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posted by takyon on Tuesday January 15 2019, @06:29PM   Printer-friendly
from the Eat-the-fish,-Mr.-Burns dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Gaaark on Wednesday January 16 2019, @12:07AM (1 child)

    by Gaaark (41) on Wednesday January 16 2019, @12:07AM (#787118) Journal

    The problem I have with GMO's is the thinking behind it and others:

    Lets fuck with food for profit.
    Lets fuck with the environment for profit.
    If we kill a few people, it's okay because lawsuits are cheap, we won't probably go to jail and look at the profit!

    We don't even need to think about consequences, so long as there is PROFIT!

    We need to be thinking about more than just profit.

    --
    --- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
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  • (Score: 2) by Kalas on Wednesday January 16 2019, @11:34AM

    by Kalas (4247) on Wednesday January 16 2019, @11:34AM (#787339)

    More than that, like you said I think the biggest problem is that corporate law seems set up to let companies literally get away with murder if they just pay the requisite fines and/or bribes. If the people standing to make the most profit also stood the biggest chance of real jail time we'd see a lot less blatant supervillainy these days.