicle will stop in short distances when it is physically impossible to do so.

It also leads to speeding, as most people don't realise the effects of speed and how it varies in different conditions, causing a lot of road deaths annually.

This is evident when drivers have engaged in an activity such as skidpan and they begin to think that they're skilled.

Which often results in doing things and practising things which are not as yet ingrained.

How do you detect and address or reduce these bad driving habits, you may ask. Simply start educating and training at an early age.

Attend a reputable defensive driver training six-week course, so you can benchmark your ability against a credible standard.

Professionals assisting you during the course will not only show you what bad driving habits are but how these habits could affect us in our daily lives.

Automate your application of these habits.

You should be able to continue to drive defensively without additional effort in the face of adverse conditions, severe distractions, unexpected situations, and the incorrect actions of others.

Attend refresher training every couple of years to stay sharp, and learn new techniques needed to drive modern vehicles effectively.
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Ignorance and apathy, main causes of bad driving habits | Germiston City News

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Annually, the holiday season claims plenty of lives due to road accidents. Before you hit the road, detect, address and manage your bad driving habits warns Arrive Alive. Bad driving habits have two main causes, ignorance and apathy. Luckily for motorists, ignorance can be rectified by training.

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Bad science: Ignorance is the opposite of bliss

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Bad science: I spend a lot of my time wondering: why are people so afraid of science, when it has given us so much?

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2005 quotes have been tagged as ignorance: Aldous Huxley: 'Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.', George Orwell: 'War is peace. Freedom...

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Not sure what "oblivion" means? Take a minute and look it up.

Your response to that suggestion reveals a lot. Some of you will already know what it means. Some of you won't look it up because you think you know (Goethe called this frightening phenomena "ignorance in action" but in this case it's actually a case of ignorance begetting inaction). Some of you will take the time to look it up and be the better for it. Some of you just won't care (shame on you). And most of you will say that you don't have the time.

But, of course, you do. Here's a tip about time: If you really want to do something you'll find the time. If you don't, you'll find an excuse. The fact is that even in our frantic and time-constrained world we have all the time we need (or we can make the time) for the things we are actually interested in. And if you're not interested in life-long learning and in constantly trying to make yourself smarter and better-informed, you're not gonna be of much value to anyone (including yourself), and you certainly won't be able to compete effectively in the new knowledge economy. This isn't just an attitude you need; it needs to be a prominent part of your company's culture as well, unless you also want your company to be yesterday's news.

What to Do About Those "Known Unknowns"

Today, one of the greatest obstacles to progress isn't ignorance but the illusion of knowledge, which, as often as not, is bound up in our arrogance and our reluctance to admit that we may not know it all. Real knowledge is as much about knowing the extent of your ignorance as it is about what you actually do know. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to do some rhetorical Rumsfeld rap here. I'm just sayin'. And, unlike Rummy, I think there's good news on the horizon, and a pretty simple solution to the problem.

While stupidity is forever, ignorance is curable. We can't save most folks from their own stupidity or laziness, but I'm hopeful that we can help you get everyone in your business focused on getting better and smarter all the time with a simple turn of a phrase. Because even if ignorance doesn't kill you it's certainly gonna make you sweat a lot more than you need to.

So here's a simple suggestion on how to change the conversation and the culture in a few words. The next time anyone, anywhere, says, "I don't know," tell them that that phrase no longer means "they lack knowledge"; it means that they're lazy because they didn't take the time to find out. Don't know = didn't look.

The answers to just about anything we need to know today are out there, we just need to find them. To paraphrase Yoda: it's not about "trying," half-heartedly, to find the information; it's about doing it with a vengeance. To remain competitive in today's economy your team needs to know where to look and how to find the right answers fast. Because you can be sure that someone else is right behind you looking over your shoulder for the same advantage.

Sometimes it's a really short journey. It's not even about automatically searching the web. In many cases you just need to do a better job of knowing what's going on in your own shop. I call this the "If P&G only knew what P&G knows" syndrome, and it's applicable to every business, large and small. The answers, my friends, aren't always in the stars; sometimes they're in ourselves. In other cases, even a simple web search will provide more relevant and actionable information than you can imagine, and more real value as well. It's not always easy, so tenacity and perseverance matter as well, but the rewards for persistence are clear.

But your people have to have the intention, the inclination, and your permission to look. They need a bias toward investigation and learning, not the self-satisfied and smug attitude that they already know everything worth knowing. Education isn't cheap, but ignorance is beyond costly. I recommend getting a t-shirt for the ones who just refuse to get with the program (while they're packing their bags) that says: "I DON'T KNOW AND I'M TOO LAZY TO GO FIND OUT." Not knowing is bad; not caring about not knowing is grounds for termination.

The fact is that, except for your lawn sprinkling system, I'm afraid that there's nothing left in our world that can operate on the "set it and forget it" principle that made life so easy for so many people in the past. The vast amount of data, the prospect of constant feedback and trend information, and the ability to change the behavior of our customers in real time are all raising the need to be (a) on the case, (b) in the know, (c) all the time. Not knowing isn't even a bad excuse anymore: It's a death sentence for your business.

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Not sure what "oblivion" means? Take a minute and look it up. Your response to that suggestion reveals a lot. Some of you will already know what it means. Some of you won't look it up because you think you know (Goethe called this frightening phenomena "ignorance in action" but in this case it's actually a case of ignorance begetting inaction).

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A black man on the phone from a jail in San Francisco said, in 2015, "He come tell 'bout I'm gonna take the TV," which meant that this man was not going to do so. The transcriber listening in couldn't understand the first part, apparently, and recorded the whole statement as "I'm gonna take the TV."

It's impossible to know how often mistakes of this sort occur, but chances are they're common. An upcoming study in the linguistics journal Language found that 27 Philadelphia stenographers, presented with recordings of Black English grammatical patterns, made transcription errors on average in two out of every five sentences, and could accurately paraphrase only one in three sentences.
John McWhorter: There's nothing wrong with Black English
The Black English gap, as one might call it, matters: It can affect people's lives at crucial junctures. In 2007, a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals dissent claimed that when a black woman said, in terror, "He finna shoot me," she may have been referring to something in the past, when in fact "finna" refers to the immediate future. "Why don't you just give me a lawyer, dog?" Warren Demesme asked the police when accused of sexual assault in 2017. The statements one makes to law enforcement after requesting a lawyer are inadmissible-but Demesme's rights were ignored because, it was argued, he'd requested a "lawyer dog," not an actual attorney.

Black people are overrepresented within the criminal-justice system, and race relations in America will never truly budge until "equality under the law" is more than a quaint phrase. But equality is, of course, impossible if the black people grappling with courts and imprisonment are routinely misunderstood.

Transcription mistakes can happen quite innocently. As far back as the 1930s, white men and women tasked with transcribing recordings of ex-slaves produced error-ridden manuscripts. One man was supposed to have said that after Emancipation Day, "the colored people sure went for!," which sounds odd grammatically and substantively; why wouldn't ex-slaves have been "for" their freedom? It turned out that the man was saying that ex-slaves "sure been poor," a straightforward statement.

I thought of this recently when I was staying at a hotel and asked a black woman working at the front desk where I could get a cup of coffee. When she pointed toward the restaurant, I said it was closed. Then she pointed more directly to a table with coffee urns near the restaurant-I was sleepy and hadn't seen it-and she said, with warm irony, "Dat table, dey close?" Her utterance could easily have thrown a foreigner, given that in Black English you can leave out the are of Are they closed? and the final - d of closed. Even some native English speakers may have misheard her without a certain amount of familiarity with the dialect.
Read: What does it mean to "sound" black?
When someone in a position of authority draws attention to the differences between standard and Black English, the response is often perplexity and derision. That was true in 2010 when the Drug Enforcement Administration put out a call for Black English translators so the agency could better understand conversations on wiretaps. Some in the media, poking fun at the whole project, suggested that Black English is simply a collection of slang words or even just a sloppy way of enunciating. The pervasive assumption was that black speech differs from mainstream speech only in some spicy lingo plus various instances of "broken" grammar.

In fact, Black English is not deficient but alternate. There is no scientific basis for judging Black English grammatical structures as faulty or unclear, and a Martian assigned to learn English who happened to land on the South Side of Chicago rather than in Scarsdale, New York, would have the same challenge in mastering the rules and nuances of the local speech. For example, the come in "He come tell 'bout I'm gonna take the TV" is used to convey indignation, and has inspired a linguistics article itself. Miss this and the man's whole meaning is lost-and to his possible detriment.

Even those who accept that Black English is more than slang may feel that a translation approach is unwarranted, condescending, or both. Sometimes it may be. In 1996, the Oakland, California, school district proposed to use Black English in the classroom as a sort of training wheel. The idea was that kids raised with Black English as a home language had trouble learning to read because standard English was so unfamiliar. But many (including me) thought that was a misdiagnosis: Black people, including kids, use Black English alongside standard English rather than exclusively.

The transcription issue is different. Most stenographers have not grown up with the bidialectal experience of poor black people and are thus encountering something genuinely unfamiliar, which they may not know how to get down on paper properly.
Read: Julie Washington's quest to get schools to respect African-American English
The solution here is not difficult. People who will spend their careers transcribing phrases such as "He come tell 'bout I'm gonna take the TV"-or even "Dat table, dey close?"-ought to learn the basics of how Black English works. They would need mastery of only about 25 grammatical traits, which are universal in Black English nationwide, despite local differences. For example, be, when used in a sentence such as She be there on Sunday, refers to something regular and habitual, as in "every Sunday," and is not simply a randomly unconjugated be. Another example: We had went to the store then I got a text conveys that the person was still in the store when the text came, not that it came after he left.

"Dat table, dey close?" is a passing anecdote, but "I'm gonna take the TV" could be the prelude to a man going to prison. A linguistically sophisticated America would understand that these speech patterns are not a pathology; they are the vessel of as much clarity and nuance as those of a privileged college kid. A sophisticated America would make sure those charged with distributing these words to the public sphere, or to a judge and jury, were aware of that fact.

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bidialectal experience of poor black people

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Could Black English Mean a Prison Sentence?

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A black man on the phone from a jail in San Francisco said, in 2015, "He come tell 'bout I'm gonna take the TV," which meant that this man was not going to do so. The transcriber listening in couldn't understand the first part, apparently, and recorded the whole statement as "I'm gonna take the TV."