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It does get abused, but IMO the abuse of perceived scientific authority is far more important. At the end of the day, who really cares if some random college fr

by ufmace 4y ago

It does get abused, but IMO the abuse of perceived scientific authority is far more important. At the end of the day, who really cares if some random college friend doesn't believe in the scientific consensus on black holes? His opinion has zero impact on anything at all. On the other hand, when bad science gets elevated to near-religious status, we get horrific outcomes. I'm 1000x more afraid of the regime that can persuade some random college friend to mouth the mainstream opinion on black hole structure than I am that this guy wants to believe something that might not be true, especially in a field that will never have any impact on any of our daily lives.

atoav 4y ago
The point is that critical thinking doesn't mean "question everything and assume everybody except yourself is incompetent or evil". It means that you understand you can replicate someone's results if you doubt them. You can look at the methods they used and find why they were adequate or inadequate. You can reason if the conclusions they drew from their findings are accurate. But all of this will not come out of "I have a strange feeling on that topic". Unless you are really an expert on the matter, many topics will produce strange feelings in people, because chances are they lack some fundamental understanding that would be needed to even understand the findings. I am not saying you need to either do all the work and check yourself OR blindly trust science and awallow everything that looks "sciency". What we need to do is to educate people on how to check studies and papers for themselves all while admiting which parts they don't know.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  I don't think we should. The problem isn't science, the problem is that fake "sciencey" presentations of opinions that are known to be wrong have been used to devalue real science. Climate change is the perfect example. The fossil barons knew that a move to renewables would destroy their political influence and financial power, so they literally ran a decades-long campaign to discredit the established science and individual scientists. There is far more need to educate the public about toxic PR technologies, media manipulations, FUD, cut-out think tanks all funded by the same sources and pushing the same disinformation, social media bot farms, and all the other industrial fake news techniques than there is about basic science. It doesn't matter if individuals don't understand what a mass spectrometer does. But it's hugely damaging to democracy if individuals believe they have an informed personal opinion when in fact they've been manipulated into a distorted and provably unrealistic world view without even being aware of it.
  - atoav 4y ago
    I think your assertion is spot on: One of the biggest issues of today is that people think they know everything. And they want to know everything because they learned not having an answer is bad in school. At the same time they have an ever-present answer machine in their pockets. Just type a question and you will find the answer. That the question might already imply a certain answer is either ignored or willfully accepted. I am not sure how we come (back?) to a culture where people who don't know anything about an issue stop pretending they do, but I think this is not unimportant these days.

by ufmace 4y ago

atoav 4y ago

The point is that critical thinking doesn't mean "question everything and assume everybody except yourself is incompetent or evil". It means that you understand you can replicate someone's results if you doubt them. You can look at the methods they used and find why they were adequate or inadequate. You can reason if the conclusions they drew from their findings are accurate. But all of this will not come out of "I have a strange feeling on that topic". Unless you are really an expert on the matter, many topics will produce strange feelings in people, because chances are they lack some fundamental understanding that would be needed to even understand the findings. I am not saying you need to either do all the work and check yourself OR blindly trust science and awallow everything that looks "sciency". What we need to do is to educate people on how to check studies and papers for themselves all while admiting which parts they don't know.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
I don't think we should. The problem isn't science, the problem is that fake "sciencey" presentations of opinions that are known to be wrong have been used to devalue real science. Climate change is the perfect example. The fossil barons knew that a move to renewables would destroy their political influence and financial power, so they literally ran a decades-long campaign to discredit the established science and individual scientists. There is far more need to educate the public about toxic PR technologies, media manipulations, FUD, cut-out think tanks all funded by the same sources and pushing the same disinformation, social media bot farms, and all the other industrial fake news techniques than there is about basic science. It doesn't matter if individuals don't understand what a mass spectrometer does. But it's hugely damaging to democracy if individuals believe they have an informed personal opinion when in fact they've been manipulated into a distorted and provably unrealistic world view without even being aware of it.
- atoav 4y ago
  I think your assertion is spot on: One of the biggest issues of today is that people think they know everything. And they want to know everything because they learned not having an answer is bad in school. At the same time they have an ever-present answer machine in their pockets. Just type a question and you will find the answer. That the question might already imply a certain answer is either ignored or willfully accepted. I am not sure how we come (back?) to a culture where people who don't know anything about an issue stop pretending they do, but I think this is not unimportant these days.