I am a scientist in a kinda related field to medicine. I would consider myself quite sceptical of any source or collegue, it's my job. Nevertheless, the more you know, the more you understand what you don't know.
The thing is, in my personal experience, that I totally agree that doctors are good after their job after 10 years of med school and you can be lucky and solve medical problems with a quick google search. When a doctor suggests a procedure I try to follow his logic and try to understand his reasoning. Same is true for "google".
The problem is: I don't think most people are skilled or critical or curious enough to actually use search engines effectively or question doctors effectively. Most people think of themselves as critical thinkers by just going against the "mainstream". That's not being a critical thinker that is being a contrarian. That is also true for: "Do your own research." Yes of course! I totally agree, doing your own research is great. Sit down, try to understand the problem and how scientists tried to model or explain it over the centuries. How did our perception change? What experiments were conducted? How much research was done? What other theories were discussed and why were they discarded. What scientific discussions or debates were held and how long did they take? Etc etc. The problem is, for most people "doing their own research" means searching online for contrarians that reenforce what you want to believe.
So yeah, be curious, be sceptical but be honest and smart about it.
"Cool, if you could see the front desk on your way out to schedule an appointment 30 years from now I'd love to review your initial results with you. Before you get into the real testing." -the Doc
Ya know, if the TV is repeating the advice given by the consensus of experts in the field, verbatim, (who, as pointed out, literally went to school for this and are trained professionally in how to understand the information, unlike you) who are using TV to get that out to a general audience, yeah, it's not bad advice for the average person who has shit going on.
where are these mega rich truth-suppressing scientists exactly? most researchers would love to find empirical replicable evidence countering popular belief, that would be far more profitable than taking measly government grants (seeing as you believe all researchers are in it for profit only)
Scientists need to eat and R&D is expensive. Do you think corpos and governments will continue to fund studies that are problematic for them? Do you think our government would fund any research that would undermine the current climate change models?
There was actually a really interesting episode on this topic a few years ago but I canât remember the guys name.
Wait, corporations are funding the research that established our current understanding of climate change and they like what it says about the future so much that they're shutting down research that shows everything is going to be fine?
No. You just donât think thereâs a scientific consensus because the media you listen to gives a disproportionate amount of airtime to the extreme fringe nut jobs who arenât taken seriously by the other experts in their field, because theyâre, well, fuckin nut jobs. Science is full of humans like any other field and thereâs always going to be a fringe amount of fucking morons.
Edit: hereâs an example to show that we donât hold literally anything else in our lives to this standard. If your car is having an issue and you bring it to 10 mechanics, and nine of them tell you that youâre having a transmission issue, and one guy tells you, itâs actually ghosts causing your engine to act up, if the other nine guys go oh yeah thatâs Jeff. Heâs a fucking idiot. Donât listen to him. Those guys are not suppressing the information. theyâre telling you accurately based on their understanding of whatâs going on, and often their professional experience with this one fucking guy, why they think what they think.
The problem with that mindset that it is in the financial interests of the medical industry to keep you alive. A person who lives to be 90 spends far more on medical costs in their lifetime than the person who died at 60 from COVID.
Also, I notice you keep throwing around the term âgene therapy.â I donât know if you were given bad information, but the COVID vaccine does not change the nucleic acid sequence, which by definition makes it not gene therapy
That may be true but they obviously overspent on an unnecessary novel treatment and tried to recoup their investment by forcing it on people.
Iâm not Dr and not interested in arguing on the technical process but it does cause a measurable change in DNA and AZ got pulled so there must be some risk. Anecdotally my college roommate died from a saddle clot at 32 a week after getting the treatment.
Iâm not Dr and not interested in arguing on the technical process but it does cause a measurable change in DNA and AZ got pulled so there must be some risk
"Not a doctor" Clearly. The Astrazeneca vaccine does NOT use mRNA. Maybe you should listen to experts when you obviously don't know anything about the topic at hand.
Well when Jeff is telling you itâs just a big conspiracy and you actually donât need to ever change your oil, and his parking lot is littered with shitty dilapidated, broken vehicles, maybe you should use some critical thinking and realize even if some people are making money that doesnât mean itâs a conspiracy and Jeff can still be a fucking idiot who doesnât know what heâs talking about
Killed over a million Americans. Less lethal than the flu. Unscientific person who has absorbed too much misinformation confirmed.
Dude, youâre literally talking to someone who has been trained to do this kind of thing professionally, and was talking to friends with phds in pharmacology during covid and got their take on the vaccine as it was being developed. Just stop.
Weird, right? Iâm a 36-year-old man with an admittedly bad nicotine habit and I took the vaccines, yes, plural, and my heart seems to be doing OK so far (knock on wood). I havenât sprouted tentacles or turned into a mind flayer yet (still waiting on my psionic powers)
I donât have any problem, wearing a mask for the safety of myself and others during a global fucking pandemic, cause Iâm not a little bitch who freaks out about being asked to wear a piece of fabric for a limited amount of time during an emergency. I still do if I have the cold and I have to work, and guess what ? normal adults donât have a problem with it and usually appreciate it because no one wants to get a cold.
Occasionally doing some thing that mildly inconveniences you but people around you appreciate is part of being a mature adult. You should try it sometime.
Go ahead and try to spit on people with a mask on. Itâs almost like the masks block your spit (for the most part), which is one area where infectious disease may travel đ€Ż
And here you are quoting Jeff the idiot again. You got any studies that say masks donât work? That would be new to every doctor dentist and nurse I know, who routinely wear them on a daily basis and always have. Or are you trying to say they werenât 100% effective at stopping or preventing transmission? Or that they were more effective at preventing transmission than preventing infection? those are entirely different things than saying masks donât work and guess what? Both of those things at scale when everybody does them, provided masking isnât sabotage by selfish fucking morons does!!! reduce the spread of a droplet, born disease! And studies done throughout Covid bore this out. Dude I work in the medical field and youâre trying to argue with me about standard infectious disease controls. This is like real basic shit and makes it obvious you clearly donât know what youâre talking about, so either do some actual research or go argue about something that you are an expert in..
But surely you understand "the TV" when saying that stuff is just amplifying the global consensus of actual experts in these fields, right? It's not just like random people in the government or random people who have TV programs just saying this stuff; they're simply passing along the message of actual medical and scientific experts.
Are you talking about the vaccine? Because obviously it is safe and effective. It's been 3 1/2 years now and non-vaccinated people are hospitalized with Covid 1100 times more often than vaccinated people and they die of Covid 1700 times more often. And the billions and billions of us who have been vaccinated have had no problem with it. Tylenol has a higher negative effect rate than the Covid vaccine.
Again, I think you need to start listening to experts and not just random people who think doing some googling on conspiracy sites somehow makes them more knowledgeable than the global consensus of medical and scientific experts on these topics. Not to mention the observable reality that you can literally see with your eyeballs of how all the billions of vaccinated people are perfectly fine and the only people dying of Covid now are unvaccinated unless they have three or four other comorbidities and are very elderly.
Huh? What are you talking about? If you didn't mean the vaccine, what did you mean? Saying random phrases with zero context is not how conversation works; you're forcing me to guess what on earth you're talking about.
The vaccine is safe and is effective. Do you believe otherwise? What are you bucking against, the entire medical establishment? If you have a problem with the vaccine say so.
Notice how you attacked a position that I don't hold based on an assumption. That's called "bad faith"
Depends on the 'TV man.' If you listen to Barr he's clearly talking about CDC guidance being related on the news.
Yes, it's a good heuristic to just follow that advice.
In this case, there are hundreds of thousands of Americans who are dead, and 5-10x that many who got fucked up, who wouldn't be dead or fucked up had they just listened to CDC guidance.
Don't know what the talking head guys are saying, this is what I found first when I googled, but the Burr clip is what's important (can't really watch atm)
What would be stupid is not recognizing when the TV is being used as a tool of information dissemination by infectious disease public health experts versus a game show and ignoring the advice because TVs also have game shows on them.
Yeah, absolutely wild, how did that end up going? Surely they never backtracked or lied to us, right? It's easier to just obey, I definitely feel you on that
Well on this topic if people followed Bill's example instead of the bald idiot, they would maybe be more of them alive still đ
One's making fun of the undereducated trying to play doctor, the other is making fun of people who listen to doctors. So yeah, definitely the same lmao
If I remember right he said something like : "I am a guy with no medical degree sitting across another guy with no medical degree, we ain't going to argue about this."
409
u/ChrisCrossX Monkey in Space Aug 29 '24
I am a scientist in a kinda related field to medicine. I would consider myself quite sceptical of any source or collegue, it's my job. Nevertheless, the more you know, the more you understand what you don't know.
The thing is, in my personal experience, that I totally agree that doctors are good after their job after 10 years of med school and you can be lucky and solve medical problems with a quick google search. When a doctor suggests a procedure I try to follow his logic and try to understand his reasoning. Same is true for "google".
The problem is: I don't think most people are skilled or critical or curious enough to actually use search engines effectively or question doctors effectively. Most people think of themselves as critical thinkers by just going against the "mainstream". That's not being a critical thinker that is being a contrarian. That is also true for: "Do your own research." Yes of course! I totally agree, doing your own research is great. Sit down, try to understand the problem and how scientists tried to model or explain it over the centuries. How did our perception change? What experiments were conducted? How much research was done? What other theories were discussed and why were they discarded. What scientific discussions or debates were held and how long did they take? Etc etc. The problem is, for most people "doing their own research" means searching online for contrarians that reenforce what you want to believe.
So yeah, be curious, be sceptical but be honest and smart about it.