ddrcrono

I would say as far as my genuine feelings I feel a bit torn about this one. I would say the people you describe definitely are a chunk of the people out there.

But just on principle alone it's more interesting if I argue for a different angle:

Just as much as you get people saying "do your own research" you get people saying "trust the science," usually people who themselves haven't actually looked at the science and are just copy-pasting media headlines. (And as I'm sure you've heard, a lot of what makes it into the public conversation is the media twisting or exaggerating scientific findings beyond the certainty they actually show).

So in this context, "do your own research," actually makes sense - for instance, when Corona started I got way ahea of the game by actually talking to my friend who was at the time doing his PhD in immunology, he recommended some videos on YouTube (which a paltry few thousand views) that were just lecture recordings of a professor talking about and breaking down to a class what had been discovered about Corona already.

From this I actually came to realize that the way the governments and media were portraying Corona in the beginning (we're talking March-May 2020 sort of time period) was actually extremely misleading. Ex: We knew the half-life of Corona in the air was like, 3-4 hours, and that it was reasonably likely transmission was occuring that way, and that transmission by touch was very unlikely, yet we were still hearing a lot of "wash and sanitize" (and we still see sanitizing stations) which very likely do nothing at all.

Anyway for the love of God let's please not have an extended Corona talk - the point that I wanted to get to here is that, compared to the information that was being publicly dessiminated by both governments and the media at the time, by doing my own (actual real) research, I got information I wouldn't have otherwise.

Similarly, if there's a topic that's really contentious, or "the science" I'm seeing seems a little suspicious or incomplete I'll suck it up and start looking at papers (which are linguistically and technically dreadfully inaccessible if you haven't done a lot of research / you don't know that field of science, but with persistence and a bit of extra learning you can get the gist of it). A lot of the time things in reality are at least a bit, if not a lot different than they're being presented. After all, the sources that control public access to science themselves have biases and interests.

This is why, I think that people who say "trust the science" can be just as bad as those saying "do your own research" because usually those "trusting the science" aren't closely taking a look at what they're actually trusting (which often ends up being "trust how the government/media is talking about the science," a far more precarious statement). To me, both groups smack of a lack of critical thinking - one group universally untrusting and the other the opposite.

Ultimately science is contingent on our rationality, and our ability to think critically - all the scientific instruments and research results in the world do no good in the hands of someone with poor reasoning or, for that matter, a lack of imagination (Einstein himself said it to be more important than a mastery of the rational side of the sciences - this is, after all, how we form hypothesis to test). That is to say, essentially, that if the way we reject, or accept science is in itself something resembling faith rather than considered critical thought, then we ourselves are not being scientific.

The last point I want to touch on is that I think, is that you can perfectly good science lead to bad policy. Not to beat it to death, but I think a lot of people feel governments overreacted / overreached with certain laws and policies, ostensibly based on good science, but without the science clearly pointing to that being a good practical way to handle people. (It's essentially the age-old list a bunch of sound premises and then an unrelated conclusion - to many people that will seem like an argment that leads to a conclusion, especially people who are feeling afraid and panicked).

So, in situations like this you can have people who intuitively feel "This isn't right," but can't put their finger on why, and then they get sucked into overtly incorrect conspiracies that confirm their feelings. (So their conclusion "This isn't trustworthy/objective/reasonable," is correct, but the theory they adopt to explain why is wrong). I think a lot of these things are fundamentally a little more complex than they initially seem, anyway, and most people at some level have a reasonable intuition that is correct that they're going on, but where it's leading them is not.

Personally, I have found that at least some "do your own research" people are people who genuinely doubt the public narrative (and with some good reason, ex: intuitively it lines up too conveniently with government/corporate interests) but they just don't know how to look for good quality stuff/where it is. While you're not going to get through to all of them, I think if you know someone who's skeptical but reasonable it's worth the time to sit down with them and show them a bit of what's going on "under the hood" so to speak.

Overall, taking a less combattive approach when possible is something I'd always like to see more of, so even if people are being unreasonable, it's important to extent grace and charity to them if you want to make things better. Be patient and find the people worth your time, and have a conversation about things, and be prepared to also be surprised that you might have not been totally right on some things you felt strongly about.

Invest in the future, not the past. For every moment of effort you spend on headstrong adults you could be having 10x the effect with youth outreach.

Tangentially related to the topic but of importance in the discussion - when the quality of choices available to us is low (Trump/Hillary/Biden or Trudeau/Jagmeet/Poillievre) it can have the effect of lowering our standards and expectations overall.

If I were to be cynical, I would say that maybe some element of the candidate selection process in various parties keeps things such that leaders who are -too good- (for the people, and who would be liked) are kept out of the spotlight so that leaders who will difficult abide by the parties desires and be easy to control will rise to the top.

(I would also highlight that there is some general public awareness of the selection process lacking which is why we got things like Sanders and to a lesser extent Trump back in 2016. I think it's likely the parties have aimed to control things even more tightly since then. I also like to point out to people who hate Trump that if someone like him looks good then what you're offering has to be pretty mediocre. Trump would never in a million years beat someone like Obama).

Conversely I've seen some very seemingly very logical people unaware that some deeper emotions are motivating their logic - people who can make what seem like very logical arguments, yet the conclusions of which immediately fail the "sniff test," of any reasonably empathetic individual.

I think that whole rationality is a necessary component of ethics, it alone won't ensure good ethical standards - someone who genuinely doesn't care how others or society at large feel well see it as rational to betray them when they can get away with it.

I would say generally there good reason for us to have various senses and that some people are better at one than the other, and an extreme weakness emotionally or rationally will impact one's ability to be a moral person.

My point of view would generally be that people who try to make things better, even if in individual cases make them worse, will, generally, overall learn from those mistakes and get better at their decision-making. (Similarly if someone who helps themselves at the expense of others accidentally helps them, they will "learn" from is as well, not making that "mistake" in the future).

I like the point about people being too tired - as much as that might have felt like a side point I think there may be something there - one thing I noticed in Japan is that when I did something nice that was not culturally required people would not only be really happy but actually surprised.

Japan is not only overworked to death, but also very strict on manners and social rules, so you're often required to pretend to be nice to someone and to follow your duty to others to the point that people start to lose the concept of doing nice things spontaneously.

As the vice grips tighten around the working and middle class, I think what you're describing has also been happening in the West not only since Corona but gradually over the last several decades. People concerned primarily with survival have less room to be kind. (That said, it means more when they are).

Good reply. I would highlight that the specific example you gave about whether you can be justified in killing someone would be a common example in the rules vs results based ethics debate. (Deontology vs Consequentialism).

Moral relativism is more the claim that morals are entirely dependent on a culture's or individual's idea of right. (Which means they would say yes to both, practically).

I should add that, in all fairness, the last, what 60-80 years have been an exception relative to the entire history of humanity where we were having 6-10-15 kids (higher mortality rates but still). I really think this being a problem has caught society as a whole off-guard.

Also keep in mind that policymaking from the 80s, 90s etc. when it was really becoming apparent this was an issue was still not as, how shall I say, scientific as these days (because an adult of that time in power would have been educated in the 30s-50s). Plus, governments have always been bad for "kick it down the road, it's a later problem" looks.

*That said it's a lot easier to "anthropomorphize" something that is literally being programmed to act/look human, vs, say, anything else we'd normally consider to be part of that category.

Oh yeah, I dated someone I could get to feel sorry for teddy bears by giving them little voice narratives about how sad they were that they had sat on the shelf alone for so long. Didn't need a study to figure this one out, anyone who's spent time around teen/20s girls in their lives have seen it firsthand.

I don't see why it wouldn't be able to do at least some basic reasoning relatively soon, if it doesn't already have the rudimentary beginnings of it. That said they may have to really get past the "language model-driven" outlook and have competing inputs from completely different systems. I think that's probably a closer reflection of how our minds work.

Imo any attempts to control things are only going to lead to more, not less bad messaging. To me, as mentioned elsewhere, the key is to improve the judgement of the observer, not the information itself.