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Those Opposed To Scientific Consensus Bolstered By 'Illusion of Knowledge' (edmontonjournal.com)
The Edmonton Journal reports:
Recently, researchers asked more than 2,000 American and European adults their thoughts about genetically modified foods. They also asked them how much they thought they understood about GM foods, and a series of 15 true-false questions to test how much they actually knew about genetics and science in general. The researchers were interested in studying a perverse human phenomenon: People tend to be lousy judges of how much they know. Across four studies conducted in three countries -- the U.S., France and Germany -- the researchers found that extreme opponents of genetically modified foods "display a lack of insight into how much they know." They know the least, but think they know the most. "The less people know," the authors conclude, "the more opposed they are to the scientific consensus."
Science communicators have made concerted efforts to educate the public with an eye to bringing their attitudes in line with the experts," they write in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. But people with an inflated sense of what they actually know -- and most in need of education -- are also the ones least likely to be open to new information.... Extreme views often come along with not appreciating the complexity of the subject -- "not realizing how much there is to know," said Philip Fernbach, lead author of the new study and a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado Boulder. "People who don't know very much think they know a lot, and that is the basis for their extreme views."
Slashdot reader Layzej links to Rational Wiki's article on "The Backfire Effect," to illustrate Fernbach's observation that "People double down on their 'counter-scientific consensus attitudes'.
"Epecially when people feel threatened or if they are being treated as if they are stupid."
Science communicators have made concerted efforts to educate the public with an eye to bringing their attitudes in line with the experts," they write in the journal Nature Human Behaviour. But people with an inflated sense of what they actually know -- and most in need of education -- are also the ones least likely to be open to new information.... Extreme views often come along with not appreciating the complexity of the subject -- "not realizing how much there is to know," said Philip Fernbach, lead author of the new study and a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado Boulder. "People who don't know very much think they know a lot, and that is the basis for their extreme views."
Slashdot reader Layzej links to Rational Wiki's article on "The Backfire Effect," to illustrate Fernbach's observation that "People double down on their 'counter-scientific consensus attitudes'.
"Epecially when people feel threatened or if they are being treated as if they are stupid."
Duh!
(by the way, First Post!)
Unfortunately the "experts" sometimes have a financial incentive to "know" what they claim is true. Therefore you have people disregarding consensus. Companies spend millions on "experts" who will tell you GM crops are perfectly fine. They might be right, or they might be lying.
That was my first thought too. You misspelled Kruger and could have added a link but otherwise, you basically said all there is to say to this.
"Money is a sign of poverty." - Iain Banks
"Why Most Published Research Findings Are False"
John P. A. Ioannidis
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
Further reading:
"There is increasing concern that most current published research findings are false. The probability that a research claim is true may depend on study power and bias, the number of other studies on the same question, and, importantly, the ratio of true to no relationships among the relationships probed in each scientific field. In this framework, a research finding is less likely to be true when the studies conducted in a field are smaller; when effect sizes are smaller; when there is a greater number and lesser preselection of tested relationships; where there is greater flexibility in designs, definitions, outcomes, and analytical modes; when there is greater financial and other interest and prejudice; and when more teams are involved in a scientific field in chase of statistical significance. Simulations show that for most study designs and settings, it is more likely for a research claim to be false than true. Moreover, for many current scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply accurate measures of the prevailing bias".
- Dr John Ioannidis (“Why Most Published Research Findings Are False”) August 30, 2005 http://journals.plos.org/plosm...
"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine".
- Dr. Marcia Angell, New York Review of Books January 15, 2009. http://www.nybooks.com/article...
"The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue.
Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness".
- Richard Horton, Editor, “The Lancet” April 11th 2015 http://www.thelancet.com/pdfs/...
"Scientists these days, especially but not only in such blatantly corrupt fields as pharmaceutical research, face a lose-lose choice between basing their own investigations on invalid studies, on the one hand, or having to distrust any experimental results they don’t replicate themselves, on the other. Meanwhile the consumers of the products of scientific research—yes, that would be all of us—have to contend with the fact that we have no way of knowing whether any given claim about the result of research is the product of valid science or not".
- John Michael Greer
http://thearchdruidreport.blog...
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
The problem with this world is that wise people are full of doubt, and dumbasses are full of confidence.
I don't trust neonicotinoids because scientists were suppressed by corporations. Call me old-fashioned but I don't trust ignorance and I don't trust those who promote it. The experts were abused, trolled and hounded. That doesn't tell me the experts were right, but it sure as hell gives me cause for concern about the corporations. Particularly as the corporations prefer ignorance, trade secrets and suppression of data.
If we are to hold experts as different from non-experts, then I must regard scientists who do the leg-work as more credible than bean-counters and snotty executives.
In the case of GMO, the same holds true. I cannot be certain an expert will be right, but they're more likely to be right.
What do the experts say? Well, in Europe (where the experts are actually expert and therefore worth listening to), GMO is banned by scientific advice.
Why not American scientists? Well, let's take something that isn't controversial. Bleached chicken. We now know chlorinating chicken doesn't kill salmonella or other pathogens, all it does is stop any existing methods from detecting salmonella. Studies show American chicken is extremely unsafe and unsanitary because it is bleached.
This should have been spotted very quickly in America, since it is their practice and all scientists are raised from hatchling (what, you thought scientists were human?) to listen to the Precautionary Principle.
So, no, I do not regard Americans as experts.
But that's ok. If there's something real, it'll be spotted by the EU, Russia, China, India or Africa, all places with scientific traditions. China's is perhaps the oldest, although they took a rest for a bit. If it's important, they'll notice and publish. I don't have to listen to one specific group. If it isn't replicated, or can't be, then it's not worth me paying attention to. If EU scientists don't trust the results, then they're experts and I listen to experts.
Is GMO food actually harmful? There's no proof of that. The precautionary principle doesn't require that there's proof of harm, it requires that you don't do anything if you don't understand the risks. Since it is applied here, it follows that a very large body of highly credible experts say that the risks aren't adequately understood to the standards expected by their profession.
GMO research is therefore substandard. There may be no risks at all, but the research isn't there.
Is it inherently harmful? Of course not! Horizontal gene transfers are remarkably common, albeit usually not from squid to pigs. I daresay that happens occasionally, though.
But it's only with CAS9 that they've been able to GMO humans to cure genetic diseases without an unacceptable cancer risk. Early retroviral inserts were more troublesome. Ergo, I would need to know the expert opinion on different generations of GMO food.
I don't see any problem with this. Ask an expert about a specific generation of GMO, not about GMO in the abstract. GMO in the abstract is safe, GMO in a specific formulation isn't necessarily and there may not be the data.
Should we put blind faith in GMO? With the myriad of techniques and the refusal of EU scientists to approve it, I'd say no. Blind faith in a specific technique, that's not so unreasonable, if EU scientists think it is safe.
Pesticide-enhanced crops? No, that's stupid. You're making resistant insects and killing off the beneficial wildlife. We know that. And most create pesticides either banned or temporarily halted prior to a ban due to the incompetence of the formula and the extreme damage to the environment.
Drought-resistant crops? If the EU scientists say it's ok, then ok.
Although, frankly, we massively overproduce food and America has a massive obesity problem. Reducing farmland to an absolute minimum and re-wilding the relinquished land would go a long way to improving health globally.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Smug fake-science Monsanto shills sneer "nah nah, you're a stupid-pants!!"
You nailed it. I tried reading the linked article, but was quickly disgusted by how obviously pro-Monstanto the bias was. The article may as well have been paid for by Monsanto-Bayer (I would not be at all surprised to find out that it was), it was so obviously tainted all the way from the fake headline onward.
The fake headline is designed to encourage people to emotionally arrive at a Dunning-Kreuger conclusion, then manipulate those emotions to conclude that anti-GMO sentiment is unwarranted. But no part of the entire article deals with generalizations related to scientific consensus or the Dunning-Kreuger effect. Rather, the article is purely a pro-GMO propaganda piece designed to benefit Monsanto-Bayer.
As much as I welcome this study, it didn't really ask the right questions and unfortunately kind of insinuates that knowledge of GM technology is the most important factor in judging whether GM food should be allowed. That's not true in general, my arguments against GM food have almost nothing to do with the way the genetic modifications work or with direct environmental impacts, they are political and philosophical. I'm pretty sure others have similar doubts.
The philosophical argument is a bit complex, involving several steps and premises. First, there is not much doubt that in the far future humans will drastically modify species including their own, given that almost every technology that has ever been invented has been used. Second, nevertheless it seems possible to kind of limit the impact of technologies, as for example the bans against nuclear proliferation show. Not every nation has nuclear weapons -- at least not yet, and that seems a good thing. Third, the larger the possible negative and positive long-term consequences of new technologies, the more you will need to err on the side of caution. (Technically, this could mean that you should use possibility theory instead of Expected Utility principles, for example.) Fourth, the more a technology is accepted and used in a society for one purpose, the more likely it will also be accepted and used for other purposes. Once GM food is ubiquitous, maybe animals will be modified next, and then humans, and so forth. I'm not claiming that there is an inevitable slippery slope, but some caution seems advisable. Fifth, human history has shown so far that humans are incapable of judging the very long-term impacts of technologies correctly. Both the net positive and net negative effects are blatantly misjudged once we're talking about time spans of 100-200 years. If you combine all those points, especially the third and fifth, then it seems that not being too liberal about GM technology and thinking this through in a bit more detail could be advisable. You certainly don't only want geneticists specializing in GM food in your expert panels for evaluating the technology. At the very least, we should perhaps delay or restrict technologies with a potential to have a high impact on the ecological system in the light of point five and point four. Again, the claim is not that a slippery slope is inevitable, but point five is still something to take into account. It's naive and irresponsible to make this a debate about "GM food" only.
The political point is simpler. The corporations who most fervently lobby for GM food have a proven history of not necessarily having the best interests of their consumers in mind, neither the interests of farmers nor those of end consumers, and have in the past been involved in all kinds of shady business about pesticides, seeds that make farmers dependent on the company, aggressive lawsuits against customers and aggressive patent policies, and so on. They also are lobbying very intensively against labelling GM food, even though there is almost no sane reason against such a requirements. In fact, their attempts to explain this rationale are mostly ridiculous despite the fact that they spend so much money on P&R. For example, they frequently argue that "there is not enough space on the packaging". In reality, their motivations are purely economical, they want to ensure that in mass production GM modified and non-GM-modified resources can be freely mixed in order to save costs. This is only a benefit to large food corporations, of course, who destroy smaller farmers and companies by sheer numbers. Irrespectively of the more philosophical worries, this alone should give you reason to think twice. Do you want no mandatory labelling, no free consumer choice, and instead laws that favour large corporations with a shady past? Do you wish to support Nestle and Bayer instead of local farming? Then maybe you should politically support GM food. If not, if you think that large food corporations are not necessarily the best choice for consumers
Although many EU countries do not grow GMOs, Europe is one of the world’s biggest consumers of them.
And that includes France.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
There was once widespread agreement about phlogiston (a nonexistent element said to be a crucial part of combustion), eugenics, the impossibility of continental drift, the idea that genes were made of protein (not DNA), homosexuality was a mental disease. and stomach ulcers were caused by stress, and so forth—all of which proved false.
Science, Richard Feyman once said, is “the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Scientists today purport to tell us how the world works, just as yesterday's high priests did. Those without means to directly confirm what is said (the majority of us), need to take their word for it.
Of course today's scientists support their contentions with data, facts etc. which supposedly were collected without any bias; just like yesterday's priests supported their contentions with "evidence" collected (charred stuff, etc.).
Finally today's Scientists corroborate each other's findings, just as yesterday's priests did.
Unfortunately, just as yesterday, there are Scientists today that skew stuff for their own interests and muddy the waters, and too many of the unwashed masses are willing to follow them.
All in all I will still take today's scientists over yesterday's (or today's) priests, but I do have to keep an open mind to figure out if what they are saying is truly the way things work, or if they are just guessing to give themselves a name.
TFA points out how people can cherry pick the information they want to believe and then call themselves experts on a subject.
Unfortunately I don't see a way to fix this....
It's interesting that you immediately jumped to the conclusion that the article is pro-Monsanto, then offered up a conspiracy theory that it might have been paid for by Monsanto and then concluded that it was obviously tainted and started blathering about fake headlines.
In one sentence, you went from "may as well" to "I wouldn't be surprised" to "it's obvious" without any evidence whatsoever, which exactly the kind of uninformed reactionary response that the article is discussing. It's no wonder you felt called out and got pissed off.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Stephen Hawking
Then again, maybe he repeated some other quote he read and I'm now victim of the illusion of knowledge myself?
A real scientist doesn't even give a shit about "experts". Experts can be (and have been) wrong. No scientist should "believe" any other scientist. Show me the EXPERIMENT, show me the DATA, and let me reproduce it for myself. Then we'll talk about whether we agree or not. All of this "belief" in science or in studies or in experts is absolutely contrary to the scientific method which MANDATES reproducible experimental results. Failure of this model, which is what we have now, lets us believe in charlatan "experts" and bogus agenda driven "studies" which no one either has the time or money to reproduce, and be led down a path that's not necessarily the TRUTH - which is what science ultimately looks for.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I just trust the people that decide what to modify and how not at all. First, they will not have the best interest of the consumer at heart, they will want to maximize profits and, if they can, make people as dependent on _their_ product as they can. So the incentives are already utterly perverted. Second, they will not care about long-term environmental impact, they will care about short-term profits. With the power of modification that comes with GM, that could cause huge disasters that society (not those causing them) will then have to pay for. Now, I know that it is hard to cause such disasters. Most dangerous stuff is not viable in the field. Most modifications are small. But it just takes one instance (e.g. by a bad actor desperately trying to get rich) and we are screwed.
With that, I am very much opposed to GM food production (not research) at this time. Incidentally, this is also my main objection to the nuclear-industrial complex. It is not the tech, it is the people I have a problem with.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The "frankenfood" is actually fine.
The part they don't want you to open your mouth about is the terrible business practices, such as making the plants purposefully infertile so you have to keep buying monsanto seeds, the part where you get sued if a monsanto crop accidentally grows on your terrain, the ol and good monopoly by infinite patenting everything...
But the strategy of calling their things frankenfood is not that all a bad strategy.
The article may as well have been paid for by Monsanto-Bayer (I would not be at all surprised to find out that it was), it was so obviously tainted all the way from the fake headline onward.
Well, given that buying Monsanto apparently was a really bad deal, they are getting desperate and any last shred of ethics they may have had are going out the window.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And the "models" are a straw man argument. There are much more elementary arguments for Global Warming that don't need complicate models. For instance, we can measure the absorption spectrum of Carbon dioxide, and it's even possible to calculate it down to ten digits, and in accordance to the actual measurements. We have the Venus and the Mars (both have about 95% Carbon dioxide in their atmospheres, and we can measure the Greenhouse effect there. Actually, all celestial bodies with an atmosphere have a Greenhouse effect, even the Saturn moon Titan.
We know the development of the Carbon dioxide contents of the atmosphere during the last 120 years. In 1900, it was about 270 ppm, in the 1950ies, it was 300 ppm, in the 1980ies 330 ppm, and it's 410 ppm now. We can easily find out how much additional Carbon dioxide we need to add that much to the atmosphere (about 700 billion metric tons). We also know how much coal and oil we have mined (270 billion metric tons) and burned since the year of 1900, and how much Carbon dioxide it has generated (1000 billion metric tons). So about 70% of all that Carbon dioxide is still in the atmosphere, and 30% has disappeared (e.g. has acidified the ocean waters, increased the plant mass on Earth or formed compounds with minerals in the Earth's crust).
See? No complicated models. Just pure numbers and basic Arithmetics. The models serve a totally other purpose. They try to predict which effects the increased Greenhouse effect has: How much warming will actually happen? How strong will the melting of the glaciers be? How will weather patterns change? What will be the new layout of the climate zones? And when will we experience how much of what effect? And yes, here we have lots of uncertainity, and partly, we have large error bars. But the general statement stays the same: Global temperatures are rising, the ocean levels are rising, coastal areas will experience more flooding and will be lost, conditions for crops will change, and all that will lead to a large amount of resettlements of people, e.g. much more migration than today.
This guy needs to read the essay "the relativity of wrong".
Science is the only way of knowing we have. It's far from perfect but it's much less wrong than everything else.
Ths attitude of "scientits have been wrong so you should believe someone with a much worse record" is utterly facile.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
It is a bad strategy. It misinforms (lies to) people about GMOs for the purpose of trying to constrain Monsanto's villainy which is a different but related problem. It would be better to tell people the truth: FDA-approved GMO foods pose no inherent risk to your body, and GMO crops are no worse for the environment or farmers than traditional crops, but Monsanto is a corporation trying to gain control over the world's food supply, and they sell the seeds for most GMO foods.
It's a bad idea for the same reasons that lying about global warming to try to trick the idiots into supporting the scientifically correct position would be.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
It's also notable that they have knowledge that Dunning-Krueger *is* a thing.
Accurately describing how your detractors would react even *before* they start doing it is the best way of discounting anything they have to say. You *knew* they would, so you're smarter than them by default, right?
It's really just a way of psychologically profiling people ahead of time to make yourself sound reasonable: better to be the one who calls the behaviour out first because it gives your information the ring of truth just for knowing human psychology.
So it could go either way. The base truth is: an average person knows next to nothing about GMO foods and at worst the patents on them are designed to control the food supply and trade of poorer nations.
If a GMO food is patented, it ultimately doesn't matter if it can even feed people in 50C+ equatorial weather. If you're forbidden to collect seeds from the patented crops or are forced to use terminator seeds, you can't control what you feed to others in your nation and a multinational corporation has control of farmers.
Oh look, a perfect example of what the article claims.
You have zero knowledge of the subject, and claim that if it isn't suited for insects that that somehow has any bearing on suitability for humans.
No, it's even worse. Rather than introduce a terminator gene, they let the seeds spread to neighboring fields so they can sue any farmer who doesn't get with the program.
Terminator genes would be a blessing.
For new technologies to be fairly tried, the company introducing it has to reap the profit from selling the new technology, but also need to be liable for damages due to any problems the new technology causes. Separating the risk from the reward causes technologies to "succeed" regardless of any negative problems they cause. The problem shows up in other areas as well.
Ego is inversely proportional to knowledge ~ Albert Einstein.
they let the seeds spread to neighboring fields so they can sue any farmer who doesn't get with the program.
Re-read my post (which was modded down despite being accurate and giving citations).
Monsanto has never sued anyone for unintentional infringement.
The myth that they did comes from the film David vs. Goliath, which was a wildly inaccurate documentary.
Terminator genes would be a blessing.
They would indeed. They were a good idea, and were stopped by protests from anti-GMO activists, including Greenpeace, because they took away one of their best arguments against GMO: That the genes might spread into the wild.
> German "wie" is pronounced roughly like English "we".
In what region of which German speaking country?
I've heard it many times, on the East side of the Rhine river, and in Vienna (the Wien in Wiener, by the way)
In both places, the 'Wie' is pronounced as a straight 'Vee'. There is no hint of anything like a rounded vowel, such as in the English 'we' or French 'oui'.
No good deed goes unpunished...
Even more concerning is the trope that a political faction has anything to say about scientific facts. The fact is that GMO is mostly harmless as any half assed study of the subject and the safety tests done on it will reveal. The political fact is that Monsanto is a predatory capitalist corporation that uses GMO to enforce a distastefull business contract. Untangling the two issues has become impossible because everybody has been polarised by the politics first and is unable to discuss the science objectively. I have no idea why this is true but it is undobutedly true.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Genetically modifying a plant to produce a pesticide was insane but they did it. There will always be intentioned consequences. For example make a plant herbicide resistant, and that resistance spreads to weeds in the same species and more and more herbicide is required and becomes toxic to us. How far will that genetic modification spread, what will be the consequences of turning out environment into a big ole trial and error lab.
I like GMO in algae, grown in a tank and not in the wild, specifically engineered to be very consumable, very little resistance and hence be eaten by everything out in the wild, can on grow in the tank for human consumption, Super foods, engineered with the right textures, flavours, nutrients and trace elements, anything is achievable in that design and once engineering, you could grow it in a controlled environment aquarium in your kitchen with your pet fish.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
Transgenic frankenstein technology is qualitatively different from previous techniques of plant and animal breeding.
I like how selling seeds and pestices to people who want them is suddenly "a distastefull business contract". Monsanto derangement syndrome still in full swing, even though the company doesn't even exist any more.
This reminds me of how older children are most likely to die in a survival situation (lost in the woods in the winter etc.) because younger children follow their instincts and adults have enough knowledge to reason out their survival. Older children attempt to reason out their survival but don't have the knowledge/wisdom to do so as successfully as if they had just followed their instincts.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Humans have been breeding crops into "frankenfoods" for thousands of years. The tennis-ball-sized tomatoes we have in stores now were bred from wild tomatoes the size of grapes. The big purple things we call eggplants used to be small white things that actually looked like birds' eggs. Corn is the biggest freak of all - look up Teosinte to see what that used to look like. We've been making "GMOs" since prehistoric times, just with more primitive "GM" methods. If there were dangers we should've found them by now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Transgenic frankenstein technology is qualitatively different from previous techniques of plant and animal breeding.
Yes, you're right -- it's more targeted, and more likely to be safer. Far more genes get changed in traditional cross-breeding, but no one gets up in arms about that because it doesn't happen in a lab.