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The University of Colorado Boulder has an article up about a paper [open, DOI: 10.1038/s41562-018-0520-3] [DX] published Monday in Nature Human Behavior which finds that U.S. adults:
who hold the most extreme views opposing genetically modified (GM) foods think they know most about GM food science, but actually know the least
The paper's key finding is that:
the more strongly people report being opposed to GM foods, the more knowledgeable they think they are on the topic, but the lower they score on an actual knowledge test.
Interestingly the authors found similar results applied to gene therapy, but were unable prove a similar conclusion when they tested against climate change denialism. This leads them to hypothesize that:
the climate change debate has become so politically polarized that people's attitudes depend more on which group they affiliate with than how much they know about the issue.
It might be instructive to run similar studies in a number of areas such as
Vaccinations
Nuclear Power
Homeopathy
...
Where would you like to see this study done next?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @07:02PM (6 children)
The captain of the Titanic knew more about ships than almost any passenger.
Certainly he knew more than some nervous Nellie who "had a bad feeling" about it.
Definitely knew more than some old chap who said, "Maiden voyage, eh? Biggest ever? Maybe I'll book the second trip if she has one".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @07:07PM
That right there is the problem. Whether or not Joe Blow understands this stuff is of minimal impact on policy. Nobody is really taking those folks seriously. The problem is that the people who are making the decisions have a naive sense of what's going to happen as a result of these decisions.
Certain classes of genetic modification are unlikely to result in problems, but the motivation for the modification is rather short-sighted and often not well understood. We've already got genes that couldn't previously get into weeds getting into weeds because they were moved from one completely unrelated organism to another that can share genetic materials with weeds. This is a particular problem with pesticides that no longer work on the weeds they were supposed to affect.
OTOH, taking a gene from one variety of apple and putting it into another is unlikely to have significant negative impacts, so long as the nutritional value is monitored. This is something that could have been done previously with non-GM methods, but can now be done in a much more controlled and precise way.
At the end of the day, this research about the views is important, but it does serve as cover for the corporations that are behaving in an irresponsible way. We can't way until an entire region is covered in super-weeds to be more careful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @07:31PM
Please don't tell me this is a White-house metaphor.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 15 2019, @08:47PM (2 children)
The Titanic would have been totally fine had there not been a lot of screw-ups (going too far north, going too fast especially at night, not having enough lifeboats on board for everybody, and the ship nearest to the sinking not responding at all to what was happening) and bad luck (hitting the iceberg in exactly the wrong way). Her near-identical sister ship the Olympic did just fine and was decommissioned 24 years later, and some of the engineering ideas used in the Titanic were substantial improvements over previous designs and are still in use today.
However, a more general rule of life is that you don't want to be the first penguin off the ice floe. Letting someone else risk their butt to see if something is safe rather than testing it yourself first is a wise move.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @09:09PM (1 child)
The reason for all those "screw-ups" was that the owners wanted to make "fastest transatlantic crossing" - an enormous marketing boon.
If the captain had put his foot down and refused these dangerous expediences (at the cost of his job, pensoon, and reputation), the Titanic would never have sank. Insider trading and corporate greed killed all those people.
At least the company survived; the ship was fully insured.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 15 2019, @11:04PM
The screw-up that has nothing to do with that was the actions, or more precisely inactions, of the Californian: They were stopped close enough to the sinking to see the ship's rockets being launched as a last ditch effort to try to get help, and did absolutely nothing about it for hours.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday January 16 2019, @12:30AM
Well, yes, confirmation bias and post-hoc reasoning are the key to good science!