How to flunk out of the University of Google

[HuckleB]

https://violentmetaphors.com/2016/06/03/how-to-flunk-out-of-the-university-of-google/

"...

I want to share with you my strategies for flunking out of the University of Google.

This is one instance where flunking is a good thing. A graduate of the University of Google chooses to accept only information that supports his or her position, and ignores or dismisses information in conflict with it. A graduate of the University of Google will not be able to answer the question “What kind of evidence would change your mind on this subject?” It’s insidious, because once their opinions are formed in this way, they tend to identify with other people who share those opinions, and any new information that comes their way will either be accepted or rejected on the basis of which position they’ve already taken (the cultural cognition effect)

...

Flunking out requires a decent amount of work, and the willingness to accept that you might be wrong about a subject from time to time. You’ll need to become more aware of your own cognitive biases, and have some strategies for overcoming them.

So as a preliminary step down the road to science literacy, I’ve put my thoughts on this together into a guide to learning about a subject in which you have no background. It’s an exercise; please don’t shortcut the process and go to Wikipedia, or you’ll miss the whole point.

..."

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A very good read, indeed.

[KamaAina]

1. More people need to flunk out of the University of Google's medical school.

[HuckleB]

3. For starters, indeed.

[Blue_Tires]

2. Damn... This describes Greenwald better than I ever could

k+r

[whatthehey]

4. Horses for courses

I'm not unfamiliar with being accused of intellectual snobbery. I'm not always innocent even, but the reflexive antipathy for casual information sources always seems to me to be not just snobbery but counterproductive. The vast majority of Wikipedia is mostly accurate most of the time, certainly in the sciences. It's also more likely to be holistic (not in the silly alt-med sense), accessible (although not always!) and applicable to general questions than medical and scientific journals, where extreme narrow focus and specificity to areas of expertise is the norm. There's also the vexing issue of analysis. I'm not expert in any of the sciences, but I'm a capable enough quant in the corporate realm and it is simply terrible how scientific, and especially medical, articles butcher and misuse statistics. How much stats do you need to be a MD? As near to zero as makes no difference. It's harder to get away with that in broader-access media like Wikipedia with thousands of statisticians among the contributor roster.

We have to remember few are equipped to understand peer reviewed articles unless they are, well, peers, and that such articles assume and are based on significant pre-existing knowledge. Of course they are the final arbiters on cutting edge controversies in the field, but they are pretty useless in imparting knowledge to even informed non-experts, because they are too specific and too isolated.

I'm a dilettante academically. I know a little about a lot, a lot about a few things, and am expert on bugger all. About the closest thing I am to an expert on would be the ancient history of the Near East. I couldn't get anything published in any of the peer-reviewed journals if my life depended on it and I were stupid enough to try, but I can understand most articles to a reasonable degree. Any relevant PhD is certainly far better on some parts of the topic and probably better on most all of it. It's their life's work, not mine, so that makes sense. But do I, a reasonably well-informed layman on the subject by any objective measure, learn more by starting a Wikipedia spiral with a very familiar topic like, hell I dunno, Tiglath-Pileser III and following a bunch of the blue words, or by reading a JANEH article that spends 8000 words talking about a few dozen Akkadian-Ugaritic cognates? Certainly the former, which is likely true even for people who are genuine experts. Not even experts have holistic (again in the philosophical sense) or incorruptible memory of their field.

[hunter]

5. I bookmarked this article.

It's likely the good folks who have filled their heads with television news and google facts still won't understand after reading this article. In their way of life one chooses an authority to follow, an authority who shares their beliefs, and then stands behind that authority to the bitter end.

If that authority says the earth was created by God just as it says in their Holy Book, then that's the way it is. If that authority divides humanity up into races (the other races usually being inferior), then that's the way it is.

People who live their lives this way, their heads full of "facts" spewed by their chosen authorities, tend to think science works the same way. Sadly, it does to some small extent. I've encountered a number of people who have graduated from a fundamentalist belief system to a "scientific" belief system without acquiring any deeper understanding of the scientific method, and without abandoning the bigotry, racism, or misogyny of the authoritarian culture they've renounced.

I've got a four year science degree, I passed, occasionally excelled in, the science classes designed to thin the optimistic mobs of pre-med students. (I once flunked o-chem too; in my defense I had a part time job then that would occasionally pay $100 a day, which often seemed more attractive than attending class...)

I don't think a science education makes one fluent in the scientific method. I've met medical doctors and even a few working scientists who are still fundamentalists in many ways. Medical doctors who don't "believe" in evolution, physicists who don't vaccinate their children... etc. Some of these are very noisy on the internet, at "Google University."

My personal history is one of heresy. That's how my ancestors ended up in the U.S.A. wild west; they had trouble with state religions, and authoritarians in general. Many of them were pacifists.

Heresy shouldn't be possible in science, but it is. The story of Barbara McClintock is an illustration of that:

For decades, scientists dismissed transposable elements, also known as transposons or “jumping genes”, as useless “junk DNA”. But are they really?

http://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/transposons-or-jumping-genes-not-junk-dna-1211

For me, the joy of science is that today's heresy can be tomorrow's truth, proven beyond any reasonable doubt. An important aspect of the scientific method is being able to walk away from a hypothesis when the evidence turns against it.