faetal on 9/4/2015 at 10:24
Still, none of that has anything to do with science or research expertise, but in how the media portrays research and how businesses and government manipulate or subvert it.
As someone who actually reads the research papers on a very regular basis, I can tell you that there are none of the problems you are mentioning there.
It seems like you are throwing out the baby with the bathwater. "I can't trust The Man, so that means that anyone who sounds like they know what they are talking about must be suspect" is baseless. If that's your stance and you're sticking to it, fair enough, but if so, then I think my time is wasted trying to talk past the fingers in your ears.
bjack on 9/4/2015 at 15:19
I am giving examples of why people feel the way they do. They do not trust the science because of the manipulation from all sides. It may not be a valid view, granted, but it is a factor that is not going away.
What I am reading about the "settled side" is contrary opinions and conclusions should be outright rejected from now on. That type of viewpoint gives many people pause. The tactics of the pro side also turns off a lot of people. Yes, the coal industry would like this to go away and is carefully choosing data to try to show holes in the theory. Or they may be spreading disinformation. This raises the ire of the settled side and furthers their political stance of calling every one a denier. But not every single contrary scientist out there is in the pocket of the boogie men, just as the settled side is not in a huge colluded effort to bring about world wide socialism.
More on topic:
Anti intellectualism comes and goes. There was a nasty spat of it at the end of the 19th century that eventually grew into our buddies the Nazis. Today we have the natural foods craze, anti-vaccinators, and yes, AGW deniers. I am not in any of these camps, but I do understand why people feel the need to be in them.
Take the field of medicine, doctors do follow the advice of research, but they also get swayed by big pharma. A lot of research out there is now frequently funded by big pharma. Some beneficial medications are withheld from the public, while others that are approved are killing patients. In the USA, many doctors' offices are filled with promotional pens, charts, booklets, anatomical models, etc. from pharmaceutical firms. They offer loads of freebies - trial samples of meds that are supposed to fix the latest disease of the month. 4 out of 10 children (I made that up) now need speed to treat their ADD. Autism is now a spectrum that has been stretched so far that nearly anyone can fall into it.
So how do some cope with this? They say all traditional medicine is bunk and go off to their chiropractor, Chinese Herbalist, or Homeopathic quack. I am not in that camp. I still trust doctors, but not so much when it comes to pushing pills because they get a cut, or are swayed by swag.
As for AGW, maybe you don't get the same bullshit propaganda that we get here in the USA - that every issue is due to AGW. We have a president claiming AGW aggravated his daughter's asthma. Every forest fire, every known cyclical drought, every storm or lack there of is due solely to AGW? Corn costs high? AGW. Outright lies that we are experiencing the worst storms ever and all due to climate change. Most Americans are sick and tired of this blaming nearly everything bad in the world on AGW. We find it dishonest. Al Gore is a joke and a hypocrite and still a big poster child for AGW. One cannot deny that the political usurpation of AGW theory has gone a long way to make people feel it is false and give up caring. Or, they get really mad about the bullshit claims that do not come true and reject the idea outright.
Is AGW real? Probably. I still need to look into surface vs atmospheric temps. I still buy into the heat island effect as being at least a factor. Is climate change going to be the terrible thing everyone says it will be? Maybe. Not sure about that one yet. Still open to the idea though. I am not closed off. :D
faetal on 9/4/2015 at 15:28
My point is that you are not reacting to "science" you are reacting to a simplified portrayal of science.
I can read 2 papers after one another which contradict each other and still feel like I've gained information by doing so.
Saying "well none of it makes sense then", is just throwing toys out of the pram and justifying your own laziness / ignorance by blaming the experts for it.
bjack on 9/4/2015 at 16:23
You keep saying the "I" am reacting to this or that. No, I am describing what others (your dilettantes) are doing. I am not saying that I am confused. I am saying the public at large is confused, or just frustrated and apathetic. They do not make a distinction between "the science" and the politics. To them, it is all the same thing.
The scientists can work in their own isolation and do their best. Fine. Don't complain though that you and your science are misunderstood. Neil deGrasse Tyson thought he was being clever with his Christmas post about Newton. I thought it was very funny. I saw it before all the controversy. Many felt it was a terrible slight against Christians. Since he works in a world that is pretty much atheist, he apparently has a world view that everyone else feels the same, or at least would get the joke. Even with his exceptional intelligence, he did not fathom his comment could be taken as a severe slight. I think the outrage was absolutely silly, but he should have expected those words would piss off a number of people.
Scientific research is one thing. Using it to push a political, social, sales agenda, etc. is another. It may very well be valid, but credibility wanes after a while if the story constantly is changing. The masses don't get it, OK? It goes away totally when the dogma police are dispatched. By that I am talking about efforts to illegalize dissent and debate.
If you are really concerned about this, you need to find a better way to explain why there is a polar vortex and how this is due to warming. The average Joe Smith out there is going to hear, "The coldest winter every is caused by Global Warming" I understand how it can be, but most people will laugh in your face and call you a hack. You've got a terrible PR problem here. And calling people idiots for pointing it out is not doing you or your cause any favors. No one likes a smart ass. :p :D Except for a few people here.
faetal on 9/4/2015 at 19:34
Well, you've displayed stunning amounts of ignorance in this thread, dressed it up as not being anchored to dogma and put the term "experts" in quotation marks as often as possible (like Tony does with "peer-reviewed"), so I'm not sure now switching the goal posts and making it about your projected notions of other people is supposed to fool anyone.
Anyway it's stupid - people trust science plenty when they're using electronic consumer goods, going to hospital, taking medicine, watching cool documentaries about wildlife etc... it's only when science tells them something unpalatable that suddenly all of this scrutiny rears its head. When the media is saying "science tells us chocolate is a superfood" people are all "yay science", then when a separate report warns that this isn't quite the case, science gets the blame for being inconsistent or whatever.
The end result is almost always people talking like they know better than the "experts" because of the Dunning-Kruger effect, as if all of these highly trained people are oblivious to the insights which seem so obvious to you, so you notion yourself as this plucky, straight-talking underdog idiot savant and the "experts" (yes, I'm parodying your quotations) are pitched as faceless drones blindly following some elaborate brainwashing programme fuelled by The System or whatever.
So while your ideas about why Joe Public (whoever the hell that might be) is distrusting of science seems to be just an arbitrary conflation with distrust of authority, but only when it isn't saying things people like. e.g. "Humans are causing climate change? Nah, it's all a conspiracy or something, I'd know, because I read an article somewhere by a guy who said so. Then I read another one and agreed with that too, then I learned how to basically google just for things which backed that up, so now I'm an expert".
tl;dr - people need to trust their knee-jerk opinions on stuff less and realise that blind trust of experts may not be ideal, but it is way ahead of thinking you are better equipped to deal with the topic, which is really the only other option.
Yakoob on 18/4/2015 at 20:11
Bringing this thread from slow death since i wanted to bring up a specific (
http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/well/2015/04/15/the-right-dose-of-exercise-for-a-longer-life) example i just read in the New York times and ask some honest questions. Tldr version is that two fairly big sale studies show the positive effect of exercise.
Thats all good and aligns with common knowledge but further scrutiny reveals the two studies were not randomized and based on self reporting which is notoriously inaccurate.
Quote:
Of course, these studies relied on people's shaky recall of exercise habits and were not randomized experiments, so can't prove that any exercise dose caused changes in mortality risk, only that exercise and death risks were associated.
Still, the associations were strong and consistent and the takeaway message seems straightforward, according to the researchers.
While most of the article is pretty good and objective, It's that "still" that peeves me, and I think the reason I take issue with modern journalism. The author acknowledges the shortcoming of the study, glosses over number of other faults, and "still" draws a conclusion which i don.t think can be confidently drawn due to the study's design. The " according to scientists" feel like a cheap excuse to justify a conclusion from a shaky correlation at best.
So heres my honest question: Am I reading into it too much though? Maybe it's not the author but me who is jumping to the conclusion?
There is a second part to my question but I think I will actually hold off on that until getting some feedback first.
EDIT: perhaps an even (
http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-flavor-drives-nutrition-1428596326) better example would be this article from World Journal which takes one study and somehow manages to arrive at the pretty bold conclusion:
Quote:
The lesson: Spend money on the good stuff. Vote for real flavor with your pocketbook, and let the free market work. Remember what buying wine and beer was like before Americans took them seriously? Now imagine what the supermarket might look like if we took flavor seriously. Stop counting carbs. Don't live in fear of fat. Start eating food that tastes better. We'll all be skinnier, healthier and a whole lot happier.
faetal on 18/4/2015 at 20:19
This is kind of the difference between scientific and the media. If you want to make unsupported statements in a news report, you can and then get picked up on it in the comments section. Do the same in a paper and it gets bounced back by the reviewers, or worse, if they somehow let it though, you get a "Comment on..." letter published to the same journal by another researcher tearing you a new one, which you then have to respond to, or issue an erratum if there was a genuine error in the paper, or retract the paper if the mistake affects the overall message of the paper.
The media can report on science any way it pleases, which is why, with various media channels all doing that, science often seems to contradict itself.
bjack on 18/4/2015 at 21:20
Yakoob, I have similar distaste for the "still" argument. You are not jumping to conclusions. It is a term used by activists with a specific agenda. It is propaganda. Now, I should search back through my previous posts to see if I used that term too! :cheeky:
There are so many factors that regulate life span. Most of them are genetic, at least that seems to be the latest gospel. This is what I was taught oh so many years ago and it still seems to be the case. While we have free will in actions, our bodies are pretty much predestined to go "kabloowee" at a specific time. You may be able to move the detonation forward a few years, but not much. One can move it back (earlier) by smoking too much, drinking a lot, and going to spin the needle parties with bi-sexual bikers.
Exercise may help you feel better as you age, but it may not extend life. You will probably die when you were programmed to die, but if you exercise, your older years may be more pleasant. The same thing goes with diet.
For the layman, it is best to consider most media reports of medical breakthroughs as questionable. If the news comes from Dr. OZ, then you should give it the attention it deserves (I'll let you decide what that is.) Follow the money. While it is not wrong to profit, it is wrong (in my moral sense) to profit from ignorance if it involves your physical being. Gluten free is a good example of this. And this leads to a question... I wonder if all those people that have gone gluten free are really feeling better just because they are not getting huge carb loads from bread? It seems they are saying they feel better over all. That is not what celiac disease is about though. My sister in law almost died from it. Gluten free people don't talk about not having to shit blood every 2 minutes, being hospitalized and having blood transfusions. They talk about how they don't have head aches anymore, etc. It makes a mockery of real disease. Or maybe it does not. Maybe they are really intolerant of Gluten, but my bet it is lack of carbo load.
faetal on 18/4/2015 at 21:39
The gluten free thing is a reactionary co-opting of coeliac disease (a disease caused by enzymes called transglutaminases cross-linking a certain peptide from the gluten protein to other self-proteins leading to an attack from the acquired immune system to novel protein topology) into a generic and ill-defined complaint, probably linked to irritable bowel disease which is an idiopathic and widespread complaint with no known origin. The people who self-diagnose gluten intolerance are probably a large portion just paranoid people with poorly defined health problems, a smaller portion of people who have an intolerance to something which contains gluten (hence are accidentally treating themselves when they stop all gluten-containing foods), plus a tiny portion of undiagnosed coeliac sufferers (though this is probably quite a minute amount as coeliac is quite serious, so tends to get diagnosed during childhood since the '80s).
bjack on 18/4/2015 at 23:24
Coeliac yes, not celiac as I wrote. I have succumbed to the banality of the internet. I was never a great speller and I made a mistake of spelling reliance upon a search on my misspelled word. Yep, of course it would come up! So does "alot", a non word. However, I refuse to use the silly "can care less". While it is not nice to point out incorrect English of another, that one irks me a little. While I can't care less that someone can care less than I can, I do care that they do not understand the phrase in the first place. I find that those that "can care less" will vote labor or democrat. Lower case is intentional. Lower class, you know... :ebil: Common... it's a joke! :joke:
And faetal, what do you think of the recent pushing of "Humira" for lots of auto immune diseases? I think it is premature, but if it helps people, OK... but the side effects, especially death, seem to be severe. And no, I have not read the papers on it... Remember, I am a complete fucking idiot, remember? :)
