The result “blows the lid off of this idea” that such beliefs are held by only a fringe population of individuals who are uninformed or ideologically driven, says David Bersoff, head of research at the Edelman Trust Institute. “This is not like a small problematic group.”
The conservative world has captured the media, and it’s the single largest problem facing health, science, democracy, and so much else these days.
It’s terrifyingly sad
Yet the oligarch-owned mass media and political class will claim “nobody could have predicted this”; meanwhile “the left” have considered the fascist state propaganda machines that conservatism have constructed around the world, and the disinformation campaigns they wage 24/7, to be the greatest threat facing humanity for multiple decades…
We know exactly who the propaganda operatives are. They could be destroyed or neutered at any time. The oligarchs can’t destroy democracy without first destroying the minds of the average voter, so their propaganda machines are allowed to continue.
huh, i live in a highly liberal area… people here are just as stupid and believe all sorts of crazy nonsense.
mostly because they believe it makes them smart and progressive. and if you show them evidence that is contrary, they just call you ignorant and stupid and conservative. because it’s conservatives who are stupid and bad, if you are liberal you can’t ever be wrong!
I remind people that RFK Jr was planned to be a part of the Obama administration but wasn’t believed possible to make it through confirmation hearings with the negative being - he’s too leftist. RFK Jr was for a long time a major influencer in hippie medicine. He’s pretty much a quintessential example of young 60/70s, often privileged upbringing, hippies that would go on to be today’s anti-science (intellectual authority) leaders.
I know plenty of people with degrees that are leftist in most American issues but are the opposite when it comes to health/medicine/nutrition. Plenty of the top of my high schools grade class rankings went to university and were culturally art focused. They would be called hipsters. They have degrees. And quite a number are deep into homeopathy/alt-health. At least a couple have gone down the osteopathy career path and they’re not the worse but they do veil the homeopathic uncertainty with their actual scientific jargon knowledge to make it sound more certain
Carl Sagan’s warning seems relevant:
“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…”
Highly recommend Sagan’s book “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”
Calling them “unproven claims” does a disservice to science, society, and all of humanity. Call them what they are: lies. They’re lies, and they’re killing people.
Aka a staggering number of people are stupid, or at least undereducated.
a staggering number of people are also unhealthy and unfit.
because becoming educated, health, and fit, requires lots of leisure time and resources.
Here’s some interesting tables from the report:
edit: Interesting how much more accepted it seems to be to answer “I don’t know” in Japan compared to other countries.
american culture punishes humility. it’s a culture that rewards arrogance.
and we love bullshit. american culture is amazing at producing bullshit and selling it.
I’m shocked by how well the US does compared to other countries. I would have thought that it is very easy to be a conspiracy theorist when your country has death panels in the form of health insurance companies denying treatments.
The headline writer misspelled “disproven.”
Why the fuck is even Nature giving more credence to this delusional shit than it deserves?
I recently found out one of my college kids believed the crap about raw milk. I told him that any such benefits were due to it being whole milk, not due to it being unpasteurized. I’ll take my milk fat without a side of diarrhea, thank you
I wonder what you do about this.
I just started reading Demon Haunted World by Carl Sagan, published in 1994, and the intro is basically saying the same thing but framed as curious people being more well read in Atlantis than they are in interesting recent science or critical thinking skills
What I’ve seen in people I know is that it centers around a need for certainty. They’re scared of something they can’t control or are too tired to or lack belief in themselves to control. Scared of having autistic children, there must be an identifiable cause that can be avoided to blame. There’s a growing vocal crowd saying vaccines so latch onto that. Friends I’ve seen with just about zero dietary self-control, they get into dietary fads. Like alkaline water and way more expensive seasonings than the common price - marketed as healthier. They generally make no weight goals or whatever but the expensive placebo brings them some mental comfort
I just remembered the ones that seem like they really want to come off as smart and seem certain that the way to that is to be very visibly against conventional wisdom regardless of their lack of proof and lack of ability to prove their beliefs. They’re the leaders and the ones coping the followers
While China and India make advancements in science and medicine, the US is headed back to witch trials and traveling medicine salesmen.
Yeah its basis is in social panics. The same reason marijuana was banned in the USA. Immigrants today also social panics. They use social panics as a weapon for the ignorant.
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For each statement, between 25% and 32% of respondents said they believed it, and another sizeable percentage (17–39%) said they didn’t know whether it was true. In total, 70% of respondents believed at least one of the claims (see ‘Divided views’). The findings, which have not been peer reviewed and were published today by the Edelman Trust Institute in New York City, were described as ‘staggering’ in an accompanying article by the think tank’s chief executive, Richard Edelman.
A lot of smart people, scientists even, would be inclined to say “I don’t know if it’s true” with the key word being “know”.
If they’re not familiar with the literature and they’re being exposed to a claim for the very first time, they’d potentially want to consult the research on the matter. (Not “do their own research”, but to look into respectable research done by professionals)
Like all that raw milk stuff? I’ve got no clue what that’s about. And if the claims are like “Raw milk promotes the maintenance of healthy bones and teeth better than homogenized milk” or something, I dunno man. I’ve never heard anything one way or the other. “I don’t know if it’s true”. I might even be leaning towards disbelieving it, but I don’t know.
Yeah, so that accounts for the grey being reasonable (although in some of these a arguably too large, if things are well established and people are unsure that’s because of groups spreading uncertainty)
The article is mostly focused on that red bar though
I’m not sure if 1/4 to 1/3 of people being gullible is staggering to me
‘Staggering’ number of people are idiots. It’s okay, the non-idiots know what we’re dealing with here.
