- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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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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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?
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.
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?
Even the fucking witches know to trust the virologists
I like the witches who tell people to buy carbon monoxide detectors. One time I told a patient with abusive auditory hallucinations that her nighttime zyprexa was gonna shut the stupid bastard up and she was welcome to ascribe whatever spiritual interpretation she liked to that.
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.
Therapist here w/ Masters. Sick of life coaches.
That is one of the most damaging scams in existence. Any jackhole can hang out a sign and call themselves a life coach. They are the homeopaths and chiropractors of psychology.
Masters degree in AI here.
Every day I feel like medical specialist during highest anti-vax craze. No matter what I say, no matter what kinda research and articles I cite social media and advertising simply scream louder and more often.
Maybe if the people in control of AI weren’t quite literally the most evil people currently on the planet, more people would understand. Also the fact that they’re all trying to cram it into every aspect of our lives, despite it being a demonstrable failure doesn’t help.
Same. AI/ML background long pre-dating GPT; trying to navigate my career is sending me to an early grave from the number of charlatans and rich idiots flooding every part of the industry, talking complete nonsense, and getting an army of devoted fans who make shit memes dissing “luddites”.
I can’t participate in any AI-related forums any more because of the sheer number of twats pontificating about nature of sentience, who think “backpropagating” is something you’d find at a swingers’ party.
Yeah AI-related forums are absolutely apeshit. Online discourse is pretty much either “AGI is here, use AI for everything, no questions asked, no criticism accepted” or “AI is the coming of anti-christ, end to humanity and even looking at AI products should be punishable by death”.
No in-between online.
Says someone on alt right pedo platform Twitter. He’s not wrong, but come on. The irony.
With a blue check. Which means they paid the pedo techno fascist.
Holy shit yes. Everybody thinks they’re smarter then everybody else. That’s a huge part of the problem. Nobody can just stay in their lane and admit anymore that a person with a PhD in a specific field might know a little more about that field than you. Even the educated now think they’re the smartest person on the planet.
You 100% should not trust:
- An epidemiologist’s opinion on inflation
- A civil engineer’s opinion on viral spread
- An economist’s opinion on traffic flow
They’re just as guilty of this bullshit as everyone else. It’s everybody. The whole fucking planet at this point.
Also people think being smarter means knowing more, which is stupid. A guy who spent thousands of hours studying random topic is obviously going to know more about it, no matter how smart you are it just doesn’t replace time spent learning
That’s me, I’m a complete dumbass but I like history and recognize that to know the most about history I need to understand it in an interdisciplinary way. Which is how me an barely high-schools graduate has a working understanding of trade networks and macro-economics because how else am I to understand the Late Bronze Age collapse and it’s causes.
It wasn’t always this way, though — general education standards have been severely eroded. There was a point in time where you could trust that a civil engineer would have the general knowledge required to understand what they don’t know — thus leaving the decision to better educated minds.
There are so many things wrong about how we teach each other in the U.S., and wrong with how we perceive being taught. So many people believe that unwarranted advice is the worst fucking crime imaginable, or that correcting someone’s spelling/grammar is a shitty thing to do. So many people are so innately positioned against learning that it’s no fucking wonder why your anesthesiologist has 0 fucking clue what the nation should do regarding immigration. Totally ignorant of the fact that they should absolutely be intelligent enough to come to the correct answers; at the very least they should be able to listen to those who come backed with facts and verify their veracity at a later point.
I have no idea what I can do about it beyond being a grammar nazi. /endrant
That’s the thing though…in real life that anesthesiologist is going to be just as confident in their shitty opinion about immigration as a high-school dropout.
I want that anesthesiologist and that high school dropout to admit that they don’t know as much about immigration as a sociologists, demographers, and immigration lawyers, and should trust those professional opinions rather then their own shitty opinions that are probably based on cable news shows.
But there are plenty of antivaxxers with PHDs…
Yes. That’s the point. A PhD in Geology does not in any way to qualify a person to declare the safety and efficacy of a vaccine.
Many prominent antivaxxers are MDs. A Nobel prize winner in immunology ranks among antivaxxers. There are experts on both sides.
Are these people actually actively working in the in the immunology and virology field, or are they paid schills who used to have real jobs but now work for a “think tank” for 10 times what they were making?
I think you’ll find that these outliers are no longer actively working and have been corrupted by either money or cognitive decline.
What antivax “think tanks” are paying 10x a doctor’s salary? And why? There’s not exactly a lot of money in it.
If money is your motivation, you work for Pharma, not against them.
an economist’s opinion on traffic flow
An economist’s opinion
Ftfy
There it is though.
An actual “Economist” will have a Masters in Economics at the least or a PhD in Economics at the research level.
So I would and should indeed trust an economist on matters of economics more than anyone should trust, well, you on matters of economics.
You just proved the point of the post. Unless I missed that you are an economist and are poking fun at yourself…
Economy is not a science. Hand waving does not equal knowledge that can instruct good decisions on any level. I laughed my ass off in the 3 econ classes I took. Jumped through the hoops, but there’s not much there, there, as they say.
Economist here. This is pretty much the anti-intellectualism that everyone here is talking about and this is the opinion I’ve seen constantly on Lemmy.
Most people have no idea what it is that I do and think it’s something to do with making billionaires more money. It isn’t and it never has been and it hasn’t been for anyone that I’ve kept in contact with from any of my classes.
You don’t have to be involved in financial matters to be an economist either. We’re more involved in finding out root causes and impacts in certain fields.
To be fair while economists do a lot of good empirical testing across disciplines they are notorious for mis-interpreting other fields
People so fragile they can’t live with the idea other people might be smarter than they are
Spot on, this is literally how society rotted away.
Nope, that was unfettered capitalism.
Feels to me like they are related, rugged individualism is much easier to sell to people who feel this way.
100%
People so fragile they can’t live with the idea other people might be smarter than they are
Need to be ridiculed, and their opinions ignored.
But put MDs at the top of that list. They refuse critical assessment.
Intellectual elitism is absolutely not what we’re missing, we’re missing respect for expertise
I’m sure you can find many people with MDs that aren’t above peddling snake oil.
Dr Oz.
Ugh. I have Medicare so I get notices from Dr. Oz on occasion.
Yes but the percentage would be much lower.
Also, an MD isn’t necessarily a virologist or vaccine expert. I mean, you really shouldn’t ask an ortho bro about anything but bones and joints. So I doubt MD necessarily means “elite”.
Yes, but the barrier to entry is much much higher. Also, we should trust licensed MDs, and if they are a public nuisance (eg, “vaccines cause autism!” nonsense), they should lose that license, and thus the trust.
I feel like pointing at “influencers” and putting the blame on them isn’t really correct. They are probably more of a symptom.
Whose fault is it that some random blogger is being treated the same as people who studied something for decades?
E.g. the media owned by the rich or the governments
bought“lobbied” by the rich.A few crazy people will always exist, but currently the “inmates are running the asylum” and they actively promote this garbage. Just look at RFK.
Yeah, before we had influencers on the internet, we had celebrity gurus, magazines, etc… In Hungary, interest in home gardening surged after some magazines declared that if some fruits/vegetables rot in a weird way, they must be GMO, thus must cause cancer and have zero vitamins. Some went as far as if some powder of a common food item existed, such as “milk powder”, it meant that said thing was made out of crude oil, and all milk products were fake and vitamin-free.
The moment my stepmother heard meat powder and egg powder existed, I had to move in with them, so once they got their hands on chickens they can let free of “GMO food made out of crude oil”. That part never happened, but at least it helped to sabotage my college education.
The idea that its scientists vs bloggers was created by PR firms. It’s scientists and bloggers vs scientists and bloggers. Both sides have geniuses and idiots.
No, not in the cases of vaccines or climate change. The incredibly overwhelming majority of scientists are on the plainly correct side of both of those, they don’t have to be geniuses for that, just somewhat educated.
Highly educated and credentialed people have complex disagreements on both subjects.
Climate change: that the climate changes and is changing is self-evident, but how it will change and how much of that change is influenced by human activity is a subject of fierce debate.
Vaccines: while nobody thinks that vaccines are never effective, studies consistently show links between high vaccination and chronic health issues, leading to many highly credentialed and educated doctors and researchers arguing that vaccines are a risk factor for SIDs and allergic rhinitis.
Henry Ford Health recently conducted a large study, which they themselves described as near perfect, that showed links to many chronic health conditions, though not autism.
The only reason there is any “fierce debate” about either of those topics, is because vested interests are spending a lot of money to have voices shout very loudly but knowingly in the wrong, in order to prolong the status quo.
The oil industry, for example, is one of the most heavily subsidised, highly profitable industries on the planet. That only remains so if the world’s demand for oil and gas remains insatiable.
Time and again, leaks, lawsuits and increasingly rare/dangerous investigative journalism have shown various oil and gas companies up to the fucking elbows in corrupt practices -ranging from skewed science to outright murder- to deny the extraordinary effects of burning their fuels, let alone the absolutely insane list of environmental damage that is accruing from all the non-fuel petroleum products society has been conditioned to be reliant on.
There is no disagreement on human caused climate change besides “Just how utterly fucked are our grandkids?”.
I’m inclined to agree. But that demonstrates the point: you can find highly credentialed and educated experts on both sides of any issue.
Vaccines are unique in that one side (big pharma) has unlimited money, while the other side (doctors, scientists, and parents) don’t have nearly the same funding, and stand to lose everything by speaking out, yet still do at great personal cost.
You have clearly been misled by propaganda. There is no broad disagreement about these issues. If there is debate about “how much climate change is caused by human activity” it is regarding the third nine after the decimal point of the percentage figure, which might be debated fiercely but makes no difference at all to the overall message.
Yes. The debate was about whether highly credentialed and educated experts can be wrong due to perverse incentives. As you pointed out, yes they can.
You can find so-called experts on both sides of any issue, so saying “a subset of so-called experts agree with me” is not a slam dunk argument.
You know what else leads to much higher levels of chronic health conditions? Viral infections.
You will have 1 in a million adverse events with a glass of water.
It’s not a 1 in a million chance. It’s a lot higher.
Do you know how vaccines (live attenuated or adjuvanated) work?
