15 Brutal Truths We're Dying To Tell The Willfully Ignorant
Avoiding facts won't make the consequences magically disappear. Research from the American Psychological Association shows that people often choose ignorance to justify selfish behavior and avoid accountability. This leads to more harm, not less, both for individuals and society as a whole. Ignorance doesn't protect you from outcomes—it just delays dealing with them. Turning away from reality doesn't make it vanish.
When people ignore what's inconvenient, they erode trust and ethical standards. Refusing to acknowledge the impact doesn't erase it. Ignorance may seem easier, but it often exacerbates situations. Choosing not to know is still a choice. And every choice comes with responsibility attached.
Pretending something isn't real doesn't make it untrue. Reality doesn't shift just because someone refuses to accept it. Facts remain facts, even if they're inconvenient or uncomfortable. Dismissing science or history won't undo what's been proven. Reality doesn't bend to denial—it stays the same.
Ignoring the truth can cause significant harm, especially when it affects crucial decisions. Whether it's health, relationships, or politics, facts matter. Denial keeps people stuck in false narratives. Facing reality is uncomfortable, but it's the only path to progress. Truth doesn't require your approval to exist.
Avoiding problems only postpones the inevitable. Psychology Today notes that unaddressed issues often escalate and become more difficult to address over time. Facing challenges directly is how you resolve them and grow. Ignoring them creates bigger messes that could've been avoided. Silence and avoidance aren't solutions—they're delays.
Problems thrive in the dark where they're ignored. The longer they're left unchecked, the worse they usually become. Maturity means addressing what's wrong, even when it's uncomfortable. Growth comes from confronting difficulties, not pretending they don't exist. Avoidance doesn't protect you—it traps you.
Tuning out other perspectives doesn't magically make your viewpoint correct. Real understanding comes from hearing ideas you might not agree with. Shutting down conversation keeps you stuck in an echo chamber. Growth requires listening, even when it's uncomfortable. Ignoring others doesn't make your position stronger—it makes it weaker.
Listening broadens awareness and sharpens thinking. When you refuse to listen, you cut off chances to learn and evolve. Dismissing dissent doesn't protect your ideas—it isolates them. Engaging respectfully with different viewpoints strengthens understanding. Growth depends on curiosity, not stubbornness.
Choosing to stay ignorant just because it's more comfortable is a luxury not everyone has. The Greater Good Science Center emphasizes how empathy and understanding require stepping outside our comfort zones. Turning a blind eye to injustice protects privilege, not progress. Staying silent or uninformed can help perpetuate harm. Awareness and compassion often come with discomfort—that's part of the growth process.
Comfort shouldn't override doing what's right. Acknowledging others' realities fosters a more compassionate and inclusive world. Willful ignorance perpetuates systems of harm. Growth asks us to confront discomfort, not avoid it. Real change starts with awareness and empathy.
Refusing to acknowledge injustice or wrongdoing allows it to thrive. Silence isn't neutral—it's often complicity. Staying quiet allows harm to continue unchecked. Speaking up takes courage, but it also creates change. Ignoring problems doesn't absolve you; it aligns you with them.
Awareness is the first step toward fixing what's wrong. When people remain silent, they help perpetuate broken systems. Speaking out disrupts harm and makes space for solutions. Injustice depends on people looking away. Courage means refusing to do that.
Reality doesn't change because someone chooses not to look. The National Institutes of Health reports that ignoring facts leads to poor decisions and worse outcomes. Facts remain true, even when they're uncomfortable. Ignorance may seem easier, but it ultimately leads to harm. The truth doesn't need validation to exist—it stands on its own.
Acknowledging reality helps people make informed, responsible choices. Ignoring facts delays solutions and creates bigger problems. Rational decisions depend on facing evidence, not avoiding it. Reality will catch up eventually—better to meet it head-on. Knowledge protects; ignorance exposes.
Holding a belief doesn't shield it from scrutiny. Strong ideas should survive questioning and evidence. Hiding beliefs from critique keeps people stagnant and closed off. Growth requires curiosity and openness to change. Protecting beliefs from challenge only exposes insecurity, not strength.
Engaging with different perspectives strengthens understanding. Avoiding these conversations signals a lack of conviction, not fear. Confidence comes from knowing your beliefs can withstand examination. Growth is about learning, not staying comfortable. Openness leads to stronger, more informed beliefs.
Choosing not to know won't stop the consequences from happening. Life moves forward, with or without your awareness. Ignoring reality makes you less prepared to face it. Problems don't disappear because you looked away—they grow in the dark. Being informed helps you make smarter, safer decisions.
Avoiding information increases your vulnerability. Knowledge empowers you to adapt and protect yourself. Ignorance removes those tools and leaves you exposed. Facing facts might be uncomfortable, but it's always wiser. Truth doesn't wait for your permission to unfold.
You can't grow if you're stuck in denial of reality. Progress depends on facing challenges honestly and taking action. Denial can freeze people in place and block new opportunities. Moving forward requires acknowledgment, even when it's uncomfortable. Avoidance keeps people circling the same problems.
Facing reality unlocks potential solutions. You can't change what you refuse to see. Stagnation thrives in denial, not in truth. Growth is a process of acceptance, not avoidance. Facing facts is the only way to improve.
Not knowing something doesn't make you stronger or safer. Ignorance often makes people easier to manipulate and more prone to mistakes. Information gives power and resilience. Choosing not to learn weakens your ability to adapt and succeed. Strength comes from knowledge, not avoidance.
Avoiding facts leads to repeated failures. Learning helps you grow, evolve, and protect yourself. Staying ignorant limits your potential and your opportunities. Embracing knowledge shows courage and curiosity. Growth starts with asking questions, not hiding from answers.
Ignoring problems doesn't just affect you—it affects everyone you're connected to. Your silence or inaction can allow harm to continue unchecked. Communities suffer when people refuse to engage. Change requires awareness and participation from everyone. Indifference isn't harmless—it's part of the problem.
Caring creates change. Ignorance often upholds systems that hurt others. Choosing to understand builds stronger, more compassionate societies. Awareness is contagious; so is apathy. Your choice matters more than you realize.
Growth often starts with discomfort. Facing hard truths stretches your understanding and strengthens resilience. Avoiding tough conversations might feel easier, but it limits your potential. Willful ignorance traps people in patterns that no longer serve them. Growth asks you to lean into discomfort, not run from it.
Avoidance delays the necessary change. The longer you ignore discomfort, the harder growth becomes. Facing reality builds courage and adaptability. Discomfort isn't the enemy—stagnation is. Growth comes through challenges, not escape.
You can't grow without learning. Staying willfully ignorant locks you into outdated beliefs and missed opportunities. Progress demands flexibility, curiosity, and the willingness to change. Avoiding new information holds you back. Ignorance isn't a shield—it's an anchor.
Change starts with openness to learning. Growth requires letting go of what no longer works. Staying stuck is a choice, not a fate. Every new fact presents an opportunity to move forward. Ignorance keeps the door closed.
It's no one else's responsibility to educate you if you refuse to learn. Personal growth requires effort, curiosity, and accountability. Expecting others to carry the weight of your ignorance is unfair and exhausting. Learning is a choice you make for yourself. Respect others by taking responsibility for your knowledge.
Self-directed learning builds independence and confidence. Relying on others for answers you won't seek yourself isn't fair. Knowledge is out there—you have to reach for it. Growth starts with your effort, not someone else's labor. Accountability begins with choosing to understand.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Associated Press
15 minutes ago
- Associated Press
Man dies after large chain necklace pulls him into MRI machine
WESTBURY, N.Y. (AP) — A man who was pulled into an MRI machine in New York after he walked into the room wearing a large chain necklace has died, according to police and his wife, who told a local television outlet that he waved goodbye before his body went limp. The man, 61, had entered an MRI room while a scan was underway Wednesday afternoon at Nassau Open MRI. The machine's strong magnetic force drew him in by his metallic necklace, according to a release from the Nassau County Police Department. He died Thursday afternoon, but a police officer who answered the phone at the Nassau County police precinct where the MRI facility is located said the department had not been given permission to release the name Saturday. Adrienne Jones-McAllister told News 12 Long Island in a recorded interview that she was undergoing an MRI on her knee when she asked the technician to get her husband, Keith McAllister, to help her get off the table. When he got close to her, she said, 'at that instant, the machine switched him around, pulled him in and he hit the MRI.' 'I said: 'Could you turn off the machine, call 911, do something, Turn this damn thing off!'' she recalled, as tears ran down her face. 'He went limp in my arms.' She told News 12 that the technician summoned into the room her husband, who was wearing a 20-pound chain that he uses for weight training, an object they'd had a casual conversation about during a previous visit. 'He waved goodbye to me and then his whole body went limp,' Jones-McAllister told the TV outlet. A person who answered the phone at Nassau Open MRI on Long Island declined to comment Friday. The phone number went unanswered on Saturday. It wasn't the first New York death to result from an MRI machine. In 2001, 6-year-old Michael Colombini of Croton-on-Hudson was killed at the Westchester Medical Center when an oxygen tank flew into the chamber, drawn in by the MRI's 10-ton electromagnet. In 2010, records filed in Westchester County revealed that the family settled a lawsuit for $2.9 million. MRI machines 'employ a strong magnetic field' that 'exerts very powerful forces on objects of iron, some steels, and other magnetizable objects,' according to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, which says the units are 'strong enough to fling a wheelchair across the room.'
WIRED
44 minutes ago
- WIRED
At Least 750 US Hospitals Faced Disruptions During Last Year's CrowdStrike Outage, Study Finds
Jul 19, 2025 11:54 AM Of those, more than 200 appear to have had outages of services related to patient care following CrowdStrike's disastrous crash, researchers have revealed. Photograph:When, one year ago today, a buggy update to software sold by the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike took down millions of computers around the world and sent them into a death spiral of repeated reboots, the global cost of all those crashed machines was equivalent to one of the worst cyberattacks in history. Some of the various estimates of the total damage worldwide have stretched well into the billions of dollars. Now a new study by a team of medical cybersecurity researchers has taken the first steps toward quantifying the cost of CrowdStrike's disaster not in dollars, but in potential harm to hospitals and their patients across the US. It reveals evidence that hundreds of those hospitals' services were disrupted during the outage, and raises concerns about potentially grave effects to patients' health and well-being. Researchers from the University of California San Diego today marked the one-year anniversary of CrowdStrike's catastrophe by releasing a paper in JAMA Network Open, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association Network, that attempts for the first time to create a rough estimate of the number of hospitals whose networks were affected by that IT meltdown on July 19, 2024, as well as which services on those networks appeared to have been disrupted. A chart showing a massive spike in detected medical service outages on the day of CrowdStrike's crashes. Courtesy of UCSD and JAMA Network Open By scanning internet-exposed parts of hospital networks before, during, and after the crisis, they detected that at minimum 759 hospitals in the US appear to have experienced network disruption of some kind on that day. They found that more than 200 of those hospitals seemed to have been hit specifically with outages that directly affected patients, from inaccessible health records and test scans to fetal monitoring systems that went offline. Of the 2,232 hospital networks they were able to scan, the researchers detected that fully 34 percent of them appear to have suffered from some type of disruption. All of that indicates the CrowdStrike outage could have been a 'significant public health issue,' argues Christian Dameff, a UCSD emergency medicine doctor and cybersecurity researcher, and one of the paper's authors. 'If we had had this paper's data a year ago when this happened," he adds, 'I think we would have been much more concerned about how much impact it really had on US health care.' CrowdStrike, in a statement to WIRED, strongly criticized the UCSD study and JAMA's decision to publish it, calling the paper 'junk science.' They note that the researchers didn't verify that the disrupted networks ran Windows or CrowdStrike software, and point out that Microsoft's cloud service Azure experienced a major outage on the same day, which may have been responsible for some of the hospital network disruptions. 'Drawing conclusions about downtime and patient impact without verifying the findings with any of the hospitals mentioned is completely irresponsible and scientifically indefensible,' the statement reads. 'While we reject the methodology and conclusions of this report, we recognize the impact the incident had a year ago,' the statement adds. 'As we've said from the start, we sincerely apologize to our customers and those affected and continue to focus on strengthening the resilience of our platform and the industry.' In response to CrowdStrike's criticisms, the UCSD researchers say they stand by their findings. The Azure outage that CrowdStrike noted, they point out, began the previous night and affected mostly the central US, while the outages they measured began at roughly midnight US east coast time on July 19—about the time when CrowdStrike's faulty update began crashing computers—and affected the entire country. (Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) 'We are unaware of any other hypothesis that would explain such simultaneous geographically-distributed service outages inside hospital networks such as we see here' other than CrowdStrike's crash, writes UCSD computer science professor Stefan Savage, one of the paper's co-authors, in an email to WIRED. (JAMA declined to comment in response to CrowdStrike's criticisms.) In fact, the researchers describe their count of detected hospital disruptions as only a minimum estimate, not a measure of the real blast radius of CrowdStrike's crashes. That's in part because the researchers were only able to scan roughly a third of America's 6,000-plus hospitals, which would suggest that the true number of medical facilities affected may have been several times higher. The UCSD researchers' findings stemmed from a larger internet-scanning project they call Ransomwhere?, funded by the Advance Research Projects Agency for Health and launched in early 2024 with the intention of detecting hospitals' ransomware outages. As a result of that project, they were already probing US hospitals using the scanning tools ZMap and Censys when CrowdStrike's July 2024 calamity struck. For the 759 hospitals in which the researchers detected that a service was knocked offline on July 19, their scans also allowed them to analyze which specific services appeared to be down, using publicly available tools like Censys and the Lantern Project to identify different medical services, as well as manually checking some web-based services they could visit. They found that 202 hospitals experienced outages of services directly related to patients. Those services included staff portals used to view patient health records, fetal monitoring systems, tools for remote monitoring of patient care, secure document transfer systems that allow patients to be transferred to another hospital, 'pre-hospital' information systems like the tools that can share initial test results from an ambulance to an emergency room for patients requiring time-critical treatments, and the image storage and retrieval systems that are used to make scan results available to doctors and patients. 'If a patient was having a stroke and the radiologist needed to look at a scan image quickly, it would be much harder to get it from the CT scanner to the radiologist to read,' Dameff offers as one hypothetical example. The researchers also found that 212 hospitals had outages of 'operationally relevant' systems like staff scheduling platforms, bill payment systems, and tools for managing patient wait times. In another category of 'research relevant' services, the study found that 62 hospitals faced outages. The biggest fraction of outages in the researchers' findings was an 'other' category that included offline services that the researchers couldn't fully identify in their scans at 287 hospitals, suggesting that some of those, too, might have been uncounted patient-relevant services. 'Nothing in this paper says that someone's stroke got misdiagnosed or there was a delay in the care of someone getting life-saving antibiotics, for instance. But there might have been,' says Dameff. 'I think there's a lot of evidence of these types of disruptions. It would be hard to argue that people weren't impacted at a potentially pretty significant level.' The study's findings give a sprawling new sense of scope to anecdotal reports of how CrowdStrike's outage affected medical facilities that already surfaced over the last year. WIRED reported at the time that Baylor hospital network, a major nonprofit health care system, and Quest Diagnostics were both unable to process routine bloodwork. The Boston-area hospital system Mass General Brigham reportedly had to bring 45,000 of its PCs back online, each of which required a manual fix that took 15 to 20 minutes. In their study, researchers also tried to roughly measure the length of downtime of the hospital services affected by the CrowdStrike outage, and found that most recovered relatively quickly: About 58 percent of the hospital services were back online within six hours, and only 8 percent or so took more than 48 hours to recover. That's a far shorter disruption than the outages from actual cyberattacks that have hit hospitals, the researchers note: Mass-spreading malware attacks like NotPetya and WannaCry in 2017 as well as the Change Healthcare ransomware attack that struck the payment provider subsidiary of United Healthcare in early 2024 all shut down scores of hospitals across the US—or in the case of WannaCry, the United Kingdom—for days or weeks in some cases. But the effects of the CrowdStrike debacle nonetheless deserve to be compared to those intentionally inflicted digital disasters for hospitals, the researchers argue. 'The duration of the downtimes is different, but the breadth, the number of hospitals affected across the entire country, the scale, the potential intensity of the disruption is similar,' says Jeffrey Tully, a pediatrician, anesthesiologist, and cybersecurity researcher who coauthored the study. A map showing the duration of the apparent downtime of detected medical service outages in hospitals across the US. Courtesy of UCSD and JAMA Network Open A delay of hours, or even minutes, can increase mortality rates for heart attack and stroke patients, says Josh Corman, a cybersecurity researcher with a focus on medical cybersecurity at the Institute for Security and Technology and former CISA staffer who reviewed the UCSD study. That means that even a shorter-duration outage in patient related services across hundreds of hospitals could have concrete and seriously harmful—if hard to measure—consequences. Aside from drawing a first estimate of the possible toll on patients' health in this single incident, the UCSD team emphasizes that the real work of their study is to show that, with the right tools, it's possible to monitor and learn from these mass medical network outages. The result may be a better sense of how to prevent—or in the case of more intentional downtime from cyberattacks and ransomware—protect hospitals from experiencing them in the future.
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Tomatoes Can Sunburn—Here's What You Need To Know To Prevent Sunscald
Key Takeaways Provide shade during peak sun. Don't over-prune; let leaves provide coverage. Plant tomatoes early enough so they mature before extreme summer love and need a lot of sunlight and heat to grow. But too much of a good thing can cause the plant to get sunscald–the plant equivalent of a sunburn. 'Sunscald in tomatoes can happen in all parts of the country, but it is more prominent in the South where the days are longer and the weather is hotter,' says Greg Key, gardener and president of Hoss Tools in Georgia. What is Sunscald? Tomatoes need plenty of sunlight to produce fruit, typically around six to eight hours a day. Too much sun and heat can cause tomatoes to get sunscald. 'Sunscald happens when the tomatoes are hit with the direct waves of the sun without any protection, similar to sunburn on us humans,' says Key. According to Jennifer McDonald, certified organic garden specialist and co-founder of Garden Girls, a garden design company based in Houston, Texas, she says sunscald occurs with 'extreme heat coupled with direct sunlight.' If you're experiencing a heat wave or increased temperatures, there's usually no need to worry. 'A few days of higher-than-normal temperatures usually don't cause sunscald,' says McDonald. What Sunscald Looks Like Sunscald can affect the leaves as well as the fruit. 'Leaves with white or brown spots, and tomatoes with cracks or patches of blotchy white, yellow, or gray spots are all indications of sunscald,' says McDonald. Fruit that is exposed due to over-pruning can also be more prone to sunscald. 'For example, if you've spent the day pruning your tomato plants and removing diseased foliage, you'll often see tomatoes in bunches that are exposed to direct sunlight,' says McDonald. 'When the leaves are gone, so is the umbrella effect.' So before you go overboard with pruning tomato stems and leaves, think about how the foliage is providing natural shade. Why Planting Tomatoes Early in the South is Important When you plant your tomatoes ensure they grow properly and reach all growth stages. As a guide, you want to plant after the last freeze in spring. 'In the South, we plant our tomatoes right after Valentine's Day to allow them enough time to pollinate, bear fruit, and ripen before the extreme heat takes over in late June,' says McDonald. 'Once the extreme heat is upon us, tomato growth all but stops completely.' She says that's when it's time to harvest or remove the plants. Choose Tomatoes that Thrive in Your Climate The type of tomato plant you grow is important to minimize the chance of sunscald. 'In the South where sunscald is a serious problem, planting the correct type and variety can help with this issue,' says Key. He recommends two tomato plants: 'Red Snapper and Hossinator are two varieties that thrive and have minimal sunscald.' He explains that both are determinate tomatoes that are bred to have little to no pruning, dense foliage, outstanding fruit size and to be very high in yield production. Oftentimes, bigger-sized tomatoes are more susceptible to sunscald. 'Larger beefsteak tomatoes take longer to grow and have more surface area which means a higher chance of direct sunlight exposure and greater risk for sunscald,' says McDonald. If your USDA Zone has very hot summers, you may want to grow smaller-sized tomatoes. 'In zones with exceptionally hot summers, choosing smaller indeterminate cherry tomatoes will result in better outcomes and less sunscald,' says McDonald. How to Prevent Sunscald Sunscald can be prevented. 'Sunscald is a physiological condition, unlike fungal diseases in tomatoes, which are harder to prevent and treat,' says McDonald. Here are two ways to reduce the chances of sunscald. Use a Shade Cloth Although tomatoes love the sun, putting up a shade cloth can help them out significantly during the hottest parts of the day. 'This is a simple but effective way to ensure that fruit-bearing plants receive enough sunlight but are protected from the intensity of direct rays,' says McDonald. 'There are a number of options when choosing shade cloth, with percentages ranging from 30-75% shade coverage. When in a pinch, an umbrella can provide shade to growing plants.' Don't Over-prune Pruning helps promote fruit growth. But overdoing it can cause your tomato plants harm. 'Over the years there's been a growing practice to prune tomatoes heavily to maximize the size of fruit and produce more fruit per plant,' says Key. 'This strategy certainly works, but the downside to the pruning method is you leave the fruit exposed to the sun, and that is when the damage occurs.' According to McDonald, 'Pruning tomato plants can become quite addicting, but it's beneficial to avoid over-pruning during the peak of summer.' She says that even sunburned leaves can provide protection to delicate fruit. Even crispy leaves are fine to leave on a tomato plant if fungal diseases aren't present, she adds. Can You Eat Them? Typically, you can eat a sunscalded tomato if there isn't any mold. According to McDonald, 'While they may look a little funky, they are still edible, assuming that the white patches have not become black, which could indicate mold.' Sometimes a tomato just has a yellow or white blemish. 'If the sunscald is just a blotchy patch on the tomato that hasn't blistered, it's fine,' she says. 'Cut around it and enjoy the rest of that juicy tomato!' But there are some signs when you shouldn't eat a sunscald tomato. 'If your tomato looks sunken or blistered or has deep cracks that have exposed the flesh, you're better off tossing it,' she says. Read the original article on Southern Living Solve the daily Crossword
