this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
3 points (100.0% liked)
Chat
7500 readers
19 users here now
Relaxed section for discussion and debate that doesn't fit anywhere else. Whether it's advice, how your week is going, a link that's at the back of your mind, or something like that, it can likely go here.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Facts have a half-life of about 7 years and it’s decreasing
Do go on 🤔
I can see this being a thing, and have ideas about contributing factors (eg. Social media, age of misinformation...etc). But I also would (preemptively) argue that this is likely heavily weighted towards social facts, and not hard scientific truths.
Scientific truths change over time too. Science isn’t exact, it’s always our best guess.
That isn’t even getting into how every scientific confirmation creates countless new questions and hypothesis. With each confirmation our NET understanding of reality actually decreases
You're not wrong, but thats the kind of statement that leads people to doubt science. Scientists are definitely understanding more and more about how the world works. They are not becoming more and more uncertain. Its just that the more we understand, the more avenues for research we open up. We discover new unknowns to explore.
I know I'm restating what you said, but my family legit thinks that scientists all disagree with each other and aren't sure about anything. And that mentality seems to be getting more common. Its not good.
I feel that issue occurs because people are expected to have faith in scientific consensus and aren’t taught the nuances of our understanding of the world.
People are taught to follow the scientific consensus as rhetoric when they should be taught that science is always the best guess and that increased understanding that undermines previous understanding is a good things.
Instead the logical gulf is used to discredit scientific foundations and advancement by those who seek to profit of societal combat and hostility.
This all comes back to how we fail to educate adults generally in anyway and it’s left up to the likes of for profit News and entertainment companies to tell the story however they want