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Details aside, I do think we are in the midst of a cultural trend where nihilism and relativism are taking hold. I used to be more of a relativist myself, but t

Details aside, I do think we are in the midst of a cultural trend where nihilism and relativism are taking hold. I used to be more of a relativist myself, but those ideas are hard to reconcile with an engineering degree. In engineering, you have real consequences for being mistaken about how reality works. For most people though, reality means the social systems around them, and truth and meaning in that world is highly relative. The internet sort of accentuates this, right? Everyone’s social webs are growing and more points of view are shaping things. It’s just a shame it leads to distrust of science

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
And part of what comes along with "everyone's social webs are growing" is that more and more people have in their social web some kind of science crank. "All the mainstream people are wrong; they're ignoring the evidence that my theory is right." And some of these people can sound very convincing if you don't know the field. But when they say "all the experts are wrong", they're undermining the public's faith in science. Now, sometimes the experts are wrong, but that kind of situation doesn't get resolved by someone running a PR campaign on Facebook to support their pet theory. It gets resolved by hard data from careful experiments.
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imbnwa 6y ago
> Details aside, Sure, it just strikes me that you're willing to sorta handwaive an entire body of work that you likely only have a passing understanding of when that looks eerily close to people waving off the body of work that is science, which they likely in turn only have a passing understanding of, if that. Hard to demand people hold a higher standard when you don't do the same. You attempted to explain a social antagonism by posing some corrupting Other badly influencing the youth, figuratively speaking, that's no different than people being anti-science which appears to them to also either be some corrupting influence or controlled by such. Social problems require more rigor than that.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago

And part of what comes along with "everyone's social webs are growing" is that more and more people have in their social web some kind of science crank. "All the mainstream people are wrong; they're ignoring the evidence that my theory is right." And some of these people can sound very convincing if you don't know the field. But when they say "all the experts are wrong", they're undermining the public's faith in science. Now, sometimes the experts are wrong, but that kind of situation doesn't get resolved by someone running a PR campaign on Facebook to support their pet theory. It gets resolved by hard data from careful experiments.

deleted 6y ago

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imbnwa 6y ago

> Details aside, Sure, it just strikes me that you're willing to sorta handwaive an entire body of work that you likely only have a passing understanding of when that looks eerily close to people waving off the body of work that is science, which they likely in turn only have a passing understanding of, if that. Hard to demand people hold a higher standard when you don't do the same. You attempted to explain a social antagonism by posing some corrupting Other badly influencing the youth, figuratively speaking, that's no different than people being anti-science which appears to them to also either be some corrupting influence or controlled by such. Social problems require more rigor than that.