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Ironically, doing research is the best way to be right. What people want is to feel right without having to think very hard. Feelings don’t really require energy in the same way that thinking does.
More than just research is needed and that’s what many miss. One must be able to reliably evaluate the quality of evidence to sort fact from baloney. Doing so requires critical thinking, the ability to be able to poke holes in theories regardless of whether you like them or not, and the willingness to be wrong and, above all else, the mental flexibility to update your knowledge when proven so. Not everyone is able to do that.
I am used to being wrong a lot so it comes naturally lol.
I end most of my thoughts with “but I may be wrong”
Plus the methodology. There’s an idea of actively seeking out research contrary to one’s hypothesis, this helps circumvent the confirmation bias of only looking for things that support a hypothesis and ignoring anything contradictory. It can be healthy to find and consider dissenting opinions.
Another fundamental issue is people using different meanings for similar words. Someone with a strong understanding of scientific method will say things like “I believe” or “studies show”, while someone else will say things like “This is” or “we know”. Colloquially the latter is stronger language conveying more confidence, but the former is more likely to be evidence based. “Theory” is used colloquially the way a scientist would use “hypothesis”. People will say “I have a theory”, that’s only a few sentences and doesn’t make any reliable predictions, the put down an actual theory backed by years of supporting evidence and peer review as “just a theory”.
Feelings are SUPER important to humans because they’re a huge efficiency boost. We take everything we’ve ever learned in our lives and crunch it down into a feeling for how the world works. Then we make the vast majority of our decisions by using that “gut feeling”. Can you imagine how ridiculously inefficient it would be to have to analyze every new scenario you come across?
The big problem today is that people lean in too hard on that idea and assume that because their feelings are right most of the time, feelings must be equivalent to truth.
The problem is that the efficiency is achieved through shortcuts and biases. It’d those biases people need to be careful with.
Works fine when you’re a wild animal, not so much when you’re part of a society
In other words, shortcuts and biases really just trade accuracy for speed.
Those many cognitive biases we succumb to may be great for scenarios faced by hominids a hundred thousand years ago or more. But for sussing out truth and evaluating evidence, they’re straight caca.
Can you imagine how ridiculously inefficient it would be to have to analyze every new scenario you come across?
I have adhd so I do not need to imagine it.
Can you imagine how ridiculously inefficient it would be to have to analyze every new scenario you come across?
The problem arises from the fact that the internet in particular incentivizes attracting attention above all other things and there’s no incentive for being correct, nuanced or well-researched. Combine that with the fact that people like to be right about things and doubly so when everyone else is wrong about it and you create a world where conspiracy, woo and other bullshit is actually an industry. I feel like that’s part that always gets lost in these discussions: people are making money from this.
Third option: they’ve fallen into a pattern recognition fallacy and think it’s a number when it’s a completely different symbol. This happens a lot more often than most realize and even knowing about it, it can be difficult to go against the human instinct to find patterns that may or may not exist and then fit the data to it.
Someone, somewhere, will misrepresent this to give credence to the “do your own research” crowd.
Which is not to discredit the message. They misrepresent everything.
g
GTFO! Clearly a drawing of a sanitary door hook. This is war!
See, this meme is annoyed at the ramifications of epistemological relativism.
I am extremely annoyed by the superfluous commas.
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I really like this take.
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I’m a little amused that in the comic both viewers are correct relative to their frame of reference. An extremely powerful concept that significantly advanced physics and about which famous people are household names.
I’m a little amused that in the comic both viewers are correct relative to their frame of reference. An extremely powerful concept that significantly advanced physics and about which famous people are household names.
You accidentally made the wrong point, because Einstein’s breakthrough of special relativity was that the speed of light is constant regardless of reference frame.
So if two people with different frames of reference are measuring the speed of light differently, at least one of them is objectively wrong.
But if they measure the order of events differently, they may both be correct. That is because light is always perceived as being the same speed regardless of the observer.
And yet, causality is preserved, and there is a clear specific mathematical relationship between the two frames of reference.
So you will measure differently, but as soon as you do the math to account for your different frames of reference, you will again have the same measurements. Of course, we know there is an objective mathematical relationship between the two frames of reference, because the speed of light is constant.
If you assume this is the entirety of the universe of the comic (perhaps encased in a spherical cow), sure.
That grammar is shit as hell, too.
“Just because you are right
Does not mean
I am wrong
Except my grammar
Which sucks doodie”
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“The building is behind me therefore it’s a six”
“But the number should be facing away from the building therefore it’s a nine”
Me, an intellectual: “I want egg”
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Just make a 8 From it.
That’s not an 8, that’s an infinity
That’s not an infinity, it’s a lemniscate!
You mean ∞?
No i mean balls
To further this point, there was an incident in early human history where it was debated whether the massive blobs in space where gas giants or galaxy. It went so far, in fact, that a mass of people built a telescope to clearly see the blobs just to prove eachother wrong and find out that both ideas were correct.
I’m aware of the irony of correcting you but I can’t help it. Nebulae not gas giants. Gas giants were known to be planets at the time, as they have apparent motion relative to the Stars. Nebulae and galaxies don’t have apparent motion relitive to the stars.
My bad. But at least you still understood what I meant.
That’s so deep. I’m shooketh.
