Trust in science down; trends worst in minorities, Republicans
Trust in science down; trends worst in minorities, Republicans
A new poll examines how the US public views science and scientists.
Trust the evidence, not the scientists. If you have better evidence, show it, but without better evidence you should accept the current evidence and the conclusions you can draw from it.
Problem is, anyone who doesn't believe in science thinks that peer-reviewed evidence is secondary to anecdotal evidence. That's how you end up with Karen turning into an antivaxxer because her nephew got vaccinated as a toddler and was later diagnosed with autism. It doesn't matter if every scientist under the sun disagrees. She knows what happened and all those scientists just lie for money, or in service to some liberal conspiracy.
I have an engineering degree, so I know my share of physics. I can smell bullshit about mechanics and engineering no doubt. I can gather the evidence, I know where to find it, how to judge the quality and conduct experiments to test my theories. But my knowledge is limited to my domain.
My knowledge of biology or climate science is limited. I'm not an expert nor do I try to be an expert. I don't have the time or the skill set together better evidence comb through the different theories and the mountains of data to come to my own conclusions. I must trust the scientists of their fields because they trust me with my knowledge. It's impossible to be an expert in multiple domains in today's world.
It's unreasonable to ask to draw conclusions of highly complex systems that most people will need, at minimum, a domain specific university degree to understand.
In reality, no one can be trusted, because we're all just apes, some of us apes have a degree. We're not some enlightened species, we're full of biases and unconscious flaws and agendas that are really hard to impossible to avoid.
But still, some are better than others at identifying these, and some are better than others at mitigating them. Scientists in general are probably a group better at those things.
This only works with good information literacy. The ability to find, gather, read, and assess information gathered is what's necessary. The majority of people can't ve bothered to read a summary of a summary, let alone journal articles.
That being said a science is flawless, ppl definitely aren't. Inherent bias finds its way into all kinds of studies.
Sometimes evidence is treated as the gospel with little to no peer review.
Science is not flawless….thats way too broad a statement to make for it to have any meaning. The concept at the core sure, but in practice you can’t account for so many infinite variables that ultimately impact the ability to practice it with 100% accuracy. That’s not a people flaw either, that’s just how complex systems work.
“Trust in science is down”
Jesus fucking Christ, I hate humanity
So.....there really has been some massive psy-op done on us all,right? Make us dumber and take us out. Seems like it.
Republicans have consistently voted to reduce funding to public education, etc, yes.
Specifically to make people dumber and more susceptible to their bullshit. While also increasing the overall supply of cheap labor.
Climate change will do this. No additional conspiracy required.
There's research showing people get incrementally less intelligent as oxygen ratios get worse. There's also research showing that plants (which really all of our food depends on one way or another) become less nutritious and more sugary/starchy as carbon dioxide ratios rise. That's before we even factor in things like endocrine disruption from plastic particulate ubiquity and dozens of other pollutant effects.
We really are the frog in the slowly boiling pot, and even when citing sources on this kind of thing people would rather argue about it. 🤷♂️ (I'm not going to bother. Can be looked up easily enough if you're so inclined.)
You know that CO2 concentration is at 421 ppm, (0.0421%) up from 280 ppm in 1850? That change is negligible compared to the 21% oxygen. Standing in a crowd or being inside causes a much higher variation of the oxygen concentration. Even moving up 2 meters changes the amount of oxygen molecules per volume by more than that.
This really feels like one of those curves where the edges on both sides would have similar conclusions.
On one end you have stupid people and partisan folks denying 'science' because it disagrees with their gut about vaccines and 6,000 year old dinosaurs.
But on the other you have people actually in academia broadly aware of institutional issues from the optimization around pressure to publish that's led to everything from falsified papers across multiple domains, several reproducibility crises, journals previously highly respected publishing papers that are either retracted or very questionable, failures to properly report conflicts of interest, etc.
Science as a methodology is great and awesome and a very valuable thing for society, but there are real concerns with institutional issues surrounding it right now that unfortunately are probably going to get ignored as people circle the wagons to defend it against criticisms from abject morons upset it isn't validating BS.
If the past few years have taught me anything, it's that what seems an innate biological bias humans have to see things as binary opposites with a side to be picked as opposed to a multidimensional gradient with nuances is going to kill us all.
I actually find the various crises around science a good thing. It means that people are paying attention and are aware of scandals and issues, which gives me more hope of something changing because of it.
Contrast that with a system that never changes because it's perfect -- I know what I find more trustworthy.
Yeah, every sufficiently big group has unethical folks in it.
It's when the group never condemns insider and even defends them when obvious misdeeds happen, where you need to be extra wary.
I think the subtext of the polling, that poor and minority folks report lower rates of trust in "science", seems to be about the way that science doesn't occur in a vacuum, it occurs within power structures and when you're on the lower rungs of any system of power, that will shape your opinions about it.
My read on this is that when "science" becomes the sphere of mega-corporations and pharma giants, on some level it's going to occur to your everyday folk as a tool of oppression more than as a boon to civilization.
I think that's an important observation. The next question though is, how do we fix that? ... and I don't have a good answer