this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine (www.vice.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Scientists show how ‘doing your own research’ leads to believing conspiracies — This effect arises because of the quality of information churned out by Google’s search engine::Researchers found that people searching misinformation online risk falling into “data voids” that increase belief in conspiracies.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago

"no experts"

I never said that, I said that you are cherry-picking the handful of related people who agree with you, most of whom are not experts in anything relevant.

Clearly there are going to be a handful of subject matter experts that believe claims with extraordinarily weak evidence (see Nobel disease), the game of science is not played by fishing for individuals with degrees that support your beliefs. It's by looking at the evidence, engaging in a fair amount of epistemic and abductive reasoning and arriving at the most useful conclusion. In the case of people like you who don't have the skillset to do so, you can defer to the consensus of relevant experts. (Eyewitnesses are not subject matter experts, and I certainly wouldn't cite my vision as an instrument in a paper).

"Some scientists and even Harvard"

You realise you are talking to a physicist right? All your appeal to crackpots and generic "find more information" statements aren't going to convince me unless you rigorously explain why you think the data is better explained by theories that you can't formulate (nobody seems to be able to, because the theory is just "it's beyond our understanding", the most epistemically worthless statement ever) versus very well known sensory and psychological phenomenon.