Tony_Tarantula on 15/2/2015 at 23:01
Quote Posted by froghawk
On the medical front, from thalidomide to vioxx, constant lawsuits over side effects or pushing drugs for incorrect applications, and commercials that mostly consist of a lengthy list of side effects, people don't trust drug companies or the FDA anymore. After the economic crash, why would you trust banks? etc.
To try to write off this whole issue as basically being 'because stupid people' is utterly absurd and intellectually lazy. It's much more complicated than that.
For what it's worth one of the ladies in my Toastmasters club used to work for the FDA. She has a graduate degree in nutrition and made a habit of making off the record recommendations to folks that she encountered in her work. Frequently this included saying that foods widely regarded as "safe" weren't. This lasted until her supervisor got wind of it, came into her office, and told her to zip it because "you need to remember where your paycheck comes from".
Kolya on 15/2/2015 at 23:08
Quote Posted by Aja
I see lots of web ads these days that say things like, "New weight-loss formula that has angered doctors!"
I like the one the best that says: "Mother finds a way to lose weight over night that angers doctors".
Since I never click, I don't know what she did, but my bet is on childbirth. :D
Tony_Tarantula on 16/2/2015 at 00:27
I'm pretty sure I lost a few pounds last night as well:
Inline Image:
http://i.imgur.com/2pKPkEF.pngMy personal favorites were the ads that claim that you "could have up to 40lbs of waste trapped in your colon". In practical terms this means you'd have to have a freaking basketball-sized mass stuck in there and not have noticed something was wrong.
demagogue on 16/2/2015 at 01:44
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
Nobody's mentioned the big elephant in the room. ...
Wiki Leaks as an organization does belong on that list.
What struck me is that much of the information they leaked was already publicly available in other forms, and the people most interested in Wiki Leaks information seemed to be the ones most oblivious to what was already out there. I mean, people are suddenly really interested in X when wiki leaks mentions it, but their eyes glaze over when you talk about all the articles on X going back 20 years. If they were people already following the field that wiki leaks helped, that's great. But that's not what most of the hoopla about Wiki leaks was about. Its main purpose was to embarrass officials and raise a little cain, and Assange was on a personal crusade to shame the US at any cost. It's easy to do, anyway. But we shouldn't fool ourselves. It wasn't designed to be in any way helpful to researchers, because the last thing on the planet their organization is good for is providing quality research data. Crusades make for shit policymaking.
Also the examples you (Tony) mentioned aren't reflecting the debate going in the academic community.
E.g., nutritionists have long criticized the Food Pyramid as bullshit, though some of your examples are more fair than others. When science gets involved with politics, the two get intertwined, and you can always criticize politicizing that goes on. Political Action Theory describes it, and Shelia Jasanoff is the leading scholar on it. But that's a different point than attacking and throwing out academic science altogether. It also doesn't mean you can "purify" the process and take the politics out, since that opens the door to outright authoritarianism & then the science really gets left out. Anyway, this issue is my bread and butter. I've written 120 page articles on it, so I can't exactly fit it into a forum post.
Tony_Tarantula on 16/2/2015 at 04:23
We're talking about optics, not what goes on behind the scenes.
I also think you are grossly overestimating how informed the general public is. I've been called crazy numerous times for stating that the government collects virtually all email communications...including here on TTLG. Turns out I was right for over a decade.
Not that any of Wikipedia's data was useful for "research". It was useful because it provided, for the first time, hard proof of policies and consitutional violations that previously would have gotten one labeled as an Alex Jones worshipper and a basketcase for taking seriously. The media's downplayed it severely but do not underestimate the ripple effect that's had in the common psyche.
For some of the others it has as much to do with optics as it does. The fat that there was a debate in academia is largely irrelevent when it comes to shaping public opinion. For eons the FDA treated the food pyramid like it was gospel...and many people behaved accordingly because they thought the FDA was credible. It turns out they weren't, and now that they've been publicly revealed as putting groupthink and politics over science it was only a matter of time until people started being skeptical of every other item the FDA pushes as common wisdom.
demagogue on 16/2/2015 at 04:59
Ok, let's try the virtue ethics response here. Not my position per se, but anyway an entertaining & enlightening one.
Wait. Let's start with what's even grounding the OP and the topic at hand: The general public is stupid. Fucking stupid. Full stop. They bring stupid to the next level. They are a level of stupid Obi Wan Kenobi hasn't seen since, well, long before you were born. Fuck 'em. Why do we even have to bother informing them? And optics? Watering down facts to the point they're useless just so their pea mush brains can misunderstand them anyway? It's wasted effort. They can anyway Google that shit or take their ass to a library and find everything they need to know. They have no one to blame for their lack of information and medieval prejudices but themselves. So I don't underestimate how stupid and uninformed the public is at all; I take it for granted.
But. There is still a need for good policy, and good policy calls for good science. Since the general public is so distrustful of science and fact-based reasoning because they are such neanderthalic urine-brained doges, we can hardly trust them or their handlers feeding them emotive conspiracy theories for their own ends to do the job. It is up to us, the reasonable and literate, to pay attention to good science and contribute towards policymaking, either crafting good policies or criticizing existing policies according to the best available science so they can be better.
The purpose of journalism is maybe to explain why policy was made the way it was, to give the public a record of what happened -- why these circumstances led to this policy -- so they can't complain they didn't know what was going on, or that it was all behind closed doors. They could have participated if they ever got informed on a subject and had an intelligent response to make, but they didn't, so this is what you need to know, and if you want to know more, do your own homework. (I'm fully granting that all of us can't be experts in every field. We're all ignoramuses in one field or another.) Journalism should be sufficiently detailed that a reasonably intelligent person could fill in the missing pieces and be part of the public debate; but for the general public, which has no capacity to contribute even if they wanted to, it's only explanatory.
But it's not like journalism is ever going to be able to explain good science on its own terms itself, much less to a level the public is going to be competent to make good policy out of. So it's kind of unreasonable to expect it to do a job it wasn't designed to handle, and would be a clusterfuck for policymaking if we forced the issue.
Tony_Tarantula on 16/2/2015 at 05:10
That's also a massive generalization. The majority of the public simply doesn't care, and is just trying to get through each day at their soul sucking dead end jobs.
Some of this whole storm seems like Academia is throwing a childish temper tantrum. They're outraged that people DARE question their conclusions, and angry that lesser beings would demand to see some proof before they accept a hypothesis. And of course it's completely unreasonable to question "settled" science even after countless incidents in the past years where the "settled science" turned out to be complete bullshit.
On the contrary I'm seeing...I wouldn't call it a greater divide. There's more people camping down in the middle who are skeptical of everything they read, a lot of people who rabidly espouse either mainstream groupthink or fringe new age/alex jones groupthink, and relatively few who fall at the edges of the ideological standard deviation.
Here's the challenge. Exactly why should the public trust mainstream academia blindly anymore? They've been caught red handed lying so many times in the past decade that it's entirely justified for people to want to see the proof.
faetal on 16/2/2015 at 10:21
I spent 4 years studying to get the point where I felt like I could properly understand science in general and be able to (most of the time) separate good research from bad research. Bear in mind that this was FULL TIME study. I then spent an additional 4 years getting to the point where I felt I understood chemical immuntoxicology in human skin (which is pretty niche) that to the point where I could even hope to discuss on the same level as others specialised in this field. It's not a case of ivory towers, or intellectual snobbery, it's a far more simple case of there being such a huge volume of information you need to assimilate in order to be able to have a mechanistic understanding of the workings of biology. The idea that scientists just need to condense this into handy public-friendly pamphlets which make it all super clear (not forgetting that this already happens to a huge extent for those who can be bothered to seek the information out) and deliver it to everyone in the world simultaneously in a way which means that the average person understands the current trends of medical science is ASTOUNDINGLY naive to the complexity of medical science.
It's not that we want all that delicious knowledge for ourselves, it's more that unless you have a few hours a day for a week or five to spend with me while I explain exactly why A causes C and B doesn't cause C, but sometimes causes D which resembles C; there is lliterally no way you are going to understand it at the same level as I do, because I have years of learning stuffed in my mind-library. At some point, you do have to trust some experts, because without the tools to differentiate, people like Tony talking about the flaws in vaccines and global warming theory may sound almost as plausible as those who have a clue how to interpret research (and most key, avoid confirmation bias and cherry-picking). And if Tony starts to sound like a plausible source of scientific reasoning, you're in quite serious trouble.
One thing to take into account also is the (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) Dunning-Kruger effect. People who actually know what they are talking about, tend to downplay the language of discovery and hence scientific reporting sounds to people like a bunch of very indecisive nerds who don't know how to make their mind up as they couch their findings in terms like "most likely", "best fits the model", "appears to suggest" etc.... Whereas people who read a few slushy opinion pieces from sources they are ideologically aligned with, feel totally confident to wade in with a "telling it how it is" attitude, despite being completely dumb to the complexity of what they are talking about. A great example being the media, who take these tentative findings and turn it into EASTER EGGS CURE EVERY CANCER or whatever.
This isn't to say that people shouldn't question experts, far from it. But people shouldn't consider a few hours worth of googling (often using leading search terms, such as
vaccines efficacy flawed or similar, which would hugely skew results) to be somehow a legitimate challenge to years of education and experience. There are very good reasons to e.g. mistrust the pharmaceutical industry (I just finished reading Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre and won't be taking any medicines which aren't out of patent without some seriously objective justification for the foreseeable future), but this isn't because people in the know are inherently untrustworthy, it's because of the usual bad effects of capital and markets pushing everything towards a better profit margin and guess what - the guys selling herbal remedies are making money too (in fact, the largest seller of alt med is the giant pharma companies).
Not sure where I'm exactly going with all of this. But yeah, there is no sure fire way to trust anyone, expert of otherwise, but if you don't have the education to know otherwise, at least keep your scepticism open-ended. Replacing lack of knowledge with bluster suggesting you know
better than said experts, just makes you look stupid.
DDL on 16/2/2015 at 11:08
My favourite bit from that page is this:
Quote:
The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, because lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras.
I just....I don't even
faetal on 16/2/2015 at 11:17
You'd at least want to confirm with a camera first, right?
