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by meheleventyone
1733 days ago
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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. |
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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.