cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10673163
Evidence shows that shoving data in peoples’ faces doesn’t work to change minds.
As a scientist heavily engaged in science communication, I’ve seen it all.
People have come to my public talks to argue with me that the Big Bang never happened. People have sent me handwritten letters explaining how dark matter means that ghosts are real. People have asked me for my scientific opinion about homeopathy—and scoffed when they didn’t like my answer. People have told me, to my face, that what they just learned on a TV show proves that aliens built the pyramids and that I didn’t understand the science.
People have left comments on my YouTube videos saying… well, let’s not even go there.
I encounter pseudoscience everywhere I go. And I have to admit, it can be frustrating. But in all my years of working with the public, I’ve found a potential strategy. And that strategy doesn’t involve confronting pseudoscience head-on but rather empathizing with why people have pseudoscientific beliefs and finding ways to get them to understand and appreciate the scientific method.
A lot of pseudoscience has a material basis in privatized healthcare - real scientific medicine is fuckin expensive, so people get sucked in to woo-woo scam bullshit to try and avoid medical debt
A lot of it is also tied up with religion. Flat Earthers, for example, started by trying to reconcile biblical explanations of the Earth and the universe and it spiraled from there.
Religion, itself, has a material basis. Real scientific medicine is expensive, going to church is free.
More than that, it fills the gaps science hasn’t explained yet. Many people really don’t like hearing “I don’t know”. Pseudoscience gives them certainly.
Science can’t cure your cold? We can!
That’s definitely another material component of the problem - there’s not always a pill you can take for a problem, so naturally people are going to cope with that by latching on to whatever explanations and options they can.
This might be an explanation in the US, but here in Romania (not normally useful to talk about the EU as a monolith) there are tons of people that love pseudoscientific woo-woo despite the fact that we have some of the cheapest medical coverage in the world (definitely cheapest in the EU).
Small tangent: in some sense, we get what we pay for. Our medical system is nowhere close to France, for example, in outcome. It’s probably one of the worst in Europe. It is cheap though, and for basic things (broken limbs, colds, basic medical surgeries) is just fine. It only becomes unfit for purpose during mass casualty events and exotic diseases.
Not to shift the blame onto the Yanks again, but I have noticed a lot of the lunacy in Europe is the same as in the US, just on a 2-3 year delay.
It’s certainly like that in Canada. Our next government is likely to be nothing but a deliberate and cynical imitation of US Republicanism, since the floundering Conservatives have discovered this taps them into a rich seam of wannabe American idiot votes. Their campaigning just involves echoing whatever the far right conspiracy theory of the day is on the other side of the border.
The US exports its culture to the rest of the world.
Also, as you point out your medical system sometimes has poor outcomes. That, too, acts as a material basis for pseudoscience.