[marshallbananas]

Another way I noticed that makes "smart" people believe in bullshit is using very scientific language and vague science concepts.

I noticed one of my friends (college educated and an ex FAANG executive) reading a book about astrology that basically tried to explain it with science. She made me read a chapter to prove that it's not bullshit. And it really didn't "sound" bullshit, and the author used many scientific terms and quoting papers on quantum mechanics and referring to astronomy. But once you actually tried to process the gist of it it was complete nonsense, literally zero information or stated facts. A horoscope dressed in scientific language.

[kzrdude]

Some people go through school life the same way, and that is probably partly the cause. They never really understood the subject, just went through learning about it and accepting it - without deeper understanding(?). This shapes people to basically believing anything - if it comes from a source with enough sheen of authority.

[meheleventyone]

This is literally everyone, look at experts trying their hand outside of their field of expertise.

The issue isn’t that we need to take some things on trust it’s how to work out who to trust.

Even scientifically literate people find this hard, you’ll often find people arguing something quite general by linking a paper that is very specific (or actually says the opposite!).

Less honest people will outright lie and link to a source in the hopes you won’t read it and trust them to be diligent. Just the other day a user here stated some facts and linked to a wiki page that immediately and outright refuted them.

We’re not just in an environment where we need to make sure people aren’t making mistakes. It’s also highly adversarial.

[kzrdude]

It's about something else than just having to work out who to trust - that just sounds like a restatement of the relativization.

Not everyone can be scientifically literate. And I agree, there are many things masquerading as scientific literacy - including picking out single papers while being clueless of the wider stream of knowledge in that field.

Yes, it really is much better to ask someone in the field - for example - what does this paper mean when you see it in context, and so on. That's what the good science journalists use to do.

But, we can't just give up. We can't be perfectionists in the sense that - "either you're an expert and know the field or you just don't know anything". We can all be curious and humble about what we don't know, while still trying to understand things in their context and fit them into our model of the world.

> We’re not just an environment where we need to make sure people aren’t making mistakes. It’s also highly adversarial.

Here I'm a bit unsure what you mean. Maybe, if I do: I don't think 0 mistakes is the goal. Mistakes are allowed. The differentiator is always, how we handle and correct our mistakes.

[meheleventyone]

I’m not advocating giving up.

By the last bit I mean people are not just making mistakes they are also deliberately lying by making things that lead people to making mistakes.

[pas]

I think it's worse than that. Sure there are intentional liars, but they are the easy to spot bullshit factory managers. What's harder is dealing with the true believers, who lie to save their own world view, who need that thing to be true.

[datavirtue]

Bingo. You figured out public school.

[beckman466]

> Bingo. You figured out public school.

what do you see as alternatives?

[sk2020]

Mandatory, universal indoctrination of the youth by the state long into adulthood wasn’t even normal until about a century ago. I suppose the Ottoman Janissary Corps is the only older example I can think of.

Outside of knowledge-based fields, most adults I know obtained all of their practical knowledge in the course of their careers.

[jacquesm]

Or just using complicated language to say something simple in the first place.

Annoyingly, science is sometimes also guilty of this - as is the medical profession. It's a form of gatekeeping. It would be better if we all just used the simplest set of words to communicate a concept. There are valid reasons for using more complex terms, they serve as some kind of data compression mechanism, but more often than not they are simply obfuscation.

[bluefirebrand]

Using complicated language because it is more precise is not gatekeeping. Boiling it down into simpler language is going to make it less accurate and more prone to misunderstanding.

[beckman466]

> Using complicated language because it is more precise is not gatekeeping.

But that's not what OP said.

They said "science is sometimes also guilty of this". They didn't say "always guilty".

[howaboutnope]

Ain't HN the king of that..

"you are being disingenuous": 110 results

"you are being stupid": 4 results

[meheleventyone]

I get your point but disingenuous doesn’t mean remotely the same thing as stupid.

[howaboutnope]

Oh, you're right. But still:

"you are being deceitful" 1 result "you are being dishonest" 42 results

... if I tried them all they might add up to over 100, but still. It's hard to make the case with a few searches, maybe I shouldn't have started this ^^ It's just something I notice constantly. E.g. half of the time, "I'm not entirely sure I agree" is a sincere statement, the other half it's just "I disagree" in more words that are supposed to give an impression of depth that isn't there.

[jobigoud]

But "dishonest" is simpler language register than "deceitful". Doesn't that weakens your argument?

[howaboutnope]

I didn't mean to contrast the two with each other, but both with "disingenuous", of which they're synonyms.

[donw]

I recall a video where a biologist talked about how students from prestigious universities had become completely incapable of doing science.

He would take them in the field, and they were utterly unable to study the real world. To make predictions, observe the world, challenge their assumptions. All they could do was fall back on peer-reviewed papers.

If it wasn't in a peer-reviewed paper, it simply didn't exist.

[elihu]

There's a saying that goes something like "sometimes half an hour in the library can save you two weeks in the lab". I think that's true, but at the same time, sometimes half an hour in the lab can save you two weeks in the library.

[hutzlibu]

In my experience, all of the latest esoteric scene tries this. Using a pseudo science language to impress the simple minded and if more elaborate, also the more clever ones.

Some of the more funny ones explained why the dna nucleous of the new vaccines change the energy field of the receiver. Meaning you loose your soul, if you get vaccinated.

Very hilarious are the scientific explanations around the flat earth society. They try in all seriousness to work out physics modells that work with a flat earth. Deep shit it seems.

[dorkwood]

I think there's a logical explanation for why being born at a particular time of year might have an effect on how your personality develops, and that's that the time of year you're born determines where you are placed within your cohort at school. Only just old enough for this year's intake? You're more likely to be shorter and weaker than everyone else on the sports team. Almost too old, but just squeaked in? You have both a physical and mental advantage over everyone else.

While 'horoscopes' might not have any basis in reality, it's not unimaginable to me that groups of personalities might arise who all share a particular birth month.

[jkhdigital]

In general I agree with you, but the more I consider topics like this the more I see it as a problem of correlation strength vs. effect size. That is, at the population level there may very well be a strong correlation between birthday and certain personality traits, but the effect size is likely to be infinitesimal compared to everything else we know about what shapes a person’s psychology.

I actually think this is one of the ways that published science tends to distort rather than clarify our view of reality, as the strength of correlation tends to be overly emphasized as measure of quality or relevance.

[marshallbananas]

That's most definitely true. But describing one's character or predicting behavior based on that is simply random stereotyping. And even if we could make some use of it, the astrology crowd would never embrace it.

[api]

That's exactly the sort of thought I've always had about astrology: if there's any truth at all to it, it's because all the astrology BS is just being used as a clock. The effect is the result of other factors that are periodic such as seasons, social factors as you say, etc.

[maccolgan]

Any such effect would be infinitesmally small at a city, state or nation level, not to mention such effects will not be self-repeating, defeating the purpose of such a book

[inglor_cz]

So true. I studied algebra and I am fairly acquainted with modern cryptography.

Sometimes I meet "seriously looking" texts that mix cryptographic and information theoretic expressions ("code", "one time pad", "asymmetric", "stream cipher", "entropy", "quantum") in a hodgepodge that does not make any sense, but looks convincing to the amateur reader.

I suppose it is the same with, say, immunology. People can cook up a Sokal-like text that throws all the buzzwords around and look knowledgeable on Facebook, without actually saying anything of value.

[kzzzznot]

It’s quite alarming how much misunderstanding I find in articles the mainstream media channels in my country write about about anything I have professional/deep knowledge in. I wonder how much nonsense I’m reading and perhaps blindly accepting about subjects in which I am not as knowledgeable.

[msrenee]

I run into that all the time. I've got a solid grasp of biology and have a lot of knowledge about animals. It's pretty rare that I find an article that draws the conclusions I feel should be drawn from the information. I had to stop reading an article posted on this site the other day, as early in the article, they claimed that no one knows why plants produce latex. Obviously, that's not true so I went to see how hard the info would be to find and it's right there in the Wikipedia article on natural latex. I can forgive not knowing, but I can't forgive making a claim like that when the information is so accessible.

So what am I being told about economics or international relations that's just completely untrue? I don't even know enough to know what's an obvious lie, so how do I know what to read up on to verify the claims? How do I know that the source I'm using to verify the article isn't complete bunk itself? It's kind of terrifying.

[UncleMeat]

But isn't this evidence that you should rely on the conclusions of experts? What you are describing here is that amateurs fail dramatically to synthesize correct beliefs about a subject, but if you spend years immersed in that subject you are much more capable of doing this correctly.

[datavirtue]

Same. I take raw video with a grain of salt.

[Sebb767]

Even then, the problem is that it's sometimes hard to say whether there is nothing of value in there or whether you just don't get it. At least I read quite a few papers where I knew the information was in there, but it was formulated cryptic enough so that it took me a long time to find out.

[Blikkentrekker]

The Bogdanov Affair happened, where papers that were later concluded to be devoid of any real meaning but full of jargon were published in physics journals, and most likely it was not a troll attempt but the auctor's were actually serious.

“zero information” was a common criticism on these papers when they were later more heavily scrutinized, that they had a tendency to use paragraphs of jargon to say the obvious and nothing new.

[MattPalmer1086]

I recall during my first degree, I once rewrote an essay, making the essential points clearer. I still believe it was my best essay, but I got the lowest mark with a comment that it was "too simple".

I got the highest mark for an essay I wrote the night before it was due with no knowledge of the subject. Just used a bunch of clever sounding words and threw in a fake bibliography at 8am in the library.

[londgine]

Out of curiosity, what book was it? I might get it as an April fool's joke for my astronomer friend of mine.

[marshallbananas]

Sorry, I don't remember. But it was definitely written by a Prof. Something Something, PhD. And of course it had a mesmerizing rendering of some cosmic occurrence on the cover.

[jkhdigital]

My sister, who is sharp but not highly educated, gave me a book on numerology once. I read the first chapter at least, just to humor her, and came away with the exact same feeling: zero information.

She’s a very “intuitive” kind of person, if you know what I mean. I do my best to stay curious and avoid judging her narratives about her personal experience; even if her explanations seem nonsensical I can’t deny the phenomenology of it.

However, I definitely draw a firm line with her on numerology. When you’re talking up theories about historical events and real people and organizations, you’re in the realm of falsifiability and you’d better bring evidence.

[BeFlatXIII]

I like to express the same point with something like "new age is when you take someone with zero understanding of quantum mechanics and even less understanding of vedantic philosophy and then combine the vocabulary of both"

[andi999]

Or one exaggerates results. Anybody read wisdom of crowds? Went back to the original nature paper (was it from 1904? Not sure) and I think the book made cited the result with ten times higher precision as in the paper.

[maccolgan]

Wonder if she peer reviewed some Sokal-esque papers some day