As a society, we’ve learnt to be polite. And then we took it too far to the extent that telling someone they’re wrong has become really rare. When someone is factually wrong, or careless in thinking, we are told to be polite and “sandwich” our feedback so that they do not feel bad. I’ve felt nowadays people don’t even tell each other when they are wrong.
This is logical because when I tell someone they’re wrong, most likely they will have a negative emotion which gets associated with me. Why would I want that unless they are at conflict with my interests in some way.
An unintended consequence of this is lack of stick feedback for doing or saying wrong things. We work on rewards and punishment. We have learnt very well how to reward good behaviour. But, on an interpersonal level, we’ve tried to mellow the punishment as far as possible. On a legal level, punishment is increasing.
When we let the bad behaviour – fallacies of thinking or just plain wrong facts – goes unpunished, we become dumber.