Re: Attention Dialed Into a Higher Dimension

[Saffron]

@ADDled, I hear you.

Personally, I get concerned when I see more and more examples of people believing everything they read (see Stella’s remarks: “I also read that…” and “I just pass on what I read.”) while schools still fail to teach even the very basics on cognitive biases and logical fallacies.

People seem to have a growing resistance to complex reasoning. And they have a growing hostility to science. I recently read that what most irritates scientists is the way fluff-believers continually say “Science doesn’t have all the answers.”

Funny, because science is the one area where answers are *never* taken to be static or written in stone. Rather, they are continually reexamined from every angle. Every claim based on science must be backed up by controlled research, be logically sound AND be continually subject to replication or refutation and then to update. Researchers must publish their studies, and they must subject them to peer-review. They must openly declare all financial/competing interests.

Even when a claim by a pharmaceutical firm is distorted or fails to report all of the information, the distortion is eventually outed by this self-correcting system. (I work in medical publishing, and am constantly seeing studies published that correct or update pharmaceutic studies. We published one of the first studies that found statins can cause muscle atrophy, for example.)

None of the above checks and balances is true for claims made by Big Placebo or by writers of fluffy woo. They get to say anything they want, while taking hypocritical potshots at career scientists who have come by their learning through years of education. Frankly, this annoys me to no end.

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