Cause and Effect

Call it pseudo-science

Yea agreed. When shitty science is given as a reference then it becomes much harder to critically judge something but at least it is not a huge amount of work to see that there is conflicting scientific data on a topic. It is a huge effort to try to gauge which one is more credible. And it does not even have to be agenda driven. It can just be bad science, science driven by strong priors. Then you really have to be an expert on the topic to be able to spot the weaknesses in that study. Luckily however most outrageously stupid statements made by politicians/billionaires and a huge body of online disinformation content don't even refer to existing science (if it doesn't give any references to scientific statements, assume it does not exist or ask for links) and are easy to pick apart by realizing the blatant contradictions in their statements.

I’m really happy to see this discussion here. Intellectual self defense comes from a well rounded liberal arts education. The type of people who whine about having to take general education and non science courses are already displaying an alarming lack of critical thinking skills; they are exactly the ones who need it most.

IMHO, understanding the Scientific Method and, maybe more importantly, why it is as it is (so, understanding things like Confirmation Bias - including that we ourselves have it without noticing it, which skews our perception, recollection and conclusions - as well as Logical Falacies) is what makes the most difference in how we mentally handle data, information and even offered knowledge from the outside.

PS: Also more broadly in STEM, the structured and analytical way of thinking in those areas also helps in things like spotting logical inconsistencies, circular logic and other such tricks to make the illogical superficially seem logical.

Even subtle but common Propaganda techniques used in the modern age are a lot more obvious once one is aware of one's one natural biases and how these techniques act on and via those biases, purposefully avoiding logic.

Personally I feel that that's the part of my training in Science (which I never finished, since I changed the degree I was taking from Physics to EE half way) is what makes me a bit more robust (though not immune: none of us are, IMHO) to Propaganda.

Science is powerful but, as you've stated, balance is most critical. It was one of the most impactful biologists of the modern era that wrote "the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races" based on his theory of natural selection.

As you can imagine, statements like these were used to justify the Atlantic slave trade, the genocide of indigineous people ie. "manifest destiny" and other colonial era horrors.

One should not treat science or the words of scientists as absolute truth. Unfortunately it is not free from human greed or corruption.

It's not a new thing. The same issues were the case for television, radio, and newspapers. They had to teach media literacy before the internet too. You go back into the archives and you'll see some wild misinformation that's very reminiscent of what we see on the internet. We did have a brief few decades where we had a more consistent and adhered to set of standards, but these were by no means universal. The perception of reliable information is also skewed the combination of being less aware of misinformation when younger and by a unique period where mass reputable media were all saying the same thing... But that also meant they were leaving the same things out.

But the internet did change things. Standards have been blown up, misinformation is much faster and the volume of it is much higher. Our brains couldn't keep up with 24hr news channels, let alone the cesspools of social media we have now.

I'd say critical thinking is divorced from any one subject. You can learn it in a humanities context just as easily as a scientific one.

It is clear, you need some bases to be able to reasonice and understand the cause of an problem. You can find the cause of an problem why an engine don't work with some basic knowledge about physics, but even an intelligent aborigen who has no knowledge about mecanics and physic never can, also not a person which only had memorized data without understandig it, can't But the current education system priorice the latter, because of this there are a lot of integral idiots with graduation, which outside of their routine don't understand anything.

I've worked IT in healthcare and let me tell you, I've met some incredibly stupid doctors and learned just cause you're a doctor doesn't make you smart. And then I realized, there is someone at the bottom of every graduating class out there.

What do you call someone who almost failed out of medical school? Doctor.

Tbh, reasoning and thinking is hard work, even if you learned how to.

And it's getting increasingly harder to find reliable information, so you have to check the sources of your sources. And at some point down the rabbit hole stuff gets real complex, and maybe, you still haven't figured out what's true...

So the layman has to trust someone, and in our age of disinformation, someone isn't necessarily trustworthy. So between the day to day struggles and constant indoctrination, I get why people just hear what they want to hear. Still doesn't excuse it though.

They're complaining about how it is fashionable to say up with STEM down with Arts, to present them as opposed

SCIENTISM

Same here in Belgium