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You have to use parables to teach moral concepts to most people. Sociology is very valuable as a science, but if you come at the general public with unvarnished findings you are going to have a bad time, few will listen to you.

The old alpha male trope is a parable that serves some narrow interests. The newer counter parables about how that is BS are based in observations from sociology, later generations of more rigorous animal behavior studies and related fields.

You are correct that good scientific work is the source of what we need. The equally difficult truth is that those findings will only make their way into general consciousness through parables.

This one weird fact drives nerds crazy, but for newer, better ideas to take hold in society they have to be translated into simple stories.

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sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

You have to use parables to teach moral concepts to most people.

This one weird fact drives nerds crazy, but for newer, better ideas to take hold in society they have to be translated into simple stories.

As a person with a career in data analytics…

You are completely correct.

When talking to non nerds, non autists, non data wonks…

Yep, 100% you absolutely must be able to present your data as a narrative of some kind if you want to have any hope of most people having any reaction other than confusion or their eyes glossing over.

I have learned this the hardway in my own life, and its why people like Sagan and Nye and Tyson were/are science communicators, which is a different skillset from being an actual scientist in whatever field.

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- LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  People of science understand, without the parables, because they have the working and “book” knowledge to interpret the relative meaning of the presented data. To communicate the meaning relative data, without the background knowledge, and without taking the time to learn (or even package for small, focused learning) it is easier to understand, if put into a relative comparable, with similar, relative distance, or changes. Especially when people are already overloaded with *gestures towards everything. The way to eat an elephant, small bites. It’s an elephant to people without all that back knowledge or ability to interpret the science, so you gotta break it into small bites for them, using your understanding.
  
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- meyotch@slrpnk.net ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
  One of the most discouraging moments in my training was when I was looking into the literature around Decision Support Systems, in the context of Geographic Information Systems as a tool for supporting complex efforts.
  
  Over and over, no matter the specific focus of a study, the authors would reiterate that no matter the quality of the information produced by the decision support system, decision makers were more likely to go with solutions supported by people the decision makers considered to be peers, even when the hard data showed that the opposite course was more justified.
  
  In short, CEOs and similar almost always care more about the opinions of other CEOs than being true to the scientific ideal.
  
  So to go back to the name of our species, ‘homo sapiens’ as a name is aspirational, not reflective of fact.
  
  Perhaps ‘homo recumbens’ would be more appropriate as a descriptor, but I prefer we keep the current name so as to at least give us something to strive for.
  
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  - AppleTea@lemmy.zip ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
    
    Terry Pratchett
    
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  - sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨16⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago
    
    Over and over, no matter the specific focus of a study, the authors would reiterate that no matter the quality of the information produced by the decision support system, decision makers were more likely to go with solutions supported by people the decision makers considered to be peers, even when the hard data showed that the opposite course was more justified.
    
    In short, CEOs and similar almost always care more about the opinions of other CEOs than being true to the scientific ideal.
    
    Extremely ironically, what this means is that the actual prime candidate for a job to replace with AI…
    
    Is CEOs, C Suite.
    
    They are the most expensive employees, after all.
    
    Maybe not replace them with LLMs as we currently have them, beyond possibly being used to generate a narrative, human readable explanation of their decision making process and policies…
    
    Where the actual decision making and policy determinations would themselves be decided by basically a much more specialized algorithm, that is made out of code a human can actually read.
    
    Like, we’ve already got Zoom entirely seriously trying to get AI-LLMs that train themselves on your work emails and chats, then make an avatar emulation of ‘you’, then send that to digital meetings, then output the chat log ‘results’ of this ‘meeting’.
    
    So, there you go.
    
    C Suite doesn’t really do anything beyond networking and corpo politics, this can simulate that, minus the off the record corruption, which shouldn’t be a problem, right?
    
    … Its always been about power and social status.
    
    If otherwise, they’d all be developing something along the lines of what I just described.
    
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