Re:Coronavirus skeptics, deniers: Why some of us stick to de...
by thu2111 on Friday March 27, 2020 @09:17AM
(#22702574)
It's this kind of openly biased article that makes people perceive academia as blind to its own failings and ideological dementia.
I'll summarise the article.
Apparently only conservatives stick to deadly beliefs. They're bad because they don't listen to academics (ever, any of them) in order to follow "authoritarian ideology". People blindly follow the words of authority figures, and that's bad because of an example involving Trump and chloroquine.
What about when people blindly follow what academic authorities say? Well, that's totally rational of course because those experts make smart decisions, so don't think or ask questions, just obey:
We all need to be more intellectually humble. We all need to recognize that how certain we feel is irrelevant to how certain we should be. We need to recognize that there are scientists and medical experts out there who have the knowledge and expertise we need to make smart decisions
The lack of self-awareness in this lady is astonishing. She's a psychologist. Psychology has had its credibility utterly trashed by the growing awareness that so much of what they do doesn't replicate and/or contains major errors. The evidence grows all the time that listening to psychologists is a good way to make dumb decisions whilst feeling smart. Yet she says:
As for behavioral and cognitive scientists, we don’t yet know if the tendency to hold onto dubious beliefs can be trained out of people
Indeed we don't. I guess a good place to start would be trying to train her colleagues out of the many, many dubious beliefs that pop psychology and other academic backwaters propagate every day.
In this crisis we see the man who first wrote about the replication crisis once again publicly warning us about the dodgy data and modelling being done by academic 'experts', people who are never held to account for mistaken predictions and thus have no incentive not to constantly give us confident sounding 'expert advice', regardless of their own certainty. Who should we listen to? The article doesn't help answer this.
I'll summarise the article.
Apparently only conservatives stick to deadly beliefs. They're bad because they don't listen to academics (ever, any of them) in order to follow "authoritarian ideology". People blindly follow the words of authority figures, and that's bad because of an example involving Trump and chloroquine.
What about when people blindly follow what academic authorities say? Well, that's totally rational of course because those experts make smart decisions, so don't think or ask questions, just obey:
We all need to be more intellectually humble. We all need to recognize that how certain we feel is irrelevant to how certain we should be. We need to recognize that there are scientists and medical experts out there who have the knowledge and expertise we need to make smart decisions
The lack of self-awareness in this lady is astonishing. She's a psychologist. Psychology has had its credibility utterly trashed by the growing awareness that so much of what they do doesn't replicate and/or contains major errors. The evidence grows all the time that listening to psychologists is a good way to make dumb decisions whilst feeling smart. Yet she says:
As for behavioral and cognitive scientists, we don’t yet know if the tendency to hold onto dubious beliefs can be trained out of people
Indeed we don't. I guess a good place to start would be trying to train her colleagues out of the many, many dubious beliefs that pop psychology and other academic backwaters propagate every day.
In this crisis we see the man who first wrote about the replication crisis once again publicly warning us about the dodgy data and modelling being done by academic 'experts', people who are never held to account for mistaken predictions and thus have no incentive not to constantly give us confident sounding 'expert advice', regardless of their own certainty. Who should we listen to? The article doesn't help answer this.