One might say they blinded us with science...
Still, I don't blame the scientific community for this state of affairs. I blame marketing firms, our faltering underfunded education system, and more recently soc media for amplifying BS and blurring the line between it and fact.
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Replying to @jqgregory @CornyKorn21
But honestly, that really seems like picking the person to blame first, then putting the blame on them, without much evidence. There was no social media when "sugar calories are the same as other calories" or "dairy is bad for you" were inculcated.
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Is marketing to blame for people saying you shouldn't eat full-fat dairy? If anything, marketing for the dairy industry wouldn't have been doing that :) It's just medical "researchers" in high positions of authority being really, really bad at their job.
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I don't think any amount of pointing the finger at social media or marketing departments can change the fact that there are a lot of "scientific" community structures that produce laughably bad conclusions even by the evidence of the day.
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And if that's the case, isn't the game over before it's even begun? Sure, we should worry about whether quality science can be disseminated to citizens. But it's putting the cart before the horse if the "science" the authorities are pushing is actually opinion, not science!
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Replying to @cmuratori @CornyKorn21
Depends on the discipline. Nutrition "research" isn't good science IMO, but for example vaccine research, climate research, quantum physics, genetics, and cosmology have been incredibly good overall. To blame the "scientific community" is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
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Replying to @jqgregory @CornyKorn21
Again, not the citizens' fault. They don't know the difference. If you want to blame people for not trusting science, they would need a way to tell the difference between science that was real and "science" that wasn't. And that is _very_ difficult.
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If there was a lot of very vocal denunciation of, eg., medical and psychological sciences by other sciences, that would be one thing. But in general there has been very little of that and a lot more blaming of people for not "trusting science" without differentiating.
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Stated alternately, if you want to blame someone for not believing in "science", you first have to explain how that person was supposed to tell the difference between real science and fake science. How is the average citizen going to do that?
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Replying to @cmuratori @CornyKorn21
Yep. As I said, it's an education problem, not the fault of the scientific community. I donate to Union of Concerned Scientists and National Center for Science Education because I think better science education is a big part of the solution. Dumping on science doesn't help.
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Dumping on _science_ doesn't help, but dumping on the scientific community is very warranted. No amount of educating citizens is going to let the average person read a longitudinal study on cholesterol and know that it's bullshit.
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If the community writ large wants to be believed moreso than any other community who simply states opinions, it is incumbent upon them to _actually ensure they are not stating unfounded opinions_. Otherwise, they have no greater claim to accuracy than anyone else.
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And yet another way to say it would be, how is the average citizen to know that "climate change is manmade" science is real but "calories in calories out" science is not? The only "education" they could have for that would be to be an expert in both!
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