- formulating an initial opinion the first time we hear about something,
- evaluating everything we encounter after that through that lens of our gut instinct,
- finding reasons to think positively about the portions of the narrative that support or justify our initial opinion,
- and finding reasons to discount or otherwise dismiss the portions that detract from it.
The fact of the matter is that we are actually driven first and foremost by our preexisting biases. The good news is that our preexisting biases are usually based on experience, pattern recognition, and survival instincts - these are actually all good things. Without these intuitions, you would make terrible decisions every day about an astonishing number of things. Our logical reasoning process is inseparably tied to our "emotional cognition", which is to say, how things make us feel, which we construct based on living day to day. This might feel icky to you if you regard yourself as an enlightened, rational thinker - which, funnily enough, is a fantastic example of our emotional, preexisting biases influencing our opinions on things. Amazing.
The largest flaw that the article has is ironically this exact explanation. The implication it attempts to make is that scientists - either through will power or kung-fu-master-like discipline - suppress their emotional cognition, their "formulation of an initial opinion the first time they hear something" step, as listed above. It may be surprising to you, but scientists are people, too.
As a church-goer, I have long understood that my religious teachers are not exempt from the same plagues of us common rabble. The priests and pastors are not magically more righteous and free from the temptations suffered by the rest of us. It appears that scientism worshipers - those who have made science their religion and scientists their priests - have yet to recognize that. My pastors have always encouraged me to read my bible and check behind them after a sermon, and yet the priests of scientism are doing what anti-theists accused the priests of old of doing to the peasantry - forbidding them from reading the source material, perhaps even hiding it behind a paywall, or at least writing it in a language that is difficult for the peasant class to read. The resemblance is striking, scarily so.
The second implication, then, if the first is that scientists can avoid their gut instincts influencing everything they interpret about a subject from that point forward, is that the peasantry cannot manage to recognize when their initial gut instinct was wrong. Indeed, the main idea here, in any other words, is that people who are not scientists are stupid, illogical, slaves to their biases, incapable of analyzing information like the esteemed scientist caste. Somewhere, in the process of being educated how to use lab tools and publish scientific studies, amongst the scramble to create a dissertation in order to cement your place in the union and continue to receive funding, a steadfast, mental acuity toward bias-rejection is magically instilled into the scientist - the creature who is identical in every way to the plumber or janitor.
Of course, the article continues with some more amazing assumptions, which is to outright say we are all far too stupid to understand scientific data. A nebulous concept of "expertise" is invoked, insisting that scientists who study established scientific facts for awhile in between coaching on the politics and financial workings of actually being a scientist are naturally smarter than any given person. The implication here, of course, is that "professional" education via college makes you an expert. It is, as we all know, actually impossible to research anything online, the place where infinite knowledge is available to everyone who would seek it. Teaching yourself anything is, as we all know, literally impossible, a fevered dream of a madman, a person seeking to be their own teacher. Obviously, teachers are also magically better people, as they also had professional education. Normal, stupid people do not know anything. Indeed, anyone who is smart enough to be a scientist is already a scientist. No one who is smart is not a scientist, so we must assume anyone not a scientist is too stupid to understand things. The magical status of "being a scientist" is truly powerful.
This particular line from the article is striking: "It’s absolutely foolish to think that you, a non-expert who lacks the
very scientific expertise necessary to evaluate the claims of experts,
are going to do a better job than the actual, bona fide experts of
separating truth from fiction or fraud."
Astounding. The writer makes no attempt to avoid calling you stupid. The average prole is beaten down, an emotion-driven attack on their confidence and trust of their grasp on reality. Here, us peasants are gaslit against every conclusion we have ever come to through a logical analysis.
The article has more to say, of course, about how misinformation becomes embedded in our minds. It speaks about vaccines and how, as we all know, there are people against vaccines, and thus, people who do not get vaccines. Within a paragraph about this, there is a very, very important line. The author creates a problem that I do not think he knows about. The following sentence reads, emphasis mine:
But if you “do your own research,” you can find a small percentage of online activists, and even a few medical professionals, who rail against the overwhelming science, pushing discredited claims, fear, and often unproven cures or supplements as well.
Ah, but wait, I thought any scientist who dedicated years of their life to college education to acquire that magical scientific expertise was reliable? The problem inherent in the "trust the experts" mantra blares out of this line, a small dependent clause the author likely should have simply left out, but perhaps his own dedication to "appearing unbiased" caused him to reveal this flaw in his argument. The article states outright that people who are scientists have expertise. At no point in the beginning paragraphs does the author shed doubt on the concept that we can "trust the experts" (but not ourselves) because they have that mystical expertise. They, of course, got that expertise from years of scientific study. The medical professionals here, then, surely have the same accredited, respectable expertise as any other given scientist.
Except, clearly, the author does not think that. The author believes that only certain experts are actually reliable, while these "few medical professionals", for some reason, are not trustworthy. Why are they not trustworthy? Where is the difference between the college educated experts who agree with the author and the college educated experts who disagree with the author?
They are not to be considered trustworthy because they have gone against the majority opinion. This is not a conspiracy but an easily logically discernible conclusion. Allow me to lay it out easily for you:
- There is a "majority opinion" where many scientists agree on Thing X
- Scientist A says "I don't believe Thing X is true"
- The majority opinion holders accuse Scientist A of not being a trustworthy expert, because they have said Thing X is wrong, and the majority opinion holders say it is right
Genuinely, no smoke and mirrors, the only thing that is happening here is "appeal to the majority". The author betrays their own assertions from the beginning with this quip here. If scientists can be trusted because they are experts, because they have graduated from college in their field, then we must trust when Scientist A says they don't believe Thing X is true. If we cannot, then, logically, there is no magical aspect of scientists that makes them any more reliable than anyone else. If Scientist A's expertise and scientific training did not magically teach them Thing A is true, then the author must admit, at the very least, that either 1. Thing A could be false, or 2. Being a scientist doesn't make you capable of magically divining the truth. (The trick is that both are true.)
Furthermore, when disagreeing with the majority opinion causes irreparable harm to your career, causes your credentials to be revoked, and permanently brands you as a "dangerous lunatic" whenever your name is mentioned in the public sphere, the validity of the "majority opinion" should rightly be called into question. The entire history of scientific advancement came from the fact that people challenged the status quo. Imagine if we executed the first guy to question humorism. Imagine indeed, as all scientists would then agree unanimously with humorism, since the alternative is execution. We would still practice humorism today, even if a large number of people had a strong suspicion that it wasn't true. It's almost like this is not how science is supposed to be used.
The fact of the matter is that, in every single way, scientists are exactly like everyone else. Scientists are subject to their biases, they are subject to ingroup preference. They can be bought and sold, they will manipulate data to serve their own agendas, they will ignore evidence that goes against their beliefs. Absolutely nothing about being a scientist makes a regular human, subject to all the extensive mental faults that plague every other human, some sort of superhuman power thinker.
You may wonder, then, what are we to do? Surely, even if "expertise" from professionally educated scientists isn't perfect, it's better than nothing, yes? Well, unfortunately, it may be literally impossible to know what to believe. That's just my opinion, anyway. Stay tuned if you'd like to know why.
An article I read several years ago actually tells us exactly how big science is broken. An exact oppositely titled article says science is not broken, but they both actually make the same point. "Science" as a system, as a "corporation" so to speak, is nearly irreparably corrupted.
The first article cites a "replication crisis" (simply view the actual article for details) wherein an overwhelming number of studies have not been or cannot be replicated. Replication, if you know things about the scientific process, is the method through which we confirm that a scientific finding is accurate. If you run a study and get a certain result, but can never get that particular result again, we can be nearly certain that the first result was "a fluke" and not, say, a scientific "rule" of reality. That means an overwhelming number of studies appear by every measure to be flukes. That would be like believing walking under a ladder was bad luck because exactly one time that you did it, you broke your wrist five hours later on the same day. That is, by all accounts, an exact parallel to believing the results of a scientific study that cannot be replicated.
If that weren't enough, there is evidence that scientists regularly engage in outright lying, or fraud as it were. This was done via a survey where they simply asked scientists if they had engaged in unethical acts, such as selectively choosing results that supported their beliefs, or straight up fabricating data. Considering such admissions mean that the scientists are admitting to doing things that are bad we can only assume the number is actually higher, as we can safely assume not everyone was keen to admit wrongdoing, even if the survey is anonymous.
Finally, the icing on the cake, the peer-review process that is supposed to weed out faulty data before studies get published? It's compromised, too. Even when scientists knew they were being tested via faulty studies, they still rubber stamped them for approval. The social-aspect failures continue, with an explanation that older scientists are as superstitiously embroiled into whatever their original biases were as any irrational religious zealot, resulting in younger scientists needing to submit to whatever the more established scientists say, or risk losing their union membership. There are even more articles about how peer-review is abused, citing new and exciting ways scientists are ruining science, including the practice of letting scientists choose the people who will peer-review their work. To believe this wouldn't be abused would be to quite literally put scientists on a pedestal, above any other given human, assuming all scientists are naturally, unwaveringly ethical and working from a mindset of advancing scientific progress rather than their own paychecks and status (or that it's not possible for them to convince themselves they're doing both).
There are plenty more astonishing facts about the state of "big science" in that article, but I'd like to move onto the second article. Herein we find a new sort of excuse for the absolutely destitute state of modern science, and that is - and bear with me - that science is very hard.
The article makes an excellent point - and supplies an interactive little chart, even! - that shows how easy it is to manipulate data to say whatever you want. Given we know that some scientists admit to fudging data to support their claims via a voluntary survey, it should not be surprising that it is as easy as the interactive data chart makes it appear. And that's the part that this article claims is "hard" - it's hard to work with such small numbers, such small differences, and not only find valuable, useful data, but interpret it responsibly. In fact, the only way to recognize if the conclusions pushed by scientists are merely borderline-statistically-insignificant manipulated data is to, phew, do our own research.
But wait, I'm not even done. Here is an article that discusses how a "phantom reference" infiltrated hundreds of otherwise real scientific papers. The reference in question is from a paper that is not real but was still managed to be cited 480 times. It goes on to discuss how most scientists who write papers and make citations do not even read the cited works, they simply cite works other scientists have cited, almost a game of "citation telephone" wherein you wind up with papers making claims and citing sources wherein the claim made is not written. Later in the article we find the approximation that "only about 20% of citers read the original".
This means that those scientists we are supposed to essentially trust with our very lives are possibly manipulating data, lying, simply kowtowing to majority opinion for brownie points, or referencing studies they have not even read - or are reading papers that reference other studies that are nonexistent.
So what are we to do? It is, frankly, a bit much to expect the everyday person, the average Joe, to do painstaking research about so many things. The fact of the matter is that many people do simply "trust the experts", as the alternative is much more difficult. We often do not want to take our lives into our own hands, hoping a confident, trustworthy authority figure, looking out for our best interests, will simply tell us what is best. The fact of the matter is that there is no one looking out for our best interests. The experts do not care about us, they do not even care about the truth. I have been let down by doctors, people paid to care for my health, multiple times. Many people report doctors dismissing their problems and people have even died for it. Medical malpractice is an incredible killer. Those same pompous, educated "experts" in the form of scientists are no more interested in your health and well being. Scientists are bought and sold like anyone else, dissenting views are suppressed and attacked regardless of the validity of their methods. The only way to truly get a grasp on things is to explicitly do our own research.
Unfortunately, it will be pretty difficult to do even that. If the data is compromised, that means any research your look at could be compromised. This includes dissenting opinions. Yes, what I'm saying is all scientific research is suspect and it's nearly impossible to know which scientists lied or manipulated their data for their own ends. Regarding things we could not possibly hope to research ourselves, like whether the arctic is shrinking, we truly can have no idea what is the honest truth.
In fact, a very interesting tweet I came across explained this problem well, but maybe without realizing it. The OP laments that it's nearly impossible to do research because there's conflicting data everywhere with no way of telling who is "trustworthy" or not. They ignorantly - but innocently enough - "miss the days of Encylopedia Brittanica". The ending sentence of the tweet shows that they miss the point - there was likely always dissenting science by any number of opponents to the majority consensus, but because all of our information was compiled into name brand books which were then the main staple of libraries across the country, no one knew about it. Now any dissenting scientist can publish their work and get noticed. This seems like a new problem, but it actually discounts the fact that dissenting scientific opinions could be right, and thus, the majority opinion in Encyclopedia Brittanica, may actually not reflect reality, but a misled majority opinion based in nepotism and brown-nosing. If we only had "majority opinion enforced" encyclopedias today, I can only imagine how much worse the status-and-money-grabbing state of science would be. In a way, allowing dissenting scientists a platform may actually be healthier for truth-seeking than it is unhealthy, though I'm not sure it's salvageable at all at this point, frankly.
There is good news, though it may not seem like it at first. Most things do not actually matter. It actually, despite the outcry and controversy, doesn't matter if you think the earth is flat. What difference does it truly make to you, the average person, if pluto is a planet? It is not important. I think, however, for the things that matter, we can get a pretty good idea of what is right. Unfortunately, one of the kinds of things that is very important to the
average person is notoriously one of the most difficult things to
research, and that is nutrition science. If you are going to dedicate
hours of research into anything, don't worry about planets and icebergs -
figure out what the food you are putting into your own body every day
is doing to you. What is most amazing about this type of research isn't simply that it is applicable, but due to your very close, personal relationship with yourself, nutrition science is something you can easily study with the consent of the subject. You can, in fact, employ bona fide, grade-A science to your own life by making alterations to your diet and paying attention to the results! Amazing. In a real way, the science that truly matters to us is the most accessible, as it is personally testable.
It may never be possible for us to know particular things for certain, as science as an institution has been compromised. The things that personally affect us the most, however, we can figure out ourselves by utilizing the actual scientific process that professional scientists have left behind in favor of social status and wealth accumulation. You can lie about climate science all day and the average person cannot actually contest you with data of their own, only the data from other scientists. You cannot lie to someone about what certain foods are doing to them - they will find out on their own. What's important is not "listening to experts" but learning the mechanisms and functions behind what "science" actually is and applying them where it matters in your own life.
It's important to recognize that we do have biases, but it's also important to understand that our gut instincts are there for a reason. In this day and age, with the complete degradation of trust in "expert opinion", I would argue that you are better off trusting your gut instincts and your own judgements. Both systems are flawed, but at least you have your best interests in mind, where we cannot say as much for "the experts".
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