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from the That's-what-they-WANT-you-to-think dept.
In the Salon
There seems to be a lot of science being thrown at the "Trump Phenomenon." Salon covers yet another, and interviews the author.
A new paper, recently presented at the American Political Science Association's annual convention, suggests a widespread motive driving people to share fake news, conspiracy theories and other hostile political rumors. "Many status-obsessed, yet marginalized individuals experience a 'Need for Chaos' and want to 'watch the world burn'," lead author Michael Petersen tweeted, announcing the availability of a preprint copy.
Truth, in such a worldview, is beside the point, which offers a new perspective on the limitations of fact-checking. The motivation behind sharing or spreading narratives one may not even believe can help make sense of a variety of threatening or confusing recent developments in advanced democracies. It also sheds light on disturbing similarities with outbreaks of ethnic or genocidal violence, such as those seen in Rwanda and the Balkan nations during the 1990s.
Preprint of the paper available at PsyArXiv, here. [DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/6m4ts]
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday September 13 2018, @12:39AM (1 child)
Long-Term Capital Management [wikipedia.org]. Led by two Nobel prize winners, including Myron Scholes, of the Black-Scholes Model [wikipedia.org], which is taught all over the world.
Mars Climate Orbiter [wired.com], designed by friggin' rocket scientists, burned up because they didn't convert English to metric.
VW emissions scandal [wikipedia.org]. Everybody does say German engineers suck.
Those are a handful of relatively recent examples off the top of my head. You don't need too many of those to justify the average man looking askance at claims made by the experts.
Now, you may say those don't add up to "epic," but I reckon they're more deserving of that description than the neat skateboard tricks the kids do like to post to YouTube.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 13 2018, @08:39AM
Commenting as an actual rocket scientist, that is not true. The real reason is more involved and had to do with project (mis) management and communication. The software that was used had worked multiple times before, but was ordained from high that it be converted to metric, which was also fine...but not all departments got the memo.
As Feynman noted in one of his books, the real genius of Apollo was not technical, but organizational.