Gluten makes your dick fly off and explode tho.
In all seriousness, it's being caused by the centralisation of media and education. Groups like twitter and CNN are now performing more or less the same function as a church pulpit used to. They can broadcast any nonesense they like and the majority will accept it because "the experts say so, believe in science!"
Yeah and for some things I can accept that. Like with this covid thing, I’m not a virologist so I defer to the experts on that. And there’s lots of things like that where deference to experts is probably a good idea. My issue is when the experts say things that you can disprove with a mere minute’s rationalisation of what they’re saying, and there appears to an awful lot of people who either can’t or won’t expend that minute’s thought. The older I get the more I realise how stupid most people really are.
Which experts? The same people who try to tell you what to think are the ones deciding who counts as an expert and who doesn't. Even if a person is completely independent, experts come up with retarded nonsense all the time. Even if you decide to listen to some described as an expert, it's suicidal to blindly defer to them.
Not defer to particular individuals, but to defer to bodies of academic research I mean. Like with virology, I just don’t know enough about the subject to make any kind of proclamations. But there are many people producing large bodies of research into behaviours of viruses, so if that research suggests certain things are likely I’ll tend to believe them even if I don’t fully understand why. It’s more a matter of faith in the scientific process than faith in any individual, self declared expert. That said, I do understand the sometimes severe limitations in the peer review method of review, but I’m not sure I can think of a better alternative.
(post is archived)