#Scientific denialism

[theexodvs]

Given the (warranted) suspicion given towards the disease denialism found in both Christian Science and Scientology, it can be said that if the claims of the neurodiversity movement were attached to organized religion, they too would be constantly lambasted.

[heightsofmadness]

On the one hand, sure, Pluto's status is and was a mostly-arbitrary categorical distinction. But the only reason it was considered a planet in the first place was because (tldr) they figured there had to be another one out there to account for weirdness in Uranus's orbit; when they found Pluto, they also massively overestimated its, uh, mass, until they found its moon and used that for measurement. In 2005 they found another object out there with greater mass than Pluto; in 2006 they said "okay, we can't keep pretending this belongs on the same tier as the other 8," and demoted it to dwarf planet. Thus, the category changed as a result of new information.

Also, the reason "pluto is a planet" gets lumped in with the other shit is because 9 times out of 10, the people shouting it loudest are doing so because pretending they're smarter than actual experts makes them feel special. There's a good reason Pluto isn't considered a planet anymore, just like there's a good reason people get vaccinated, and there's a good reason the Earth is widely accepted to be round... so it goes with climate change, evolution, the historical existence of trans identities, etc. Denying any of the things I listed means that a person 1) hasn't done the research, 2) ignored or didn't hear from the people who DID do the research, 3) refuse to listen to those people or do the research themselves for a variety of reasons (a few of which are valid, to be fair), and 4) have decided to double-down on their position despite all of the above (which never has a valid reason).

I've noticed something I find somewhat concerning and it's that for a lot of people, 'pluto is a planet' has fallen into the stock list of examples for what one might call 'science denialism', along with things like antivaxx, denying the existence of feathered (non-avian) dinosaurs, and flat earthers

there's a sentiment that goes like 'well, sure, you learned in school that the solar system has nine planets, but Science Marches On and we now know it has eight' and while certainly people should not take what they learned in school to be immutable law they should also like. have a concept of the rather significant difference between 'we've learned something new about the world' and 'we've decided to slice up the world in categories along different lines'

slicing up the world into categories is one of the basic operations of human thought and if you do not understand it well enough that you think 'people used to think the earth flat -> now we know better' and 'astronomers used to call pluto a planet -> now they don't' are analogous processes then you fucked up somewhere.

and if you don't think they are analogous, if you understand the difference i am pointing out and think it does not matter to the quest of listing stock examples of people disagreeing with things scientists say, well. you fucked up in a different place, probably.

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 146

So. Dan is a combination of both Danny and Vlad. Which he has never had an issue with before, but this is just frustrating. It’s not like he can’t deal with the fact the combination of the obsessions forms a protect family one, and he can deal with it. It’s not like he has one anymore. 

Which is where the gobsmacked annoyance came from- he was planning on destroying his sort-of past-self, showing this was inevitable. But his obsession, apparently like his old man, decided instead to latch onto the kid, definitely not helped by the fact the brat is like two years dead. If that, he can’t recall, all his ghostliness knows is that the brat is a fucking baby. 

He was going to destroy him, he swore! That had been the plan! So how the fuck did he get to helping the brat and the brat’s Jazz packing bags to run away? How the fuck is he responsible parent material, because he is damn sure he definitely isn’t. 

Damnit. He’s taking this half-grown clone daughter too. Fuck Vlad, he can rot in that thermos and the Fentons can stay trying to figure out why the portal is no longer working. Being the responsible one sucks though, he’d rather go back to destroying the world but killing the league a second time also sounds like too much work right now. Damnit again. 

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

"Evolution is a fact, not a theory. It really happened, and the fossil record and the molecular biology all confirm it. And yet, in this country, the United States, which is the leading scientific country in the world, we have people who are not only ignorant of science, but who are actively hostile to it and to the scientific method. And that is a serious problem, because science is not just a body of knowledge, it's a way of thinking. It's a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility." -- Carl Sagan

[novadreii]

rewatched arrival for the hundredth time. this movie never fails to gut punch me with its approach to determinism. louise embracing her future that she knows every moment of, despite the tremendous loss and pain it contains, with open arms. she doesn't hesitate, or ruminate on how she can try and change it. she accepts it all, the good and the bad, because what she gains is worth it, so many times over for her. she steels herself against a certain future and runs forward to meet it all, to love, learn, and lose, and trusts and leans on herself to live through it all. because that's what life is; it's the joy and the suffering. to try and isolate the joy alone is madness, futility in its purest definition.

comparing her line of thinking to a palindrome (how she named her daughter, hannah), the movie kept emphasizing, "it's the same backwards as it is forwards." it doesn't matter if you can see the end; life is the same whether you live it "forwards" (without knowledge of the future) or "backwards" (with foresight). it doesn't change the significance of your life experiences; to try and avoid certain future pain just because you have the knowledge of it is a zero sum game. you think you win because you avoided pain, but you also avoided the joy that preceded it. the metamorphosis. so you still lose if you try to win, and vice-versa.

all you can do is rush forward and take it all head-on. see this whole beautiful mess as your one most precious gift; this one life, this one chance, a laughably miniature blip on the colossus that is linear time, to experience all there is to feel before you return back to an eternity without perception. it's all worth it, because only in living a full-fledged life open to everything it has to offer does the experience of living turn out to be greater than the sum of its parts; it's in trying to beat the system (avoid pain) that we actually lose.

"if you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?"

"maybe i'd say what i feel more often. i...i don't know."

[moodr1ng]

"this social psychology experiment proves humans are inherently cruel and domineering!" "no this other social psychology experiment proves humans are inherently kind and cooperative!" everyone learn that singular experiments cannot be taken as conclusive proof of anything + consider that perhaps literally no amount of social psychology studies will ever "prove" any kind of inherent, all-encompassing moral truth about all of humanity and will only ever be an example of possible group conduct in certain conditions, in a certain culture and time, among certain people

[catmint1]

Alexander von Humboldt… observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

—Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything

[aftonrobotiics]

new year new william. leaning into the mad scientist vibe. it's what he deserves.

[ashton-ryder]

this friggen nerd still writing his research paper during a zombie apocalypse I mean REALLY. (although rosie would be happy to edit it because she does so much reading and writing)

"research doesn't end just because the world did. science wouldn't be where it is today if it didn't continue to evolve while the world was burning. how else did you think all the wars and pandemics ended?"

[theexodvs]

"You don't believe in scrupulousity? You're a denialist!"

"You're also a denialist of humor theory, phrenology, female hysteria, drapetomania, the effectiveness of lobotomies, and the vast majority of medical concepts that have ever been proposed."

[the-defiant-fluffball]

I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about, but let me explain what I'm talking about!

This article focuses primarily on the boomerang effect, that is, the idea that telling people a fact will somehow make them believe the opposite. It says so right at the start:

This idea is what the article ultimately presents a case against. The whole thing about changing someone's belief is secondary at best, and the article doesn't seem to come to a clear conclusion about it (because that's not the main topic):

(you can see that in both of these quotes, it even says straight up that people tend to cling to their beliefs, although it's not supported by a source - probably because the article is not really about that, like I said.)

The main study they refer to throughout the article is Skurnik, Yoon, and Schwartz, which is all about a flyer about facts and myths backfiring:

You can see that this is not actually about the students' pre-existing beliefs, but rather about telling them facts and seeing if doing so will somehow be worse than not saying anything. The vast majority of the text is talking about how this study was being repeated and the results came out different.

So what does it actually say about changing one's beliefs?

One study is mentioned at the very beginning, but I couldn't find any references to it being refuted:

Other than that, the closest we get to talking about pre-existing beliefs is this study:

You can see that there's not a whole lot of info here. We don't know what the false statements were, but the example given in the article is non-political and more about general knowledge. The average strength of belief seems to be 6 out of 10, which is kinda middlish. So what this seems to show is that if corrected about a topic you don't feel very strongly about, by someone who has authority over you, you'll be likely to at least temporarily accept the new info. Which, great, but this only covers a small amount of scenarios where someone is presented with information that's contrary to their belief.

So the article mentions another study about people (not) changing their opinion:

(See how the focus is on doubling down, aka the boomerang effect? That's because it's what the article is about.)

So there was a repeat of this study with updated methodology,* and:

So no boomerang effect was shown, but people also didn't seem to change their minds. (Based on both the wording in the article and the actual paper - looking at the graphs, I'm not really seeing a flip from 'this statement is 100% true' to 'this statement is 100% false'.)

I could go on, but I hope it's now clear what I meant - this article primarily refutes the boomerang effect, and doesn't prove very well that people change their minds when confronted with facts. (They might be slightly less convinced though, but this is not enough to say 'those sources were wrong'.)

_____

*They used MTurk, and only MTurk, to get data from more than 10k people. MTurk data is generally considered to be pure trash, but if you don't believe me, here's a pretty persuasive paper about how unreliable studies using this tool can be, but this is a whole different topic.

[tornadoquest]

Tornado Quest Top Science Links For August 31 - September 7, 2024

Greetings everybody! Thanks so much for visiting. With the arrival of September, meteorological autumn has begun in the northern hemisphere and spring starts south of the equator. We’re reaching the peak season for hurricane potential and the Atlantic has a few areas of concern that are worth watching. While preparedness supplies are plentiful and the Atlantic is somewhat quiet (for the moment),…

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

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At this point, Pseudo-Scientific American is basically as reliable as The National Enquirer.

This is what ideological takeover looks like.

[in-sightjournal]

Ask A Genius 988: Creepy Racist Assholes, the Strato-Flat, Holocaust Deniers, and "Lance Versus Rick"

Rick Rosner: All right, so I haven’t talked to a flat earther about flat earth theory, but I’ve run into several on Twitter recently and may have one on Lance versus Rick this weekend or early next week. A flat earther believes that the Earth is a flat disk and that any indication that it’s a sphere floating in space is, in their minds and, according to their theories, an illusion and a bunch of…

[revelisms]

There is so much subtext here and I just keep coming back to it.

At the highest level—Love and legacy are the sacrifices we make for progress—isn't that, at its core, just the moral conflict of the entire series, for almost every character we see?

"Progress," of course, means different things for different characters—and the type of love/legacy they sacrifice changes accordingly. But it's a change we see from start to finish, and the motivator to every character arc we're introduced to. And within that, there's a lot of arcs we don't have full visibility into; instead, we just get glimpses of what may have been, what might have happened, etc. through other characters' interpretations/dialogue.

Singed could be speaking about anyone here. But he's had this conversation before. Moments before this, Singed tells Viktor that he knows the look of a doomed man. And then he gives his warning—because he's seen the cycle of what a man willing to do anything will result in. He, in some ways, has already enabled this cycle before: in himself—and, we can infer, in Silco.

The natural assumption to make is that Silco's relationship to Singed became what it is immediately following the fight in the river.

They could have known of each other before—Silco, the revolutionary within Vander's freedom-fight; Singed, the "mad doctor" who parted ways with Topside, who Fissurefolk only went to when they had nothing else to lose. And maybe Silco went to him immediately, because he didn't know what else to do: barreled through his door, soaked and shell-shocked and covered in blood, a knife shaking in his palm, like he'd barreled through his door with Jinx. Or maybe he waited, holed up and hid until the rot spread, until he'd been all but driven mad by it, and he wavered in like a wraith in his doorway, hollow-eyed and haggard—and Singed had this very same conversation with him. Wagged a vile of Shimmer's earliest strand in his face, and asked, Are you sure this is the path you want to take?

The irony here, of course, is that the narrative sets us up to believe that a man willing to do anything will stick to that cycle, from beginning to end—and, as Singed shares from his own past with Viktor, will sacrifice love and legacy for the sake of progress.

But in Act 3, Silco shows up on his doorstep, again—spits, You think I can't see that? when Singed says Her injuries are severe—and Singed makes that little hum. Surprised, almost. Because here is a man who built an identity on the back of doing whatever he must to achieve progress, to fight, to survive; who has found family, found love and legacy, again.

Only now, that's a sacrifice he's not willing to make. And maybe Singed knows that, sees it, before he does, himself.

Just like he knows Viktor is more doomed that he'll let on—that he's willing to do anything he must, to progress their research and battle his own illness, his own rot—and that he's setting off on the same path, the same cycle, here again.

ARCANE | 1x07 - THE BOY SAVIOR

I understand now.

[asexualchad]

this is becoming exhausting are there any covid-conscious spaces that do not have heavy overtones of kink/polyamory/transgenderism