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.
Actually if the best evidence you’ve got doesn’t allow for strong conclusions, then you should think of it as a situation where you don’t know, not a situation where you know whatever explanation has the most certainty.
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
“Science acting in untrustworthy ways”
Its not, really. The reality is that there is no respect for preserving clarity. Powerful interest groups decided that muddying the waters was the best way preserve their interests. This became easier with the current explosion of tech and social media
I’m amazed by how many stupid people say to me “there’s no evidence for evolution”.
The anti-intellectualization of America is gaining speed.
It accelerated after COVID.
For me, I felt the biggest change around 2016 (in the US, coinciding with Cult 45 and Russian disinfo farms). There was definitely another enormous surge of insanity during COVID shutdowns (coinciding with a boom of social media grifters and moderation failures).
“There’s no evidence for evolution”
So where’d we come from?
“God made us!”
And how’d he do that?
“He picked up a handful of dust and breathed life into it”
And what proof do you have of this?
“The bible says so”
Is that all?
“It’s all you need!”
And that makes sense to you?
“Of course! Where else would we have come from? Monkeys? lol, that’s insane! ”
Sometimes science is a bitch! /s
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.)
If you cite sources once, you can save them and cite them easily via copy paste.
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.
There’s research showing people get incrementally less intelligent as oxygen ratios get worse.
And I thought the Lead Generation thing was bad, we’re fucked.
There is also microplastics and hormone altering substances. But since we put it all out there ourselves it’s less getting fucked and more some type of masturbation.
So it’s pretty established science that RNA doesn’t become part of your genome right? That’s just not a thing that happens, which is why we don’t have to worry about mRNA vaccines altering our genomes.
Is that the scientific consensus?
Yes, mRNA does not enter your cell nucleus. And on the other hand, DNA doesn’t leave the cell nucleus. They don’t ever meet in person.
In theory, proteins could read that mRNA, transcribe it into DNA and build it into your DNA. If you find a way to make them do this you can go and collect your Nobel Prize!
Seriously, when humans are able to do that it would mean we had control over our genome. If that was something currently possible, the Corona vaccine would be the most boring application.
But what about reverse transcriptase? Isn’t that a protein that does exactly that, which we’ve known about for decades? Isn’t that what RNA retroviruses use to encode their RNA genome into the host genome?
What’s going on? I thought you just said the scientific consensus was that RNA doesn’t get encoded into the DNA genome, that it was scientific consensus?
Should I be taking this as evidence that people declaring a scientific consensus are arrogant, sloppy, and dangerous in their lack of consideration of all the angles?
Should I really get a nobel prize for pointing out a fact in every high school biology textbook?
Perhaps you should read again what I wrote. I wrote:
They never meet in person
The problem with people like you is that you don’t understand enough to get why the mRNA of the vaccine suddenly and “on it’s own” being transcribed into DNA very likely* isn’t an issue. You would need to read a bit more than just high school biology textbooks.
But if you stumble upon it without a deeper understanding you get panicky because you now believe that there is a chance of that happening.
*Yes, there is also a chance of a chimpanzees writing the entire encyclopedia of Brockhaus by randomly hitting around on a keyboard.
For this reason I added: if you discover how we can make proteins do that you would get a Nobel prize.
There is a lot research trying to modify the DNA with means like CRISPR and other techniques that hopefully will allow us to integrate vaccines (and other stuff) into the DNA. But that costs a lot of effort and it doesn’t just happen randomly just because there is mRNA and RNA transcriptase.
Even with latest efforts, this only works in vitro. Means you take single cells, change something in the structure of the mRNA and then add certain proteins and then these can be transcribed into the DNA of specific cells.
Even when you imagine you go full tinhead circle and Invision Big Pharma to add these components (which would be dumb on their part) somehow in a way that it works in your cells, this would only produce DNA that is there until the cell divides. Because that still doesn’t integrate the change into your chromosome, it’s just the transcription process into DNA.
You would need to make some additional steps to add it into your chromosomes. And even that’s not the end of it! Because you would also need to make it in a way that your immune system doesn’t immediately destroy these cells.
I hope this makes it more clear, sorry if it is not well written since English isn’t my native language. If you want to, I can try and find some sources in English for you to read on this. But it’s really not something you can get behind in just reading a few papers.
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
No one clicked the link.
No one saw what the wording of the question was.
“Do you have confidence in scientists to act in the best interests of the public?”
“A fair amount”
“A great deal”
“Not too much/None at all”
I’m not Mathematician but these don’t add up.
73% “A fair amount” 23% “A great deal” 27% “Not too much”
Makes 123%
People who have a great deal of confidence also have a fair amount.
So the 23% is included in the 73%, giving (50 + 23) + 27 = 100.
