I think equally important is letting students know when they’re being taught a simplified model, and that serious academic discourse of the subject is still evolving and/or involves much more nuance (which is pretty much always). some people who do pay attention in science classes nonetheless think that what they learned is gospel and never re-examine it, or stubbornly refuse to acknowledge when said nuance is relevant because it seems to contradict the simplified model they’ve cemented in their brain as the whole truth. the kind of people who say things like “I know there’s two genders because I learned it in high school biology” and apparently never considered why there would be collegiate and post-graduate studies on biology and gender (or why those are two entirely different fields of study) if we all already learned everything there is to know in high school.
you're doing ReSeArCh rong!!
Submitted 1 week ago by slothrop@lemmy.ca to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/e86caa20-5667-493e-9364-ab5b0f288413.jpeg
Comments
arctanthrope@lemmy.world 1 week ago
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
I think chemistry is APPALLINGLY bad at this to be honest.
Raiderkev@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’m going to be that guy about GMO crops. If we were modifying them to be drought resistant or need less water, I’d be all for it. Instead, what we modify them for is to be “roundup ready” meaning that glyphosate can be sprayed liberally on it without killing it making weeding the field much easier. I am not concerned about the GMO crop, but I am concerned with all my food being covered in Roundup.
bblkargonaut@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Unfortunately you don’t really have a choice. Organic and GMO free doesn’t mean herbicide free, and plants with natural tolerance to herbicides either have genes to detoxify or sequester them in their cell walls. If the sequester them, then you get to eat nice bioaccumulation of herbicide. Glyphosate itself is pretty safe mechanistically, however everyone forgets about the adjuvants its formulation.
uniquethrowagay@feddit.org 1 week ago
Also all of the insects covered in Roundup, making ecosystems collapse
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 1 week ago
And somebody’s gotta spray that RoundUp… hasn’t there been numerous class actions about the effects of that stuff? 😬
slothrop@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
You’re absolutely not alone with GMO concerns.
Celiac enters the chat.argarath@lemmy.world 1 week ago
As someone who’s graduating in biotechnology, we want and we do, but there are a few things that make this not reach the market.
Round-up ready plants are incredibly easy to make, you insert only one gene (effectively, there are some little extra things but details) and now your plant can resist glyphosate, which means you can make many different species resistant to it much more easily, or make all of the different lines of whatever crop you sell also be restaurant to it.
For making drought resistant plants, there isn’t exactly one gene that makes the plant resistant. Just one example would be root length. If a plant has longer roots it can access moist soil for longer periods of time and thus making it more resilient against droughts, but to make the roots grow longer you have several genes that interact and changing one might not result in deeper roots in a drought environment since that gene is activated by a phytohormone that is upregulated during long days (summer time) but this location only encounters droughts during early spring when the days are still short, and for you to regulate that gene to change when the phytohormone is upregulated you’d need to change a BUNCH of other things on the plant that would result in a complete mess of how the plant develops as now it acts like summer during spring but only for the roots and the roots send signals that the leafs must ignore until the correct time of the year and that changes when the seeds are going to be released because the plant is now blooming at a completely different time and oh fuck we’ve developed the equivalent of ancient Egyptian inbreed pharaohs but for plants, which is horrible but incredibly impressive given that most plants can self fertilize… This is one route of trying to just make longer roots, if we go through giving the root growth gene sensibility to another phytohormone that is upregulated on short days, the roots now will release other phytohormones in higher levels than the plant is used to (more length = more roots = more cells making said phytohormones) and since plants develop through gradients of hormones and the proportion of one vs another, the amount of work to make it so that the plant actually develops correctly will also be huge! And this is just for one single characteristic that we think would help in many cases but wouldn’t actually make plants fully resistant to droughts, just able to get a few extra days of water, unlike how roundup ready is still just add this gene that allows the plant to break down glyphosate fast enough that it doesn’t die.
Now the other side of the issue is funding. Yeah, droughts are a really bad problem for farms, but the BUG farms are either in places that they don’t suffer from droughts that much, in places that they can buy a lot of water cheaply (government subsidies) or can produce a lot of crops even when there’s a drought vs what they’d loose against weeds competing with their crops for water, nutrients and diseases spread by those weeds
In the end, we have the same reasons that tuberculosis and malaria are not funded and researched flash much as they should, it just doesn’t make sense (commercially) to do so for big corporations like monsanto/bayer and the subject is complex enough that several universities having small teams researching it will tackle it from so many different angles and have such a difficult time with it that progress is really slow. The researchers want to work on cures for malaria, tuberculosis and to make plants resistant to droughts, soil acidification, nutrient content of the final produce and much much more, but we’re fighting against capitalism and spaghetti code with no annotations written by thousands of not millions of different coders that didn’t talk with each other through the millions of years of development of said code
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 week ago
To be fair, most schools give those classes only out of obligation. Doing dumb calculations of mols and atomic masses in high school is definitely teaching kids to ask “why the fuck am I even doing this?”
LePoisson@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Learning some chemistry basics is probably still good though. Not that we’re using it daily but just in the “hey mixing this stuff can kill you” or, in the same vein, seeing how it only requires small amounts to make big changes.
We’re surrounded by chemicals in our everyday lives, learning a healthy fear of them is probably for the best.
Also high school is meant to prepare you for further education, if you want to pursue that, so it really does cover a lot of ground for basic concepts you need to learn to understand and gain further education in whatever field applies.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Kids are wired to ask that, so what, basic chemistry knowledge is extremely useful.
Zerush@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Yeah, like an German Comedian said, while the Teacher shows how an Morse communication works, the childrens with their Smartphones already are logged in his Pacemaker.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 1 week ago
LOL I wish it were like that. The “kids and their superior grasp of technology.” That’s how it’s supposed to be. They’re supposed to be smarter than us.
Indeed, with desktops and internet forums it really did seem to be going that way…and then with smartphones becoming specialized as content consumption and attention-capture devices, the kids started going backwards.
Yeah, they can swipe their lil’ fingers and use instagram now, but using files and folders or printing their homework? Relegated back to the esoteric and arcane arts. It’s tragic.
But this kids who do make a point to learn and teach themselves are doing incredible things.
So I guess, the average has dropped, and now we’re seeing two more prominent extremes. 🤔
…/TED_talk lol
ZkhqrD5o@lemmy.world 1 week ago
IMO: GMOs are sus. Fuck the rest though.
allcretansareliars@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
GM is just a technology, which can be put to many uses, and there are many methods. All pasta wheats, for example, are derived from radiation mutants.
newaccountwhodis@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
The risk isn’t derived from the technology but how it is used. The proprietary technology is used to prevent farmers from creating their own seed (including using copy right laws) while increasing their dependency on matching pesticides. Industrial agriculture is not sustainable - insect populations are dwindling because every square foot of landscape is sprayed with poison. GMO is used to further industrialize agriculture, e.g. by making crops resistant to poison, which in turn can (and will) be used more liberally.
Gladaed@feddit.org 1 week ago
Nature does evolve quickly when posed with harsh conditions. Roundup and other poisons used agriculture make the targeted pests resistant quickly.
Some GM features can be fine, but there are no cheats in real life. Constructing an environment that makes resistance and strength the viable strategy for pests will not work. Harmony is the only sustainable choice.
PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Most of the foods you eat are GMOs and have been for centuries
Bloomcole@lemmy.world 1 week ago
selective breeding is not not the same as GMO
roscoe@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
The problem with GMOs isn’t the GMOs themselves, it’s why they’ve been GM’d. If they’ve been modified to be “roundup resistant” so they can dump a truckload of glyphosate on them, or something similar to that, that might be a problem.
If I’m buying fresh produce it’s not a problem, I can can make double sure to wash it properly. But if it’s processed food, I definitely do not trust food manufacturers to get all that shit off the vegetables.
Looking for GMO free canned or frozen vegetables is, in my opinion, a good idea. But a fresh cucumber just wash it.
1984@lemmy.today 1 week ago
The vaccines have side effects that destroy lives, and its almost impossible to prove that their deceases come from the vaccines. But Im not going to take the chance to be one of these people.
newaccountwhodis@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
If this person takes the risks of sickness and its life destroying consequences over the risks of vaccination, they’re an idiot.
www.sciencedirect.com/…/S0264410X25011399 …org.nz/…/comparison-of-possible-disease-complica…
Rbnsft@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The Chance for a serious side effect is lower vs the permanent damage you could get from covid.
mack123@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It is purely a numbers game. Risk vs Risk. Any meal you eat has the possibility of you ending up in hospital. This happened to me, developing a sudden allergy to food I ate before with no problems. It does not stop me eating though 😉
Allergic reaction is your greatest risk with a vaccine. And even there you will the chances slim for such a reaction. We simply take that risk for the vaccine in question, take its effectiveness into account and compare that to the risks of getting the decease in question.
I would not wish long covid on my worst enemy. The never ending brain fog, the tiredness that simply does not go away, the lack of taste for food. It really sucks the joy out of living. So if a vaccine can prevent that, and help shield those around you, that you may infect, I think the risk of side effects are more than justified and worth taking.
themaninblack@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The propagation of these ideas will lead to the maiming and death of children
the_strange@feddit.org 1 week ago
You’re one of the people the meme is talking about.
MrShankles@reddthat.com 1 week ago
Sticking to your opinion without openness to changing them (especially due to fear)… that’s how you become inflexible and risk breaking something (or something breaking you)
TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You question vaccines and yet you probably don’t have any problem asking for antibiotic when you get flu, even though antibiotics don’t work on viruses and only kills the healthy bacteria in your gut. Or, taking painkillers for headaches, even though one of its side effects for constant use is eventual hearing loss.
You question vaccines as if they are all the same, but don’t question other medicinal products that are made in the exact same process as vaccines. And all medicines have some side effects nonetheless. Heck, almost anything you consume has side effects. As another person mentioned, we take medicines and they are approved because the benefits outweigh the risks. They are tested first for crying out loud.
BananaPeal@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
And billionaires love people like that because it keeps the most obsessive of us focused away from the greed.
MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world 1 week ago
LOL, school curriculums are part of the “billionaire conspiracy” too?
FFS.
Peanutbjelly@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
As someone aware of decades of legal battles to prevent the gutting of education systems, usually noticeable around local levels, you almost always end up at corpo think tanks like the heritage foundation.
If you’re familiar with the heritage foundation, they’ve been trying to run a project2025 style playbook for decades, and it is only through their success that current administration is a billionaire playground. Reminder that elon musk could directly choose for hundreds of thousands of children to die this year by taking aware their food and medicine, because he wanted to. Also billionaires got an unimaginably generous treatment at the same time, worth much more than all of the food and medicine.
It’s more an amalgam of cooperatively evil assholes, most of which have an absurd amount of money for some reason, but yeah, billionaires are a good chunk of why there are whole groups being funded to spend all day every day trying to kneecap educational efforts, or painting academics as evil satanists who are corrupting your children with science.
SleepyPie@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They are saying people who don’t understand how to reason beyond high school basics are useful idiots for billionaires because they’re easily manipulated
Nothing about a school curriculum conspiracy was mentioned
Zerush@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
Internet contains the whole knowledge of humanity… the other 98% are influencers, ChatGPT posts, memes, cat photos, fake news, bots and flat earthers.
MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The sad thing is those people did take those classes.
Marinatorres@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Real talk: those “boring” science classes aren’t about memorizing facts — they teach you how to spot bad claims and check sources. That skill pays off forever.
Jankatarch@lemmy.world 1 week ago
On a related note having 6 different classes a day 8 hours total each and 5 days a week made it impossible to learn properly.
kazerniel@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I hated chemistry in school, because it was teaching us irrelevant shit like electron structure of atoms. But when I’m interested in something, I’ll look it up, and may get lost in a Wikipedia wormhole for hours about the most random topics. (some recent ones were: image file formats, the history of feminism, Serengeti National Park)
Imho the difference all lies in when knowledge is shoved down our throats vs exploring it out of curiosity.
BanMe@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s funny how as adults we become interested in elements of stuff we were taught and found boring before. But I’m not sure how you’d teach science without “shoving it down people’s throats” because most teenagers simply don’t give a shit about any of it, so pretty much anything you teach will be shoving it down someone’s throat. The better solution would be explaining why electron structure is important foundational stuff. About 98% of the time, in HS, they didn’t explain why we needed to know it, how it would be contextualized in later life - it was simply “learn this so you can pass next week’s test.” And for me, knowing why is crucial to me caring enough to learn.
Bytemeister@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I hated chemistry in school, because it was teaching us irrelevant shit like the electron structure of atoms.
It’s only unimportant because you don’t care. Reading random facts on Wikipedia isn’t learning, it’s just reading. You can read the Wikipedia page on juggling, (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling) but I wouldn’t expect you to understand (much less, perform) a 3 ball cascade, reverse cascade and waterfall after just reading the page. Those are very basic juggling patterns and fundamentals to more advanced patterns, such as juggler’s tennis, mills mess, boston mess etc… and that’s the difference between learning, and reading.
Not ripping on going on a Wikipedia dive here, it’s one of my favorite things to do, but recognize that it’s not the same as learning
kazerniel@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I feel like you’re nitpicking. For physical activities personal experience is obviously best, but for most topics, reading about them is the same as learning about them. Except for PE and art, nothing I learnt in school was through direct experience. Also how is anyone supposed to learn about stuff that cannot be experienced personally, like history or space?
sakuraba@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
I used to think like this until I found out you can explain a lot of chemical interactions by just knowing how the electron structure of atoms lead to those reactions. Helpful when you try to wonder if anything could be toxic.
gravitas@pie.gravitywell.xyz 1 week ago
I always found science and history interesting even though i hated school.
Maths though, i always resented “you wont always have a calculator” … but now as im older i imagine kids today having a similar idea about “AI” and i can see that not ending well for anyone.
BilSabab@lemmy.world 1 week ago
that’s the same people who later get to helm companies and say “who the fuck needs market research when you have the force of will”
titanicx@lemmy.zip 1 week ago
AI is a great idea and everyone in our company must use it!
BilSabab@lemmy.world 1 week ago
it’s a great idea if all you need to do is to compile the research you already did into variety of content types. my current fave is notebookLM because i’m uploading all the reports from other companies and sift through them somewhat faster. other than that - it is basically a linkedin post generator.
nek0d3r@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
As a kid I always thought a lot of stuff taught was like, duh, so obvious. It took being thrown in the adult world to see hmm… I guess… not obvious enough???
Randomgal@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Tbf this does kind of imply we are doing something wrong. Maybe instead we should teach people to learn and judge information, rather than train them to take information presented to them at face value.
There are as many irrational science fanatics as there are religious fanatics.
MiddleAgesModem@lemmy.world 1 week ago
There are as many irrational science fanatics as there are religious fanatics.
I really doubt that.
Also, how are they to judge information presented to them if there is no agreed upon valid source?
eestileib@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Loooooool
PotatoesFall@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Naw. High School Science does jack shit to prevent this. At least I ejever encountered epistemology in my high school science classes.
DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Vaccines could cause autism since they contain immune system steroids. GMOs can also be dangerous although not likely. Flat earth is a troll.
slothrop@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Vaccines could cause autism since they contain immune system steroids…
Source, LIAR?
DarkAri@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
Well it’s beyond current scientific understanding so there wouldn’t be a source. How could you ask for a source on something that is undefined like autism? I hope you realize that anyone who tries to make scientific claims on the basis of autism is lying to you. This is because autism is not understood scientifically. Those people are trying to steal the valor of actual science to use as some authority to convince people dumber then themselves that they are correct.
But yes vaccines do cause autism in some cases. The reason I know this is because I am a researcher and I study many things and I have spent many years investigating these things and I don’t get any money from the corporate or pharmacological world. The people who make vaccines including the scientists also know this but won’t say it because they don’t want to lose their six or seven figure incomes. They are the side effects of vaccines as acceptable given their benefits. Maybe 1 out of 100 to 1 out of 1000 people who use vaccines might develop complications but it will probably save more than 1% of the population.
Autism is also caused by a wide range of things. Anything that disrupts the immune system or its signals can cause it. Being inside buildings exposed to synthetic materials too often can cause it. Taking antiinflammatory medications can cause it. Your mother having too many sexual partners can cause it. Donald Trump’s speech causes it. Eating too much artificially flavored food that has no nutrition can cause it. The biggest cause however is by far parental neglect. Buying shitty food, leaving kids inside all day, not having good ventilation in the interior spaces. If it turns out that vaccines cause autism at a fairly high rate, then it might turn out that the pragmatist ethics behind covering up vaccine side effects were a terrible idea.
Autism I believe, I’m not 100%, is often caused by a destruction of the bodies ability to regulate its own epibiome and immune responses. This leads to reduced neural function, particularly in high functioning areas of the brain, which causes the symptoms associated with autism.
You will never really see an autistic wild dog because it lives in nature and it’s body is good at upregulating and down regulating it’s immune response and dealing with inflammation. Many humans have lost this ability and can easily die from minor wounds like scraps.
Autism like many other gigantic blanket terms used for things barely understood by humans, like the brain, can be caused by a very wide number of things. Fundamentally however it’s just the epigenetic equivalent of limp mode.
I have managed to cure a case or two of autism in my time through many years of therapy designed to fix the immune systems of people. It takes years because after fixing the immune system it takes years for the brain’s proteins to be replaced.
Anyways I doubt you will consider any of this, but I did my part by attempting to make people aware.
WraithGear@lemmy.world 1 week ago
no.
steroids are a specific thing, and are not used in vaccines. steroids can’t cause autism even if that was the case. vaccines can not cause autism at all. vaccines work by incapacitating a viral or bacterial agent, sprinkling some red flag on it and dumping it in your system for the immune system to stumble across
autism is a developmental issue, either selected genes at conception mess with developmental plans, or something interrupts development before birth. vaccines do not have a chance to be administered before that period is over.
also!
GMO’s are a meaningless designation to determine harm in any regard. all it dictates is whether humans have in any fashion altered the organism. bananas are GMO not because we went mad with genetic code splicing, but because we artificially selected for maximizing the food portion and minimizing the seed output, and use cuttings from the result to grow the same plant over and over. you might as well have said “red foods can also be dangerously although not likely”
also,
there are people who do believe in flat earth, because otherwise their religion is false.
pewgar_seemsimandroid@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 week ago
rong? like the estonian word for train?
vivalapivo@lemmy.today 1 week ago
Baa
58008@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The “do your own research” people need to have it explained to them that even experts in their respective fields aren’t automatically capable of parsing scientific literature. A family doctor with 50 years experience who prescribes antidepressants every day will have no deep understanding of what any particular scientific peer reviewed study on SSRIs is telling them. They need a grounding in statistics more than anything else, which most people just don’t have. So the idea that a non-educated, non-scientist can read peer reviewed studies and come away from them with some sort of understanding of the issue is the thing that needs to be highlighted, preferably in high school science class (earlier, frankly). A willingness to slog through scientific papers in pursuit of deeper knowledge is admirable, but is dangerously misguided without proper training. I don’t even mean training in the specific science, but just in how to speak the language of peer reviewed studies more generally. It’s very much its own discipline.
I want someone to ask Joe Rogan what ‘regression to the mean’ means. I want someone to ask him what a ‘standard deviation’ is and how to apply the concept. I don’t want to know what papers he’s read, because you could read 50 true scientific papers a day on one topic and still have no idea what the current scientific consensus is on said topic, absent the requisite training. You’ll almost certainly come away from it with a very wrong but very confident belief. Dunning-Kruger on steroids.
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 1 week ago
The ‘research’ that the “do your own research” people are referring to isn’t peer reviewed scientific literature.
It’s other fools’ social media rantings.
MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 1 week ago
Seriously if we just hardcore PSA’d even basic media literacy skills into our culture, MAYBE people would stop thinking that random internet anecdotes (which are likely largely bot-driven these days) constitute “scientific evidence.”
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Hard disagree, if research findings were more accessible, NOT PAYWALLED, and published with some degree of intent for a wide audience then WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY more people would dabble in reading scientific research and the benefit could have potentially saved science from collapse in my country (the US).