Sick to death of this anti science conspiracy nonsense.

[fakenamefornow]

People actually believe the earth is flat.
Anti vaxers.
Creationists.
Young earthers.
Even Brexit, so many people just wrong about stuff and don't believe the facts when they are put in front of them (90% of Boston are now Polish).

Why are these nonsense views increasing?

Anyway, aibu to think people are fucking stupid?

@Justanotherlurker I like Corbyn - but I was one of the people calling for his resignation a few months ago because he seemed too divisive. We shall see.

I grew up surrounded by racists (or so it often seemed) so people believing the world is flat is just funny to me.

I have a friend, when her eldest was diagnosed with autism doctors/ "science" told her the chances of having two children with with autism in the same family was ridiculous. Now we know that statistically it is highly likely.

Just like the genetic link it wouldn't surprise me at all if in the long run there was found to be an immune system overload element to many cases. Doesn't make the anti-vaxxers right but doesn't mean they really either.

We just found a whole new "nervous system" about five years ago in the US. The quote from the scientists was something like we thought we had the body mapped evidently we were wrong.

Science is an ever changing body of knowledge. The public loses faith when the scientists forget this. The current generation of scientists/doctors are unspeakably arrogant and forget that the next generation of knowledge is built on investigating and challenging the knowledge of today.

Everytime I hear scientists bemoaning the stupidity of antiscience find myself wondering why they can't recognise science's role in that

Vaccination does carry a risk of damage. For most, that risk is smaller than the risks from the diseases. Those of us in that position should be vaccinated to protect those who cannot be.

The problem is idiots wanting everything to be totally safe. Life doesn't work like that.

See also gender.
Bloody hell still doesn't make any sense and no textbooks have been rewritten on male and female sex. And yet gender has become a talking point.

how do they explain all the fossils?

I know this one! Apparently, the devil put them there to shake man's belief in God. It's either that, or they are the remains of demons.

I think a lot of it, as I said above, is about exposure. My MIL was a hematologist all her life and used to talk about how she saw new blood sequences all the time (I've probably got the terminology wrong there, but you get the idea). And I once asked her: "So is that like 'evolution in action' then?" And she said: "Yeah, I suppose you could say it is."

But if you are not a hematologist or a virologist, you never see that, do you? You never see how viruses adapt and change to survive in an environment.

Again, a mumsnetter a few years ago once wrote something on a thread that I have always remembered. It was something about how autodidacts become very wedded to their particular primary sources and tend to put a kind of blind faith in what those sources say, rather than understanding that knowledge comes from assessing all sources on a subject and coming to a rational conclusion.

I always think of this in terms of conspiracy theorists. They are like those auto-didacts, and become very wedded to the first alternative explanation they find, defending it to the hilt.

Unfortunately the average I is about 96 and is dropping every year as the dumb fuckers are out breeding the smart people ie a couple who both have an I above 110 tend to have only 1 or 2 children where as those who have an I of 100 or below tend to have 3 or more children as such things are only going to get worse

I have my own theory about conspiracy theories: thousands of years ago the human race made up stories to explain things they didn't understand (earthquakes/volcanoes because the gods are angry; eclipses being caused by dragons eating the sun, etc) conspiracy theories are just a modern extension of that.

What I mean is they are a natural part of human nature, the difference now being that people have the opportunity to educate themselves if they wish. Sadly an awful lot of them actively choose not to do so.

I think the less faith someone has in the government, the media, any authority figures such as the police then the more likely they are to believe conspiracy theories. It's less that they always believe the conspiracy and more a case of I don't believe the official line and therefore it must be something else.

I think bearing in mind the amount of coverups that go on, it's understandable to be cynical.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that not much of the relevant information is available to base the conspiracy theorists' assumptions upon.. so it is a work of "connecting the dots", as they often say.
The other major problem is that a lot of conspiracy themed websites are pure disinformation, designed to discredit anyone who dares to question the "official " version of events.
Any right minded individual should have no problem concluding that the general population has been, and is being bullshitted to by our "leaders", as there is plenty of evidence to support this.

People are really fucking stupid, is why. Loads of them. And they can all see each others stupidity on FB and online, and the King of the Fucking Stupid People got voted in as the American president and the REally Fucking Stupid Idea that was Brexit happened....all of which legitimises and emboldens the stupid.

It's the endarkenment, the idiocracy is now.

Why blame 'the left' for the kinds of people that voted for Trump, or wont vaccinate their kids, or believe gravity doesnt exist?

I have a friend who has cancer, her tumour is benign

......then she doesn't have cancer, a benign tumour is, by definition, not cancerous.

Yes. There does seem to be an increasing number of wilfully ignorant people who 'educate' themselves by talking to each other instead of critically assessing the information Google gives them.

It is stunning, frightening and depressing in equal measure.

yanbu.

I think that as the numer of the population increases then there are bound to be more stupid people. There are bound to be more clever people and more ordinary people too. The proportions will be pretty much the same at any time.

I do think that if average intelligence is always 100, then it is quite possible the entire population has actually shifted down the scale, but as the scale gets adjusted so the average remains 100, then acually we could all be a lot stupider than the population of 50years ago. Or indeed, a lot cleverer. We'll never know though.

Funnily enough, no one ever thought the earth was flat until now. Make of that what you will.

Tell me about it, I met a woman recently who said the brexit vote was fixed in London because small planes were sent up which seeded the clouds to make it rain, and this kept all the pro brexiters at home. She was very miffed when this theory was dissed , her comeback was "it's on the Internet, I can send you the links" . I was very polite and didn't say I thought people who believe everything on the Internet is true should have their voting rights taken away, but I was tempted!

I think part of the problem with the vaccination issue is two fold. Firstly anyone with questions or doubts will often struggle to find a pro-vaccination voice that speaks to them in the same educational, supportive tone that anti-vaxxers do. My eldest girls (twins) had single vaccinations, which now horrified me, because when I asked questions my anti-vaxxer friends and relatives talked through issues and 'evidence'. My HV called me an idiot and my best friend stupid for even asking a question. As a terrified new mum I asked questions about everything, only vaccinations did asking a question see people treat me like an imbecile. So, of course, I ended up taking the supported path which was the wrong one. (The internet was no help, so many contradictory things came up).

Secondly the lack of honesty and quick recompense when things do go wrong makes people suspicious. My DD has narcolepsy, now hers wasn't caused by the swine flu vaccine, but two of the children at her support group did get it as a result of the vaccine. The unnecessary hoops people go through, long after it is known and shown where the damage came from is ridiculous. The lack of transparency over if the problem batches were used later than the original cut off date makes people worry that unnecessary risks are taken.

I also think a blanket "it'll be fine" doesn't reassure people. I know vaccines are for the best. I want to know that the chances of it going wrong are 1 in however many millions. Telling me it's perfectly safe makes me think you don't know what you are talking about or are trying to hide the true rate of it going wrong.

Education works much better than patronising, or being rude.

Unfortunately the average I is about 96 and is dropping every year

I don't know where you got that idea, which is contrary to the well-known Flynn effect.

GrainOfSalt how do they explain all the fossils?

According to one fundamentalist Christian, they were put there by God to test our faith in him

Don't understand the obsession with iq tests, they are fundamentally flawed. Ironic that people are referring to them as facts when scientists have proved them to be of little use.

The things I like best about this thread are the fundamental misunderstandings about IQ.

Science is an ever changing body of knowledge.

Well, quite. Science doesn't stand still. Much of the information believed to be incontrovertible today will one day be superseded.

Ten years ago, the official advice was to avoid peanuts in pregnancy to reduce the risk of allergy. Today, pregnant women are told the opposite. Were people who chose to disregard official advice ten years ago dangerous idiots? Until today's scientific beliefs have moved on it's difficult to say who is an idiot and who is simply exercising their capacity for independent thought.

Yes Silent but maybe not so difficult when the belief is about the Earth being flat or dinosaurs being planted as a test by God, not so hard in those cases to spot the idiots...

I think a lot of it is because "science" is now taught and represented as a body of philosophy and belief, rather than a method

I would personally laud some of the ideas being criticised here, because people are questioning things. The flat earth theory is OTT, but a lot of people remember all the times that scientific theory has let us down and pharmaceutical companies have been unscrupulous. Mad cow disease was misapplied science, as was thalidomide.

Science is a method and, much as it is cool to sneer at creationists, Darwin only proposed a theory that could well be proved wrong as so many scientific theories have been in the past.