I think I've had enough of the inclusive frameworks this article advocates for.
Generally speaking, between your average conspiracy theorist, and the average university scientist, rhetorically speaking, the conspiracy theorist will probably run circles around the scientist.
To a lay persons understanding of argument and rhetoric, unless you have a good bullshit detector(and bullshit detector’s are imperfect, you’ll get it wrong a certain percentage of of the time) the conspiracy theorist is more convincing and usually has “better” arguments.
We now have 8,000+ mRNA products awaiting field testing and trials.
Here's another example: the various screenings with age cutoffs. For example colorectal cancer screening is only recommended for people above 45; statins are only recommended for the prevention of cardiovascular disease after age 40 with risk factors. I've had a few primary care physicians who follow these guidance like gospel and refuse to do screening because I haven't met the age cutoff. The reason why these cutoffs exist is mainly a cost/benefit analysis for the entire population, not an analysis tailored for an individual.
Feels like rationalising? No masks were the prior recommendation for the public and status quo.
No, we don't need "inclusive frameworks" because some beliefs are idiotic.
We need experts who put reason and data before political agendas and they need to be able to say "I don't know" instead of lying.
E.g. experts saying "we don't know if masks work" (stated over and over) the general public heard as "we know that masks don't work" (I've found exactly one instance of this being stated by a US public health expert, USSG Jerome Adams).
Generally, science is not built on trusting others, it's built on being skeptical.
What people miss is not trust in alleged or real experts, what they lack is intellectual humility and the ability to determine when someone else likely knows more about a topic than you. That doesn't mean that they have to trust that person's opinion about the matter, it just means that they should have a tendency to believe that person's informed opinions more easily than their own uninformed preconceptions.
For example, people shouldn't trust authorities and the experts these rely on. It's perfectly fine if they constantly scrutinize these authorities. However, they should be able to recognize when they clearly know less then these and act accordingly. Whether that means remaining agnostic or acting upon the expert's knowledge (even if it is taken with a pinch of salt) depends on the decision situation, how much need for action there is.
By the same token, you should also not trust text books. You should be aware of your own limitations while trying to check the information in the book. When you know you don't have enough knowledge to check it, you're going to have to trust some of the content. The more you build up knowledge, the more you can check the book, and at some point you will find errors in it.
Science is always at least as messy (generally more so) as it was during COVID, but generally it doesn't matter because only "settled science" gets turned into technology and deployed to people's lives. All the input chaos has been abstracted away by the time it matters at all to most people.
The general public is not, has never been, and never will be cognitively and intellectually equipped to grapple with shifting science directly -- nor should they need to, they've got other shit to do that scientists can't do!
Does this mean the experts are wrong? Nope. It’s for a variety of reasons, but perhaps the largest is that experts are handcuffed by corruption.
A real doctor knows best, but there are negative outcomes because of the insurance industry. A climate scientist knows best, but corruption and fossil fuel industry prevents implementation of the correct policies. Some financial advisors are scam artists and others are legit, leading people to trust neither.
For experts to gain trust they have to deliver visibly positive outcomes, and they have to greedily take credit for those outcomes. When people experience a good result, they have to make the connection that it was the advice of smart, correct, educated people that got them there.
Just a warning, I may agree with them overall, but they are constantly getting the numbers wrong. We have been 3 years away from the point of no return for the last 20 years. I am old enough to remember the "ice age" that we were going to enter. There are a ton of video clips showing Al Gore predicting things that never came to past.
I read the science and I agree that climate is changing, but to the layperson, they have been saying wrong things for years now and they are tired of hearing them "cry wolf". The moral of the "cry wolf" story is that the falsehoods are what causes people not to be prepared. It is not helping the cause.
I'm nearly 60 and I don't ever remember anyone talking about an imminent ice age - given my fondness for skiing when I was younger I'm sure I would have noticed.
I remember being extremely worried about it as a child and thinking "I am the last generation to know civilization as it has been before the world freezes over!"
It probably goes without saying but I haven't been especially concerned about global warming this go around.
> [relays bullshit]
There was never anything like a scientific consensus on a coming ice age.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/9/2008bam...
> One way to determine what scientists think is to ask them. This was actually done in 1977 following the severe 1976/77 winter in the eastern United States. "Collectively," the 24 eminent climatologists responding to the survey "tended to anticipate a slight global warming rather than a cooling" (National Defense University Research Directorate 1978).
> we [also] conducted a rigorous literature review of the American Meteorological Society's electronic archives as well as those of Nature and the scholarly journal archive Journal Storage (JSTOR)... The survey identified only 7 articles indicating cooling compared to 44 indicating warming. Those seven cooling articles garnered just 12% of the citations.
Here's an alternative explanation: you were duped back then just like you've been duped today, but in the opposite direction than you thought.
No where in my statement did I say that I agreed with anything, just that constant "false predictions" causes people to quit listening.
But as you have proved, reading comprehension can be a big part as well.
You are remembering a fringe theory amigo. If that's what you expected to happen, it's because you were listening to fringe scientists.
You are continuing to listen to fringe scientists.
Science happens in public, so you will hear all sorts of different theories thrown out. If you are latching onto these and then perceiving divergence from them later on as "creating a loss of trust," that's on you. It means you are incapable of reasoning about the world and is probably something you should try to address yourself instead of externalizing blame.
You keep harping on my beliefs, but I have not stated them. I did not believe in an ice age, and I have already stated that I believe in climate change. Why do you keep trying to talk about what I personally believe when you dont even know what they are?
When have I hurt you in the past? Go back to the article on what it is about. I am only trying to add to the discussion on what could be a cause.
I understand the dynamic you're pointing to, but it's simply not something that's solvable from the institutional/scientific-community side. We cannot allow institutions to actually control media, nor can we allow science to "go private."
The responsibility, which you and I both should reaffirm, is that individuals need to better manage their own information ecosystem and diet!
Do you have another solution?
I feel like this article misses the reason why people distrust institutions. Being "kicked out of the tent" is no doubt part of it, but it's more that the institutions themselves have stopped trying to communicate in good faith.
In the past 50 or so years we've seen almost every institution (in USA at least) get caught in a massive scheme of lying and manipulation. The church was caught harboring pedophiles, the education system told us trades were bad and we needed to spend $100k+ to have a good job, the Healthcare system leveraged our own wellbeing against their profits, the government sided with insurance companies, banks, etc over its own people at every turn then proceeded to lie us into war after war after war, and all the the while the news has been proven to support almost every lie happily if the ad dollars go their way. Not a single institution hasn't failed us.
Asking why people distrust institutions is the wrong question. Any partner that lied to you that much would never be trusted again, distrust is a defense mechanism that comes from years of betrayal. But still there's some implication that we should still trust them, despite the lies, and along with it a sense that distrusting them makes you crazy (paranormal/alien beliefs are a good example). This problem does not originate from the people, it's the result of a world where truth only gets in the way of profits and power and actual people are the lowest priority.
"The healthcare system" is not one thing that "says" stuff. For every component of the education system that was trying to eliminate trades, there were others trying to combat it, and neither side was merely the decision of any conscious agent that could be said to be deciding or "saying" anything. All of the outcomes and the things these systems "say" are emergent phenomena from a confluence of countless forces. Sometimes they yield bad outcomes!
But that doesn't mean you can just toss out the system, largely because unless you alter the larger dynamics that produced that system, any replacement will just come to mimic the prior one. The individuals involved hardly matter.
That would point toward the business interests of actual provider organizations (like hospitals) or insurers, who have different incentives from each other and very different incentives from individual healthcare providers, who also have very different interests (and are very different people on a variety of dimensions) from those in academia who are "heavily defined by grant funding."
Perhaps you could share a concrete example of what you mean, because right now we're talking about 4 or 5 completely distinct, individually gigantic industries that all interact to produce "the healthcare system" and its behaviors.
For example, during COVID there were doctors who lost their license to practice because they disagreed with the government stance on vaccines. Therefore, the remaining doctors spoke with one voice. The government used them as sock puppets, in effect. Whether you agree with this policy or not, it is an example in which the healthcare system became one system that "said" things in concert.
Can you share some examples of these doctors? AFAIK the only doctors who lost their licenses are those who created fake medical documentation or who shared verifiably false medical information. Not for "disagreeing" with the government stance on vaccines.
I don't know if you lived in a different timeline than me, but I remember a lively debate throughout the entirety of COVID. Consensus (and evidence) was overwhelmingly on one side, sure, similar to how consensus is that you should go to the hospital if you get a heart attack. And yeah, if a doctor advises someone against that despite strong clinical evidence that the patient is best served by going to the hospital, they'll jeopardize their license.
Can you give some examples?
>He said the 6-foot guideline “sort of just appeared” and wasn’t based on any data, and that such a study would be difficult to do. He also said he didn’t recall any studies about masking young children, but said the guideline was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s decision.
https://oversight.house.gov/release/hearing-wrap-up-dr-fauci...
Making up arbitrary rules and then enforcing them saying "trust the science" is not coming from a place of honesty. Especially when combined with the deletion of emails.
First the strong rebuttal: "Verifiably false information at time of sharing" in this case would mean you have evidence that Fauci knew distance played no role in infection rates, or that a distance other than 6 feet was better, and put out information suggesting 6 feet was correct anyway. You have no evidence of this, of course, because this is not what happened.
The more general rebuttal is that you are revealing exactly the type of "can't be trusted with details" that kneecapped public health communications throughout COVID.
The question is why Fauci selected 6 feet instead of 4, 5, 7, 8 or even 6.1, 6.148, or even 6.489598365983 feet.
The reality is that there's no real reason to select any of these over any other. There's a continuous curve of difficulty of adherence and a continuous curve of transmission reduction.
Any specific number would have been "arbitrary", but very obviously a clear guideline is better than a completely non-actionable "stay as far away as you reasonably can."
This is like hauling out the guy who set interstate speed limits at 60mph and not 59 or 59.5 or 59.84846898 and then blasting him for selecting the "arbitrary" 60 miles per hour.
Does that make sense to you?
Does that make sense to you?
There's not "a lack of information." The information is there's a continuous curve of transmission. You could have complete information and you would still need to pick an "arbitrary" point.
> it is 6ft and that's the science, follow the rules or don't enter public spaces
Link to which guidance you feel most closely stated this. I have never seen any guidance from CDC, NIH, FDA, or anywhere else that resembles this.
"Can you show me where?"
"No, but there's less trust now, ergo the government did it!"
Another hypothesis for you: You were peppered with bullshit from non-government sources so thoroughly and so frequently that you abdicated your responsibility to understand what's true and what's not.
This is, of course, the goal of such information campaigns.
In theory, I buy the argument that the government should be able to successfully overcome the 24/7 bullshit machine that you plugged yourself into, but I personally struggle to imagine a good/safe/non-authoritarian way for it to achieve that.
So I'm left with the conclusion that we each bear some amount of responsibility to try to counteract the game of telephone when it comes to understanding matters of personal or national importance, and you (like many other perfectly fine/smart/honorable people) failed to meet that obligation. Not really a personal critique given you didn't know the game you were playing and how proactive you needed to be in it, but here we are, and I'd recommend a high-agency look at how you chose to find and interpret information. The institutions were not the problem here.
Can't see how this goes wrong!
> it absolutely results in a single unified direction for that system.
Like below, you must live in an alternate timeline. There are lots of people who chose to "go their own way."
That's why I didn't list it in my response, though I think there's even a meaningful difference between "the church" (a super heterogenous type of organization) and "the Catholic church" (a single, highly centralized organization).
We have some insight from Decision theory. Klein and Kahneman have both identified required properties for valuable expert intuition (or knowledge, tacit or not) to be available to aquire. (here's a simplified version of this by Veritasium [1])
Most people would see through the conartist claiming "I'm a roulette expert. I've done roulette for 10 years, I have 10 years of roulette expertise, you should listen to me when it comes to what number you should bet on a roulette!" Yet we all fall for other form of expert where their problem domain follow similar structures that makes expert knowledge acquisition either hard or impossible.
But every expert with a PhD want to claim their expertise to be as valid as the actual valid expertise. Combine that with internet, short form (tweet etc) communication, we tend to dumb down the conversation using "expert" to cover all the domains, to the fraud-experts advantage.
Certain fields, you should probably trust the expert almost blindly (Emergency Care, firefighters) but others, maybe not (clinical psychologist, policy maker, economists). Problem is that if we just bundle them all up, people will end up not trusting either.
"bundling up" is a recurring tactic by conartists of all kind (subprime mortgage anyone?)
If we would "rate" different field on their expertise validity (or scientific validity etc) easily understandable by layman, we might regain some institutional trust.
But that would cause a crazy amount of resistance from certain fields (macro econ, psychology, nutritional science, etc) and in real term wouldn't happen
[1] Vertiasium https://youtu.be/5eW6Eagr9XA?feature=shared
And on the opposite side, should no clinical psychologist be trusted? Is nutritional science all wrong?
No ... no, I don't.
This is why deception by officials or experts is dangerous, even if they think "it's for the greater good".
Simulacra•4h ago
thinkharderdev•3h ago
techpineapple•3h ago
Simulacra•17m ago
AnimalMuppet•2m ago
1. Many people find the default accepted worldview to be empty or unsatisfying. Aliens or bigfoot give them something else, something "out there" to believe in.
2. Aliens or bigfoot give them the sense of being "in the know", one of the few who "accept the truth". It lets them feel good about themselves, that they are special.
3. Aliens and bigfoot don't ask them to change their life in any way. University scientists and government experts say some uncomfortable things sometimes.