Comment by bayesianbot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bayesianbot | Hacker News Reader

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After covid my trust in future of humanity has plummeted. It feels like every time I see people they're talking about "science" where they've actually thrown the science part out and are having a lot of feelings how things are. Apparently everything is impossible to know, even all the things that are extremely well studied and really simple, and you can replace all the modern science by reading some tweets, listening to bro science podcasts and feeling them out, and always ending up the result you were looking for anyways. It's hard to understand how people's understanding of complex subjects can be on so ridiculous level but still be thinking they know everything they need to know. Maybe my view is biased but it's always the same story everywhere I go, though I've stopped going out as I find it so frustrating and depressing. I even meet people who have been "studying science" for years but don't really know how scientific method works and obviously don't even know what scientific paper looks like.

Sadly, disinformation is here to stay I think. And AI generated crap will probably worsen this rather than help.

But I'm fairly confident that Darwin's "survival of the fittest" still applies.

Where "fittest" means those (groups of) people which are better informed than their science-denying peers. And as a result, better equipped to deal with the many challenges of life.

Here on HN, it shouldn't need explaining what effect even small differences in "fitness" can have over a # of generations.

Scientists aren't the ones who are having lots of kids lol. Same goes for the kids of scientists too.

So extended lockdowns were the right chocie?

Maybe they were the right choice with the info available at the time?

Ok, I accept that. The problem was the doubling down by authorities of that choice as knowledge about the virus and its transmission increased. So at a certain point most people realized it was BS but authorities (both governmental and medical) were reluctant to admit that it was counter intuitive.

Erodes trust.

My opinion on extended lockdowns or anything else Covid-related really doesn't have much to do with my opinion that when forming strong opinions on complex subjects, especially ones that differ from consensus of experts, you should have good understanding of the basics of the subject as well as what are the experts basing their opinions on and why. Especially in science where the whole basis of the whole thing is evaluating how well your model performs predicting real world, throwing that all out and feeling things out really isn't as great method as many people seem to think.

I don’t think everyone appreciated suddenly taking part in an iterative scientific process without consent.

Doesn't really mean they should proudly talk about scientific subjects like they really know their stuff when they mostly don't know the things you'd learn from first chapters of your first science book, does it?

It's not like this is only related to Covid. You can see people "doing their own research" on climate change as well, without knowing the basics of science, physics, systems science or actual climate science, but they've watched a podcast or read a blog. Covid just made this bro science stuff so mainstream that it's hard to have a beer in a bar without hearing about it.

Letting in whatever scientists spew from their mouth in uncritically seems like a very bad idea. It's very naive because scientists have political, economic, social etc biases that might be counter to yours, and as we've seen clearly during the last couple of years, they have no issue with talking about their biased ideas as if they are scientific truth. To such an extent that scientific truth, trust the science, etc etc have become jokes.

Most of modern society is a series of iterative scientific processes by which we learn what does and doesn't work in e.g. our economies

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