I’m so glad that people finally start to grasp, how bad excessive specialisation really is.
society is healing
Cause and Effect
Submitted 5 months ago by HootinNHollerin@lemmy.dbzer0.com to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/95a80dc2-dccb-490e-bc27-86fdbb257882.webp
Comments
CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
sleen@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
Once I was doubting the need for higher levels of mathematics. Now as an engineer I realize the utility of this knowledge.
What made my change my mind? Well it’s definitely not my intelligence nor my age, it’s the practical application of that theory which got me here. Reading in between the lines can only happen if you like what you’re doing.
CheesyFox@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
I have a similar relationship with math. Only that I learnt to admire it through 3D and shaders.
Check out Shadertoy.com
People there create works of art from something, that’s usually perceived as “cold”. I’m still in awe of how people, using “cold” analythical methods achieve something so full of soul. I think it deserves to be appreciated far more than it is now. This is literal magic.
Blindsite@lemmy.today 5 months ago
Your garden and kitchen = biochemistry and biology. Home improvement, crafting and anything to do with the trades = physics. Household cleaners, gas, automotive chemicals and plastics = chemistry + healthcare = more organic chemistry and biology. Just dealing with everyday life is science.
Look I think one of the fundamental problems here is we have a cultural divide between people with thousand dollar degrees and everyday people. When someone says “I’m not going to be a scientist” they’re probably thinking “I can’t afford to pay thousands of dollars to pay for a degree” whilst actual scientists are wondering “why don’t people pursue this subject more?” Money. Pure and simple. Real science = cooking, building something, worrying about that scum in your sink, trying to figure out the best cleaner that won’t set off an allergic reaction, and yes looking into the side effects of vaccines and assorted drugs. You want people to think scientifically then call them scientists. Don’t create an economic barrier for those who want to pursue knowledge. And don’t treat science like it only happens in labs. It’s an every day process. Science = the study of nature and everybody can do that every day. You don’t need an expensive degree to do that. So being a “scientist” shouldn’t be limited to those in white coats, getting grants and have a dozen plaques on their wall that cost a couple thousand dollars to buy.
F_State@midwest.social 5 months ago
I never had money or a science degree. I just watched Cosmos as a kid, devoured documentaries, and read articles on wikipedia all day.
smeenz@lemmy.nz 5 months ago
We’re not talking about people with expensive degrees. The earth is not flat, and mcgyver is not an elitist. These things should be obvious with a high school level of education.
BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today 5 months ago
When I was a senior in high school, I needed one more science credit for graduation, so I took Human Anatomy. It was taught by a young hippie (it was the 70s), who also taught the exact same course at the local community college.
It was a great class, with lots of cool labs, experiments, and dissections. We had to memorize every bone, and every muscle. It was one of the hardest classes I’ve ever taken, but also the most fun.
That class was filled with future doctors and nurses, so none of them were whining about how they’d never use this stuff. But I wasn’t on a medical track (I was a music history major), and I could have probably said that (I didn’t), but I have used the knowledge I gained in that class literally every single day of my life, decades later. Easily one of the best classes I took in my entire life.
gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
We need to split the US up into two parts so we can do A/B testing.
As others have said, the problem of vaccines isn’t that they don’t work. The problem of vaccines is that they work too well. They have completely eliminated the diseases that motivated their development, so people can’t imagine a world where these vaccines don’t exist anymore.
We need to split the US up into two parts. One gets vaccines, the other one does not. Wait 30 years. Then the people will see the effects and then the people will understand why we should have vaccines. If the people don’t see the alternative scenario, they can’t see the difference that vaccines make. We need to make these differences more visual, by making practical experiments.
Blindsite@lemmy.today 5 months ago
I mean your premise seems to be that various diseases will reemerge and that will scare people into getting vaccines. But what if they end up healthier and so adapt in different ways? Better sanitation, immune boosters, improved forms of treatment, etc. What if the medical culture takes a totally different route because you allowed people not to get vaccinated?
Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
I don’t know how that would work. Everyone that I know who is anti-vax thinks all the rest of your list is elitist crap as well.
Blindsite@lemmy.today 5 months ago
And if you’re wrong? What if those who are vaccine free do better? I mean you’ve got a good idea there with the A/B testing but what if your premise is wrong or the anti-vaccine crowd is right and they do end up healthier despite the presence of diseases?
ColdSideOfYourPillow@piefed.social 5 months ago
Singling out a group of people to fuck over “for educational purposes” doesn’t seem like a great idea.
III@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Sadly, there is no amount of in-their-face proof to overcome the “I do my own research” mentality.
And the original meme here misses the most important piece - they lack the basic concept of logic to understand how cause and effect relate to each other. So showing them A vs B won’t get them to the results you expect - even though it should.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Academia is completely captured by capitalism. That’s why “scientists” can’t/won’t/don’t go after their masters. How can people oppose genocide when they’re working to build the weapons of genocide? And a society that accepts genocide will accept anything.
tempest@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
I mean most don’t go to their PhDs because it is effectively training for being an academic. Except there are very few jobs for academics so you’ll be an adjunct professor getting paid poverty wages.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
If smart people are so smart, why are they in charge? Checkmate nerds!
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Because they’re not rich.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Because with educatio comes a sense of ethics and responsibility. Anyone with ethics will never get accepted into any political party.
Digit@lemmy.wtf 5 months ago
Because there’s no valid nor sound singular-pecking-order, and typically those “smart people” respected as “so smart” are “smart” in other aptitudes than the social aptitude and ruthlessness to so social climb and manipulate to be “in charge”.
I very often say: we can all be polymaths in the making, not slaves in training. If/when we do so proceed that way, we’d catch more of these follies, and seek better protections and implementations and systems, than just leaving it to the most ruthless social climber, the most effective liar, getting in charge.
trxxruraxvr@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Because to be successful in politics it’s much more important to be charismatic and well spoken than to be actually smart. It’s a dad state of affairs.
the_tab_key@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Agreed, we need to get the dad brainrot out of office. When, if ever, was the last time we didn’t have a dad for president?
ThunderclapSasquatch@startrek.website 5 months ago
Hi dad, I’m democracies vital weakness, the voter
whoisearth@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
I will argue this is not the problem. It’s that vaccines were too good in their effectiveness. A victim of their own success.
The problem is not and has not been science. The problem is messaging.
This is the same reason why anti-vax is so popular, you think that’s about science? It’s idiots like RFK Jr and Trump have the ear of people. It’s all messaging folks.
A person is smart. People are dumb.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
The problem is not and has not been science. The problem is messaging.
Yes, but the actual factor driving this is the meteoric rise of the top 1% richest, it is *wealth inequality that creates a coherence to misinformation by establishing systematic incentives.
Digit@lemmy.wtf 5 months ago
A person is smart. People are dumb.
Well between the anti-vaxxers and any-vaxxers, the any-vaxxers won, by measure of how many took the jabs, believing “follow the science” without detecting an oxymoron.
Beware the power of advertising and ignorance of epistemology.
buttnugget@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I have to agree about the too good in their effectiveness. To get to a point where people are just like, “Nah, it ain’t a big deal” is built atop the millions of dead.
BilSabab@lemmy.world 5 months ago
the bigger problem is that some teachers are so mentally checked out that they make those subjects actively unappealing. I wonder what makes them that way…
Atomic@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Students. Students make them that way. It’s no coincidence that most older teachers feel like they’ve checked out.
I did substitute teaching for about two years. I got to see a lot of my old teachers, Some classes were wonderful, a true joy to teach. Others, not so much. I can understand why some people, as you say, mentally check out. It’s a coping mechanism. They were not all the same people I remember. Maybe part of growing older. Maybe part of years of difficult students sucking out all the joy of teaching they had in them
BilSabab@lemmy.world 5 months ago
my mom is a teacher and she has similar observation. It also has a lot to do with how parents treat their children. i don’t know if that’s a problem in US, in Ukraine my generation (born late 80s early 90s) is very insecure about their social performance and stats and it’s a complete bullshit. The current middle and school kids are affected by that. There is a lot of stuff in children’s heads that just needs time to settle and forcing to push through at someone’s else pace is counterproductive. it is a regular pattern when a student starts with solid grades but the chase for the highest grade over the years completely wrecks them and their overall grades start to slip hard because their parents conditioned them to perform and they try to brute force their way to high grades like it’s a competition when it is anything but. The burnout they go through is brutal. And by the time they finish school - it’s just a performer of sorts - a person who is able to do enough for a grade or rewards but there’s just no substance no passion behind it. Meanwhile, students who starts off mediocre or low grades at middle school level up significantly by the time they get to high school simply because they commit to figure it out and once they tap into what clicks for them (math, sciences, languages, arts) they just start pieces together their personality jigsaws and it is way less dramatic then with high performers who would do anything for a grade.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
This is an important comment. We do not teach science on high schools , we stream students to science if they are self directed, then everyone else takes bullshit courses for an easy grade, these days acheived with LLMs.
BilSabab@lemmy.world 5 months ago
yeah, and this approach is so bullshit it is ridiculous - it depends on a child being self-conscious and motivated enough to get into stuff that A LOT of time and effort to understand even with significant adult assistance and proper focus. Of course there will be a significant segment that won’t handle it well
CountryBreakfast@lemmygrad.ml 5 months ago
The dogma of scientism and the obsession with STEM is just as responsible for this situation as anti intellectualism is.
Zerush@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
Dogma of science is an oximoron, if it is dogmatic it isn’t science.
CountryBreakfast@lemmygrad.ml 5 months ago
SCIENTISM
Gloomy@mander.xyz 5 months ago
I assume that i disagree, but i think it mainly is because “the dogma of science” is a phrase that i immediately recognize as a right wing talking point.
But since you kind of only put that out there and i don’t expect right wing idiots on Lemmy i’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and ask you to kindly elaborate a bit.
What is the dogma of science? Who holds it? What sciences? All of them? Just STEM? And speaking of, who is obsessed with STEM? How and where does that obsession express itself?
Evil_Shrubbery@thelemmy.club 5 months ago
This ‘Today’ is outdated by 5+ years.
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Should add a sentence to top panel that says “they should teach useful things in school like how to do your taxes!”
spoiler alert: that’s just reading and basic math applied to something besides a test for a grade.
Digit@lemmy.wtf 5 months ago
Wouldn’t a better thing to teach be innovating upon technology and social structure, such that we no longer even need taxes? Nor any other rents designed to keep us down and impoverished. Imagine where we’d be now if not for the suppression of all the emancipatory technologies. All those patents being sat on, or secreted[1]. All those inventors usurped or disappeared. We have so much more headroom.
If education were not so corrupted and riddled with nonsense and slave conditioning, perhaps there’d be fewer rejecting it; fewer throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We can all be polymaths in the making, not slaves in training.
[1: According to patent office whistle blower Tom Valone, (iirc) there were already over 3000 free energy device patents secreted by the year 2000. Seriously. We have so much headroom without the corruption. Even the rich parasites would be better off, with the release and proliferation of the emancipatory technologies. …Buuuuuut, that’s not in most people’s world view to which they’re attached, and so, they tend to go on attack upon encountering mention of such, as if this new information is a threat to their life.]
dream_weasel@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Total sidetrack and total missing the point.
I didn’t say “taxes are good” or “current education is good”.
The problem I posed is that knowledge transfer is an essential skill and people who are bad at it are–I would suppose–both oblivious to it and easier to take advantage of.
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
People need to learn how to build a “firewall” for their brain.
Digit@lemmy.wtf 5 months ago
And epistemology to help build the firewall’s list?
“It is the mark of an educated mind, to be able to entertain an idea without necessarily accepting nor rejecting it” --Whoever said that.
Lushed_Lungfish@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
You’ll never be a writer but you still learned how to write (if somewhat poorly).
QuinnyCoded@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Yeah basic english is extremely complicated with a vast vocabulary and syntax, while the quadratic formula is an extremely basic computation.
shawn1122@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
I’ve seen a lot of the counter balance to this which is STEM folk not having respect for the humanities, rendering them empathetically underdeveloped.
technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Yeah the whole “STEM” thing is dumb and anti-science. This corny meme implies that philosophy majors becomes flat-earthers. It’s a great example of the STEM mindset.
STEM is just a product.
Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org 5 months ago
This corny meme implies that philosophy majors become flat-earthers, etc.
No, most philosophy majors still believe in gravity. While flat-earthers cease to believe in gravity once they realize that a flat earth is incompatible with gravity. They replace it with this notion that the earth disc (and the rest of the system) is accelerating upwards through the void at 9.8 m/s^2.
Though I’ve come across some interdisciplinary studies types who would probably argue that gravity is a social construct because we describe it with language.
camelbeard@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’m not even sure what you are trying to say here, science and empathy are 2 very different things. This is a very oversimplified version, but science should only be about answering if assumptions we have are true or false, based on enough evidence.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 5 months ago
the problem is that critical thinking should be a reflex and not a mental effort
RedditRefugee69@lemmynsfw.com 5 months ago
Yeah someone really wired us humans wrong.
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I think we are strongly geared towards survival with lots of cost cutting measures. Going with the option that best suits our mental state is probably a side effect of that.
biotin7@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Exactly
doingthestuff@lemy.lol 5 months ago
It doesn’t help that there is way too much shitty, agenda-funded science today. And science we aren’t supposed to question. And science driven entirely by profit. Like, isn’t questioning science part of science? Of course the response is completely unreasonable too. All of my family are research scientists, and if a discovery doesn’t meet capitalistic goals, is it even a discovery at this point?
Soleos@lemmy.world 5 months ago
That’s why you teach philosophy and critical thinking. Science will follow if that’s the kid’s interest. But learning to be being self-aware of your own position amongst others, including the position of Science, is key.
biotin7@sopuli.xyz 5 months ago
Call it pseudo-science
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Yea agreed. When shitty science is given as a reference then it becomes much harder to critically judge something but at least it is not a huge amount of work to see that there is conflicting scientific data on a topic. It is a huge effort to try to gauge which one is more credible. And it does not even have to be agenda driven. It can just be bad science, science driven by strong priors. Then you really have to be an expert on the topic to be able to spot the weaknesses in thay study. Luckily however most outrageously stupid statements made by politicians don’t refer to science and are easy to pick apart by realizing the.blatant contradictions in their statements.
bridgeenjoyer@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
Well the new world order is what the people in power want, but they only need smartphones and tv to do it. No chips in the brain needed, people are idiots.
Eat_Your_Paisley@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I was one of those people in college, the only reason I even graduated was because I found tutors to get me through my required math and science credits. I’m smart enough to know that there are many things I don’t understand so I listen to who do understand them to not do that is like going to a lawyer and explaining the practice of law or to a mechanic and telling them how to fix your car.
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 5 months ago
the problem is most emphatically not people skipping stuff in school, the problem is that the world is filled with people who have literally researched how to mislead and manipulate people. The only classes i think would actively help protect you against this is history and political science.
We can’t expect everyone to be educated in every field so they can recognize misinformation, what we need is for everyone to recognize fascism and general authoritarian methods.
ZombieMantis@lemmy.world 5 months ago
A bit of philosophy/media would help as well, it doesn’t help to teach someone science, if they don’t understand what science is.
shawn1122@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
To your point, I’ve met quite a few STEM educated people who fall for this type of information due to lack of historical and political literacy.
buttnugget@lemmy.world 5 months ago
I’m really happy to see this discussion here. Intellectual self defense comes from a well rounded liberal arts education. The type of people who whine about having to take general education and non science courses are already displaying an alarming lack of critical thinking skills; they are exactly the ones who need it most.
brygphilomena@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 months ago
Media literacy and how to validate sources. Unfortunately, the second part was primarily taught in college when I was still in school.
Critical thinking is very difficult to teach. Its so much easier for people to just accept whatever confirms their current preconceived notion. It also requires that the person is both open to learning new things and that they are open to the idea that they may be wrong, misinformed, or not know everything.
So many people are simply over confident about their own knowledge.
DrunkAnRoot@sh.itjust.works 5 months ago
i went to 4 science classes senior year and i gotta say i agree with the one on the right
ArmchairAce1944@discuss.online 5 months ago
I studied history (and by that I mean I liked to watch documentaries) and as a kid I saw educational cartoons and Anime (yes anime) that showed how there was a huge backlash against telephone and telegraphy when they first came out. With farmers blaming telegraph wire for destroying crops or crop diseases and they would sometimes even sabotage the wires and poles.
When I heard of the 5G bullshit that was literally what came to mind… it is incredible how eternal this form of ignorance is.
fullsquare@awful.systems 5 months ago
i think that conspiracy theories are more about feeling special about knowing some secret knowledge, lots of people fall for this and even create conspiracy theories without realizing, no matter how smart they are
CallMeAnAI@lemmy.world 5 months ago
None of the basic bio taught in American or Western schools is enough to actually understand mrna and how modern immunization works. Physics has ONLY been helpful to me racing cars.
The issue is tearing down institutions that serve as experts.
GregorGizeh@lemmy.zip 5 months ago
I have no scientific education. I am still not retarded enough to believe any of the nonsensical conspiracies found online.
Could it be that the key here is media competence and not a doctors degree?
Zerush@lemmy.ml 5 months ago
ByteJunk@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Ah so close. This comic should end with
“I did my own research”
LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 5 months ago
I feel like media literacy is more useful for preventing this crap than a scientific education would be, though both help to some degree.
waldo_was_here@piefed.social 5 months ago
Dunning-Kruger effect in full force in a land called Distopia States of Amerika
Artisian@lemmy.world 5 months ago
Makes me think of this upcoming competition to find fossils that are not surrounded by the rocks that science expects.
I suspect a lot of people who believe (some subset of) the crazy nonsense are actually science inclined. But we (often/used to) teach science as about great people heroically defying the consensus and triggering a paradigm shift that changes the world. And that looks a lot more like vaccine denialism than pipetting samples for 50 hours. Some of the community spaces are clearly interested in thinking about the world, and there’s a self-isolating effect of asking someone
“Why is there a tree that’s fossilized across 5 different epochs of bedrock?”
and being told you’re a crank. Then layer on the grifters.
So yes; do remember to talk people through the facts before labeling them a conspiracy theorists, and focus on the shared amazement at how weird/complicated/nuanced the data is. Ask lots of questions!