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”
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 generally, of course.
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
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.
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.
When you have enough charlatans trying to push corporate or religious agendas, you’ve got two choices:
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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
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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.
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It’s not elitism. It’s fucking fact. Someone trained in a discipline knows more about said discipline than someone who isn’t
Not to say that you’re wrong, but this is a dangerous argument. There are a FUCKTON of antivax nurses and numerous antivax doctors.
Yogo moms are a universally bad source, but even ‘credible’ sources suffer the appeal to authority fallacy .
Never said to trust someone blindly. Is this how far we’ve fallen? The mere thought that an expert in their field may in fact be an expert in said field needs to be taken apart?
https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-to-Authority
We haven’t fallen at all. You should be aware of logical fallacies.
I literally just pointed out that someone who is trained in a discipline knows more about said subject than someone who is not. This is fact. What they choose to do with said knowledge up to and including falling victim to conspiracy theories is a seperate matter.
I also said not to trust blindly. These words are written right there to go back to look at whenever you please.
If you want to spew logical fallacies, look up “straw man” and “false dilemma”
I think I’ll just skip to block user and let you be as salty as you want to be to everyone else.
Correcting your misconceptions isn’t salt. But feel free to block.
It’s not hard to buy an MD and they can be bought cheap, especially in the UK.
Dog whistle.
No, don’t just blindly believe professionals either.
Cause some of them a assholes who try to sow discord for their own personal profit.
Like Andrew Wakefield, who started the whole “Vaccines cause autism!” fraud, because he wanted to sell shit that would benefit from the distrust he was creating and thought undermining faith in existing medicine would be a great marketing ploy.
and theres been tons of famous, formerly reputable doctors since, that have put down their ethics and picked up the snake oil since then. Like Mehmet Oz.
I have had pharmacists refuse to hand over the script after asking a few questions because it turned out the prescribing doctor was actually very incredibly dangerously wrong.
That’s the reason why Pharmacology is a tough degree. Nurses also cross check MD mistakes every day.
Not just influencers, but also politicians and news media. I have a master’s degree in statistics, and it’s not at all uncommon for politicians and media to misrepresent scientific results. Correlation does not equal causation. If a study hasn’t been peer reviewed, I wouldn’t say that it proves anything just yet. Studies on a non-representative sample aren’t generalizeable to the population as a whole. And so on…
And science is more about disproving things anyway. It’s more of a “this is the best we can tell right now, given the information and observations we currently have”
Not “zomg vaccines cause puppy deaths! My dog died after getting hit by a car but wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been vaccinated! See? I proved it!”
We need to bring back actual learning. Sorry, but an accredited source will always be better than anything emerging from nazi owned X.com.
The “intellectual elite” did a lot of the damage themselves.
I want you to go watch a youtube channel called The Octopus Lady. She’s a member of Nebula, young woman with some marine biology credentials who zilennials her way through science communication mostly about ocean life. And she does the legwork, or tries to. She makes a running gag out of sounding out all the latin. “Nootfish are in the order pi…pisca…pis-caen-id-ae? And the phylum Pis-caein-in-ae? Piscaieninae.” And it’s not difficult to find an episode where she’ll talk about reading published research papers and completely failing to understand them, because they’re written in space catholic. She’ll read excerpts like “The phyringial jaws are motulidated lantitherally from the up end of the distal and caudal sclipera. When feeding, they linticulate joternimously in a cirratic fashion.” She has a habit of damning basically any scientist in any field other than marine biology to turbohell because she understands their work even less.
“Cite your source.” “Okay. 5.8th dimensional pile of moon runes Hope this clears it up.”
It raises the problem of science-shaped bullshit. The MLA or APA style guides are manuals on how to fake scientific literature. It’s very easy to make bullshit look credible. This happens a lot; industries hold fake scientific conferences where bullshit research is presented before being published in bullshit journals so that you can find the bullshit people cite when lying on behalf of a corporation.
Hell just go to a doctor. Make an appointment months in advance to have someone dead inside prescribe you whatever SSRI their office is wallpapered with ads for as treatment for astigmatism. Women commonly complain of having their problems outright ignored, meanwhile men pretty much just give up and just…live with three knees on one leg out of not unfounded fear the hospital will just maim them further. After all, if you cut a patient’s dick off during a tonsilectomy, you get to charge them for reattachment. The healthcare system managed to make themselves the worst part of a forklift accident.
Universities selling out en masse offering bullshit degrees like Musical Psychology casts a certain “What the fuck are you doing?” shadow over everything they do. But what do you expect out of our nation’s classroom-themed minor league professional sports franchises?
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: this kind of “elitism” is literally just division of labor which is basically required for a modern society to function.
Good luck making the pigs stop eating slop
Capitalism has been grooming its people to be the piggiest pigs for decades.
We need to start tellingmtjmem to close their mouths because we dont want to smell the shot in them whenever the pigs start talking.
I dont mind if people stream but sometimes the exaggerated thumbnails with their stupid exaggerated expressions is so fucking weird. Like it smells like LOOK AT ME.
Use the “dearrow” browser expansion. It’s a game changer
Idiocracy has become a documentary.
Idiocracy had leaders who were actually wanting to make things better and hired the smartest people they could.
Why don’t we structure our political systems around the scientific method? That is all of the policies are testable and the goal is the optimization of the HDI, GDPPP, and environmental impact. Why employ policies based on beliefs or feelings when we can just test them.
Sure, as soon as politicians have to have minimal education requirements.
It’s a tough problem. Those who are intelligent typically do not want to be politicians. A problem as old as society, the best rulers are typically the last people who would want the position.
Because then the capital class wouldn’t be able to control us, and steal the value of our work from us. If governments ran on tested and proven data, then we would have wind and solar farms, vast public transportation networks, infrastructure for cycling as transportation, national healthcare, 2-3 years of paid family/maternal leave for the birth/placement of a new child, and low cost post secondary education. Drops mic
Most likely. I think we’ve lost the plot globally. Society was meant to increase the quality of life of humans. In the origin when a society or more so a town failed to benefit people could just transition back into hunter gatherers and leave.
I think the other part of this is we don’t need to be beholden to a political philosophy devised by people who were essentially unconcerned by the scientific method or not even aware of it in their time. That is it really doesn’t matter if a policy is quote unquote socialist or capitalist or anything if it measurably optimizes the HDI, GDPPP, and environmental impact better than another policy. A lot of this political philosophical infighting seems more like a divide and conquer tactic than people collectively working towards a more fruitful society. I think we can step back from myopic world views and embrace a multimodal system that’s a little of whatever literally works the best.
That’s just what mega-corporations are doing right now. And you can see the results of that. IMHO it’s not that easy.
I don’t think E-corps are structured similarly, that is if they are using a scientific method to discern their policies it’s towards the end goal of increasing profits and market dominance more so than human and environmental wellbeing. So you may be right in one aspect but the target is totally different.
Look, I have no qualifications at all, but I did read a blog post. So I’m pretty sure I know what I’m talking about
Well at least you’ve read something which puts you ahead of most anti-vaxxers, who just rely on Facebook videos.
I hate to disagree with you, but I’be honestly got a feeling and I can’t think of a better reason than that.
Based on what I see in this thread, I find more of an issue to be media. Mainstream media can walk the line of truth and falsehood and make people think a certain way. Anyone who sees that can be redirected to an online source, which can be anybody from Jane/John Infantbrain to legitimate scientists. Being an influencer doesn’t preclude being a specialist, academic, etc., but the average person isn’t going to determine or care for the difference.
IMHO “Appeal to Authority” is a very bad mindset, but conspiracy theory thinking is worse.
The funniest part about conspiracy theories is that, while yes, professionals can absolutely be wrong, but how is it better just to make up random nonsense and see what sticks? Preaching critical thinking and then failing to engage in it is the peak of comedy.
You’re talking about the logical fallacy. Or maybe you’re not, I don’t know. It’s only a bad mindset when the authority isn’t qualified.
The problem right now is there’s nothing but false claims to authority. Hence the original post.
Maybe we shouldn’t perpetuate dunning-krugerization such that everyone feels they fully understand the effects of a magnetosphere on orbital mechanics after a one paragraph explanation. The sense of ‘ownership’ and ‘mastery’ people seem to have of a field after
ingestinglicking like two facts is really disappointing.
