4 ms·

But what if you're wrong? An idea. Popular. Backed by compelling arguments. Agreed upon by all the smart people. Broadcast from all the right news channels. Ye

But what if you're wrong? An idea. Popular. Backed by compelling arguments. Agreed upon by all the smart people. Broadcast from all the right news channels. Yet still totally wrong and utterly fucked. It's happened before and it'll happen again. Best to leave us our right to choose.

Nursie 5y ago
Did I say you should take that away? No, I said it’s not wrong to lose faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. Right now we have people hospitalising themselves eating horse pharmaceuticals, all the while congratulating themselves on how smart they are for doing their own “research”. It’s pitiable.
shadowgovt 5y ago
I sometimes wonder if we have a gap in public education around epistemology. In this era, we have more sources of signal to access than ever before. I don't know that people are equipped with enough tools for knowing how to know things to discern fact from fiction given those sources. In an era where people would have barely known about ivermectin / COVID-19 interaction because most doctors who look at the research discard it as insufficient, there would have been no choice to be made. In this era? Now everyone has to have a passing familiarity with how clinical studies work (or trust authority), because the data isn't filtered (and, in fact, there are people who dedicate themselves to spreading misinformation... This observation is independent of whether ivermectin is effective; we know people have been doing dishonest things "for the lulz" for decades).
- swayvil 5y ago
  We take the words of strangers that we never met as gospel. As equal, if not greater in weight, to our own observations. This certainly says something about the popular epistemology.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    That's true about a lot of things. There are less than twenty people who have ever seen the surface of the moon. We believe their testimony on the topic.

Nursie 5y ago

Did I say you should take that away? No, I said it’s not wrong to lose faith in the reasoning capacity of the common individual. Right now we have people hospitalising themselves eating horse pharmaceuticals, all the while congratulating themselves on how smart they are for doing their own “research”. It’s pitiable.

shadowgovt 5y ago

I sometimes wonder if we have a gap in public education around epistemology. In this era, we have more sources of signal to access than ever before. I don't know that people are equipped with enough tools for knowing how to know things to discern fact from fiction given those sources. In an era where people would have barely known about ivermectin / COVID-19 interaction because most doctors who look at the research discard it as insufficient, there would have been no choice to be made. In this era? Now everyone has to have a passing familiarity with how clinical studies work (or trust authority), because the data isn't filtered (and, in fact, there are people who dedicate themselves to spreading misinformation... This observation is independent of whether ivermectin is effective; we know people have been doing dishonest things "for the lulz" for decades).

swayvil 5y ago
We take the words of strangers that we never met as gospel. As equal, if not greater in weight, to our own observations. This certainly says something about the popular epistemology.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  That's true about a lot of things. There are less than twenty people who have ever seen the surface of the moon. We believe their testimony on the topic.