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> And given how weaponized pretty much all information is these days, it is perfectly reasonable to adopt the stance that if you can't objectively judge the acc

> And given how weaponized pretty much all information is these days, it is perfectly reasonable to adopt the stance that if you can't objectively judge the accuracy yourself, you simply won't take the information on board. How do you judge information you're not qualified for? Do you "objectively judge the accuracy yourself" of medical research (and of course, the research that lead to that research, and derivation of all underlying equations) before permitting yourself to listen to advice from a doctor? It may seem silly, but this is the same logic that anti-vaxxers adopt. Personally, I think the actual problem[1] here is not that people aren't critical enough, it's that they don't know how to perform, contextualize and interpret research, and in particular to do this for work that lies outside of their domain-specific expertise. The kind of work graduate students learn to do: find meta-review papers, drill into the work of early pioneers, survey the current state-of-the-art, and then, after all this: identify any gaps and omissions to critique; which then gets tested in the humbling environment of advisor-meetings, conferences etc. This is why I think the people most vulnerable to this kind of "I must objectively judge the accuracy or I won't take it on board" are people who are educated enough to be comfortable with technical concepts and jargon, but are not actual domain experts and haven't done any actual research themselves. It's how you get large numbers of anti-vaccine nurses, and engineers skeptical of climate change. [1] Actually, I suspect the actual problem is the discomfort people have with reality's liberal bias, and its corresponding reflection in historically trusted media sources (i.e. BBC, CBC). Even if you aren't uncomfortable with liberal politics, it may seem obvous to you such media sources are pushing an obviously liberal agenda, when it's really just a mainstream scientific consensus.

pdonis 5y ago
> How do you judge information you're not qualified for? Why do you need to judge it? If you absolutely have to make a choice about something, and that choice absolutely has to depend on some particular piece of information, then your best option is to make yourself qualified to judge that information. If you can't do that, then your next best option is to have someone you trust independently of that particular topic (such as a family member or close friend) who is qualified to judge the information and whose advice you can rely on. If neither of those two things is possible, then you should think really, really hard about whether you actually have to have that information to make the choice you have to make (or whether you absolutely have to make that particular choice, instead of finding some other choice you could make that wouldn't depend on that information). My personal experience is that, when I actually apply the above principles, I find that most of the information with which I get inundated every day, just as all of us do, is irrelevant to the actual choices I have to make. It's mostly just trying to get me to signal something, or to get me to have a strong opinion about something because some politically active group wants me to, not because I actually need to. > Do you "objectively judge the accuracy yourself" of medical research (and of course, the research that lead to that research, and derivation of all underlying equations) before permitting yourself to listen to advice from a doctor? Me personally? Not quite (there are no "underlying equations" for medicine anyway, so some of what you describe is impossible), but I try to come as close as I can. I never trust anything a doctor tells me implicitly. I always look at other sources of information. I also always ask critical questions to see if the doctor really understands the subject or is just repeating some kind of conventional wisdom that they don't actually understand. (Unfortunately the frequency of the latter in my experience with doctors is much higher than one would like.) > how to perform, contextualize and interpret research All of the things you describe are important, yes, and I do all of them. The only thing I would add is making use of cross-domain knowledge, something in which our current scientific community is, unfortunately, weak. > Even if you aren't uncomfortable with liberal politics, it may seem obvous to you such media sources are pushing an obviously liberal agenda, when it's really just a mainstream scientific consensus. In some cases this is true, but I think it's a lot less frequent than many liberal advocates (or indeed advocates for any ideology) claim. Claiming "mainstream scientific consensus" for what are actually ideologically based political opinions and nothing more is a common example of the weaponizatlon of information that I referred to. (Which is not at all to say that only liberals do this: ideologues of all political persuasions do it. It has become more frequent in recent years because we have allowed politics to control more and more aspects of our lives, so the stakes in political controversies are higher and higher, and hence so are the incentives to weaponize information.)

pdonis 5y ago

> How do you judge information you're not qualified for? Why do you need to judge it? If you absolutely have to make a choice about something, and that choice absolutely has to depend on some particular piece of information, then your best option is to make yourself qualified to judge that information. If you can't do that, then your next best option is to have someone you trust independently of that particular topic (such as a family member or close friend) who is qualified to judge the information and whose advice you can rely on. If neither of those two things is possible, then you should think really, really hard about whether you actually have to have that information to make the choice you have to make (or whether you absolutely have to make that particular choice, instead of finding some other choice you could make that wouldn't depend on that information). My personal experience is that, when I actually apply the above principles, I find that most of the information with which I get inundated every day, just as all of us do, is irrelevant to the actual choices I have to make. It's mostly just trying to get me to signal something, or to get me to have a strong opinion about something because some politically active group wants me to, not because I actually need to. > Do you "objectively judge the accuracy yourself" of medical research (and of course, the research that lead to that research, and derivation of all underlying equations) before permitting yourself to listen to advice from a doctor? Me personally? Not quite (there are no "underlying equations" for medicine anyway, so some of what you describe is impossible), but I try to come as close as I can. I never trust anything a doctor tells me implicitly. I always look at other sources of information. I also always ask critical questions to see if the doctor really understands the subject or is just repeating some kind of conventional wisdom that they don't actually understand. (Unfortunately the frequency of the latter in my experience with doctors is much higher than one would like.) > how to perform, contextualize and interpret research All of the things you describe are important, yes, and I do all of them. The only thing I would add is making use of cross-domain knowledge, something in which our current scientific community is, unfortunately, weak. > Even if you aren't uncomfortable with liberal politics, it may seem obvous to you such media sources are pushing an obviously liberal agenda, when it's really just a mainstream scientific consensus. In some cases this is true, but I think it's a lot less frequent than many liberal advocates (or indeed advocates for any ideology) claim. Claiming "mainstream scientific consensus" for what are actually ideologically based political opinions and nothing more is a common example of the weaponizatlon of information that I referred to. (Which is not at all to say that only liberals do this: ideologues of all political persuasions do it. It has become more frequent in recent years because we have allowed politics to control more and more aspects of our lives, so the stakes in political controversies are higher and higher, and hence so are the incentives to weaponize information.)