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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: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday January 15 2019, @08:34PM
I tend to think that applies to a much wider range of people than we might want to admit. And no, academics aren't immune from this problem either, although the smarter ones do manage to reduce that influence in fields where ideas have to face empirical testing.
As far as "non-experts who've thoroughly reviewed relevant expert analysis", I'm still fairly skeptical about declaring something to be The Truth in a subject I'm not an expert in without good evidence backing up whatever is being said, mostly because those same biases and fallacious worldviews influence both which expert analyses are included in that review and how the non-expert interpreted what the experts wrote. My general viewpoint on the maximum levels of truth attainment possible depends on the relationship between the person in question and the subject matter at hand, and what sort of corroboration and evidence is available to back up their statement.
My experience is that there's a lot of BS out there coming from a lot of different sources, and that you're far better off having tiers of knowledge in between The Truth and compete BS to cover things like "This seems likely based on what I've read" or "Bob's never lied to me before, so he probably did catch a pretty big fish there even if it wasn't as big as he says", and the level of how true a nugget of knowledge needs to be to act on it depends a great deal on how important the action will be. As for pundits, Facebook memes, and anybody involved in politics, I don't believe a word of it without non-human evidence and corroboration.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.