121–130 of 970 posts
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Do you mean "Do their own research" like make up conspiracy theories out of thin air and parrot nonsense deep state rhetoric? Completely divorcing yourself from reality? You want more of that?
The world will always have heathens and heretics. Some people will always come to the wrong conclusion some of the time. Skepticism of any claims is a pretty good heuristic, but should be equally applied to counter claims.
I think the US has caught this cancerous idea that the average person can't be trusted to think for themselves. The amount of condescension in that thought process is disgraceful. They think, someone has to tell the average person how to think. And the baffling thing is that supposed liberals think that thoughts should be policed by corporations, government, and self styled intellectuals (which seems so much against…
This is not a new development: the boundaries of scientific knowledge - across all fields - have required a large amount of specialization for a while now. The barrier to entry is a PhD, and even then you’re only an expert in a small part of your field.
If you suddenly decide to jump in without context and make judgements about topics you are not qualified to talk about all while ignoring the state of the art, can you really expect others to take you seriously?
I think the real cancer is the rapid rise of distrust of subject matter experts.
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Let people draw their own conclusions and don’t censor or otherwise penalize them for questioning one interpretation of data vs another. Encourage people to do their own research and investigate who is funding the sources used for that research. There is no need for conspiracy theories when financial incentives exist.
>There is no need for conspiracy theories when financial incentives exist. Why do you assume that the financial incentive is for the truth rather than for the conspiracy theory?
Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific research in general after starting a PhD and seeing how the sausage is made. The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselv…
> Most research is flawed or useless, but published anyway because it's expedient for the authors to do so. For the record I now know a professor at one of the premier institutions in the world, who is a total fraud. Their research was fraudulent in grad school. Their lab mates tried to raise concerns and nothing happened. That person graduated, with everyone on the committee knowing the issues. Then they got a premi…
As you are doing here. I don't see a name or any specifics anywhere in your comment. Of course not including any names or specifics also means you could be making it up for a good story. We have no way of knowing.
Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific research in general after starting a PhD and seeing how the sausage is made. The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselv…
I don't think many people outside of academia truly understand how much scientific research has degraded over the years.
There are an extremely small number of fields in which the overall quality is still quite high (mathematics, etc.) but overwhelmingly the social sciences, medical science, etc. are wastelands of p-hacked, low-N, biased, poorly designed studies that can't be replicated (not to mention the outright frauds and absolutely rampant plagiarism).
Every intelligent person should be deeply, deeply skeptical of papers published in particular fields over the last ~20 years.
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because people don't need to be scientifically literate to express their desires in the form of a vote, which is mainly concerned with tasking representatives with what people want, not how they're going to get it. It's perfectly coherent to think that voting is a good mechanism to express preferences while at the same time thinking that your average person can't really validate scientific claims.
I don’t think there’s nearly as much daylight between these as you’re suggesting. Just look at how current beliefs in COVID or climate science fall along political preference lines. Scientific literacy is absolutely important to express coherent preferences on how policy should address these matters.
discourse about values in regards to covid or climate is sensible. Do you want more freedom, more safety, fewer deaths, more economic growth? That's something every person has a meaningful position on. The safety of mrna vaccines? That's not a layman's question, and these factual technical questions are where misinformation enters the picture.
And the twisted thing about the debate is that saying this often creates accusations of elitism. But really, if scientific literacy is required to have coherent political preferences, what does that say about the right of participation of people in a democracy who are simply not educated or smart enough?
The issue that plagues us is a lack of trust in long-standing societal authorities. We can't follow the entire scientific proof chain for every piece of information we encounter, because we don't have time. So we rely on authority to some extent, whether that be peer review, government, independent bodies, etc. We need to be able to trust that these bodies are telling us the truth and aren't seeking to mislead us. Be…
I wasn't social media that eroded the trust in research and science, it was the introduction of politics. We need to separate research from politics. It needs to be a separate pillar of the state. You don't want reseachers chasing funds continously and doing short-term research for local sponsors. You want sizeable investments in long-term research projects, high autonomy and following of the scientific method. This…
Historically, scientists either were well-off and independent (e.g. Ulug beg, Newton, Cavendish), or worked at the expense of very rich personal patrons (e.g. Tycho). This limited the number of potential scientists, and the amount of science done, quite drastically.
In 18th-20th centuries it was somehow overcome, when partly states, partly industries gave more scientists more resources. By mid-20th century, the system started to develop cracks, as science became increasingly driven by formal metrics, such as impactful publications. The metrics are actively gamed, but worse, since science is unpredictable, honestly checking everything and building a picture of reality became a worse strategy than going for a flashy if more weakly researched result.
I don't know a good way out of the current trap.
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I think unfortunately we also need to protect science from idiots making very bad conclusions based on not understanding a paper... That's how we end up with 'bacon cures cancer' headlines in the daily fail...
How do you protect science from idiots? Is science going to stop working if some people think that bacon cures cancer?
Just throwing my 2c into the well, as someone who used to be highly "pro-science" but lost confidence in much of academia and the validity of scientific research in general after starting a PhD and seeing how the sausage is made. The biggest problem science is facing is not an external threat from a rabble of ignorant science deniers, but the complete degradation of quality within the scientific institutions themselv…
Academia has been taken over by an advanced persistent threat of social sciences that are all completely corrupted. That corruption infects and touches every aspect of the academic's life cycle these days. Funding determines most research and doubley so the conclusions. The infection politicizes everything and rewards those who use scientific branding to support the establishment.