Remember when we walked on the moon, or proved the world was round, or even that the earth revolves around the sun? I sure hope the dumb people don’t lead us back to the stone ages. Trust science.
I remember talking to a coworker when the Covid vaccines were available. She said she didn’t want to get them because she read they were killing people. I asked her did she ask her Doctor (scientist) about it. She said yea and he said to get the vaccine. I told her, I’d believe my doctor over dumb strangers on the internet.
Dumb leader and not a scientist Donald Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.
It’s unrealistic to expect most people to get through the jargon and statistics that are involved in pretty straightforward papers. When you include meta analysis in that, most lay people would need to head back to school for a couple of years to get the necessary background.
This is where effective science communication are necessary. The scientific community needs to be able to speak to people directly to explain findings.
The problem is, the majority of people don’t have the ability to do that kind of analysis. It makes much more sense for them to simply trust the consensus of the scientific community than any other course of action.
Unfortunately true - get to 2nd and 3rd year uni you start being taught about assessing peer reviewed journal articles based on which journal published them and their relative experience and authority, and the university of the authors and experience of their departments.
No one did it though - God forbid anyone do it based on a 6 second post.
Fuck, I know multiple hospital nurses that were mask and vaccine skeptics during the massive outbreaks.
Also, unfortunately here in America, the only economically advanced society on the planet that allows for prescription drugs to be advertised on TV, there are and have been huge amounts of over prescriptions of drugs of all kinds that are massively expensive and have many side effects that are costly in many ways, when its often the case that if people simply could actually afford the time and money to do regular screenings, checkups, and even just an actually basically healthy diet with some routine light exercise, many of these drugs would never be needed at all in many cases.
I agree with you on trust the science, but when it comes to medicine, the unfortunate truth is that our healthcare system is so broken that you often cannot trust/afford it generally, opening up people to be susceptible to both officially approved and proffered solutions which are dubious (opiod crisis, sackler family) as well as absolute nonsense quackery like homeopathy, or drinking bleach, or even urine.
Even Nurses with a bachelor’s degree have a very light core science foundation. They take Biology for Health Sciences 1 and 2 instead of the Biology 1, 2, 3, and 4 that biology majors take. I had a nurse ask me if creatinine had a “nice little abbreviation” like Sodium (Na) and Magnesium (Mg)… Creatinine isn’t an element on the periodic table so no, it doesn’t. It is lots of C’s H’s O’s and probably some N’s. I had another nurse ask me to explain saturation. Nurses sent cookies to the lab (a “dirty zone”) in the same carrier tubes that hold sputum, blood, urine, and stool. Then they were confused on why we threw the cookies away and scolded them for the unsafe practice. Their education prepares them for the job of nursing not research scientist.
Remember when we walked on the moon, or proved the world was round, or even that the earth revolves around the sun? I sure hope the dumb people don’t lead us back to the stone ages. Trust science.
I remember talking to a coworker when the Covid vaccines were available. She said she didn’t want to get them because she read they were killing people. I asked her did she ask her Doctor (scientist) about it. She said yea and he said to get the vaccine. I told her, I’d believe my doctor over dumb strangers on the internet.
Dumb leader and not a scientist Donald Trump believed the human body was like a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depleted.
Science can take you to the moon, but religion will fly you into buildings.
Don’t trust science. Use it, scrutinize actual published science with it, and apply it within the bounds that the studies were done.
It’s unrealistic to expect most people to get through the jargon and statistics that are involved in pretty straightforward papers. When you include meta analysis in that, most lay people would need to head back to school for a couple of years to get the necessary background.
This is where effective science communication are necessary. The scientific community needs to be able to speak to people directly to explain findings.
This is where the media of old would pick up the findings and condense them into a 10 min segment run every 2 hours for a few days.
But that requires integrity, skill, understanding, and doesn’t help the anti-science political agenda.
(Yes, I am calling out FOX)
The problem is, the majority of people don’t have the ability to do that kind of analysis. It makes much more sense for them to simply trust the consensus of the scientific community than any other course of action.
Unfortunately true - get to 2nd and 3rd year uni you start being taught about assessing peer reviewed journal articles based on which journal published them and their relative experience and authority, and the university of the authors and experience of their departments.
No one did it though - God forbid anyone do it based on a 6 second post.
Fuck, I know multiple hospital nurses that were mask and vaccine skeptics during the massive outbreaks.
Also, unfortunately here in America, the only economically advanced society on the planet that allows for prescription drugs to be advertised on TV, there are and have been huge amounts of over prescriptions of drugs of all kinds that are massively expensive and have many side effects that are costly in many ways, when its often the case that if people simply could actually afford the time and money to do regular screenings, checkups, and even just an actually basically healthy diet with some routine light exercise, many of these drugs would never be needed at all in many cases.
I agree with you on trust the science, but when it comes to medicine, the unfortunate truth is that our healthcare system is so broken that you often cannot trust/afford it generally, opening up people to be susceptible to both officially approved and proffered solutions which are dubious (opiod crisis, sackler family) as well as absolute nonsense quackery like homeopathy, or drinking bleach, or even urine.
Even Nurses with a bachelor’s degree have a very light core science foundation. They take Biology for Health Sciences 1 and 2 instead of the Biology 1, 2, 3, and 4 that biology majors take. I had a nurse ask me if creatinine had a “nice little abbreviation” like Sodium (Na) and Magnesium (Mg)… Creatinine isn’t an element on the periodic table so no, it doesn’t. It is lots of C’s H’s O’s and probably some N’s. I had another nurse ask me to explain saturation. Nurses sent cookies to the lab (a “dirty zone”) in the same carrier tubes that hold sputum, blood, urine, and stool. Then they were confused on why we threw the cookies away and scolded them for the unsafe practice. Their education prepares them for the job of nursing not research scientist.
Worth pointing out that nurses are not part of the scientific community.
One eye opener for me of the pandemic was the large number of nurses who completely ignore accepted medical science.