• neutronbumblebee@mander.xyz
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    13 hours ago

    Indeed, and in addition if your religion is not supported by the facts it’s time to revise its assumptions. Religion can deal with new evidence, it’s just rather slow compared to say human lifetimes. I suspect thats because the basis of many faiths reasoning is built on philosophy, Christianity in particular. Which is a kind of precursor to experimental science where progress is slow or even circular.

  • underwire212@lemm.ee
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    9
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    24 hours ago

    Ideally, yes.

    What ends up happening if your research shows new conclusions on the basis of “better science” is that those in power will probably ridicule your new conclusions and findings since it doesn’t align with ‘accepted’ scientific consensus and doctrine. And by ridicule I don’t mean challenging the new theory on the basis of counter data/evidence and reasoning. I mean ad hominem attacks on the researchers themselves. “Well, they graduated from a top 30 university and not MIT, so anything they produce is not worth looking into”. You won’t be funded and the status quo will be allowed to continue without significant challenge.

    I used to want to be a researcher when I was younger. My experiences have been wrought with closed-mindedness, arrogance, and lack of critical judgment and objectivity. Maybe my experiences aren’t representative, but hearing from others (at least in my field), I see that this is a systemic and widespread problem within the scientific community as a whole.

    How long did it take to convince people the Earth was not at the center of our universe?

  • Blackmist@feddit.uk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    8
    ·
    1 day ago

    “I did my own research”

    Oh, you did? You had a lab, and test subjects and ran double blind studies? Is it peer reviewed?

    “Oh, no I listened to Joe Rogan”

  • rmuk@feddit.uk
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    17
    ·
    1 day ago

    Who has time for YouTube? I get my conspiracies and lies from millisecond-long TikToks.

  • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    80
    ·
    2 days ago

    don’t worry, science as conclusions derived from research will soon be replaced by bullshit psuedo-research-AI-word-vomit derived from equally bullshit pre-determined conclusions

      • FundMECFS@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        edit-2
        1 day ago

        And some scientists!

        “If I repeat it in enough papers it’ll become true” seems to be the mantra of scientists with hard to defend theories they claim are fact.

      • spujb@lemmy.cafe
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        6
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        Luddites’ main concern was the systemic redirection of revenue from them, the laborers, to the owners of the factories. They did not simply hate technology for technology’s sake.

        The fact that you ignore this basic historical fact betrays an embarrassing ignorance.

        I personally don’t give a shit if some AI is used in research. I think that’s awesome. But AI also actively and materially deprives laborers of compensation for their work, both before and after the model training process. And I fucking hate that.

      • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        7
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        the problem is that AI can generate a million bogus “research papers” for every single legit paper. and for the general public (ie science writers, bloggers, news reporters, etc.) they are indistinguishable from each other. so unless you have literally done the research on a particular hypothesis yourself (good luck with that, with all the funding cuts), then everything is suspect

        so the question of “are we better off with AI?” as of right now, is absolutely fucking not

        • kitnaht@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          3
          ·
          edit-2
          1 day ago

          Literally you are better off with AI - it’s produced some of the most groundbreaking work in decades. You didn’t watch the video, did you? AI ended up being better than humans at tasks involving protein folding, so much so that they won a Nobel prize for its use. The breakthroughs of this AI have put us forward in medical research by an order of magnitude. Many orders of magnitude in fact.

          AI is more than just LLMs and Stable Diffusors. It’s being used in Science by people who aren’t reactionaries and anti-tech luddites to give people better vaccines faster, to discover new proteins for antivenom, to ensure a better future for people who need medical care.

      • NaibofTabr@infosec.pub
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        21
        arrow-down
        3
        ·
        2 days ago

        AI’s primary use case so far is to further concentrate wealth with the wealthy, and to replace employees. People who think AI is bad recognize that it is in the hands of the modern generation of robber barons, and serves their interests.

        Those who don’t recognize this are delusional.

        • Mr Fish@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          11
          arrow-down
          1
          ·
          2 days ago

          AI as a tool can absolutely be a good thing, just like almost any tool. A tool on its own is neither good nor bad, it’s just a tool that can be used. The usage is what makes it good or bad.

          Yes, most of what AI is used for now is bad, but it can absolutely be a good thing in the right use cases.

        • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 day ago

          AI’s primary use case so far is to further concentrate wealth with the wealthy,

          Under capitalism, everything further concentrates wealth with the wealthy because the wealthy are best able to capitalize on anything. Wealth gives you the means to better pursue further wealth.

          and to replace employees.

          So what you’re saying is that we need to dismantle every piece of automation and go back to manufacturing everything by hand with the most basic hand tools possible? Because that will maximize the number of people needed to be employed to produce, well, anything. Anything else is using technology to replace employees.

          Or is it just that now we’re talking about people working office jobs they thought were automation-proof getting partially automated that’s made automation a bad thing?

  • fsxylo@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    37
    ·
    2 days ago

    But I said the phrase “scientists don’t know everything” so now you have to listen to my bullshit.

    • Mellibird@lemm.ee
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 day ago

      Ahhhhh… Love that line. My brother and his fiance just had a baby and are debating on vaccines or not. They asked me, I said, it’s always better to get them and protect your child from as much as you possibly can. Like all of us here are vaccinated. I recommended that they follow what their doctor recommends. My dad chimes in with, “Doctors don’t know everything, they’re just trying to sell drugs for the pharmaceutical companies, that’s all they care about.” I looked at him and said, “As someone who studied biology in college, there’s a lot that a lot of us don’t know. But seeing as that doctor has had significantly more training than I’ve had, let alone you, I’m going to trust them more than some random article I’ve read online.” He stopped talking to me for a large portion of the day after that.

    • Shou@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 day ago

      If they did, their job would no longer exist! This is proof they don’t know everything!

  • shadow_wolf@aussie.zone
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    27
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    2 days ago

    That why its such a shame that big corporations can and do regularly buy scientists opinions in exchange for funding setting up a ill give $xxx.xxx for your environmental impact study to not blame my coal mine. Thus by negating the peer review process. science can sadly no longer be taken at face value with out knowing who funded it and why. i miss trusting scientists who are clearly smarter than me because they fell in to the capitalist greed trap RIP real science we should have treated you better and i am sorry.

    • halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      23
      ·
      2 days ago

      This is why you never trust a single source. For anything. Reputable news organizations have never trusted single sources, they always use multiple sources to verify information they are told. Science is not immune from this, and never has been. And even for those that you’ve followed in the past, times change, especially in a capitalist society with a massive oligarchy that owns the news companies, like modern western civilizations. Trust, but verify.

      • blackbrook@mander.xyz
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        Big money can buy a lot of sources, even most on topic, and distorts what gets researched. So you still have to look at where the money is coming from.

    • Mavvik@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      2 days ago

      How often does this actually happen? The cases where this does occur stand out because they are rare. I really hate the implication that scientists are not trustworthy because some individuals acted in bad faith. Scientific fraud is real but it doesn’t mean you can’t trust science.

      • MeowZedong@lemmygrad.ml
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        I agree, but also approach much of what is published with skepticism because there are many factors that can lead to results not being reproducible.

        Not that there aren’t issues with this idea, but I would like to see peer review change to include another independent lab having to reproduce your experiments as a means to verify the results. The methods you hand over to that lab are the ones that will be published, so if they can’t reproduce your results, it stays in review.