Here is the news....

[jturner]

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-online-attack

I'd love to say I'm surprised but I'm not. I think the author has got a sensible idea to resolve the situation but I fear that he's misunderstood the fundamental change that's happened in society, in which someone's opinion now has to receive as much "weight" as researched facts, and you can research anything by looking at YouTube or the like. Communication is fine but if the audience isn't listening and incapable of understanding what is being explained to them (either due to it being too specialised or simply because they choose not to), it won't change anything. People need to be open to receive a message to actually hear it. Another thing that would help IMHO which he doesn't mention is to get the money in research fully out in the open. Too much requires money from "interested parties", who may or may not have an agenda, and unless that is transparent, there will always be accusations of being in the pocket of special interests.

[notdeadyet]

I'd love to say I'm surprised but I'm not. I think the author has got a sensible idea to resolve the situation but I fear that he's misunderstood the fundamental change that's happened in society, in which someone's opinion now has to receive as much "weight" as researched facts, and you can research anything by looking at YouTube or the like. Communication is fine but if the audience isn't listening and incapable of understanding what is being explained to them (either due to it being too specialised or simply because they choose not to), it won't change anything. People need to be open to receive a message to actually hear it. Another thing that would help IMHO which he doesn't mention is to get the money in research fully out in the open. Too much requires money from "interested parties", who may or may not have an agenda, and unless that is transparent, there will always be accusations of being in the pocket of special interests.

There has been a clear anti-science, anti-intellectualism push in politics and the media for a long time. Covid ramped it up to psychotic levels but it was already there long before that. I'd guess the tipping point was the Trump era where the whole post-truth world met the QAnon nutsacks but before that there was all the Intellectual Dark Web bullshit as well.

There are so many issues involved that I don't know how you fix it. There's a completely lunatic belief that there has to be "balance" in the media. Which is fine when it comes to opinion but when it comes to science is absolute bullshit. There are some areas where you can't get a fag paper between theory A and theory B but I don't think that is the majority of science. When the alternative to evolution is creationism then providing "balance" is just bad journalism.

Doesn't help that high-profile gobshites like Neil Oliver and Russell Brand have built very lucrative identities on spreading very bad science and pretending "I'm only asking questions". Then pretending "I'm the victim of a conspiracy" the moment there's any effort to disagree with them.

I totally agree that interests of scientists should be as out in the open as possible. But science journalists also need to do a bit of due diligence. There's been a fair bit of reporting in the media over the last couple of years of the discovery of the Biblical town of Sodom in Jordan, an ancient site supposedly destroyed by an airburst or asteroid impact. It's even been published in Nature, the Independent and the Smithsonian magazine. But it's all bollocks. The "university" carrying out the research is an American Bible college operating out of a retail unit in a strip mall in the desert, many of the participants have no specialist experience and one of the main people was convicted of fraud after passing himself off as hydrologist. If journalists had spent 5 minutes looking at who the project was then they wouldn't have published.

I don't know what the fix is. It isn't hiding bad science and more good science in the media. The people seeking out bullshit pseudoscience aren't doing it because they want to learn about climatology, virology, archaeology, etc. They get into it because they want to believe they have been lied to and want evidence to support that. If you want an example of how stupid people can be in the face of evidence then look into the Tartarian Empire dickheads.

[Chrisch]

... The people seeking out bullshit pseudoscience aren't doing it because they want to learn about climatology, virology, archaeology, etc. They get into it because they want to believe they have been lied to and want evidence to support that. ...

This is the absolute core of the problem. It is why there are armies of liars on social media making a living out of bullshit. It is a fundamental problem with our species and probably it is impossible to overcome it.

[Paul Evans]

https://news.sky.com/story/herd-of-s...loods-12969680

[Paul Evans]

research anything by looking at YouTube

liars on social media making a living out of bullshit.

"Reality is inside the skull … There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation – anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to … You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature."

1984

I don't know what the fix is.

We need to drastically improve our education systems, that would be start!

[notdeadyet]

This is the absolute core of the problem. It is why there are armies of liars on social media making a living out of bullshit. It is a fundamental problem with our species and probably it is impossible to overcome it.

The internet is an all-you-can-eat buffet for fuckwits. In the 90's you had to actively seek out crackpots, now it's all there. I guess the start of it was the autism and vaccines guy. He's such a turd that I don't even want to google his name. He came at the right time to kick it all off.

[notdeadyet]

We need to drastically improve our education systems, that would be start!

Yeah. Seeing my daughter go from primary to secondary has been an eye-opener. Primary was fantastic, the secondary system is complete shit. She's gone from loving learning to hating it now. And I totally understand. There's nothing enjoyable about the system that I can see, it appears to have gone backwards since I was at secondary school.

[Paul Evans]

t appears to have gone backwards since I was at secondary school.

Thats my thought as well, its been dumbed down somewhat. Same with Tertiary educatation, A levels are the new GCSE's........

[notdeadyet]

Thats my thought as well, its been dumbed down somewhat. Same with Tertiary educatation, A levels are the new GCSE's........

I don't know that it's dumbed down. It's definitely badly done and presumably the drive for performance figures is behind it. Nothing works together, nothing is seen as a complete system, nothing makes any sense. I think it's more how everything is done rather than what is taught. I absolutely think the direction from government is shit but I also think the management is atrocious too at school level. I know teachers are supposed to be immune from criticism like NHS staff but the quality of some of the people doing it really is poor. Particularly the high level staff.

[Spirit of Guernsey]

https://www.theguardian.com/commenti...-online-attack

We all know that the Earth is really flat.