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This sort of thing is why "do your own research" is simply not plausible advice for 99% of people, even highly educated intelligent people with time on their ha
by api 5y ago
This sort of thing is why "do your own research" is simply not plausible advice for 99% of people, even highly educated intelligent people with time on their hands.
Most of the high level problems in our civilization require years of study to even be capable of formulating a valid opinion.
The thing people have to do is to instead focus on evaluating people and deciding who probably knows who they are talking about. This is the same thing successful leaders and managers have to do when they hire. Unfortunately there is no foolproof method. Going with the consensus in a field is going to yield better than average results, but it's not a perfect rule by any means.
- sinuhe69 5y agoMy take is opposite. Everybody with a bit of common sense would see such claims as problematic immediately and so they can dive deeper into the stuff. The problem is so much easier to explain if one uses the visual approach with proportional boxes for each age group. Single metric (projection) can distort a multi-dimensional data significantly, everyone knows that. But unfortunately people make the same mistake again all the time.
- mcguire 5y ago"But unfortunately people make the same mistake again all the time." Exactly what the previous comment said.
- mattcwilson 5y agoAgreed. No one needs to become an expert in every possible field. What we do need to do is educate people out of new forms of innumeracy and illiteracy, where they are falling prey to basic fallacies of statistics or rhetorical tricks like motte and bailey and cat couplings. People are generally familiar with logical fallacies like ad hominem, strawman arguments, or circular reasoning. New weapons of persuasion are getting crafted every day; we owe it to ourselves, each other, and the future humans to educate them on defense against the dark arts.
- tjpnz 5y agoSounds good in theory but what about those who've fallen so hopelessly down the rabbit hole? I've pointed out the statistical flaws in the tweets and Instagram posts they send me, often there's an "aha" moment. But then they'll find another article from a questionable source or tweet from some "data scientist" misrepresenting data from John's Hopkins and the process begins all over again. Debunking the same nonsense over and over again is exhausting.
- mattcwilson 5y agoI don’t have a ton of hope for some short-term (5-10 years) corrective out of the present state of affairs. What I do see happening in that timeframe is a recognition that these skills are foundational to online culture and discourse, and a push to inculcate them in forthcoming generations through education and private and public policy action. An immune response evolving to the environmental harms of Twitter, if you will. But yeah - that chap who keeps failing at science in your Insta is likely a lost cause.
- _jal 5y agoTake the "Do your own research" slogan for what it is - an attack on expertise. It is an attempt to lower the status, and presumably power, of "the elites" (credentialed experts), mostly perpetrated by the real (monied) elites.
- mcguire 5y agoOn the contrary, most of the people making the "do your own research" attack on expertise are not "elites" in any sense. They're the same people who say, "I could have been an X except for all the pointless math/science". The wealthy or semi-wealthy are either riding the wave for their own benefit or don't like what the expertise says.
- jkhdigital 5y ago> evaluating people and deciding who probably knows who they are talking about This is hard, possibly just as hard as “doing your own research”.