Opinion What's the deal with layman(s) questioning the credentials and scientific ability of actual experts?

[evergreenrider]

Trust, but verify

 

[LeonardoBjj]

I speak at events often and get challenged. I use it as an opportunity to dive deeper and expose how their question/comment has merit or not and why not. It's a good practice to improve your ability to defend your positions without being adversarial, even if they are. I will say, the public does not attend our nuclear energy events.

I am interested though... what is the deal with microplastics?

- I had a pretty good law teacher that was also a delegado, i think it's trhe equivalent of american sherifs? Some guys asked the most stupid questions just to prove he was wrong. He just ignored.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Too many journalism majors thinking they are trained scientific thinkers because they can spill the bounds of the English language without really saying much or sometimes really anything at all.

- That's the truth. Excepet that you dont need a degree in jornalism anymore here. Also actors and musicians, some of the stupidiest creatures to ever walk on Brazil soil, think they're scientists!

 

[LeonardoBjj]

I recently had a pack of Karens tell me that their kids will succumb to silicosis if they play on a beach that has F35 silica sand.

- F22 is far cooler!

 

[The XL]

Two main reasons.

1. Having credentials doesn't inherently make you competent.

2. Having credentials doesn't make you trustworthy or beyond taking bribes or bending to threats to do the will of those in government and business. This is the more important and prevalent reason.

 

[LeonardoBjj]

I don't know but I believe him

- Theres several videos of the municipal guard efetueting arrests and preventing crimes. But since they got cooller uniforms and arent under the militaristic discipline(aka nuthugging) of the military, the old-man is jeallous.

 

[Osculater]

- F22 is far cooler!

Is more conductive to free flowing positive energy

 

[BFoe]

Fucking retarded... You still believing everything they're telling you?










This Asshole is still giving presentations on the National Stage for Climate Change. And worse, world leaders listen to him... lol

Yeah... I'm anti-science and education. I'm a Civil Engineer in Water Treatment. My career is strictly almost all a meritocracy. Can you do the job or not. Because it's immediately apparent when you lie about your abilities and what you can do. lol

However, I collide on the world where politics fuck up public projects. I see it all from the inside from the Government and Design side, including the incompetence and negligence of so called "experts". I know how to design and build these projects... that's all I care about. But that's not the real world.

I've about a jaded as you can get with politics, big corporations or anyone with agendas. I've seen massive fuck ups and how the news gets almost every detail wrong.

Dunnig Kreger is right. You're fucking clueless... as we all are. And the so called "experts" are likely clueless or worse, compromised, for an agenda. If they can lie about one topic, they're definitely lying about other topics. Why wouldn't they? And why would you believe anything "they" say.

And you're dumb as fuck if you take anyone's statement of "Fact" on face value. In one of the biggest government fiascos of human history, Fauci fucking lied several times. Why? To protect his ass and his associates.

Lockdowns? Face mask? 6' social distancing... Social Distancing. Are you fucking kidding. A term they grabbed out of their ass and shoved down your throat. The set back US Children several years over their incomptence.

Who are you supposed to trust now? CNN? MSNBC? Fox? Are you fucking kidding?

We just watching the Biden Admin literally lie about everything from the border to the economy for 4 years. Including Biden's health and mental competency.

lol...

Boy, when I said you guys were emotion-based, you sure were in a hurry to prove me right with this emotional rant.
I’m just going to bullet point some things in response.

—I have never said to automatically “believe everything they tell you” (whomever “they” is supposed to refer to). Later in your post you say “you’re as dumb as fuck if you take anyone’s statement of fact at face value.” I never said to do that at all.
Evaluate the data, its source, its claims, and go where the data leads. And always be aware that tomorrow, there could be a new discovery that changes the data and makes it lead somewhere else.
It’s Data. It’s not Dogma.

—A President’s press secretary standing in front of a mic and simply saying “Don’t worry about president Biden, he’s doing great,” is not at all the type of thing I’m talking about. It’s one thing if there was a preponderance of good data to back up that assertion, but again, you seem to be interpreting what I said as “just believe what you’re told” or some shit, and that’s not what I’m saying at all.


—The concept of social distancing wasn’t pulled out of their ass. It comes from past experience in treating patients with SARS and H1N1, and the distances are recommendations—ill say it again, recommendations—that medical professionals made because of the preponderance of scientific data that they gathered when greeting those cases. It’s not an absolute, and it’s not magic.
It’s so interesting to me how you guys single out Fauci, when the most prolific and public spreader of COVID misinformation was Trump, whose knob you slob continually.


I also think it’s pretty ironic for you to take this POV, when you post like a zillion dumb tweets and TikTok posts and shit that I know damn well you don’t bother to fact check or verify. You accept and regurgitate that shit without a moment’s thought.

 

[Osculater]

Boy, when I said you guys were emotion-based, you sure were in a hurry to prove me right with this emotional rant.
I’m just going to bullet point some things in response.

—I have never said to automatically “believe everything they tell you” (whomever “they” is supposed to refer to). Later in your post you say “you’re as dumb as fuck if you take anyone’s statement of fact at face value.” I never said to do that at all.
Evaluate the data, its source, its claims, and go where the data leads. And always be aware that tomorrow, there could be a new discovery that changes the data and makes it lead somewhere else.
It’s Data. It’s not Dogma.

—A President’s press secretary standing in front of a mic and simply saying “Don’t worry about president Biden, he’s doing great,” is not at all the type of thing I’m talking about. It’s one thing if there was a preponderance of good data to back up that assertion, but again, you seem to be interpreting what I said as “just believe what you’re told” or some shit, and that’s not what I’m saying at all.


—The concept of social distancing wasn’t pulled out of their ass. It comes from past experience in treating patients with SARS and H1N1, and the distances are recommendations—ill say it again, recommendations—that medical professionals made because of the preponderance of scientific data that they gathered when greeting those cases. It’s not an absolute, and it’s not magic.
It’s so interesting to me how you guys single out Fauci, when the most prolific and public spreader of COVID misinformation was Trump, whose knob you slob continually.


I also think it’s pretty ironic for you to take this POV, when you post like a zillion dumb tweets and TikTok posts and shit that I know damn well you don’t bother to fact check or verify. You accept and regurgitate that shit without a moment’s thought.

The USA is doomed

 

[LeonardoBjj]

Is more conductive to free flowing positive energy

- The fighter jet. Looks like SwatCats jet

 

[BFoe]

The USA is doomed

Absolutely cooked. Wildly unqualified billionaires running everything, constant conspiracy theories, terrible diseases making a comeback because anti-vax dumbfucks ont vaccinate their kids. We’re on the cusp of Idiocracy, held hostages by the Stupids.

 

[heloder]

Modern science has afforded the people in this country a lifestyle that allows them to act like modern science is a scam. It's really as simple as that.

If modern medicine hadn't solved smallpox, measles, polio, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, plague, yellow fever, tetanus, rabies, et cetera...do you think there would be a burgeoning anti-vax movement? Exactly. Anybody stupid enough to say anything to that effect would be immediately shouted down and shunned. But we live in a world where those diseases are, for the most part, eradicated. So naturally you'll get retards popping out of the woodwork speaking out against vaccines.

And it doesn't stop at medicine. If modern government regulations hadn't drastically improved food safety, building standards, workplace health and safety standards, financial stability, et cetera, do you think there would be a burgeoning anti-regulation movement? Nope. But we live in a world where there aren't bank runs and depressions every three years, or tens of thousands dying from food-borne illnesses. So naturally you'll get retards popping out of the woodwork speaking out against pasteurization and government regulations.

Is it a lack of education with regards to history? Is it simply stupidity? Or is it all tied to the cult of ignorance that has been cultivated by the MAGA movement?

I'd say it's all three combined with social media.

 

[Spam On Rye]

There is so much tuth to this man.. but I have to say whenever you post in particular I find myself wishing you would say a lot more..


I would think many of the people on the left have never heard these kinds of discussions that are really cutting edge philosophically in the world right now having to do with the crisis of meaning and having to do with the religion of scientific materialism and what that has done to people.


On another note... apophaticism is one of the foundational principles/approaches of spiritual growth in the Orthodox Church. The notion that all of our divine revelation is true but that we can't really know what it means except by direct mystical experience and so we must approach our union with God, which is the truth itself, through unknowing, through letting go of concepts, emptying ourselves until we come to divine simplicity, which prepares us to have mystical encounter with God directly.

But I've noticed that everyone who has this is also extremely comfortable with uncertainty and they are much less likely to fall into any kinds of propaganda or arrogance based on what they know because they've become comfortable with uncertainty and they've seen past discursive knowledge.

I remember the celebration some of us felt when we heard certain scientists begin to postulate that maybe we weren't smart enough to understand the whole universe, that maybe we didn't evolve to understand the whole universe and that we could be forever in mystery concerning the universe. I and a bunch of my friends felt a certain kinship with scientists when we heard them start to speak in this way... the way we had already been taught by Christian spirituality to think about Revelation and God.

Appreciate that, man. Honestly, I get hesitant to go too deep into metaphysics or presuppositional stuff, just because a lot of people seem stuck in a kind of Hegelian haze. Everything turns into politics, and the deeper questions get lost.

Yeah, truth is a person, right? That’s what keeps us from falling into prelest, which I’ve definitely done before. Spiritual discernment feels like a superpower sometimes, being able to see through all the worldy noise.

I’m not super confident diving into heavy theology, but I do feel more at home in philosophy, especially philosophy of science. Popular science has kind of lost the plot imo. It’s become more of a belief system than a method.

This Enlightenment mindset that chases quantity over quality just doesn’t cut it. Modern science threw out metaphysics, and now it’s stumbling around half-blind.

It’s never gonna answer Hume or give us that holistic world the human soul craves. It just keeps trying to find every piece, not realizing some of the pieces are hidden from us and honestly, that’s okay.

Again, appreciate you spurring me on to write a bit more. I'm not good at it so sorry if my thoughts seem scattered or my grammar offensive.

 

[Milgrim]

What do you do when two people with medical degrees and labs have differing opinions?

Then you talk to more than two. There aren't many matters that the medical community hasn't arrived at a general consensus about. However, some people will pretend that the CDC, Mayo Clinic, AMA and Surgeon General collectively carry no more weight than a chiropractor from Florida with a You Tube channel. Those people are fucking idiots with an agenda.

 

[HereticBD]

Easy. It's because scientists have recently made an effort to go against science, in favor of politics.

 

[Hdfi]

We live in a world full of deception. The government, media, etc. lie and manipulate all the time and consequently a widespread lack of trust is to be expected.

 

[gatchaman]

For my job, I often have to speak at conferences and events sharing aspects of my research, or being asked to comment about certain topical issues.

I make a fairly concerted effort to be as neutral as possible and rely on what the available data is telling me - in fact, my talks are often specifically about something called "material agnosticism" (there is no such thing as a good or bad material, it depends on the context and application in which it is being used). It is a position that is gaining a lot of traction in the product design space, as it doesn't ascribe value based characteristics to something like plastics vs. paper.

On several occasions now, I have had members of the audience make baseless claims completely divorced from scientific reality. The most recent examples were about micro-plastics - at one conference, an audience member said "Microplastics cause heart attacks". The exact opposite occurred at a different event, where somebody claimed that microplastics don't exist. Trying to explain to people what the data is actually suggesting is a fools errand. They either accuse me of being a paid shill, or that they read their own trusted sources (usually on reddit/facebook/youtube).

I don't go into a mechanic and say "I know more about fixing a transmission because I watched a youtube video", so why are these people with no background questioning my knowledge? It takes every ounce of restraint not to call them retarded, and I am forced to be conciliatory and feign respect for their opinions.

When you were pushed by interviewers to connect your waste management expertise to climate change, why didn't you explain that you cannot make this connection because it is not your area of expertise?

 

[Deleted member 577981]

Easy. It's because scientists have recently made an effort to go against science, in favor of politics.

It's actually a lot deeper than that and precedes any of those forms man even though I agree with you in the forms you pointed out.

But there are many other forms and the entire country and both parties are complicit in them.

Check out post #93 where a guy goes a little deeper into what went wrong.

 

[Deleted member 592570]

Then you talk to more than two. There aren't many matters that the medical community hasn't arrived at a general consensus about.

So what do you do in a case like covid where the majority are wrong?

 

[Deleted member 592570]

When you were pushed by interviewers to connect your waste management expertise to climate change, why didn't you explain that you cannot make this connection because it is not your area of expertise?

Because he's full of shit.