12 ms·

Knowledge overconfidence is associated with anti-consensus views

52 points by IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago

HPsquared 4y ago
Could it be a kind of survivor bias? Of people who come up with anti-consensus views, you only see the really confident ones; those less confident in their unorthodox views probably don't tell others so much.
Karellen 4y ago
"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." -- Source unclear, frequently attributed to Mark Twain
kurupt213 4y ago
'science' is supposed to be driven by empirical data, not consensus
snapcaster 4y ago
I think it's pretty obvious to everyone what the downsides of people being ignorant are, I would be more interested in seeing some work trying to measure or quantify the damage done by people blindly following mainstream consensus that turns out to be incorrect
- noslenwerdna 4y ago
  This article is not about ignorance per se. It is about views in opposition to well-established consensus, e.g. "rejection of vaccines or opposition to climate change mitigation policies." These views are highly damaging to society and individuals.
  - locutous 4y ago
    Creating or joining a bandwagon to vilify people who reject well established consensus is highly damaging to individuals and society.
- IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
  You’re in luck, the article speaks to exactly that question! Specifically, it says that the people “following mainstream consensus” are actually less likely to do so “blindly”, i. e. overconfidently. So the answer would seem to be: rather low.
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    >Specifically, it says that the people “following mainstream consensus” are actually less likely to do so “blindly”, i. e. overconfidently. After the past few years, I’m really not sure if there is anyone left that doesn’t have a personal anecdote against this.
    - guelo 4y ago
      The right has developed their own "mainstream concensus".
- bogota 4y ago
  That would be interesting i know how it has personally effected me and others. All i can gather is that over time the people blindly following mainstream consensus are isolating themselves together and getting more and more radical ideas.
- dukeofdoom 4y ago
  I'm generally pretty biased against police shooting someone with a knife. Until one time I saw a video of one guy with a knife stabbing 5 police officers, with their guns drawn, before any of them fired a shot. Sometimes your intuitive sense of what is possible is actually quite wrong.
- clairity 4y ago
  to tease out the nuance, the mechanism of mainstreaming isn't an extension of stupidity (ignorance is certainly a more accurate term), but of limited focus and stress. most people don't spend much time thinking about the wider world and how it should work very deeply, so they follow the herd on most things, because it's a decent heuristic and it has a social benefit. it's a literal luxury to have enough time and mental space to think for more than a few minutes on any given issue. that's one of the most valuable "legs up" that wealth gives you, not so much the money itself, but the room to think (and unfortunately, often to try to manipulate the world around you in a self-serving/self-centered way--the corrupting of personal integrity that's as old as time).
  - threatofrain 4y ago
    Similarly, people don't want to evaluate interesting restaurants, they want to jump on the bandwagon known as Yelp or Google reviews. There's something wrong with jumping on the bandwagon, but there's more right than wrong.
    - clairity 4y ago
      it depends on what you're looking for psychologically. chain restaurants are the most popular, but that's because they're "safe". other folks want adventure, to wander off the beaten path. sometimes that brings great reward and other times it doesn't. it does, however, provide the adventurer satisfaction in the adventure itself. similarly, the mainstreamer gets comfort from the safety of their choice, apart from the enjoyment of the food. note that these aren't mutually exclusive groups of people, but typically phases of our own selves. for example, i rarely want chain food, but every once in a while i do. and sometimes i go and enjoy it because the people i'm with want it and enjoy it.
  - landemva 4y ago
    > a literal luxury to have enough time and mental space to think for more than a few minutes Yet I observe people reaching for their phone-distractor device when confronted with a moment of free time.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  There's dangers at both ends of the spectrum. Much of our culture applauds the anti-consensus actor, the lone visionary who goes ahead despite the disapproval of the crowd. And that's understandable. As Spike Milligan put it "Progress is like an old car. It takes a crank to get things started." Progress depends upon the unreasonable man. What looks like "knowledge over-confidence" turns out to be "justified confidence" in widely unrecognised truths. Further, in entrepreneurial circles, if you're prepared to risk your own money and time on a crazed venture then that's celebrated. But in reality you create risks to externalities far beyond your own wallet. Such a culture absolves the reckless engineer of causing great harms because they are "a genius" and we want to ride their coat tails. Some of this seeped into Silicon Valley culture where many tech people see the digital world as their own personal laboratory to experiment on masses like bugs in a petri dish. This could be contrasted with the socially conscious non-consensus actor, who departs from crowd wisdom at great personal loss and just wants to be left alone to do their own thing. That's a different breed of individualism. It's often rooted in falliblism rather than over-confidence. Such a person, out of wisdom, knows how stupid they can be themself, and sees the crowd as no better. I would say dangers at the other end of the spectrum, of blind unthinking assent, group-think, conflict avoidance, is much better documented and understood. Whether that's a negative or positive depends on the context. On a frontier rugged individualism is an asset while more measured conformity tends to work in long established communities. The contrast of the North American frontiersman and the Nordic observer of small town "Jante Law" is marked.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  This is always going to reflect, in large part, who is in power in a society, since the mainstream consensus is so heavily influenced by the top. And in societies where people, by inches or by miles, become unable to speak freely - the top can effectively dictate consensus. In a society where those in power are are not only primarily motivated to achieve a healthier society and nation, but also have the intelligence and wisdom to achieve it - then following the mainstream consensus could achieve something quite remarkable. In a society where those in power are primarily motivated by their own interests, or lack the wisdom or intelligence to positively lead society forward, then of course everybody following the mainstream consensus means you're, vice versa, headed towards something quite awful.
macondo 4y ago
Wow, Science has stooped to a new low. I could picture this in Pravda way more easily. So Copernicus was overconfident in his anti-consensus view?
- ErikVandeWater 4y ago
  That's not what "associated" means.
- tomgp 4y ago
  That's not what the paper says.
rossdavidh 4y ago
It is my experience that listening to experts normally is a good idea, but the idea of a scientific journal publishing research that we should all listen to scientists and not hold anti-consensus views, has more than a little possibility for bias on the part of the researchers. Moreover, would it not be odd if those who held anti-consensus views were not overconfident? People of average or lower-than-average confidence would defer to the consensus. It's almost like saying "people who disagree with others more, are more disagreeable".
- sidlls 4y ago
  It's saying that people who hold anti-(scientific)consensus views generally believe themselves to be more well-educated than they actually are. That's a far cry from merely being disagreeable. It doesn't seem to say anything about actually knowledgeable scientists holding anti-consensus views, except insofar as to reiterate the thesis.
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  - honkkong420 4y ago
    Idk, anecdotally I don’t think I’m right about my heterodox nutrition views because I’m more educated, I just observe the consensus view of eating 12 servings of grain per day is wrong because I feel worse listening to their advice than eating what I naturally prefer. I don’t think education comes into play at all?
    - ryanklee 4y ago
      Education must come into play. Your own case illustrates this, as there is no such consensus view. And even granting the possibility that you are exaggerating for effect, it's hard to find a field of knowledge with more contention than dietary nutrition, so one has to be even more diligent about acquiring expertise and not fooling oneself.
riccardomc 4y ago
I don't know anything about the subject, but I scored pretty high in overconfidence and I totally disagree with this scientifically sound, peer reviewed paper...
- troon-lover 4y ago
denton-scratch 4y ago
> Consuming foods with ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming foods modified by conventional plant improvement techniques. In surveys, everything hinges on how you phrase your question. In this case, I'm compelled to agree: I don't believe there's a health risk from eating GM crops. I do think GM crops are bad, though, because they are associated with strain patenting and seedless plants; because they contaminate neighbouring organic plots with non-organic DNA; because they are often sold in conjunction with herbicides; and frankly, because I hate the way their lobbyists act on our legislators.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > I do think GM crops are bad, though, because they are associated with strain patenting and seedless plants; because they contaminate neighbouring organic plots with non-organic DNA; because they are often sold in conjunction with herbicides; and frankly, because I hate the way their lobbyists act on our legislators. Are most of these an intrinsic problem with "GM crops" in general or with "most GM crops as delivered now"?
  - vorpalhex 4y ago
    Those two are sort of inseperable. We don't optimize for some theoretical patent free GM crop world.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    That is another phrasing issue, because it would be reasonable to take the question as a practical one meant to refer to the things that actually exist, but it would also be reasonable to take it as a theoretical one like you're suggesting.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      Well, most of the criticism don't apply to, e.g. golden rice, which could improve the food security and nutrition for a billion people, including preventing severe deficiencies that cause blindness. > associated with strain patenting strain patenting isn't really a GM-vs-non-GM issue. As to golden rice-- sure, it's patented, but it's also licensed in a way that most of the people cultivating it wouldn't pay any license fees. > seedless plants Golden rice isn't seedless. > because they contaminate neighbouring organic plots with non-organic DNA Because of how rice is cultivated and the fact that it self-pollinates, the potential for this is extremely limited. > because they are often sold in conjunction with herbicides Not the case here. > frankly, because I hate the way their lobbyists act on our legislators. Here, there's not much desire to cultivate it "here", though obviously governments abroad do need to approve it. The amount of pro-gm lobbying here is limited, though, because there's really just not much direct fiscal interest in approval (licensing it gratis and letting farmers retain seed neuters that). Of course, there's some, in part from the desire for an opportunity to show GM as wholesome.
tsss 4y ago
The abstract itself is already contradictory. How can a "controversial scientific issue" at the same time have "expert consensus"? If there was a consensus, then it would not be controversial. Or perhaps there's often not as much consensus as some people would like to believe.
- sidlls 4y ago
  Politically controversial issues (e.g. GM foods, COVID related practices) frequently have scientific consensus.
  - upsidesinclude 4y ago
    But that's why this whole study is really trash. The point of this paper is to conflate two issues. One is disagreement with consensus, based on underlying problems with adoption of the practices such a consensus might seem to support. As others have mentioned, GM crops are likely fine to eat, however it is not trivial to ask whether we should adopt the uses of gm linked pesticides etc. Roundup causes cancer - they paid the fees from the court cases they lost. Now it is being replaced by an even less understood insecticide. It is not trivial to ask whether we should have a high level of scrutiny toward recently generated vaccines and methods. That is not the same as disregard for vaccination. By conflating these issues, in the commonly arrogant (overconfident?) tone of academia, this is more of the same Newspeak garbage that has become all too common
  - joemazerino 4y ago
    Depends who you include in the consensus. Plenty of doctors and researchers were shut out of the public debate regarding COVID safety measures.
ssivark 4y ago
Isn’t this tautologically true when consensus views are assumed correct? (then the consensus view will be judged as appropriately confident while the non-consensus views will be judged as inappropriately confident) It’s also interesting to consider the human psychological factor that the stronger the consensus, the more effort it takes to hold a dissonant view — and plausibly one must project greater confidence in order to hold steadfast. This will only amplify, the more one is hounded with “consensus”. Consensus views might well be right! But is this study telling us anything new/interesting, beyond regurgitating common sense with a veneer of scientism?
- mlyle 4y ago
  > Isn’t this tautologically true when consensus views are assumed correct? I worried that this study might be circular reasoning in that way. Instead they quizzed knowledge on related fields but not directly connected to the disputed idea. The people involved bet higher amounts on their ability to score well on objective measures of related sciences, but scored worse.
  - jtc331 4y ago
    Isn’t that still circular though? Knowledge of the mainstream research isn’t the same as “knowledge of what’s correct”; the person who holds the non-consensus view may have equal or higher levels of knowledge about the path that got them to non-consensus. At some level you might reasonably expect what you described to be tautological: the person holding the mainstream view knows more about they things surrounding that view. But do they know the alternatives? It’d be interest to compare the knowledge level the person holding the consensus view has about the non-consensus view to vice versa.
    - ssivark 4y ago
      > It’d be interest to compare the knowledge level the person holding the consensus view has about the non-consensus view to vice versa. That's a great question -- harking back to the idea that for the best incarnation of debate one should be able to argue one's opponent's case to their satisfaction, and then make one's own counter. The unfortunate problem is that it's often far easier to cook up BS than to bust it, so the anticipated effort tilts the scales massively. But in cases where there are specific/highlighted competing alternatives, it would be very interesting to study this.
tobbob 4y ago
You've heard of "Blue skies research", this is what I call "The sky is blue research". Working very hard to show something that is pretty much self evident. I'd love it if we could learn how to change people's minds. Calling people stupid hasn't worked.
- deleted 4y ago
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- mlyle 4y ago
  Actually, I think it's important to not just hand-wave but understand the overall psychology of it. I've known very informed cranks (some of whom are on the edge of being useful contributors to the field by proposing alternative mechanisms and rigorous tests) and poorly informed cranks. But it is an interesting, if not entirely unexpected finding, that people with anti-consensus views have much lower scores of knowledge in related but not directly connected scientific fields, but are willing to bet higher amounts on their test scores.
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  "Self evident" Check some of the other comments here for some critical thinking and analysis
sidlls 4y ago
This is a phenomenon any scientist who has been practicing for any length of time is likely to have encountered. I can't even recall all the statements from ignorance (not pejorative--they simply weren't educated on the subject matter) people have made to me about various physics and engineering topics that have been settled for decades in knowledgeable circles.
- hirundo 4y ago
  > settled for decades in knowledgeable circles. Which also describes phrenology, the static universe, and phlogiston theory. A nice collection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_theories_in_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_theories_in_science
  - mlyle 4y ago
    The people who debunked these theories were quite familiar with these existing models and how to build rigorous tests to differentiate these cases from new ideas. The study tells us that most detractors are not people like this, but instead people with below-average understanding of the field and related fields-- and who are willing to bet more on their performance of objective tests of those fields than the non-detractors.
    - ogurechny 4y ago
      Sadly, the spherical “scientists” in a vacuum rigorously and unselfishly digging to get closer to the “truth” is only a fantasy found in school textbooks. What is called “science” has nothing on “truth” or “reality”, it's a specific method of creating virtual models that are many many degrees less complex than the “real thing”, and then treating real thing as if it was its model to achieve some outcome. In some way, that's how humans adapt to environment, and change it. Even a commoner can read 18th and 19th century works that spread those stereotypes on “Reason”, “seeking the truth”, etc., and see how rosy the initial reasoning was. Despite the fact those sources are long forgotten by the public, the status quo of everyone's education has been formed by them. Phrenology was not an “error”, “bad page”, yada yada on the Glorius Path of Progress. It was The Science. (Well, maybe some “overconfident” scientists disagreed with it for personal reasons, but they were “not representative”.) It was evident that all those unfamiliar people from far away lands, and all those lower class social parasites were less developed than the Educated Man armed with Scientific Knowledge, and if was perfectly reasonable to try finding the source of such a pitiful condition inside their skulls. It shouldn't surprise anyone that multiple generations taught to think like that resulted in people casually talking about races and signs of degradation at dinners or, well, political rallies. They were given that model as truth. By the way, archaeologists and biologists still use observations and concepts from phrenologists without ever “cancelling” them. Squint your eyes one way, and it's “pseudoscience”, squint them the other way, and it's “science”. Or the idea that makes any pop-sci nerd twitch and giggle in anticipation: so there is no success in finding the material soul, but maybe we can study what that soul thing does by looking at its interactions with material world, and using scientific method? Let's call that… right, psychology.
daenz 4y ago
This is an extremely smug and tone-deaf take on the deterioration of trust in public health institutions and messaging. They reference covid in their abstract, so it's fair game to discuss here: where was the scientific objective-truth-machine when the Noble Lies[0] where being told? It was silent and complicit. The general public is not as knowledgeable as experts, but they can sense when they're being lied to, or when political bias is distorting the messaging, and they don't like it. When they can't trust the experts, they fall back on their own lack of knowledge, for which they are now being mocked. But lying to and manipulating people means they won't trust you, no matter how much of an expert you provably are. This study seems to want to make it simply about the Dunning-Kruger[1] effect, which puts most of the blame on the average person, while ignoring why people feel like they can't trust experts in the first place. 0. https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  +
- mlyle 4y ago
  You mischaracterize the study. The interesting finding is not that people who hold anti-consensus beliefs have lower scores on objective tests about related fields. It's that they are willing to bet more on their performance on those objective tests despite ultimately scoring worse. That is, there's a much larger difference between their subjective assessment performance and objective performance on the test metric (of both that field and other fields) than in people who don't hold the anti-consensus belief.
- notacoward 4y ago
  > they can sense when they're being lied to What sense is this? Do you have evidence of its existence? An explanation of how it works? Because in my experience the public is severely deficient in critical thinking skills. They don't really have a good sense of truth or falsehood. They make guesses about who's telling the truth based more on presentation, politics, or popularity than on facts or logic. Right now, there's an anti-intellectual and anti-authoritarian fashion causing many to conclude that anything a professional scientist says is a lie, but it would be wrong to cherry-pick a few examples where they're right as evidence of anything. How do such people "sense when they're being lied to" other than by using heuristics (see above) which are more likely to be gamed by entertainers and politicians than by scientists?
jawns 4y ago
What the study is describing is a psychological trait known as dogmatism. You might be familiar with the words "dogma" or "dogmatic" in their religious sense: a set of beliefs that members of a religion are expected to accept as true. But there is another, broader way that "dogmatic" is used that does not necessarily have to do with religious dogma. In psychology, dogmatism is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views and an unwillingness to consider new evidence, or an unwillingness to adjust one's views in light of new evidence. Last year I read about a fascinating 2020 study that measures dogmatism in a novel way, and I created a little web app that adapts the study's technique to determine your own level of dogmatism: https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/dogmatism.html https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/dogmatism.html Going back to the 2022 study that OP posted, one thing that irks me is the way the authors lump all religious belief into one bucket: > Because several issues that we examine have come into conflict with religious thinking, and because religion can itself be a polarizing factor for attitudes and beliefs, we also test for an attenuation for issues more associated with religiosity. I'm Catholic, so that makes me religious. But I have friends who are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Baha'i, etc., and their belief systems are vastly different than mine. Yet we all have this trait "religiosity" that really tells us very little about what any of us believe. The question the study uses -- "How important is religion in your life?" -- to gauge religiosity, without making any distinctions between vastly different religious beliefs and practices, is bizarre to me. I can't help but be skeptical that religiosity in the abstract tells us anything meaningful.
- mlyle 4y ago
  The interesting finding isn't that they're dogmatic about their anti-conensus views. It's that they are willing to bet more that they'll perform well on tests of objective scientific knowledge of related fields... and then don't.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    The paper seems to have largely equated "objective scientific knowledge" with liminal consensus. For instance, among their "objective scientific knowledge" questions asked whether, "The novel coronavirus was unleashed in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread from there." Another was "The numbers of people that have died from COVID-19 are artificially inflated." The latter was at least removed from the results, but emphasizes the point nonetheless that they found it appropriate to include questions that had nothing to do with science. So you end up with results that affirm that people who disagree with consensus disagree with consensus.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
One of my favorite quotes, is by Stephen Jay Gould: "The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -and therefore never scrutinize or question."
klpartx 4y ago
[flagged]
drewcoo 4y ago
How do we know that knowledge overconfidence is not even more strongly associated with consensus views?
- simonh 4y ago
  The study tested the actual knowledge of people on these subjects. They found that people who disagreed with the scientific consensus knew less about these subjects than people who agreed with the consensus, but overestimated their confidence in their knowledge of the facts. So in other words those who agreed with the consensus were better informed and had a more accurate assessment of their level of knowledge.
transcoderx 4y ago
The risk of bias in this research seems rather high. Of the form of "our believes are correct and everybody who disagrees is underinformed".
- mlyle 4y ago
  > The risk of bias in this research seems rather high. Of the form of "our believes are correct and everybody who disagrees is underinformed". It's not circular reasoning like this. They asked a bunch of middle-school science level questions in related fields. The interesting bit isn't that people who disagrees are misinformed. It's that they assess they will do better on the test, and bet more that they will do better, than people who don't.
mike_hearn 4y ago
Scientists need to stop writing papers like this one until they get their own house in order. From a quick read through, I can see quite a few aspects that come across as misleading to me: 1. It says: "Although the knowledge gained and shared by the scientific community about [COVID] gradually increased, public health professionals prescribed traditional, time-tested, and general epidemiological measures to try to mitigate its spread ... consensus on how to mitigate viral contagion was well established even at the beginning of the pandemic." But this is nonsense. Nothing about global lockdowns was traditional, time tested or general. Nor was there any consensus about doing these things, with the WHO having previously strongly stated in 2019 that during a pandemic border closures, contact tracing and quarantines were "not recommended in any circumstances".[1] The pandemic started with public health people saying that closing borders or avoiding people who had arrived from China would be racist. They also opened by stating that there was no evidence masks were useful (in fact, because that's what the available research said at the time), then flipped almost overnight to masks being so useful they must be mandated. No new research came out that triggered this. There were quite a few other inversions on apparently basic topics but there's no need to list them all. Given that sequence of events it is quite crazy to describe what happened with COVID as traditional and time tested, or to claim that there was a well established consensus right from the start about what to do. No such consensus existed and never did: there were people both inside and outside epidemiology opposing pandemic measures the whole time. 2. They say: "This is why self-reported understanding decreases after people try to generate mechanistic explanations, and why novices are poorer judges of their talents than experts (33, 34)." This second claim is key to the whole paper's argument, but there are only two citations for it. Citation 34 is of Dunning-Kruger. The DK study has bizarre and severe flaws that make me wonder how it ever became as famous as it did, for example, one of the supposedly general tasks in which they pitched their tiny handful of psych undergrads against the "experts" was literally "joke expertise", a totally subjective task. I wrote up some of the logic and design issues with it three months ago in a HN thread [2]. 3. Although it isn't communicated in their abstract, several topics and most notably climate change are exceptions to their claim: "individuals most opposed were the least knowledgeable about science and genetics but rated their understanding of the technology the highest in the sample. A similar pattern emerged for gene therapy, although not for climate change denial ..." Probably not a huge surprise here. The sort of people who write articles disagreeing with climatology are often in my experience scientists, former scientists, engineers, even meteorologists. The sort of people who get upset about GM foods aren't. 4. They rely on Mechanical Turk. The exponential growth of Mechanical Turk usage in the social sciences is troubling. MT isn't designed for doing research and it's easy for people to pretend to be in demographics they aren't, moreover, they are financially incentivized to do so. Academics like using MT because it's more convenient and cheaper than going out and doing large scale legwork, but the results have little validity. In particular attention check failure rates are horrendous on this platform but it doesn't seem to bother anyone. They use two platforms and the second explicitly advertises itself by trashing the reliability of MT based studies [3]. Amusingly, the second platform is literally called "Prolific Academic"! [1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31119836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31119836 [3] https://www.prolific.co/blog/bots-and-data-quality-on-crowdsourcing-platforms https://www.prolific.co/blog/bots-and-data-quality-on-crowds...
Covzire 4y ago
Worship of consensus is the death of science.
TheAceOfHearts 4y ago
This kind of research just looks like political maneuvering to attack dissenters. Part of me thinks that researchers should instead work on figuring out how to better convince and educate people. But maybe a lot of really smart people have already investigated that problem and figured out that writing research papers which undermine their opponents is the most effective tactic. The core problem is that most of the division is rarely about any object-level beliefs, it's almost entirely about tribal politics and power. What a boring game.
joemazerino 4y ago
This is a poorly written study that comes across as self-conflating. Science currently has an echo chamber problem.
mgamache 4y ago
50% of all published research is false, lets start there to understand why people reject 'consensus' and prefer their own interpretation of facts.
lumb63 4y ago
Is this particularly meaningful? It seems to me that a critical assumption underpinning this study having any meaning is that someone’s ability to answer consensus questions correctly is correlated to their ability to answer non-consensus questions correctly. This does not necessarily follow - a large number of the ideas which are now “objective truths” were at one point non-consensus fringe views (e.g. germ theory, non-heliocentrism, lead paint being bad, climate change, etc.), suggesting that link doesn’t exist all that strongly, in my opinion.
somenameforme 4y ago
I always find looking at methodology for surveys like this far more interesting than reading the papers. Two things immediately stand out. First, the study selected participants from place such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk + Prolific Academic. Both are services which pay participants peanuts to engage in various menial tasks. But perhaps more interesting are the questions they chose to ask to determine "objective knowledge of scientific facts." Among the questions used to deem this was one which asked whether "The novel coronavirus was unleashed in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread from there." I can't, for the life of me, understand why people's truth in science is on the decline.
ogurechny 4y ago
> controversial scientific issues All scientific issues are controversial by definition. What is obvious is not called science. Even prehistoric men could throw rocks, and knew where they would fall. > The consequences of these anti-consensus views are dire, including… death. Hmm, so this is what makes people die. Interesting.
7402 4y ago
Obligatory Feynman quote: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, “Science teaches such and such,” he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, “Science has shown such and such,” you might ask, “How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?” It should not be “science has shown” but “this experiment, this effect, has shown.” And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.”
fnordpiglet 4y ago
I disagree.
IceMetalPunk 4y ago
Insert "not that shocked" Fry meme here There are two axes here, each with two options: Axis 1 = "I understand" or "I don't understand". Axis 2 = "I think I understand" or "I think I don't understand". That leaves 4 options. (Obviously, these can be thought of as two continuous axes as well, and I'll address that later.) Option 1: "I understand and I think I understand" -- good, you understand, you'll probably come to the same conclusion of the experts who also understand, since you're working with the same data they are. Option 2: "I understand, but I'm not sure how well" -- good, you understand, see option #1 with the added benefit that you'll look for more evidence to increase your confidence. Option 3: "I don't understand, and I don't think I do" -- good, so you at least won't form opinions because you know you aren't informed, and maybe even will be motivated to look for evidence to move yourself into categories 1 or 2. Option 4: "I don't understand, but I think I do" -- i.e. overconfidence. Your conclusions will likely be wrong, since you don't understand the data you're basing those conclusions on, but since you think you do, you will stick to those conclusions in the face of contradictory evidence or expert advice. So, yes, I would fully expect the result this study found, from a purely logical analysis. Now, as I said, both confidence and understanding can be thought of as spectra rather than discretized categories. In that case, you get a continuous transition between those resultant options, but generally you still get three discrete classifications in that space: "I act like I know but am wrong", "I refrain from forming an opinion", and "I act like I know and am correct."
cudgy 4y ago
So, do we blindly ignore common sense and instinct, handing it over to supposed experts that have been wrong repeatedly about very fundamental concepts like diet and education? So many accepted practices promoted by experts have been and are just wrong. New information is gathered and past certainty becomes present doubt. Of course, blindly ignoring information because it is outside of your understanding is equally incorrect. There is no easy solution to this issue, but generous skepticism is wise, especially when someone purports to be expert and certain about something.

52 points by IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago

Could it be a kind of survivor bias? Of people who come up with anti-consensus views, you only see the really confident ones; those less confident in their unorthodox views probably don't tell others so much.

Karellen 4y ago

"It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so." -- Source unclear, frequently attributed to Mark Twain

kurupt213 4y ago

'science' is supposed to be driven by empirical data, not consensus

snapcaster 4y ago

I think it's pretty obvious to everyone what the downsides of people being ignorant are, I would be more interested in seeing some work trying to measure or quantify the damage done by people blindly following mainstream consensus that turns out to be incorrect

noslenwerdna 4y ago
This article is not about ignorance per se. It is about views in opposition to well-established consensus, e.g. "rejection of vaccines or opposition to climate change mitigation policies." These views are highly damaging to society and individuals.
- locutous 4y ago
  Creating or joining a bandwagon to vilify people who reject well established consensus is highly damaging to individuals and society.
IfOnlyYouKnew 4y ago
You’re in luck, the article speaks to exactly that question! Specifically, it says that the people “following mainstream consensus” are actually less likely to do so “blindly”, i. e. overconfidently. So the answer would seem to be: rather low.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  >Specifically, it says that the people “following mainstream consensus” are actually less likely to do so “blindly”, i. e. overconfidently. After the past few years, I’m really not sure if there is anyone left that doesn’t have a personal anecdote against this.
  - guelo 4y ago
    The right has developed their own "mainstream concensus".
bogota 4y ago
That would be interesting i know how it has personally effected me and others. All i can gather is that over time the people blindly following mainstream consensus are isolating themselves together and getting more and more radical ideas.
dukeofdoom 4y ago
I'm generally pretty biased against police shooting someone with a knife. Until one time I saw a video of one guy with a knife stabbing 5 police officers, with their guns drawn, before any of them fired a shot. Sometimes your intuitive sense of what is possible is actually quite wrong.
clairity 4y ago
to tease out the nuance, the mechanism of mainstreaming isn't an extension of stupidity (ignorance is certainly a more accurate term), but of limited focus and stress. most people don't spend much time thinking about the wider world and how it should work very deeply, so they follow the herd on most things, because it's a decent heuristic and it has a social benefit. it's a literal luxury to have enough time and mental space to think for more than a few minutes on any given issue. that's one of the most valuable "legs up" that wealth gives you, not so much the money itself, but the room to think (and unfortunately, often to try to manipulate the world around you in a self-serving/self-centered way--the corrupting of personal integrity that's as old as time).
- threatofrain 4y ago
  Similarly, people don't want to evaluate interesting restaurants, they want to jump on the bandwagon known as Yelp or Google reviews. There's something wrong with jumping on the bandwagon, but there's more right than wrong.
  - clairity 4y ago
    it depends on what you're looking for psychologically. chain restaurants are the most popular, but that's because they're "safe". other folks want adventure, to wander off the beaten path. sometimes that brings great reward and other times it doesn't. it does, however, provide the adventurer satisfaction in the adventure itself. similarly, the mainstreamer gets comfort from the safety of their choice, apart from the enjoyment of the food. note that these aren't mutually exclusive groups of people, but typically phases of our own selves. for example, i rarely want chain food, but every once in a while i do. and sometimes i go and enjoy it because the people i'm with want it and enjoy it.
- landemva 4y ago
  > a literal luxury to have enough time and mental space to think for more than a few minutes Yet I observe people reaching for their phone-distractor device when confronted with a moment of free time.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
There's dangers at both ends of the spectrum. Much of our culture applauds the anti-consensus actor, the lone visionary who goes ahead despite the disapproval of the crowd. And that's understandable. As Spike Milligan put it "Progress is like an old car. It takes a crank to get things started." Progress depends upon the unreasonable man. What looks like "knowledge over-confidence" turns out to be "justified confidence" in widely unrecognised truths. Further, in entrepreneurial circles, if you're prepared to risk your own money and time on a crazed venture then that's celebrated. But in reality you create risks to externalities far beyond your own wallet. Such a culture absolves the reckless engineer of causing great harms because they are "a genius" and we want to ride their coat tails. Some of this seeped into Silicon Valley culture where many tech people see the digital world as their own personal laboratory to experiment on masses like bugs in a petri dish. This could be contrasted with the socially conscious non-consensus actor, who departs from crowd wisdom at great personal loss and just wants to be left alone to do their own thing. That's a different breed of individualism. It's often rooted in falliblism rather than over-confidence. Such a person, out of wisdom, knows how stupid they can be themself, and sees the crowd as no better. I would say dangers at the other end of the spectrum, of blind unthinking assent, group-think, conflict avoidance, is much better documented and understood. Whether that's a negative or positive depends on the context. On a frontier rugged individualism is an asset while more measured conformity tends to work in long established communities. The contrast of the North American frontiersman and the Nordic observer of small town "Jante Law" is marked.
somenameforme 4y ago
This is always going to reflect, in large part, who is in power in a society, since the mainstream consensus is so heavily influenced by the top. And in societies where people, by inches or by miles, become unable to speak freely - the top can effectively dictate consensus. In a society where those in power are are not only primarily motivated to achieve a healthier society and nation, but also have the intelligence and wisdom to achieve it - then following the mainstream consensus could achieve something quite remarkable. In a society where those in power are primarily motivated by their own interests, or lack the wisdom or intelligence to positively lead society forward, then of course everybody following the mainstream consensus means you're, vice versa, headed towards something quite awful.

macondo 4y ago

Wow, Science has stooped to a new low. I could picture this in Pravda way more easily. So Copernicus was overconfident in his anti-consensus view?

ErikVandeWater 4y ago
That's not what "associated" means.
tomgp 4y ago
That's not what the paper says.

rossdavidh 4y ago

It is my experience that listening to experts normally is a good idea, but the idea of a scientific journal publishing research that we should all listen to scientists and not hold anti-consensus views, has more than a little possibility for bias on the part of the researchers. Moreover, would it not be odd if those who held anti-consensus views were not overconfident? People of average or lower-than-average confidence would defer to the consensus. It's almost like saying "people who disagree with others more, are more disagreeable".

sidlls 4y ago
It's saying that people who hold anti-(scientific)consensus views generally believe themselves to be more well-educated than they actually are. That's a far cry from merely being disagreeable. It doesn't seem to say anything about actually knowledgeable scientists holding anti-consensus views, except insofar as to reiterate the thesis.
- deleted 4y ago
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- honkkong420 4y ago
  Idk, anecdotally I don’t think I’m right about my heterodox nutrition views because I’m more educated, I just observe the consensus view of eating 12 servings of grain per day is wrong because I feel worse listening to their advice than eating what I naturally prefer. I don’t think education comes into play at all?
  - ryanklee 4y ago
    Education must come into play. Your own case illustrates this, as there is no such consensus view. And even granting the possibility that you are exaggerating for effect, it's hard to find a field of knowledge with more contention than dietary nutrition, so one has to be even more diligent about acquiring expertise and not fooling oneself.

riccardomc 4y ago

I don't know anything about the subject, but I scored pretty high in overconfidence and I totally disagree with this scientifically sound, peer reviewed paper...

troon-lover 4y ago

denton-scratch 4y ago

> Consuming foods with ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming foods modified by conventional plant improvement techniques. In surveys, everything hinges on how you phrase your question. In this case, I'm compelled to agree: I don't believe there's a health risk from eating GM crops. I do think GM crops are bad, though, because they are associated with strain patenting and seedless plants; because they contaminate neighbouring organic plots with non-organic DNA; because they are often sold in conjunction with herbicides; and frankly, because I hate the way their lobbyists act on our legislators.

mlyle 4y ago
> I do think GM crops are bad, though, because they are associated with strain patenting and seedless plants; because they contaminate neighbouring organic plots with non-organic DNA; because they are often sold in conjunction with herbicides; and frankly, because I hate the way their lobbyists act on our legislators. Are most of these an intrinsic problem with "GM crops" in general or with "most GM crops as delivered now"?
- vorpalhex 4y ago
  Those two are sort of inseperable. We don't optimize for some theoretical patent free GM crop world.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  That is another phrasing issue, because it would be reasonable to take the question as a practical one meant to refer to the things that actually exist, but it would also be reasonable to take it as a theoretical one like you're suggesting.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Well, most of the criticism don't apply to, e.g. golden rice, which could improve the food security and nutrition for a billion people, including preventing severe deficiencies that cause blindness. > associated with strain patenting strain patenting isn't really a GM-vs-non-GM issue. As to golden rice-- sure, it's patented, but it's also licensed in a way that most of the people cultivating it wouldn't pay any license fees. > seedless plants Golden rice isn't seedless. > because they contaminate neighbouring organic plots with non-organic DNA Because of how rice is cultivated and the fact that it self-pollinates, the potential for this is extremely limited. > because they are often sold in conjunction with herbicides Not the case here. > frankly, because I hate the way their lobbyists act on our legislators. Here, there's not much desire to cultivate it "here", though obviously governments abroad do need to approve it. The amount of pro-gm lobbying here is limited, though, because there's really just not much direct fiscal interest in approval (licensing it gratis and letting farmers retain seed neuters that). Of course, there's some, in part from the desire for an opportunity to show GM as wholesome.

tsss 4y ago

The abstract itself is already contradictory. How can a "controversial scientific issue" at the same time have "expert consensus"? If there was a consensus, then it would not be controversial. Or perhaps there's often not as much consensus as some people would like to believe.

sidlls 4y ago
Politically controversial issues (e.g. GM foods, COVID related practices) frequently have scientific consensus.
- upsidesinclude 4y ago
  But that's why this whole study is really trash. The point of this paper is to conflate two issues. One is disagreement with consensus, based on underlying problems with adoption of the practices such a consensus might seem to support. As others have mentioned, GM crops are likely fine to eat, however it is not trivial to ask whether we should adopt the uses of gm linked pesticides etc. Roundup causes cancer - they paid the fees from the court cases they lost. Now it is being replaced by an even less understood insecticide. It is not trivial to ask whether we should have a high level of scrutiny toward recently generated vaccines and methods. That is not the same as disregard for vaccination. By conflating these issues, in the commonly arrogant (overconfident?) tone of academia, this is more of the same Newspeak garbage that has become all too common
- joemazerino 4y ago
  Depends who you include in the consensus. Plenty of doctors and researchers were shut out of the public debate regarding COVID safety measures.

ssivark 4y ago

Isn’t this tautologically true when consensus views are assumed correct? (then the consensus view will be judged as appropriately confident while the non-consensus views will be judged as inappropriately confident) It’s also interesting to consider the human psychological factor that the stronger the consensus, the more effort it takes to hold a dissonant view — and plausibly one must project greater confidence in order to hold steadfast. This will only amplify, the more one is hounded with “consensus”. Consensus views might well be right! But is this study telling us anything new/interesting, beyond regurgitating common sense with a veneer of scientism?

mlyle 4y ago
> Isn’t this tautologically true when consensus views are assumed correct? I worried that this study might be circular reasoning in that way. Instead they quizzed knowledge on related fields but not directly connected to the disputed idea. The people involved bet higher amounts on their ability to score well on objective measures of related sciences, but scored worse.
- jtc331 4y ago
  Isn’t that still circular though? Knowledge of the mainstream research isn’t the same as “knowledge of what’s correct”; the person who holds the non-consensus view may have equal or higher levels of knowledge about the path that got them to non-consensus. At some level you might reasonably expect what you described to be tautological: the person holding the mainstream view knows more about they things surrounding that view. But do they know the alternatives? It’d be interest to compare the knowledge level the person holding the consensus view has about the non-consensus view to vice versa.
  - ssivark 4y ago
    > It’d be interest to compare the knowledge level the person holding the consensus view has about the non-consensus view to vice versa. That's a great question -- harking back to the idea that for the best incarnation of debate one should be able to argue one's opponent's case to their satisfaction, and then make one's own counter. The unfortunate problem is that it's often far easier to cook up BS than to bust it, so the anticipated effort tilts the scales massively. But in cases where there are specific/highlighted competing alternatives, it would be very interesting to study this.

tobbob 4y ago

You've heard of "Blue skies research", this is what I call "The sky is blue research". Working very hard to show something that is pretty much self evident. I'd love it if we could learn how to change people's minds. Calling people stupid hasn't worked.

deleted 4y ago
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mlyle 4y ago
Actually, I think it's important to not just hand-wave but understand the overall psychology of it. I've known very informed cranks (some of whom are on the edge of being useful contributors to the field by proposing alternative mechanisms and rigorous tests) and poorly informed cranks. But it is an interesting, if not entirely unexpected finding, that people with anti-consensus views have much lower scores of knowledge in related but not directly connected scientific fields, but are willing to bet higher amounts on their test scores.
upsidesinclude 4y ago
"Self evident" Check some of the other comments here for some critical thinking and analysis

sidlls 4y ago

This is a phenomenon any scientist who has been practicing for any length of time is likely to have encountered. I can't even recall all the statements from ignorance (not pejorative--they simply weren't educated on the subject matter) people have made to me about various physics and engineering topics that have been settled for decades in knowledgeable circles.

hirundo 4y ago
> settled for decades in knowledgeable circles. Which also describes phrenology, the static universe, and phlogiston theory. A nice collection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_theories_in_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_theories_in_science
- mlyle 4y ago
  The people who debunked these theories were quite familiar with these existing models and how to build rigorous tests to differentiate these cases from new ideas. The study tells us that most detractors are not people like this, but instead people with below-average understanding of the field and related fields-- and who are willing to bet more on their performance of objective tests of those fields than the non-detractors.
  - ogurechny 4y ago
    Sadly, the spherical “scientists” in a vacuum rigorously and unselfishly digging to get closer to the “truth” is only a fantasy found in school textbooks. What is called “science” has nothing on “truth” or “reality”, it's a specific method of creating virtual models that are many many degrees less complex than the “real thing”, and then treating real thing as if it was its model to achieve some outcome. In some way, that's how humans adapt to environment, and change it. Even a commoner can read 18th and 19th century works that spread those stereotypes on “Reason”, “seeking the truth”, etc., and see how rosy the initial reasoning was. Despite the fact those sources are long forgotten by the public, the status quo of everyone's education has been formed by them. Phrenology was not an “error”, “bad page”, yada yada on the Glorius Path of Progress. It was The Science. (Well, maybe some “overconfident” scientists disagreed with it for personal reasons, but they were “not representative”.) It was evident that all those unfamiliar people from far away lands, and all those lower class social parasites were less developed than the Educated Man armed with Scientific Knowledge, and if was perfectly reasonable to try finding the source of such a pitiful condition inside their skulls. It shouldn't surprise anyone that multiple generations taught to think like that resulted in people casually talking about races and signs of degradation at dinners or, well, political rallies. They were given that model as truth. By the way, archaeologists and biologists still use observations and concepts from phrenologists without ever “cancelling” them. Squint your eyes one way, and it's “pseudoscience”, squint them the other way, and it's “science”. Or the idea that makes any pop-sci nerd twitch and giggle in anticipation: so there is no success in finding the material soul, but maybe we can study what that soul thing does by looking at its interactions with material world, and using scientific method? Let's call that… right, psychology.

daenz 4y ago

This is an extremely smug and tone-deaf take on the deterioration of trust in public health institutions and messaging. They reference covid in their abstract, so it's fair game to discuss here: where was the scientific objective-truth-machine when the Noble Lies[0] where being told? It was silent and complicit. The general public is not as knowledgeable as experts, but they can sense when they're being lied to, or when political bias is distorting the messaging, and they don't like it. When they can't trust the experts, they fall back on their own lack of knowledge, for which they are now being mocked. But lying to and manipulating people means they won't trust you, no matter how much of an expert you provably are. This study seems to want to make it simply about the Dunning-Kruger[1] effect, which puts most of the blame on the average person, while ignoring why people feel like they can't trust experts in the first place. 0. https://slate.com/technology/2021/07/noble-lies-covid-fauci-cdc-masks.html 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

upsidesinclude 4y ago
+
mlyle 4y ago
You mischaracterize the study. The interesting finding is not that people who hold anti-consensus beliefs have lower scores on objective tests about related fields. It's that they are willing to bet more on their performance on those objective tests despite ultimately scoring worse. That is, there's a much larger difference between their subjective assessment performance and objective performance on the test metric (of both that field and other fields) than in people who don't hold the anti-consensus belief.
notacoward 4y ago
> they can sense when they're being lied to What sense is this? Do you have evidence of its existence? An explanation of how it works? Because in my experience the public is severely deficient in critical thinking skills. They don't really have a good sense of truth or falsehood. They make guesses about who's telling the truth based more on presentation, politics, or popularity than on facts or logic. Right now, there's an anti-intellectual and anti-authoritarian fashion causing many to conclude that anything a professional scientist says is a lie, but it would be wrong to cherry-pick a few examples where they're right as evidence of anything. How do such people "sense when they're being lied to" other than by using heuristics (see above) which are more likely to be gamed by entertainers and politicians than by scientists?

jawns 4y ago

What the study is describing is a psychological trait known as dogmatism. You might be familiar with the words "dogma" or "dogmatic" in their religious sense: a set of beliefs that members of a religion are expected to accept as true. But there is another, broader way that "dogmatic" is used that does not necessarily have to do with religious dogma. In psychology, dogmatism is a defined as exhibiting great certainty about the correctness of one's views and an unwillingness to consider new evidence, or an unwillingness to adjust one's views in light of new evidence. Last year I read about a fascinating 2020 study that measures dogmatism in a novel way, and I created a little web app that adapts the study's technique to determine your own level of dogmatism: https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/dogmatism.html https://shaungallagher.pressbin.com/blog/dogmatism.html Going back to the 2022 study that OP posted, one thing that irks me is the way the authors lump all religious belief into one bucket: > Because several issues that we examine have come into conflict with religious thinking, and because religion can itself be a polarizing factor for attitudes and beliefs, we also test for an attenuation for issues more associated with religiosity. I'm Catholic, so that makes me religious. But I have friends who are Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Baha'i, etc., and their belief systems are vastly different than mine. Yet we all have this trait "religiosity" that really tells us very little about what any of us believe. The question the study uses -- "How important is religion in your life?" -- to gauge religiosity, without making any distinctions between vastly different religious beliefs and practices, is bizarre to me. I can't help but be skeptical that religiosity in the abstract tells us anything meaningful.

mlyle 4y ago
The interesting finding isn't that they're dogmatic about their anti-conensus views. It's that they are willing to bet more that they'll perform well on tests of objective scientific knowledge of related fields... and then don't.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  The paper seems to have largely equated "objective scientific knowledge" with liminal consensus. For instance, among their "objective scientific knowledge" questions asked whether, "The novel coronavirus was unleashed in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread from there." Another was "The numbers of people that have died from COVID-19 are artificially inflated." The latter was at least removed from the results, but emphasizes the point nonetheless that they found it appropriate to include questions that had nothing to do with science. So you end up with results that affirm that people who disagree with consensus disagree with consensus.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

One of my favorite quotes, is by Stephen Jay Gould: "The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best -and therefore never scrutinize or question."

klpartx 4y ago

[flagged]

drewcoo 4y ago

How do we know that knowledge overconfidence is not even more strongly associated with consensus views?

simonh 4y ago
The study tested the actual knowledge of people on these subjects. They found that people who disagreed with the scientific consensus knew less about these subjects than people who agreed with the consensus, but overestimated their confidence in their knowledge of the facts. So in other words those who agreed with the consensus were better informed and had a more accurate assessment of their level of knowledge.

transcoderx 4y ago

The risk of bias in this research seems rather high. Of the form of "our believes are correct and everybody who disagrees is underinformed".

mlyle 4y ago
> The risk of bias in this research seems rather high. Of the form of "our believes are correct and everybody who disagrees is underinformed". It's not circular reasoning like this. They asked a bunch of middle-school science level questions in related fields. The interesting bit isn't that people who disagrees are misinformed. It's that they assess they will do better on the test, and bet more that they will do better, than people who don't.

mike_hearn 4y ago

Scientists need to stop writing papers like this one until they get their own house in order. From a quick read through, I can see quite a few aspects that come across as misleading to me: 1. It says: "Although the knowledge gained and shared by the scientific community about [COVID] gradually increased, public health professionals prescribed traditional, time-tested, and general epidemiological measures to try to mitigate its spread ... consensus on how to mitigate viral contagion was well established even at the beginning of the pandemic." But this is nonsense. Nothing about global lockdowns was traditional, time tested or general. Nor was there any consensus about doing these things, with the WHO having previously strongly stated in 2019 that during a pandemic border closures, contact tracing and quarantines were "not recommended in any circumstances".[1] The pandemic started with public health people saying that closing borders or avoiding people who had arrived from China would be racist. They also opened by stating that there was no evidence masks were useful (in fact, because that's what the available research said at the time), then flipped almost overnight to masks being so useful they must be mandated. No new research came out that triggered this. There were quite a few other inversions on apparently basic topics but there's no need to list them all. Given that sequence of events it is quite crazy to describe what happened with COVID as traditional and time tested, or to claim that there was a well established consensus right from the start about what to do. No such consensus existed and never did: there were people both inside and outside epidemiology opposing pandemic measures the whole time. 2. They say: "This is why self-reported understanding decreases after people try to generate mechanistic explanations, and why novices are poorer judges of their talents than experts (33, 34)." This second claim is key to the whole paper's argument, but there are only two citations for it. Citation 34 is of Dunning-Kruger. The DK study has bizarre and severe flaws that make me wonder how it ever became as famous as it did, for example, one of the supposedly general tasks in which they pitched their tiny handful of psych undergrads against the "experts" was literally "joke expertise", a totally subjective task. I wrote up some of the logic and design issues with it three months ago in a HN thread [2]. 3. Although it isn't communicated in their abstract, several topics and most notably climate change are exceptions to their claim: "individuals most opposed were the least knowledgeable about science and genetics but rated their understanding of the technology the highest in the sample. A similar pattern emerged for gene therapy, although not for climate change denial ..." Probably not a huge surprise here. The sort of people who write articles disagreeing with climatology are often in my experience scientists, former scientists, engineers, even meteorologists. The sort of people who get upset about GM foods aren't. 4. They rely on Mechanical Turk. The exponential growth of Mechanical Turk usage in the social sciences is troubling. MT isn't designed for doing research and it's easy for people to pretend to be in demographics they aren't, moreover, they are financially incentivized to do so. Academics like using MT because it's more convenient and cheaper than going out and doing large scale legwork, but the results have little validity. In particular attention check failure rates are horrendous on this platform but it doesn't seem to bother anyone. They use two platforms and the second explicitly advertises itself by trashing the reliability of MT based studies [3]. Amusingly, the second platform is literally called "Prolific Academic"! [1] https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789241516839-eng.pdf https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/329438/9789... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31119836 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31119836 [3] https://www.prolific.co/blog/bots-and-data-quality-on-crowdsourcing-platforms https://www.prolific.co/blog/bots-and-data-quality-on-crowds...

Covzire 4y ago

Worship of consensus is the death of science.

TheAceOfHearts 4y ago

This kind of research just looks like political maneuvering to attack dissenters. Part of me thinks that researchers should instead work on figuring out how to better convince and educate people. But maybe a lot of really smart people have already investigated that problem and figured out that writing research papers which undermine their opponents is the most effective tactic. The core problem is that most of the division is rarely about any object-level beliefs, it's almost entirely about tribal politics and power. What a boring game.

joemazerino 4y ago

This is a poorly written study that comes across as self-conflating. Science currently has an echo chamber problem.

mgamache 4y ago

50% of all published research is false, lets start there to understand why people reject 'consensus' and prefer their own interpretation of facts.

lumb63 4y ago

Is this particularly meaningful? It seems to me that a critical assumption underpinning this study having any meaning is that someone’s ability to answer consensus questions correctly is correlated to their ability to answer non-consensus questions correctly. This does not necessarily follow - a large number of the ideas which are now “objective truths” were at one point non-consensus fringe views (e.g. germ theory, non-heliocentrism, lead paint being bad, climate change, etc.), suggesting that link doesn’t exist all that strongly, in my opinion.

somenameforme 4y ago

I always find looking at methodology for surveys like this far more interesting than reading the papers. Two things immediately stand out. First, the study selected participants from place such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk + Prolific Academic. Both are services which pay participants peanuts to engage in various menial tasks. But perhaps more interesting are the questions they chose to ask to determine "objective knowledge of scientific facts." Among the questions used to deem this was one which asked whether "The novel coronavirus was unleashed in a laboratory in Wuhan and spread from there." I can't, for the life of me, understand why people's truth in science is on the decline.

ogurechny 4y ago

> controversial scientific issues All scientific issues are controversial by definition. What is obvious is not called science. Even prehistoric men could throw rocks, and knew where they would fall. > The consequences of these anti-consensus views are dire, including… death. Hmm, so this is what makes people die. Interesting.

7402 4y ago

Obligatory Feynman quote: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, “Science teaches such and such,” he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, “Science has shown such and such,” you might ask, “How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?” It should not be “science has shown” but “this experiment, this effect, has shown.” And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.”

fnordpiglet 4y ago

I disagree.

IceMetalPunk 4y ago

Insert "not that shocked" Fry meme here There are two axes here, each with two options: Axis 1 = "I understand" or "I don't understand". Axis 2 = "I think I understand" or "I think I don't understand". That leaves 4 options. (Obviously, these can be thought of as two continuous axes as well, and I'll address that later.) Option 1: "I understand and I think I understand" -- good, you understand, you'll probably come to the same conclusion of the experts who also understand, since you're working with the same data they are. Option 2: "I understand, but I'm not sure how well" -- good, you understand, see option #1 with the added benefit that you'll look for more evidence to increase your confidence. Option 3: "I don't understand, and I don't think I do" -- good, so you at least won't form opinions because you know you aren't informed, and maybe even will be motivated to look for evidence to move yourself into categories 1 or 2. Option 4: "I don't understand, but I think I do" -- i.e. overconfidence. Your conclusions will likely be wrong, since you don't understand the data you're basing those conclusions on, but since you think you do, you will stick to those conclusions in the face of contradictory evidence or expert advice. So, yes, I would fully expect the result this study found, from a purely logical analysis. Now, as I said, both confidence and understanding can be thought of as spectra rather than discretized categories. In that case, you get a continuous transition between those resultant options, but generally you still get three discrete classifications in that space: "I act like I know but am wrong", "I refrain from forming an opinion", and "I act like I know and am correct."

cudgy 4y ago

So, do we blindly ignore common sense and instinct, handing it over to supposed experts that have been wrong repeatedly about very fundamental concepts like diet and education? So many accepted practices promoted by experts have been and are just wrong. New information is gathered and past certainty becomes present doubt. Of course, blindly ignoring information because it is outside of your understanding is equally incorrect. There is no easy solution to this issue, but generous skepticism is wise, especially when someone purports to be expert and certain about something.