What the fuck is wrong with people?
For the guys that get their opinions from businessmen:
Wat
Corporations own the media, not scientists.
My suspicion is social media. The hustle culture and billionaires are glazed over; as in there is subliminal messaging to condition to the plebians to worship the rich and lick their boots.
It's about style. Who are you going to believe, academics who are careful in what they claim and are forever hedging because even 6 sigma isn't 100% or business people who are absolutely certain when they speak whether their certainty is warranted or not?
True, and for comparison businesspeople speak out their ass with a level of certainty not even engineers can manage
I know who I trust more but that’s because I’m not a product of the American education system
People are emotionally driven. Everyone is, to an extent. Scientists are less likely to use that to support their point, or they'll have emotionally displeasing things to say.
I'm a scientist, can confirm.
I want to scratch the surface and look slightly deeper at this. I think we all agree on the one hand “Science, duh.” and this kind of headline is of course dispiriting.
It sparked an interesting thought for me though. What role does “trust” actually play in science? Scientists certainly don’t operate on trust with one another. The entire practice is based on peer-critique and no one’s results are trusted until someone has repeated them.
Yet somehow we think there is a boundary on this, a sort of outer membrane past which everyone who is outside any scientific field is just supposed to “trust science,” when science itself is a huge, distributed, diverse, and not always especially accountable or even identifiable conglomeration of different people. Not all science is carried out with the same rigor, the same sample size, and there is membership card. A corporation can conduct science. A private individual can conduct science. Exactly who and where is this “Science” we are meant to even trust?
Every study I’ve ever seen shared on Lemmy is looked at critically. There’s no “trust” about it.
So not to trust science honestly sounds like the most scientific thing for a smart person to do. Science also doesn’t require trust. It operates on proof, openness, repeatable experiments and data. Science never asks for “trust.”
We should expect the results that scientists have tried to debunk and failed to be trusted. You know, the repeated results after the initial claim. Unfortunately most of the people at least in the US don't understand any part of the way science works to come to a conclusion that's accepted by most scientists.
they are stupid and don't even believe basic history like palestine for the last 150 years
The corpo propaganda is working.
Never let businessmen discuss social issues.
I'm fine with "Never let businessmen."
Business leaders tell people what they want to hear, scientists typically bring bad news.
Unless they're paid off by big corporations to do studies favorable to a company's products, in which case they bring nice sounding lies. Like how Monsanto wrote entire passages of the paper supposedly proving the safety of their glyphosate.
This shit killed my grandma in her late 60s along with millions of others worldwide.
But I think this is due to a broader incentive problem in science. There's incentive to find new and interesting things to publish or die. There's no incentive (in fact strong incentives against) replicating other studies to see if their results hold up to external verification.
Absolutely. All the Parkinsons cases from people who've lived next to agricultural land and golf courses, all from 'safe' products.
Business leaders: "Our product is going to murder humanity."
That one is for investors in the ponzi scheme. Don't forget 'your self driving car will earn taxi fare while you sleep' and 'AI will usher in the 3-day work week'.
People who study how to convince people are more trusted than people trained to talk in technical jargon about specific fields. Shocker there.
I always have my poles reversed on these types of stories.
because scientists are autistic and businesss men are sociopaths
"Informed Electorate" vs "don't listen to what you don't want to hear."
Can we even trust the polls themselves?
But capitalism isn't a problem
people in general hate feeling dumb, and are taught by sick society early that ignorance and stupidity are the same.
Being reminded they aren't the smart one leads to anger often.
This is difficult for me to believe, honestly.
At least here in the US, there is outright hostility to Big Business, and in particular, Big Tech. We are collectively very sick of the price gouging that's been rampant for the last five years and also the egregious treatment of local communities by companies trying to build data centers. We're reaching a point where they can't even gaslight us into supporting it by promising tax breaks to homeowners anymore.
Also, we're increasingly learning that the engagement of people who are anti-science is astroturfed, and that was put on display in a big way last week when Russian bots were silenced temporarily. There's still a chunk of people who are anti-science, and they happen to be very loud, but their opinions are amplified artificially, not representative of the whole.
Maybe it's different in the UK and Sweden, but I'm skeptical.
Zero surprise for me. Capitalist media constantly promotes rich people as honest sources of information... and these are the same people constantly attacking science.
It's that but not just that.
Notice people paying attention to actors and musicians on social subjects, even though the domain expertise of those people is acting and music respectivelly, not sociology.
(You can even see it here in Lemmy: some actor or other says something on a social subject somebody agrees with and they make a post here about it, under which tons of people write about how they totally agree and it's so good that said person talked about it. If anybody points out "they're an actor, not a domain expert" they're assumed to be of an opposite opinion, even of an opposite political side)
I think there is a broader problem of people's trust on certain subjects being far more highly positivelly correlated with the fame of the advice/opinion giver than with domain expertise.
Your point about rich people does dovetail with this - rich people are often treated as celebrities by the media.
PS: Also there are a bunch of interesting effects around this - for example the more somebody's opinion on something is talked about on the media, even negativelly, the more they are perceived as having a relevant opinion on that subject (the so-called "Halo Effect").
A community to post scientific articles, news, and civil discussion.
dart board;; science bs
rule #1: be kind