4 ms·

Judging by some of the comments, the behavior and self-worth of the "enlightened" is just as reprehensible as your usual FoxNews dad parroting BS. The "enlight

Judging by some of the comments, the behavior and self-worth of the "enlightened" is just as reprehensible as your usual FoxNews dad parroting BS. The "enlightened" should know better since they are.. enlightened. Yet, the "plebs" found out they have exactly the same vices and reprehensible atitudes, plus the usual dismissive attitudes towards everyone "beneath" them. Many of the "not plebs" do exactly what you described and that's what "changed", the illusion of the benevolent white coat "egg head" was broken. And I think it's a good thing, just by principle. Highly educated people are just as nasty, flawed people as anyone else and if I make a statement, it should be judged by the statement's merits and not by who I am. The practice of science is something it can be done by everyone, as long as they.. follow the scientific method. Not even scientists follow the scientific method all the time, because they are.. flawed, lazy, greedy, dishonest sometimes. Just like everyone else.

lamontcg 4y ago
> The practice of science is something it can be done by everyone, as long as they.. follow the scientific method. The actual scientific method requires some expertise though in order to determine if any given study is junk science or not. Someone who hasn't spent their lifetime studying the subject will be at a significant disadvantage, and will generally be completely unable to tell you if a given paper is junk science or not. And amateur can approximate this knowledge, but what they wind up doing is having read many scientific papers and arguments they have a good "gut feeling" over the skill of a paper, and then they seek out actual expert opinion to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of the procedures and weigh any competing expert opinion, combined with literature searches for review articles. You can also do things like read books / watch video courses of at least undergraduate-level dispassionate introductions to subjects. And since I don't have a scientific degree this is what I wind up doing all the time and I've practiced it for the past 30 years or so. I rarely see anyone on the internet who is a scientific novice with that level of analysis. They usually stop with the fact that they've got a reference they can cite to try to win an argument and it stops there. The reality of science is that the evidence is always going to be a mess and a morass of conflicting results. You can tease out the actual truth out of there but it requires assembling evidence which is consistent and not contradictory and discarding results which are probably the result of e.g. experimental error and procedural artifacts and not real science. If you have no process at all to do that, then you're not following the scientific method, you're just making biased arguments with scientific-looking references. And the scientific method ultimately requires trusting experts. Period. Full fucking stop. Nobody can possibly figure out all of science themselves, it is too vast, so actual scientists learn over time who and what to trust more or less. Anyone who rejects that approach entirely isn't doing science and most likely doesn't know what they're talking about. And I rarely see anyone on the Internet who has gone beyond read opinion blogs and spent the hours necessary to just get exposed to the basics of field. With everything that is accessible on the Internet, nearly everyone has access to an undergraduate level education in just about anything. I rarely see anyone railing against scientists and medical professionals who have bothered to take advantage of the free information that is out there though (e.g. for virology basics I'd recommend sitting through all of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlLgaHZpZS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlLgaHZpZS4 which is just a course on virology).

lamontcg 4y ago

> The practice of science is something it can be done by everyone, as long as they.. follow the scientific method. The actual scientific method requires some expertise though in order to determine if any given study is junk science or not. Someone who hasn't spent their lifetime studying the subject will be at a significant disadvantage, and will generally be completely unable to tell you if a given paper is junk science or not. And amateur can approximate this knowledge, but what they wind up doing is having read many scientific papers and arguments they have a good "gut feeling" over the skill of a paper, and then they seek out actual expert opinion to fill in the gaps in their knowledge of the procedures and weigh any competing expert opinion, combined with literature searches for review articles. You can also do things like read books / watch video courses of at least undergraduate-level dispassionate introductions to subjects. And since I don't have a scientific degree this is what I wind up doing all the time and I've practiced it for the past 30 years or so. I rarely see anyone on the internet who is a scientific novice with that level of analysis. They usually stop with the fact that they've got a reference they can cite to try to win an argument and it stops there. The reality of science is that the evidence is always going to be a mess and a morass of conflicting results. You can tease out the actual truth out of there but it requires assembling evidence which is consistent and not contradictory and discarding results which are probably the result of e.g. experimental error and procedural artifacts and not real science. If you have no process at all to do that, then you're not following the scientific method, you're just making biased arguments with scientific-looking references. And the scientific method ultimately requires trusting experts. Period. Full fucking stop. Nobody can possibly figure out all of science themselves, it is too vast, so actual scientists learn over time who and what to trust more or less. Anyone who rejects that approach entirely isn't doing science and most likely doesn't know what they're talking about. And I rarely see anyone on the Internet who has gone beyond read opinion blogs and spent the hours necessary to just get exposed to the basics of field. With everything that is accessible on the Internet, nearly everyone has access to an undergraduate level education in just about anything. I rarely see anyone railing against scientists and medical professionals who have bothered to take advantage of the free information that is out there though (e.g. for virology basics I'd recommend sitting through all of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlLgaHZpZS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XlLgaHZpZS4 which is just a course on virology).