Yeah I even stopped believing in scientific research after seeing the lobbying to make unhealthy things appear healthy or the oil industry trying to hide oil's effects on Earth.
It's a crazy thing to not be able to believe any of this stuff but this is what it came to.
I didn't mean in the sense I believe the opposite of what's said to be true but more like try not to see this new information as a certain truth, what I mean is just reading an article fully doesn't cut it you kind of have to "see it for yourself".
Because of the "publish or perish" nature of academia and all the lobbying you can see there being wrong conclusions drawn from data on purpose or on accident and what many believe are only the conclusions.
I mentioned this on my other comment but will write here too: This is almost the same as blindly trusting an open-source software since anyone can see it's source code it has to be safe right?
What if you don't know programming and thus can't read the source code? This part seems to be similar to the case of checking the conclusions of a research, not everyone has the necessary information about the subject so they can't do it then you have to trust some people that can do it but how do you choose who to trust?
Do you choose to trust the people that align with your current knowledge? Do you see the majority believe it and consider that source or authority trustworthy? (these were my possible guesses for a method to choose who to trust)
How do you choose to trust which one of the researches about the same subject when you are faced with multiple researches with different conclusions? Do you have an authority that has already gained your trust so you trust it if that authority reviews it and says ok that's good?
Do you research it yourself? Surely you can't do that for every single thing so that's out of question.
I mean giving trust is a weird thing, do you trust most things if many people (or "your people") believe it by default?
I see it similar to defaulting to trust open-source software since you know it's open-source anyone can read the source code surely no one would put something malicious there but there have been many cases of backdoors being impletended on these stuff and some going unnoticed for years (I don't remember it's name but there was some Linux distro like that).
I could believe what we've done to Earth causing it irreparable damage for example and I could think "Man sure does every summer keep getting hotter and hotter." but these would be based on emotions and more on "noooticing the summer pattern" (for my case).
I don't know if you have done research on global warming yourself or how you did choose to believe the side you believe since you know both global warming deniers and confirmers (maybe the wrong word) are "doing science" but one side must be drawing wrong conclusions without noticing or on purpose to claim two opposite truths.
For anyone it would be easier to believe in a Mathematics proof than a Physics one for example since "seeing it for yourself" is easier to do for Mathematics, I kind of guess this last part might not make any sense.
I myself couldn't argue with anyone like that basically.
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u/zdmpage54 13d ago
It took me a while, but I no longer trust or believe what I read in any " news " paper.