During the pandemic, a third of people in the UK reported that their trust in science had increased, we recently discovered. But 7% said that it had decreased. Why is there such variety of responses?
For many years, it was thought that the main reason some people reject science was a simple deficit of knowledge and a mooted(*) fear of the unknown. Consistent with this, many surveys reported that attitudes to science are more positive among those people who know more of the textbook science.
But if that were indeed the core problem, the remedy would be simple: inform people about the facts. This strategy, which dominated science communication through much of the later part of the 20th century, has, however, failed at multiple levels.
In controlled experiments, giving people scientific information was found not to change attitudes. And in the UK, scientific messaging over genetically modified technologies has even backfired.
[...] Recent evidence has revealed that people who reject or distrust science are not especially well informed about it, but more importantly, they typically believe that they do understand the science.
[...] A common quandary for much science communication may in fact be that it appeals to those already engaged with science. Which may be why you read this.
That said, the new science of communication suggests it is certainly worth trying to reach out to those who are disengaged.
(*) Moot; see: https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/moot or https://www.etymonline.com/word/moot.
[Source]: The Conversation
What solution would you suggest ?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by edinlinux on Tuesday January 02, @05:12AM (17 children)
People don't trust science as much anymore because of all the "agenda's" out there posing as "science".
For example,
IQ:
IQs among ethnic groups are different (East Asians and Ashkenazi Jews have the highest IQs as a group, other ethnic groups (whites,hispanics,blacks..etc) fall below those two in IQ as groups. This however is "racist" to say, due to political agendas by some people who may find this offensive, though it is still true.
Covid vaccines:
The mRNA vaccines did work and worked very well. There are however some downsides that rarely can occur. These were buried in order to get as many people to take the vaccine. As a society this was probably the right choice, but did make people trust science a bit less as the facts came out later. Burying the source of Covid (the Wuhan lab, which at this point now is pretty much proven), also didn't help (also initially was dismissed as "racist").
Global Warning:
Very likely occurring, but special interests have agendas that they fund to try to cloud the science (oil companies..etc)
The "News" in general:
Mainstream News Media is generally not highly trusted in the USA anymore (compared to say the "Walter Cronkite" days). Stories on illegal immigration ("undocumented immigrants"), men ("trans women") playing in women's sports leagues..etc. rile up a lot of people who watch the news, particularly when such news sources deem people who don't like these trends as "racist". Science stories get mixed up in all this, and if it appears on the "news", people are now also less likely to believe it as there must also be an "agenda" there too..
There is a degradation of trust in the news in general in society right now (for good reason), and that is affecting trust in science as well as ineverything else (politics, democracy..etc) at the moment too.
Basically that's why.
(Score: 5, Informative) by turgid on Tuesday January 02, @11:15AM (14 children)
One point, IQ is not a "scientific" measurement. It's a subjective and culturally biased test, and I say this as someone who passed the MENSA IQ requirements. I didn't take up their offer.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Vocal Minority on Tuesday January 02, @01:53PM (13 children)
IQ (General Intelligence, g) is very much a scientific measurement (without the scare quotes). Outside of psychophysics it is one of the most robust measures in the field of psychology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G_factor_(psychometrics) [wikipedia.org]
So subjective - no. The issue of cultural differences and bias is controversial. Although bias is always a potential problem in psychometrics (and, well ,everywhere), I think that the criticisms are largely ideologically based and not supported by the science.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday January 02, @03:05PM (7 children)
IQ is a one dimensional measure of how well a subject performs on an IQ test. The fact that it is one of the most robust measures in the field of psychology says more about the weakness of psychological measurement tools than anything else.
Correlation of IQ to success in anything shifts over time and depends more on other factors than on the IQ score itself.
There are, of course, multi dimensional IQ measures, such as communication, spatial reasoning, etc. My sons are classified disabled by their IQ scores. The older was basically untestable due to inability of the psychologist to communicate well enough with him to administer the tests. The younger tested at and above average in all dimensions other than communication. The standard method of combining the scores to arrive at a final IQ number for evaluation of disability is itself dumb: a simple average, which would have given him an overall score in the 90s. The psychologist made an exception note on the evaluation that a communication score in the low 60s negates practical application of his other abilities in society.
Ability to perform many roles in society evolve over time as technology and society itself evolves. Roles like cashier have dramatically diminished their math skill requirements over the past 70 years. Medical doctors should be evolving from memory based to research and referral based. Draftsman and graphic designers have either become computer based or hopelessly antiquated. The type of social interactions used for finding and performing jobs have moved from written to telephone to digital... Online dating has taken over as the primary way people find long term relationships.
A one dimensional measure is going to have very little correlation with the complexity of real life.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by The Vocal Minority on Wednesday January 03, @06:23AM (6 children)
Ideally, an IQ test should be measuring g, with variation introduced by noise. If not then it is biased. Given that g is an abstract construct the validity of this cannot be directly known, but given all of the other indicators (performance correlation, heritability/twin studies, stability across lifespan), I think it is pretty well established.
Yes, psychology is not (and should not be) physics, and psychometric tests are not micrometers. There is complexity and measures are always going to be noisy. This does not make them invalid or not useful. There is the potential for abuse, and the reduction of the individual to a "thing", which can then be treated instrumentally is, to some extent, baked into the concept of IQ, but that is a somewhat larger topic.
This all adds up to something of a shit sandwich, so people tend to reject it out if hand - hence the modding and commentary (kind of humorous given TFA is about science denial). I get the sensitivity around this for you, your children are edge cases as you really need to be able to "play the game" of society for an IQ test to work. There are non-verbal tests of IQ though, such as Ravens Progressive Matrices, I wonder how well they would do on that?
A couple of other comments about IQ and Autism: The amount of human variation in IQ is odd given how highly correlated it is with performance, as well as it being heritable - evolutionary pressures should have selected for high IQ and everyone should be pretty similar. Speculatively, this may be because, for humans, selection works at a group level, and there is an evolutionary advantage to having low IQ people in your tribe because they are less likely to be mislead by spurious patters that a high IQ individual will pick up on (see my blog post about Bullshit). So it is modernity that makes low IQ a problem (such that it is one) - it isn't intrinsically bad. Similarly, Autism might be seen as a evolutionary adaptation that makes sense in a group but becomes a problem in a modern setting. There is, again speculatively, human variation in the tendency to impose ones preconceived notions on the world as opposed to experiencing it directly. Autists are at one end of this spectrum, and experience the world more directly than most, and people with schizoid personality disorder are at the other. Having a variety of people like this in your group is an advantage as some people are more sensitive to changes in the environment and others are better at using the stored knowledge of the group to navigate the world. Sorry if this is a little too much of an intellectual and wanky take on something that you have to deal with every day, but I thought that it might be meaningful to you.
One last comment - IQ is not skills and knowledge, it's more like an underlying mental efficiency (or perhaps "pattern matching ability", to remain consistent to what I have written above). People of different IQ can attain the same knowledge and skills, just at a different rate.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 04, @01:38AM (5 children)
Sorry about the cheap shot:
>The fact that it is one of the most robust measures in the field of psychology says more about the weakness of psychological measurement tools than anything else.
it's just too easy a target. I know some good psychologists who provide valuable insight, mainly PhDs - though not all PhD psychologists seem to have or share valuable insights, not even a majority. I also know a LOT of psychologists who are in the field to attempt to grapple with their own personal demons - some of these are also in the "good" group. Then, I know tons more psychology major / minor BA / BS holders as well as college dropouts who majored in psychology (many Mrs. degree candidates in the dropout group, mostly shortly after they achieved their objective of a potentially rich husband), and a whole pile of scatterbrained psych professors. And they ALL tend to know a more about how to apply IQ and similar scores than people who run around in the real world using IQ scores as criteria for things. One company I worked for sent all management candidates (self included) across country for a two day on-site psych profile evaluation, IQ test included - then higher management promptly ignored all the results and hired and promoted whoever the hell they had in mind for the various advertised and non-advertised management roles anyway - but they had a little dossier on all their management wannabes, self included. That profile info didn't seem to clue them in that I would be seeking other opportunities and leaving 8 months later. Anyway, just venting, and avoiding the topic of disability benefit criteria - except to say that we have been to two SSA assigned evaluators now, the first one was shockingly illiterate himself and commensurately clueless. The second guy was actually very insightful and kind - though in the end both cleared our kids for benefits. I wonder what kind of hell awaits those who the clueless guy deems non-disabled but they actually are... he seemed like the type who might clear everyone who comes his way to avoid conflict.
My psych 101 prof gave a "sample" IQ test to the class, to show what an IQ test is like. Possible scores on the test as he provided it ranged from 100 if you got everything wrong, to 130 if you got everything right. We didn't openly compare scores, but from the ones I did discuss with classmates, 120 seemed to be about the median. This in a community college summer course where most of the students couldn't write a coherent paragraph on a given topic which had been discussed all week - not even if their life depended on it I suspect. I'm sure the prof was just being careful not to hurt anyone's feelings.
>your children are edge cases
Yeah, unfortunately for society there are a lot more of these edge cases being born today than there were 40-50+ years ago.
>There are non-verbal tests of IQ though, such as Ravens Progressive Matrices, I wonder how well they would do on that?
On the one hand, I wonder. On the other hand, I don't believe that "knowing" standardized scores would do anything at all for practical day to day living with my kids, or even strategic planning. We know what they're good at, and what they lack. More interesting than abilities are interests and motivations - those are more elusive to us, particularly in the more profoundly autistic son. Also, like when my "never seen scores this high" scores returned to management at that company that had me evaluated - Carl Icahn had recently made a splash in the popular press with his Idiocracy in corporate leadership thesis that went something like this: CEOs are generally congenial frat boys, not too smart, but self-aware enough to realize this and fear putting anyone smarter than themselves in a position to rise above them. So, they surround themselves with friendly VPs who are as dumb or dumber than they are, and most of these VPs are cut from the same cloth so they stock their director pool with people as dumb or dumber than themselves, and so it goes. My director at that company couldn't spell. Or, maybe he just intentionally ignored spell check in an attempt to be promote-able... he might have been that crafty. Anyway, labeling my profoundly autistic son as a "super genius" in any particular area would probably do more to scare his care givers than anything else. He is unnaturally intuitive about a lot of things, and often will answer a question before it is asked - but not because he is processing the question quickly, his verbal processing takes 15-20 seconds or more when you offer him something he isn't anticipating. What usually happens is that he anticipates where a situation is going and will respond at the first moment of opportunity. This gets particularly tricky when he wants to go somewhere and anticipates, correctly, that he will be denied or delayed - and, so, he waits for an opportunity to go without interference and then bolts when it's available... this, and only this, behavior is what's getting him placed in an intense behavior group home, if he gets placed at all - we have been looking for potential placements for 30 months so far.
>selection works at a group level
I think this is very much the case, and given society's pyramidal wealth and power structures, nepotism, dynastic rule, etc. there are many societal mechanisms which supress superior abilities. I'd even go out on a limb for enslavement and other economic suppression of the scary strong Africans, certainly the Ashkenazi Jews were oppressed - and I have read speculation that their intelligence was a direct evolutionary result of this pressure, they had to be smart just to survive. You can observe it in schoolyard sociology: distrust and ostracism of individuals who are truly exceptionally capable in some areas, particularly those areas where the majority of the group could never hope to rise to that level of ability.
>Autists are at one end of this spectrum, and experience the world more directly than most, and people with schizoid personality disorder are at the other.
Funny you should mention schizoid - the CEO of the Icahanesque company was clearly and severely manic-depressive, schizoid was probably in there as well. He personally directed cancelling our company healthcare insurance plan with one provider "to punish them" only to replace them with a worse company, lower benefits, higher premiums, AND they did the exact same thing the first company was being "punished" for... that was one of the signs on the wall telling me to seek other employment.
>Having a variety of people like this in your group is an advantage as some people are more sensitive to changes in the environment and others are better at using the stored knowledge of the group to navigate the world.
My current employer "talks the talk" of valuing diversity, I rarely see it being put into effective practice, but at least there is some top-down pressure to try to embrace diversity for the self (or rather: group) serving strength it brings.
> Sorry if this is a little too much of an intellectual and wanky take on something that you have to deal with every day, but I thought that it might be meaningful to you.
Not a problem, and thanks for taking the time to express all of that.
>pattern matching ability
I believe my older son matches and uses patterns that most people are completely unaware of - it's too bad that ability comes with such disabling challenges in other areas. Perhaps in an un-contacted tribe in the Amazon they could benefit from his abilities without freaking out about his differences. Here in 'murica, his propensity to run up to and open unlocked doors on strange houses and walk in uninvited isn't good for his longevity expectation at all. Luckily his younger brother doesn't have that problem. The older son's normal objective: the house DVD collection, which he usually can find within 5 seconds or less. He will also seek, and can usually find bathrooms (including employee only not for public use) in strange buildings. Then there's his ability to walk up to a computer terminal, like the employee stations in an old Toys'R'Us, and subvert the system into showing him his favorite YouTube videos in a few seconds, if it's possible at all. He's 22 now, but could do all those things by the time he was 8.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Thursday January 04, @05:14AM (4 children)
No problem, and thank you for sharing some aspects of your life with your children - I do genuinely appreciate that. They certainly seem much smarter than their IQ tests would indicate, particularly the older one.
My work life has been very different from yours, probably to some extent because I live in a different country. I have worked across many different sectors and in a couple of different professions, and have seen my fair share of corruption. Generally, however, I've found that people in more senior positions to be those that are more competent (although the trend, recently, does seem to be away from this, I must admit). Even the corrupt people were competent at cultivating the right relationships and playing office politics well (until they weren't). In a context where there is a free market or similar drivers I would imagine that corrupt organisations would tend to fail more readily and thus would be less likely to exist, barring race to the bottom dynamics or monopoly conditions.
Yeah, the whole diversity thing is largely BS - or in the worst case an excuse to hire your friends who all have the same crappy politics as you. But these sorts of things have now become, it seems, in-group language for seniors executives in certain sectors/industries so we are seeing more and more of it. On the plus side I do see some good being done under the banner of diversity so there is that.
Lastly I'd like to say that I do enjoy reading your comments here, even when I disagree with what you are saying. You seem to be able to hold a lot of complexity in your political positioning, a skill which is becoming rarer and rarer these days.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday January 04, @05:37PM (3 children)
>My work life has been very different from yours
My "real" work life started in a small medical device company run by a recently retired high profile M.D. He was a genuinely good guy and we did good work, though his lack of focus on realistic sales ultimately sank the company, 12 years after I joined. He was always looking for the "big hit" and not interested in something boring like 5% annual growth. After 12 years of that, my career was pretty much locked in on medical devices - I did take a brief detour into unmanned aerial vehicles and video surveillance, but that business plan was also doomed and I ended up back in medical devices. This type of "sector lock-in" is pretty common in the U.S. - if you have anything resembling a career that grows to higher levels of responsibility and compensation. That first company was very much sex and color blind in its hiring practices and we did benefit from the diversity, not that there was any kind of affirmative action consideration at play - we just hired and retained the best available people as needed / able.
>I do enjoy reading your comments here, even when I disagree with what you are saying.
Thanks. You too... and I believe that if we all agreed, there would be no point in discussion.
>seem to be able to hold a lot of complexity in your political positioning
And again, if all you have to do is wave a red flag or a blue flag to tell all about your beliefs, that's not much of a basis for meaningful discussion, either.
>a skill which is becoming rarer and rarer these days.
Maybe it's because I stopped watching almost all video news sources around 30 years ago. When I incidentally see them today, I wonder what possible value people get from them? My stepfather, recently passed away, was a great consumer of Fox news, and you could read the fear and outrage stoking from Fox in almost everything he said and did. Of course my mother has been exposed to it indirectly through him for 30+ years, kind of like second-hand smoke. It doesn't affect her as deeply, but you can still detect the influence in her perception of many topics. I'm sure that I, too, am influenced by the news and other information I get through my Google feed and other sources, but at least I get to pick and choose and shape the content that reaches me somewhat. I strive for some level of balanced understanding, which is virtually impossible to get from a single source, even if that source was Walter Cronkite. A very illuminating episode in my University days was when Iraq invaded Kuwait - a friend of ours was from a (redundant to say when studying at US University, but) wealthy family in Jordan. After the invasion and virtually immediate US response, he spent hours per night glued to his short wave radio seeking news sources he trusted - and he did indeed have some different perceptions of what was going on over there than the people who simply watched US local TV news reports. When something of interest to me is going on "over there" I'll make a point to check out what Al Jazeera has to say about it, not that I trust Al Jazeera more highly than our news sources - far from it - but I trust that the story told by Al Jazeera will better reflect what people "over there" perceive to be going on. I must confess, I find the whole recent Israel-Hamas thing uninteresting, so I'm basically headline shallow in terms of what I know about that.
It is still amusing to browse RT once in a while to see how they spin the Ukraine situation: https://www.rt.com/russia/590113-foreign-aid-ukraine-mod/ [rt.com] https://www.rt.com/russia/590118-ukraine-prosecuted-draft-dodgers/ [rt.com]
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Friday January 05, @08:34AM (2 children)
So here we stand, in mutual admiration and respect :)
Apologies if I don't go into as much detail about my life as you do, I like to be something of a blank canvas on the internet, for a number of reasons (privacy being one, this username's trollish past being another). My interesting "career" also isn't the norm here - developing deep expertise in a specific area is seen as much more valuable. But it is who I am.
I tend to go to fairly extreme lengths to avoid the sorts of psychic effluent that emanates from most media, so my consumption of such is limited. Funnily enough, I still don't feel particularly uninformed. I have been watching Glenn Greenwald's show recently though, even though I don't agree with him on a lot of issues, because I have a lot of respect for him as a result of his Snowden reporting. He has reported on the same information as those rt articles you have linked, but I'm not sure if the numbers he provided match those reported there. Do you think that those articles are inaccurate and/or (Frankfurtian) bullshit?
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 05, @02:39PM (1 child)
> Do you think that those articles are inaccurate and/or (Frankfurtian) bullshit?
I think they're just about as accurate as what you find in Al Jazeera, or Fox News, or Forbes, or any of the rest. As the old Russian state newspaper was named, they contain Truth. Certainly not the whole truth, sometimes not "nothing but the truth", but there is truth in them - usually cherry picked to back a certain agenda, push a certain perspective, create certain emotions in the target audiences. As for accuracy of the numbers, I just got done ranting about lies, damn lies, and statistics to khallow. When you're reporting numbers like troop casualties, conscription rates, etc. the data always has a bit of uncertainty in it - which side of that uncertainty you choose to report can certainly color the perceptions those numbers create. Like the number of WMDs Saddam Hussein was believed to be hiding...
The most important thing I get from these varied perspectives is insight into our primary local news sources, and just how biased they are as well. I don't believe that much of what you find published, even in "scientific journals", comes without some amount of agenda based biases, whether from the underlying financiers, researchers/authors, editors or publishers who pick and choose what news gets the highest visibility, and when.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Saturday January 06, @05:13PM
That all sounds pretty reasonable to me, I think you are on the right track.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 02, @04:09PM (4 children)
Whatever. But I'll positively assert that the supposed IQ measurement has little to do with a person's intelligence, ability, and competence to deal with life. How many college grads have been rescued in the wilderness, because they were just frigging STUPID. Bunch of youngsters decide to climb a mountain, but they weren't smart enough to deal with the blizzard that blew in on day two. Or how 'bout all the geniuses who were going to make contact with "undiscovered tribes", and were never heard from again. All the idiots who have succumbed to harsh desert conditions. Geniuses often get in over their heads, because they think that they are smart enough to cope. Let's not forget all the bright boys and girls who wind up dead as the result of drug overdoses, or drug deals gone bad. That, and just plain stupid gang violence. All that, while just plain, regular, everyday dumbasses navigate life successfully.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 02, @10:54PM (3 children)
Have to agree: IQ tests just test if you know the answer to the questions they're asking.
Can a MENSA person tell me how many radishes i can plant into one square foot of my garden to maximize my harvest of radishes? What can i plant among my asparagus to help my asparagus grow better?
What is a snibbit?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Insightful) by The Vocal Minority on Wednesday January 03, @06:25AM (2 children)
You are both confusing IQ, wisdom, skills, and knowledge. They are not the same thing.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Thursday January 04, @01:09AM (1 child)
I don't believe that either Gaaark or I have confused anything, as you suggest. We are pointing out that highly intelligent people can be, and sometimes are, damned fools who have no wisdom, no skills, and little knowledge. While those highly intelligent people are figuratively beating their chests to display their superiority, they blindly walk into traffic, claiming their own Darwin award.
Intelligence is good, but intelligence doesn't define the superior being. Especially when most IQ tests are designed to test for narrow parameters of intelligence. Even the generation before World War One understood that 'book smart' wasn't always very smart.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Vocal Minority on Thursday January 04, @04:41AM
You say:
And then do exactly that!
"Book smart" would be knowledge, not intelligence. The type of thing you get from reading books. Modern western society has a tendency to consider this the only thing worth attaining, and people are judged by their ability to know things which can be learnt from books. This is at the expense of the ability to actually do things, form meaningful relationships, situational awareness, and the ability to form a coherent sense of self. I think that is what that saying is referring to.
When talking about intelligence in relation to IQ tests you are talking about something very specific.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ls671 on Tuesday January 02, @12:47PM (1 child)
I have always trusted science. What I have more and more problems to trust are so called "scientists" which seem very unscientific to me!
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, @05:46PM
Scientist is rare nowadays. Universities have grant winners - an entirely different skill based on kow-towing to funding agencies to overpromise on work that will be handed off to subcontracted Chinese grad students - and guru-narcissist-supplement pushers who "mentor" people and sell BrainPlus alpha (or equivalent) to maximize your potential. There's nobody left doing actual nuts and bolts science, unless it's one of the naive Chinese kids who mistakenly believes they're doing it for the good of humanity.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by XivLacuna on Tuesday January 02, @05:17AM (2 children)
You couldn't question it without being censored on social media.
It was rolled out without proper testing because it is an "emergency".
People accused others of wanting to kill Grandma for being skeptical and not taking the Science juice.
The lockdowns caused great psychological damage to everyone.
The world is now littered with disposable masks everywhere.
It enabled the rich to get richer while shrinking the middle class and making life worse for everyone.
Now why would anyone want to trust that if they have a memory better than a goldfish? The best thing they can do is bugger off and take their science snake oil with them.
The Science hasn't even given us catgirls. All it brings us is nightmares beyond human comprehension. No thanks science man.
(Score: 5, Touché) by ls671 on Tuesday January 02, @12:50PM (1 child)
I think you are confusing science and people trying to usurp it, calling themselves "scientists" along the way. Those aren't scientific at all.
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, @05:51PM
Yup. When nerds became cool, science got inundated with bullshitters with inter-personal skills (WTF are they?!) who appeal to management and thus get the jobs. Except minus the science ability.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Barenflimski on Tuesday January 02, @06:40AM (1 child)
It just cracks me up watching these folks try to parse this question. This red herring question just absolutely flummoxes these folks that ask it. Its full on entertainment to watch.
The short answer is this. Life is fine and dandy without these folks using "science" to then form an opinion and tell us all why we wrong-think.
To put it another way, it's not about the science, its about the people trying to change your mind with it, usually letting you know what an idiot you are and why you should be shamed out of society.
Is it worth asking the question, "Why do these folks care?" lol. No. Not one of us is going to run a study because we already know the answer. Plus, why ruin the fun? We don't need them to think like us. They'll figure it out eventually.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, @07:17AM
Maybe not in your country but in some countries the voters actually have some influence over elections.
In the UK, their Gov went for "herd immunity by infection": https://www.politico.eu/article/boris-johnsons-former-top-adviser-says-herd-immunity-was-uk-plan-to-fight-coronavirus/ [politico.eu]
https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/7496/documents/78687/default/ [parliament.uk]
Their initial "herd immunity" plan of letting people get infected to get immunity was as stupid as increasing "fire immunity" in houses by letting them get burnt.
Yes many of the resulting burnt houses will be more fire resistant and perhaps even more fire resistant than houses with "more conventional fireproofing treatment". Doesn't make it less stupid though.
So if more of the public understood the science then they might have been more accepting of lockdowns and quarantines to control the spread of the virus.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, @06:54AM (1 child)
In general the more reproducible the science the more I'd trust it.
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis [wikipedia.org]
Due to the "publish or perish" pressures, you shouldn't trust "science" that much. Many researchers have a lot of pressure to publish in order to get money. And it's likely that many would be pressured to stretch things out. e.g. instead of a conclusive high quality result/paper from a long term study, you might instead get multiple papers over an even longer period of time, first paper might be lower quality, incomplete or even slightly wrong, with subsequent papers getting closer and closer to the "truth". This way a researcher doesn't need as many unique topics to sustain the researcher's career (and livelihood).
It's still not as bad as being paid by lines of code or by number of bugs fixed.
That said the general public are crap at judging science or facts. From what I see too many of them are worse than a coin at figuring out whether a random WhatsApp forward is true or false.
Among the worst examples are the Flat Earthers. Many keep telling others to research Flat Earth, but they themselves lack the mental competence to even research or understand sunsets... 🤣
Many of them actually believe the Sun is always moving high up above a Flat Earth and still not realize or understand that completely disagrees with what is observed during and after a sunset.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, @09:24PM
Now that everyone knows about the replication crisis, you'll never guess what funding agencies prioritize and grant seeking bullshitters are writing grants about.... yes, you guessed it. Bullshit grants comparing bullshit techniques in multi-center, multi-vendor studies that cost twice as much. It's about as dumb as you could imagine, treating everything as a black box for statistical testing (ANOVA obviously, because everything is linear). All served to you by a single Chinese grad student with
515 professor mentors climbing on their back about lack of progress and when's the paper ready???!!!!(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Tuesday January 02, @07:06AM (7 children)
One thing 2016-2020 in the US taught me was that sometimes it's not the content of what people say, it's the person that says it that can entrench some people's positions on a subject even unto their death.
Barring that, you could always try a good marketing campaign [youtu.be]. It's worked before [imdb.com] for otherwise boring topics.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, @07:28AM (6 children)
I think this article is fairly insightful and informative:
https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-reasons-trumps-rise-that-no-one-talks-about [cracked.com]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, @10:54AM
I'd rephrase this bit :
"masculine vs. feminine,"
as
"(masculine + feminine) vs Androgynous,"
(Score: 3, Insightful) by cmdrklarg on Tuesday January 02, @10:33PM (4 children)
In what galaxy far, far away is tRump not a "prissy elite"?
Again, how is this NOT tRump?
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Tuesday January 02, @11:15PM
Prissy elitists are smarter than he is? But to be honest, the average person is smarter than he is. Example: you're the president, and you have a daily briefing with your seconds-in-command. Do you:
Which one do you think consistently described 2016-2020 ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 03, @02:21AM (2 children)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by cmdrklarg on Wednesday January 03, @11:11PM (1 child)
And? None of that changes the fact that tRump is a card-carrying member of those wealthy elite city dwellers who doesn't give a flying fuck about rural people.
tRump only cares about one person: himself. His interest in rural people ends when he successfully bullshits them into voting for him.
That's why they voted for him: because they are angry and afraid about their lot in life. People that are angry and/or afraid act on emotion and instinct instead of thinking and reason. Along comes tRump selling them Hope and Change (remember where that came from?), giving them a "brick chucked through the window of the elites". What they don't realize is that tRump is LYING to them, and the brick smashed their own window in the process.
"Country vs. City" is yet another wedge issue the wealthy elites use to divide us. If both would stop listening to the talking heads and talk to each other I think they'd find that they have way more in common than either have with the wealthy elites. Yeah, rural people have struggles; most city people do too!
And it's not just a "brick through the window" mindset either (I can actually understand that); it's the mindless cult following of tRump that completely puzzles me. The guy is anathema to their values, yet still they fawn over him.
The world is full of kings and queens who blind your eyes and steal your dreams.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 05, @09:34PM
You missed the entire point of the article.
The groups the article is talking about are pissed off with the prissy elites in the cities. They see that the prissy elites hate Trump. The enemy of my enemy may not be my friend, but he is still my enemy's enemy.
And objectively, was Trump that bad for them? He didn't start any of the wars that disproportionally get country boys killed. He didn't screw them over as bad as Democrats usually do. He apparently has the ability to turn the people they don't like into incoherent frothing morons, which is hilarious to them. He at least claims to have the same values they do. He "tells it straight", without that mealy-mouthed bullshit that pisses them off. *
*Yes I know he wanders all over the place when talking, but he does it in a "country yarnin" way, not in obfuscating bullshit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Opportunist on Tuesday January 02, @07:43AM
People are afraid of things they don't understand, and understanding science is hard. Else it would not be science but some crap you read in the yellow press.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by EJ on Tuesday January 02, @08:09AM
It's not necessarily science that people don't trust. Scientists are people, and people commit fraud.
(Score: 4, Informative) by pTamok on Tuesday January 02, @09:42AM
I don't know of a particular solution, but a review of existing research might be a good place to start.
ScienceAlert: These 4 Factors Can Explain Why So Many People Are Rejecting Science [sciencealert.com]
ScienceAlert: Scientists Have Found One Tactic That Can Change Anti-Vaccers' Minds [sciencealert.com]
PLOS Biology: People with more extreme attitudes towards science have self-confidence in their understanding of science, even if this is not justified [plos.org]
PNAS: Why are people antiscience, and what can we do about it? [pnas.org]
Social Sciences: Identifying Relevant Anti-Science Perceptions to Improve Science-Based Communication: The Negative Perceptions of Science Scale [mdpi.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Tuesday January 02, @09:48AM (1 child)
Well, I guess that's another example of correlation not being the same as causation.
Or rather, I guess it's a reverse causation. If you trust science, you are more interested in what it has to say, and therefore learn more about it. On the other hand, if you don't trust science,you are not interested in what science has to say.
Anyway, I think the main problem is that most people don't understand science. People think that science is facts published by scientists. But science is actually a method how to sort out false ideas.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Opportunist on Tuesday January 02, @11:51AM
The problem here is that we never taught people to do that. We have replaced the importance of the message with the importance of the messenger. There are teachers out there who will reprimand their students if they (correctly) correct them because they think it's more important to listen to authority than to correct false information.
And that continues.
You can see it in arguments from creationists that start with "But Einstein/Darwin/Hawking said...". Yes. So? Yes, they, too, can be wrong. And yes, they, too, have to prove what they claim.
We never learned that it's not important who said it but what matters is whether or not it can be shown to be true. But that's something that never came up in our education system. We have no time for that. Here, Timmy, take this book, cram the shit into your head, barf it out on the test and then you can forget it all again. Don't worry, we'll just ask what the book said, you won't be asked anything that requires actual understanding or building on top of the information. Just regurgitate what you're told and you'll pass.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by loonycyborg on Tuesday January 02, @09:55AM (3 children)
Science is based on reproducing other people's results and peer review. Belief means nothing. Even if you don't do experiments yourself you should educate yourself with aim to check all sources on internal consistency and compare different sources. Trust isn't the way of real science and it would not demand trust from anyone.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ls671 on Tuesday January 02, @01:06PM
Indeed. TFA's title perpetuate the false narrative that because you disagree with people who call themselves scientists, you are unscientific and "don't believe in science", whatever that's supposed to mean.
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, @09:30PM
There's a nice phrase: "There are no authorities in science". Except in practice almost every lab has a highly authoritarian hierarchy. You better believe in it or you'll fail and get your visa revoked. Science in the 21st century is top down follow the Leadership (who are prioritizing their vanity and capturing the glut of grad students brought to you by unlimited visa caps for universities).
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 02, @11:02PM
Someone i know told me that she had been hugged by Jesus. I asked how she knew it was Jesus and she said she just knew.
So scientific compared to theorizing, testing and peer review. :/
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 02, @11:04AM (8 children)
Most people cannot stand uncertainty, and science is full of it. Say something like "there is an 80% chance of X" and all they will hear is "X is true".
You cannot discuss science with them, they will repeatedly push the question "what do you believe?" followed by " I don't need no stinkin' numbers, tell me what you believe".
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday January 02, @11:56AM (7 children)
The English language is very imprecise when it comes to putting a distinction between an unfounded belief based on nothing but faith and a hypothesis based on observation and the development of a testing regime that will allow you to falsify that hypothesis if it is incorrect.
So I don't believe anything. If anything, I formulate a hypothesis that I then want to test.
And no later than there the questioning stops because they're busy trying to find out what those complicated three-syllable words mean.
(Score: 5, Touché) by https on Tuesday January 02, @03:21PM (6 children)
You just proved that English offers precision in this matter. The failure lies elsewhere.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday January 02, @08:34PM (5 children)
It's more that "believe" is used for both, a unfounded belief in something and a valid assumption based on observation.
But then again, don't get me started on how people abuse "theory".
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday January 03, @03:31PM (4 children)
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday January 03, @07:39PM (3 children)
Unfortunately, it's not. "I believe in $deity" is used in the same way as "I believe that $town is to the left". One is an unfounded belief rooted in faith without any tangible reason for it, and usually expressed as a statement of truth without any reason whatsoever. The other is based on observation and possibly prior experience, with the expression of an uncertainty factor that shows doubt rather than certainty.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 04, @01:45AM (2 children)
I don't see the point of the complaint. Even with a term that describes better the degree of belief, the quote on the left will adopt it just as much as the quote on the right. When someone is invested in the certainty of their beliefs, more semantics won't help.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Saturday January 06, @06:53PM (1 child)
Well, if your point is "if you're firmly entrenched in some position, even the best argument cannot sway you", I have to agree. If your life (or at least your sanity) depends on being "right", even being utterly and demonstrably wrong will not convince you.
People would rather accept being wrong than being shown that they are.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday January 07, @01:46AM
Sounded like that's where this thread started. We'd come up with better labels than "belief" and people would honestly self-regulate themselves to use the right ones. Not seeing that working even in a situation where a bunch of people aren't presently firmly entrenched.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Opportunist on Tuesday January 02, @11:53AM
What has science done to you that you treat it like a religion? You aren't supposed to believe in science. If you want to put blind faith into something and not even want to know why it should work, find a church.
You're supposed to question it and ask for the reason it comes to the conclusion it does.
Unlike religion, it can actually do that.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 02, @12:41PM
What's so good about blind belief in authoritarianism?
Better to learn some scientific method, work on critical thinking, etc.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday January 02, @12:59PM
No matter how naive or how sophisticated any individual might be, he/she has watched "science" done for profit. That old 'publish or die' thing that we've talked about so many times here on SN. Disclosures that Covid was being worked on in a substandard laboratory put paid to the idea that Covid arose naturally. Gain of function is a real thing, and NO ONE is quite sure how much the original Covid virus was manipulated.
Add in the fact that the mRNA vaccine idea was openly scoffed by most all scientists, then we had a vax that was pretty much ready for deployment just a few months after we first heard of Covid.
Trust science? I think people trust science a lot more than they trust people who claim to be scientists. Let's remember that scientists and medical professionals created the opioid epidemic. That statement, to the effect that "less than 1% of opioid users get addicted" assured politicians and practitioners that feeding huge qunatities of opioids to patients had no consequences. And, it was all for profit.
We might summarize by saying, people who distrust science just don't want to be the guinea pigs in the next social/science experiment. Unethical scientists have caused this - it is not lack of education that created this problem.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by r_a_trip on Tuesday January 02, @01:49PM (1 child)
I think it is more a lack of feeling in control. Most of our lives are out of our control. Stuff happens to us and we can at best roll with the punches. Since the advent of broad internet access the amount of events that come in has increased a thousand fold, leading to information overload. More news, more science reporting, more politics, more everything makes life overly complicated.
It used to be that far off events took quite some time to reach you. Now it is immediate and through multiple sources. All the time. Everywhere. Society almost dictates that you should be aware of most of it, even if it has no real bearing on your life. The reaction seems to be wholesale rejection that has to do with the rigmarole of "official" public life. People take refuge in simple to understand and safe feeling concepts. If you can reject current science/news/politics, your world immediately becomes much smaller. On the plus side you also get access to a community of people equally fed up with modern life.
Take conspiracies about the rich and the ruling. Most "theories" revolve around the belief that these are villains capable of eating children. It reduces the complexities and grey areas of societal hierarchies to classic fairytale good vs. evil. Us vs. them. Science, mainstream media, public servants, politicians are all instruments of the villains to universally deceive us all of the time to further various semi-public agendas.
Flat earth is having a rudimentary grasp on physics and understanding that objects on a table are supported by the table. Living on a semi-solid drop of material, hurtling through space and the drop continually pulling you in, is too abstract for some.
It's mostly about creating an alternate reality where things are simple, safe and understandable. A world where you know who the bad guys are, where the world itself is simple, local and concrete. A world where you are not threatened by the things you do, like burning gasoline and throwing out plastics. Where you don't have to care about the entire human race, nor have to think about what it means to live on the pale blue dot.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by OrugTor on Tuesday January 02, @04:14PM
Nailed it. Everything stems from control.
Now throw in dysfunctionality, the kind that results from the organism's failure to handle self-awareness. Best case result: irrationality, poor judgement, wilful stupidity. Worst case: mental illness. As in flat-earthers.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Tuesday January 02, @02:10PM (1 child)
Is it in some kind of generic "science" or is this specifically about pharmacology and medical science and/or vaccines? It seems to be exclusively about the latter and not have much of anything to do with some kind of generic science. Also it appears to be about feelings, which isn't very scientific.
If this is in regards to some generic science then well it's probably a lot easier to explain. It's not a lack of knowledge, it's a lack of caring. They don't care. They don't need to know or want to know. They just want things to work, they don't care how or why. They want to push the button or take that pill and things become better. This is enough or fine for them. They don't need to know the biochemical process that make vaccines work etc. That is superfluous knowledge, if there is such a thing and it probably is for most people.
It probably doesn't in that regard help when they have all these information campaigns that more or less seem to take the form of propaganda. Based on statistics or models or other things that they claim will totally be true but then turns out to be somewhat wrong. Every wrong hurts more and erodes more trust then any one truths. So if you want to blame someone then blame it on the media people and politicians. Don't blame people in general for not having a background in pharmacology. It isn't about trust. They shattered said trust and now they are looking for someone to blame. If you want to believe in something then go to church.
So this is basically about medical science and vaccines compared to other science. Not quite sure what a Geologist have in common with a Geneticists or "scientists", except years of education. This is a trick question to see if the respondents are paying attention or not since they look and sound somewhat similar and if you don't know and just lazily followed the news they might have overheard something and thought it was the other one. Since apparently Geologists is the control-question, ie are they paying attention or are they just dumb. But once again, they might not be either -- they might not just care cause it doesn't matter to them.
People with a scientific education or background believe, or know about, more in science then the people that lacks such education. Groundbreaking conclusions ...
It's hard to inform people that doesn't want to be informed. Or if they believe, rightly, that you have some kind of ulterior motive with your, more or less biased, information and questions. Every such study made and published just erode a little more trust. Why bother answering if you believe they'll misuse the information.
In a lot of cases it's probably not for a lack of general knowledge, it's that they just don't care. They don't care about how biology or physics etc work. They just want gadgets or things that work. They don't care why or how.
If this had been generic enough and they really cared if people believe in science or not they would have asked more generic question and not tied it to vaccines, that is clearly a biased and somewhat controversial topic. They would have asked people if they believed in physics or mathematics. As far as I know there are not a lot of people that doesn't believe in them. They might not know or understand them but at least I have not met or heard of any, or many, math deniers or anti-physics people.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by DannyB on Tuesday January 02, @03:18PM
It is not just about vaccines.
It is about crazy stuff. Moon landing conspiracies. People no longer actually care about facts. It's about who can yell the loudest and with the fewest pauses to breathe. That's how you win the debate. Listening or reading is out of style, unless it's social media.
-=-=-=-=-
Q. Why do we have phases of the moon?
A. Because when the moon is full and bright, it shines all its light out until it is empty. Then the moon must sit on the charger for a while until it charges back up to a full moon again. During this cycle, the light within the moon has plenty of time to ferment properly.
The universe is a vast large sphere with the stars affixed to its inside.
The earth is a large flat disk in the center of the universe.
The sun and moon move in a circular pattern around the top of the disk.
The earth is on an infinite stack of turtles.
(it's turtles all the way down)
The final turtle of that infinite stack is propelled by a rocket.
(the stack is infinite somewhere in the middle)
The rocket moves at 9.8 m/s^2 giving us the illusion of gravity.
The rocket is powered by a perpetual motion machine so it never stops.
The perpetual motion machine is powered, somehow, by crystals and magnets.
Silly skeptics would ask: if the Earth is flat, how do you explain that the sun moves South in the winter?
Stupid Round Earther: the sun moves South in the winter for the same reason that birds move South for winter -- because it's warmer in the South during winter! Look at Australia where Christmas is hottest day of the year.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by GlennC on Tuesday January 02, @02:50PM
The world is too big and complex for them to comprehend, so they don't even try to.
They accept whatever their "Trusted Source of Truth" tells them and don't question it.
I refer you to my signature.
Sorry folks...the world is bigger and more varied than you want it to be. Deal with it.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DadaDoofy on Tuesday January 02, @03:59PM
If science were just science, that would be one thing. When science started being used as a way to justify predetermined outcomes for political purposes, its relevance became greatly diminished to anyone who thinks critically.
When people say things that are antithetical to science like "the science is settled", it makes people skeptical. When actual science is ignored to advance the fantasies of a politically favored group (men can get pregnant, mutilating your body will change your sex, etc.) or for social objectives (the vax will keep you from spreading Covid), trust is further eroded. When scientists who don't adhere to the political narratives are censored, silenced, de-funded and ostracized, it's no surprise the trust is all but gone.
The really sad thing is, science that is still done legitimately gets lumped in with the snake oil. And when trust is lost, good luck ever gaining it back.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by anotherblackhat on Tuesday January 02, @08:40PM (2 children)
People have trouble believing what "authorities" tell them, so they try an experiment where an authority tells them something,
and lo and behold, people still didn't believe it.
This is the kind of failed thinking that leads to surveys that "prove" college men are having sex three times more often than college women (when most would say it proves students lie to survey takers).
The marshmallow test might test how willing someone is to wait for a greater reward, or maybe it's how much trust they put in the tester.
If you eat the marshmallow you've made a bad bet, but if you trust you'll get a 10% return investing in FTX you've made a much worse bet.
(Score: 2) by DadaDoofy on Wednesday January 03, @07:15PM (1 child)
"This is the kind of failed thinking that leads to surveys that "prove" college men are having sex three times more often than college women (when most would say it proves students lie to survey takers)."
Either that, or there are a lot of college men having sex with other college men. Greek fraternities?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Thursday January 04, @09:36PM
Or college men are having sex with non-college women.