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DrSunshine posted:Well-meaning citizens, often even progressives with a healthy skepticism about the intentions of a government aligned to the interests of big business and wealthy oligarchs, end up working against progress by spreading environmental panic about GMOs, contrails, and EMFs -- all completely harmless. It's exactly because they have that skepticism that they're so easily caught up in such beliefs. The thing about misinformation is that its victims are often predisposed to believe that misinfo before they even encounter it for the first time. They're skeptical about the intentions of a given entity, and are well-stocked on factoids about that entity's past bad behavior, so they're inclined to believe stories accusing that entity of current bad behavior. And if you challenge those stories without also acknowledging their distrust as justifiable (because it often is), they'll dismiss you as a clueless overly-trusting rube. GMOs, contrails, and EMF are all, as far as the general public knows, harmless. But for decades, the same was true of asbestos, tobacco, leaded gasoline, and opioids. And in each of those cases, the related industries learned of the dangers long before the public did and spent many years covering it up, often aided by government regulators who were either incompetent or actively colluding, as well as corrupt scientists who would happily churn out false or rigged data for the sake of the big companies funding their fake studies. Given that history, it shouldn't be surprising that some people are overly skeptical toward things that have become commonplace in our modern world because of the convenience and profitability they offer to businesses or the government. If you want to challenge the misinformation they've latched onto, you can't just target the fake info itself - you have to identify the underlying distrust that made them open to the fake info, acknowledge the basis for their skepticism, and convince them that things are different this time. You can't just say that GMOs are perfectly safe, you also have to tell them why that's more credible than it was when people said that tobacco was perfectly safe.
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May 14, 2019 14:25
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 06:52 |
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DrSunshine posted:The more I think about it, the more I feel that we need to somehow contain these types of memes, because of the risks they pose to society. It's okay to be skeptical, but when people begin to doubt the very processes underlying what creates knowledge in the first place, such as the scientific process, or to doubt all experts and people in positions of expertise or authority, it opens up society to disarray. Democracy can't function if there is no consensus on what constitutes reality. The fundamental problem driving all of this is that people in positions of expertise and authority have repeatedly shown in the past that they can't be trusted, and have done little or nothing to address those past events that have driven distrust. There was once a consensus that asbestos and leaded gasoline was safe. There was once a consensus that cigarettes and opioids weren't addictive and didn't have any harmful side effects at all. There once was a consensus that black people felt less pain than whites and therefore doctors should pay less attention to their complaints. There once was a consensus that marijuana was a "gateway drug" that would lead people's lives down the road to ruin. And so on. Now, all of that had all sorts of different reasons. Sometimes it was genuine scientific mistakes or a simple lack of data. Sometimes it was the result of an industry cover-up which funded fake studies while deliberately burying the truth. Sometimes it didn't really have any scientific basis at all but just crept into the public consciousness and medical curriculums as unscientific fear and bias. But all of them have one thing in common: people who've spent decades of their lives being told one thing by experts, and are now being told that actually, it turns out that thing was the exact opposite of true and has inflicted significant and irreversible damage to the lives of a number of people. After that, it's no wonder that people aren't going to extend nearly as much trust to the other things those experts have told them. To combat the misinformation, you first need to address a subject that's completely unrelated to the subject at hand: the incidents that have formed the root of people's distrust. We don't need to convince people of the underlying effectiveness of vaccines, we need to convince them that thirty years from now we won't be talking about the "vaccine scandal" in the same tones that we use to describe the "blood scandal" (companies knowingly selling HIV-contaminated blood products) or the opioid crisis.
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Jun 24, 2019 16:03
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