Comment on "influencers" are setting us back
Vreyan31@reddthat.com 6 days ago
As someone who is an expert in one area and as dependent as anyone else in others, and who also hates appeals to authority -
To me, the correct stance is that any should be able to question things that don’t make intuitive sense or that one suspects might be a perspective motivated by financial considerations instead of expertise.
Note that I said question. Not invent your own replacement fever-dream explanation.
Questions require good-faith attempts to find information and understand.
Not pitch something where its main virtue is that it makes ignorance feel good actually.
There’s a reason peer reviewed studies are so important.
It’s literally other people with knowledge on the subject questioning the results of a study until everyone agrees to the conclusion.
It’s not just one person pulling something out of their ass and saying “Look! This thing!” and everyone just going along with it. It’s questioned and proven multiple times.
I’ve gone to college. I’ve been taught buy people who are supposed to know this shit how to find scholarly sources. I’ve cited such sources in essays. Something I’ve never been shown are those peer reviews. Hell, it seems like half the experiments I was taught about in school come with a “And here’s why we ethically CAN’T repeat this study” like the Stanford Prison Experiment.
There are many peer reviewed studies subsequently retracted. The problem is most journals do not value the expertise or time of reviewers. Not a perfect system.
I generally agree, but there is a level of ignorance where you don’t even really know what questions to ask, and subjects complicated enough that you just aren’t equipped to understand an answer without needing a lot of background education first because they just aren’t intuitive at all by nature. At that point, is there really much value in asking the question?
Determining where that line is is hard sometimes, but I do think it’s there.
Asking questions doesn’t hurt. If the answer still confuses someone, they then need the humility to admit it instead of covering their ears and yelling “I CAN’T HEAR YOU”
This breaks down pretty quickly though because laypeople fundamentally don’t engage with the world scientifically. The default mode is “can I believe this” but science requires “have I excluded everything else”. The former feels like the job is done, so why put in more work?
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
I just want people to trust. Being skeptical and wanting to learn is perfectly fine, but also, people do go to school for these things for years, you know? Have a little a faith they aren’t lying to you.
By “you” I just mean people, of course.
tetris11@feddit.uk 6 days ago
You’re both spot on. We live in a deliberately low trust society with grief merchants heckling experts for the sole intention of division.
I don’t know how we can get back to a high trust society, but it did exist once, and I think the first step to it is education and the reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine in the media
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 6 days ago
Counterpoint: a group of MDs in Toronto published a peer-reviewed paper in 2020 claiming SARS/Cov2 was from outer space.
MDs are not scientists. They pretend they are.
petrol_sniff_king@lemmy.blahaj.zone 6 days ago
This is kind of the attitude I’m talking about.
Is this story even notable? Like, how much attention is this even getting?
I am not interested in propaganda that sews distrust in our institutions and collective efforts when I’ve already said that being skeptical is fine.
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
When you have enough charlatans trying to push corporate or religious agendas, you’ve got two choices:
Every single human being needs to repeat every single experiment they rely on for their work or pleasure because there is no such thing as trust, only the scientific method and the power of repeating experiments to verify results, or
We need to have institutions to do this shit for us whose reputations MATTER at the flesh and bone level. What that looks like, at this point I’m not sure, because criminals always win.