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> in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed. "Almost" really isn't necessary there anymore. There's a growing group that believes virtually all doctors,

by fiblye 6y ago

> in fact it's almost being denigrated and shamed. "Almost" really isn't necessary there anymore. There's a growing group that believes virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children. These used to just be a fringe group. Now it feels like about half the people I know are buying into that stuff. Even some college-educated professionals think only their field is valid, and everyone else is part of "them."

mycall 6y ago
The best I can think besides the usual suspects is a more rare one: "the more you know, the more you know you don't know" which is being read incorrectly as "why bother learning when everything is always wrong [describes 20 major problems with human race]". At that point, it is hard to follow.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I prefer the phrasing "the more you learn, the less you know".
natmaka 6y ago
Isn't it an effect of a feeling caused by governments using experts in a way letting (too often and a too large part of) the public think that they, at worst, are all (gov & experts alike) pushing their own short-termed and only self-beneficial agendas or, at best, nearly always devise some "Grand Plan" which then appears to cost much more than budgeted, gives less than promised and has unwanted unexpected side-effects? There is a fair part of subjectivity in those opinions, for example most of us tend to forget/neglect granted benefits and focus on unwanted side-effects. It seems to me that a growing opinion is that governments less and less understand what is going on, and therefore cannot efficiently adequately assess and plan. This is especially true when it comes to managing innovation, which is intrinsically full of new concepts and uncertainty.
- Qwertious 6y ago
  I wouldn't blame the government here, but the media. Their job is literally to represent experts and their true image to the general public - as in, they're supposed to research and tell us whether the expert seems credible, and if the government is lying about experts (or anything else) it's the media's job to call them out on it.
  - methodin 6y ago
    That's an interesting take as news organizations are not nonprofits. They are only businesses. The government is supposed to be acting as the central source of good information not a collection of for-profit companies. The issue we face now is our government is manipulating messages for political gain and the media is manipulating filters to further viewership both of which feed upon each other. I don't see how you place no blame on the government here.
  - nikkwong 6y ago
    I think you are giving far too much credit to other members of our species. Members of the media are clearly as fallible as the dysfunctional politicians they are covering. CNN and other left-of-center media organizations would do themselves a favor by at least holding their tongue on areas where they are too explicitly demonstrating their bias. The way their pundits make ad hominem remarks against the president every other story serves no purpose but to further aggravate the conservative right. It so obviously dilutes whatever message is attempted to be conveyed, turning what should be considered "news" into a pornography of entertainment that further divides our country. It's so blatantly destructive and should be so easy to filter out; but they create soundbite after soundbite that is cannon fodder for the other side. Publications like the Economist are critical of the president but not in an antagonizing, ad hominem way. If more of the 'mainstream media' would follow that approach, more of their message would get through to the other side rather than adding fuel to their fire.
    - infogulch 6y ago
      Interesting analogy with pornography. Just replace 'horny' with 'angry' as the primary driving emotion and political news matches porn pretty well. Potentially exciting but ultimately vacuous. Harmless in theory, but causes harm in practice by distracting / diverting energy and action away from the real thing. Is sustained through novelty, which encourages producing extremes. So that means the US has a big (political) porn addiction problem. Hey, it kinda works.
sorval 6y ago
Agreed. Its frustrating that the idea that "college is useless and a bad deal" is not challenged more. I see a real difference in terms of rigor, discipline, and professionalism from college grads vs those that didnt go.
paganel 6y ago
> doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children. From my point of view I think that is a healthy reaction against technocracy, and it's not US-specific. Those "doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields" can't expect to take the decisions that influence the life of millions each and every day, with almost no over-sight, and then complain when people question those decisions. "But science says that we should do that and that!" is not a valid enough reason anymore, because science has "said" lots of things that have been proved to be very bad to some parts of the populace (see eugenics, which has been demoted to "non-science" after the fact so that those technocrats that had tried to implement it could wash their hands off of it).
- turndown 6y ago
  I definitely agree with your central point that anyone can use any ideology to endorse their own personal beliefs, but it also has to be said that giving the same weight to the feelings of a person versus actual fact, spoken by an expert, is the literal degradation of our society.
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    Many people lack the necessary expertise to recognize an expert when they see one. They thus are left to resort to authority as the proximate measure accessible to them to assess how much credit to assign to the opinions of a particular expert. To complicate matters, there are documented cases where in the past half century at least experts have be bought by special interest groups such as big tobacco etc. This eroded public trust in any experts and many people were brought up assuming every public discourse with expert opinions is rigged. That generation now 40-50yo and their world view is having a certain weight on current matters. (Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion, I'm not an expert. And even if I was many people wouldn't trust me anyway ;-p )
    - pbourke 6y ago
      It’s easier to set up a system to provide nonpartisan funding and review of scientific work than it is to have everyone read and source all of the research. It’s also easier to set up an apolitical body that makes recommendations based on research than it is to have everyone draw their own conclusions or devolve into “blue science” vs “red science” These are mechanisms that cultivate public trust, and there are countries that do a pretty good job at it.
RestlessMind 6y ago
> There's a growing group that believes ... certain fields are "in on it" ... some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing I mean, I won't fault anyone if they are jaded and distrust everything the "experts" have to say these days. Look at what we witnessed in the last 20 or so years: 1. Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region. 2. Financial crisis, where the so-called masters of the Universe from Wall St crashed the entire economy and the "maestro" Greenspan denied the existence of a housing bubble in 2005. 3. Recent revelations that scientific studies about the ill effects of sugar were suppressed in 60's / 70's and instead sugar lobby spent money on deflecting blame to fat. 4. Snowden revelations. 5. Details uncovered about the Harvard admissions process which show how the elites are favored via legacy or obscure sports admissions. 6. TPP, especially the way it was conducted where the elected representatives didn't have any access to the details of the negotiations, while the lobbyists from the key industries had full access. You keep reading that kind of stuff and you start discounting "elite opinions" more and more.
- pbourke 6y ago
  > Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region. My impression is that the war was a solution in search of a problem. The administration leaned on the intelligence community until the right conclusion was produced.
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    Since Vietnam the war community has wanted one do over after another. To prove that war has a useful role in foreign policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Syndrome
- madengr 6y ago
  Regarding Iraq, the US did remove a dictator who tossed people into industrial shredders, but didn’t account for Islam being incompatible with a functioning Democracy.
krick 6y ago
I mean, it is hard to reason with you on your opinion, since anybody who doesn't echo what you say would be just classified by you as a member of this group and his opinion automatically dismissed. And this wouldn't even make you doubt yourself, since "half the people you know are buying into that stuff" already and you seem to be pretty confident that it is them who are fools buying into some cheap nonsense, not you. However, as a possible member of this community of fools myself, I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them. Of course, everything can be ridiculed by making such a generalizations as "virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals": about every possible sentence starting with something as generic as that would turn out either ridiculously false, or ridiculously obvious. The point being pretty much the contrary: unfortunately, having a title doesn't equal "being qualified and trustworthy" even on topics that supposedly should be covered by that title, much less on making generic political/historic/socio-economic claims. Moreover, being a professional liar with a nice title seems to be a pretty solid career choice nowadays (well, pretty much always was, if you ask me, but it is you who is claiming that number of people who notice this is growing).
- pbourke 6y ago
  > I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them I am curious about these opinions. Care to share some?
  - krick 6y ago
    It's not that I wouldn't like to share some, but this question is simply too generic for me to be able to answer it like that.
- fiblye 6y ago
  Doctors on average know more about medical subjects than non-doctors. Engineers generally know more about engineering than non-engineers. Climate scientists know more about what’s going on with the climate than non-climate scientists. Facebook-educated woke people who think everyone is just some con man and they know more than them are simply people with too much confidence. Laying evidence out in front of them will only make them angry or mock it because it collided with their world views instilled by clownery they saw on TV or from equally “woke” people. Are doctors wrong sometimes? Of course. Are some particularly bad doctors wrong a lot of the time? Yes. Are a massive group of doctors out there “hiding the truth” and people with no formal education have the real solutions, but their answers are being suppressed? No.

by fiblye 6y ago

mycall 6y ago

The best I can think besides the usual suspects is a more rare one: "the more you know, the more you know you don't know" which is being read incorrectly as "why bother learning when everything is always wrong [describes 20 major problems with human race]". At that point, it is hard to follow.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
I prefer the phrasing "the more you learn, the less you know".

natmaka 6y ago

Isn't it an effect of a feeling caused by governments using experts in a way letting (too often and a too large part of) the public think that they, at worst, are all (gov & experts alike) pushing their own short-termed and only self-beneficial agendas or, at best, nearly always devise some "Grand Plan" which then appears to cost much more than budgeted, gives less than promised and has unwanted unexpected side-effects? There is a fair part of subjectivity in those opinions, for example most of us tend to forget/neglect granted benefits and focus on unwanted side-effects. It seems to me that a growing opinion is that governments less and less understand what is going on, and therefore cannot efficiently adequately assess and plan. This is especially true when it comes to managing innovation, which is intrinsically full of new concepts and uncertainty.

Qwertious 6y ago
I wouldn't blame the government here, but the media. Their job is literally to represent experts and their true image to the general public - as in, they're supposed to research and tell us whether the expert seems credible, and if the government is lying about experts (or anything else) it's the media's job to call them out on it.
- methodin 6y ago
  That's an interesting take as news organizations are not nonprofits. They are only businesses. The government is supposed to be acting as the central source of good information not a collection of for-profit companies. The issue we face now is our government is manipulating messages for political gain and the media is manipulating filters to further viewership both of which feed upon each other. I don't see how you place no blame on the government here.
- nikkwong 6y ago
  I think you are giving far too much credit to other members of our species. Members of the media are clearly as fallible as the dysfunctional politicians they are covering. CNN and other left-of-center media organizations would do themselves a favor by at least holding their tongue on areas where they are too explicitly demonstrating their bias. The way their pundits make ad hominem remarks against the president every other story serves no purpose but to further aggravate the conservative right. It so obviously dilutes whatever message is attempted to be conveyed, turning what should be considered "news" into a pornography of entertainment that further divides our country. It's so blatantly destructive and should be so easy to filter out; but they create soundbite after soundbite that is cannon fodder for the other side. Publications like the Economist are critical of the president but not in an antagonizing, ad hominem way. If more of the 'mainstream media' would follow that approach, more of their message would get through to the other side rather than adding fuel to their fire.
  - infogulch 6y ago
    Interesting analogy with pornography. Just replace 'horny' with 'angry' as the primary driving emotion and political news matches porn pretty well. Potentially exciting but ultimately vacuous. Harmless in theory, but causes harm in practice by distracting / diverting energy and action away from the real thing. Is sustained through novelty, which encourages producing extremes. So that means the US has a big (political) porn addiction problem. Hey, it kinda works.

sorval 6y ago

Agreed. Its frustrating that the idea that "college is useless and a bad deal" is not challenged more. I see a real difference in terms of rigor, discipline, and professionalism from college grads vs those that didnt go.

paganel 6y ago

> doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields are "in on it" and part of some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing that'll take down America and corrupt their children. From my point of view I think that is a healthy reaction against technocracy, and it's not US-specific. Those "doctors, scientists, and professionals within certain fields" can't expect to take the decisions that influence the life of millions each and every day, with almost no over-sight, and then complain when people question those decisions. "But science says that we should do that and that!" is not a valid enough reason anymore, because science has "said" lots of things that have been proved to be very bad to some parts of the populace (see eugenics, which has been demoted to "non-science" after the fact so that those technocrats that had tried to implement it could wash their hands off of it).

turndown 6y ago
I definitely agree with your central point that anyone can use any ideology to endorse their own personal beliefs, but it also has to be said that giving the same weight to the feelings of a person versus actual fact, spoken by an expert, is the literal degradation of our society.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  Many people lack the necessary expertise to recognize an expert when they see one. They thus are left to resort to authority as the proximate measure accessible to them to assess how much credit to assign to the opinions of a particular expert. To complicate matters, there are documented cases where in the past half century at least experts have be bought by special interest groups such as big tobacco etc. This eroded public trust in any experts and many people were brought up assuming every public discourse with expert opinions is rigged. That generation now 40-50yo and their world view is having a certain weight on current matters. (Disclaimer: this is just my personal opinion, I'm not an expert. And even if I was many people wouldn't trust me anyway ;-p )
  - pbourke 6y ago
    It’s easier to set up a system to provide nonpartisan funding and review of scientific work than it is to have everyone read and source all of the research. It’s also easier to set up an apolitical body that makes recommendations based on research than it is to have everyone draw their own conclusions or devolve into “blue science” vs “red science” These are mechanisms that cultivate public trust, and there are countries that do a pretty good job at it.

RestlessMind 6y ago

> There's a growing group that believes ... certain fields are "in on it" ... some big conspiracy to do some vague, undefined thing I mean, I won't fault anyone if they are jaded and distrust everything the "experts" have to say these days. Look at what we witnessed in the last 20 or so years: 1. Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region. 2. Financial crisis, where the so-called masters of the Universe from Wall St crashed the entire economy and the "maestro" Greenspan denied the existence of a housing bubble in 2005. 3. Recent revelations that scientific studies about the ill effects of sugar were suppressed in 60's / 70's and instead sugar lobby spent money on deflecting blame to fat. 4. Snowden revelations. 5. Details uncovered about the Harvard admissions process which show how the elites are favored via legacy or obscure sports admissions. 6. TPP, especially the way it was conducted where the elected representatives didn't have any access to the details of the negotiations, while the lobbyists from the key industries had full access. You keep reading that kind of stuff and you start discounting "elite opinions" more and more.

pbourke 6y ago
> Iraq war, where our intelligence agencies were sure about WMDs and the senate voted 97-0 to wage a war that ended up wasting thousands of American lives, trillions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives along with destabilizing the entire region. My impression is that the war was a solution in search of a problem. The administration leaned on the intelligence community until the right conclusion was produced.
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Since Vietnam the war community has wanted one do over after another. To prove that war has a useful role in foreign policy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_Syndrome
madengr 6y ago
Regarding Iraq, the US did remove a dictator who tossed people into industrial shredders, but didn’t account for Islam being incompatible with a functioning Democracy.

krick 6y ago

I mean, it is hard to reason with you on your opinion, since anybody who doesn't echo what you say would be just classified by you as a member of this group and his opinion automatically dismissed. And this wouldn't even make you doubt yourself, since "half the people you know are buying into that stuff" already and you seem to be pretty confident that it is them who are fools buying into some cheap nonsense, not you. However, as a possible member of this community of fools myself, I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them. Of course, everything can be ridiculed by making such a generalizations as "virtually all doctors, scientists, and professionals": about every possible sentence starting with something as generic as that would turn out either ridiculously false, or ridiculously obvious. The point being pretty much the contrary: unfortunately, having a title doesn't equal "being qualified and trustworthy" even on topics that supposedly should be covered by that title, much less on making generic political/historic/socio-economic claims. Moreover, being a professional liar with a nice title seems to be a pretty solid career choice nowadays (well, pretty much always was, if you ask me, but it is you who is claiming that number of people who notice this is growing).

pbourke 6y ago
> I feel like there are some pretty good reasons to hold opinions you probably find so ridiculous that it isn't even worth your time to consider them I am curious about these opinions. Care to share some?
- krick 6y ago
  It's not that I wouldn't like to share some, but this question is simply too generic for me to be able to answer it like that.
fiblye 6y ago
Doctors on average know more about medical subjects than non-doctors. Engineers generally know more about engineering than non-engineers. Climate scientists know more about what’s going on with the climate than non-climate scientists. Facebook-educated woke people who think everyone is just some con man and they know more than them are simply people with too much confidence. Laying evidence out in front of them will only make them angry or mock it because it collided with their world views instilled by clownery they saw on TV or from equally “woke” people. Are doctors wrong sometimes? Of course. Are some particularly bad doctors wrong a lot of the time? Yes. Are a massive group of doctors out there “hiding the truth” and people with no formal education have the real solutions, but their answers are being suppressed? No.