51–60 of 107 posts
Just wait till bots/ai gets good enough to spout bullshit. Just fill forums with thousands of argue-bots and you might be able to make the noise ratio so bad the internet is unusable.
That's already the case, I think.
I think one problem is that expertise have been a bludgeon for a long time and intellectuals have done an awful job of not over reaching their expertise and at sticking to their levels of confidence.
I also think that the once important role of “public intellectuals” and philosophers as critics of everything was an essential role to keeping participants honest. We don’t have this any more.
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To tell you the truth I don't have time, energy or knowledge to find the sources of all news and research I see and investigate and assess the credibility of them, so I simply don't believe anything. This problem has existed since forever, and back in the day I believed something like reddit would work because real humans would do the curation for me and call out bad news/research/etc, but we all know how that turned…
>To tell you the truth I don't have time, energy or knowledge to find the sources of all news and research I see and investigate and assess the credibility of them, so I simply don't believe anything. So you don't even believe Donald Trump is the President of the United States, because you refuse to believe the media when it covered the campaign and election? I'm going to guess you either don't actually hold this poi…
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Why should people respect formal education? Even in many "scientific" fields, standards are so low that most published research is wrong. The non-scientific parts of academia are dominated by in-group politics and shallow status seeking. And in much of academia, evidence is less important than ideology: research and researchers are banned not because they are wrong, but because their ideas are unacceptable. If academ…
The alternative is often worse. "The mainstream media misled me about Iraq, therefore I'm going to get my information from Facebook articles posted by Russian intelligence!" "There was once a batch of contaminated vaccines, so now I'm going to risk the lives of my and other children by not vaccinating them" "The banks were unfairly bailed out, so I'm going to keep my money in Quadriga"
It's mind-boggling to me that there's people on YT/social media going out of their way to prove to flat earthers that the earth is not flat. We have 600 years of science proving that, and they don't believe that, do you think that your little experiment will change their mind? Also, what's the point? It's not like if there's enough people that think the earth is flat, NASA will shut down or anything.
It's commendable trying to educate people but in these cases it's definitely not worth the hassle, and I really hope people start realising that and stop entertaining all the crazy ideas that random strangers have around the world.
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Sure, our academic institutions have issues. We can argue about the exact severity, but that isn't terribly interesting. We can make efforts to improve this. We can try to learn more about where we go wrong. I don't think it's useful or wise to just throw our hands in the air and claim we should no longer give these institutions any respect or credence. Humanity has made real, amazing gains in knowledge, understandin…
It would also be unwise to blindly trust these institutions, or to grant them respect or credence as a whole without considering the problems and biases of specific fields. And it should be remembered that the amazing gains in knowledge humanity has made have often been opposed by academia, as Max Planck observed: science advances one funeral at at time.
Unfortunately, trusting it blindly is also necessary when you’re not active in the field. Even worse, nobody can spend enough time to be active in all fields.
I don’t know how best to balance Mr (formerly Dr) Andrew Wakefield versus Dr Ignaz Semmelweis.
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You're making a lot of wild claims. >Even in many "scientific" fields, standards are so low that most published research is wrong. Citation needed. >And in much of academia, evidence is less important than ideology Citation needed. >research and researchers are banned not because they are wrong, but because their ideas are unacceptable. Citation needed. Maybe it has happened to a couple of people at a few screwed up…
You can do your own research about that by yourself if you have a real interest in the topic. Anyway, here is a book about this issue in sociology (written by two researchers of the field): Gérald Bronner et Étienne Géhin (2017), Le Danger sociologique , Paris, Puf, 252 p.
I think the worst kind of intellectual DOS attacks are those with high compression rate. Those that sound vaguely plausible at first ("Just do away with ALL the taxes, people will sort it out and enterprise will skyrocket") but require many more words to refute . When the politician in question is also a fast talker, and has a master's degree in Philosophy, he can appear to be smarter because no one can keep up with…
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To tell you the truth I don't have time, energy or knowledge to find the sources of all news and research I see and investigate and assess the credibility of them, so I simply don't believe anything. This problem has existed since forever, and back in the day I believed something like reddit would work because real humans would do the curation for me and call out bad news/research/etc, but we all know how that turned…
>To tell you the truth I don't have time, energy or knowledge to find the sources of all news and research I see and investigate and assess the credibility of them, so I simply don't believe anything. So you don't even believe Donald Trump is the President of the United States, because you refuse to believe the media when it covered the campaign and election? I'm going to guess you either don't actually hold this poi…