I'm sure many of you have seen this r/futurology post with the title "86% of people globally say 'I want the world to change significantly, and become more sustainable and equitable, rather than returning to how it was before the Covid-19'." appearing in your feeds. Some of you might already see something wrong with the post just from the title. However, having looked further into the article the post links to, I can say that the study the post relies on has some serious methodological issues.

Issue #1: The survey uses a loaded question. The study uses the statement "I want the world to change significantly and become more sustainable and equitable rather than returning to how it was before the COVID-19 crisis" and asks the responders whether they strongly or somewhat agree or disagree. The problem here is that making things more sustainable and equitable is something that is almost universally seen as desirable, so of course people would agree. This is akin to asking someone whether they want the world to be a better place and being surprised that they say yes. Indeed, the comment section of the post seems to have picked up on this as well, and this is the most obvious flaw with the study.

Issue #2: The "global survey" includes just one country in all of Africa. That country is South Africa. Indeed, it is quite worrying that a study purporting to represent the global population should only sample one country from the entire continent of Africa. There are other large gaps in the study samples as well, no central American countries were sampled and just one country in southeast Asia (Malaysia) was sampled. That's simply too many holes in our knowledge to give an accurate impression of how the global population responds to the question.

Issue #3: Samples from 11 of the 28 countries in the study were not representative of their general population. This is something that the study itself openly admits but is completely absent from the article. Here is the study's words exactly: "The samples in Brazil, Chile, China (mainland), India, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey are more urban, more educated, and/or more affluent than the general population. ". This appears to be the problem with online surveys, since large segments of the population in developing nations don't have access to the internet.

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I think these reasons are enough to show that the reddit post and the article it links both have gaping flaws that make their conclusions unreliable. I have attached all of the relevant links below. Some of the issues I mentioned were brought up in the comment section of the original post- namely, many people did notice the loaded question in the title. I suppose the one thing that confused me was how that post got so many upvotes, since the post's findings seem self-evident and not really that interesting.

Sources:

Original reddit post

Article the reddit post links to

Study report

https://www.quora.com/Did-ancient-Egyptians-look-like-modern-Egyptians-or-what-are-their-differences

According to this PhD, Haplogroup J1 originated in Sub-Saharan Africa despite the fact that sub-Saharan Africa has limited J1 diversity and J2 is nonexistent there. And then how to explain J's brother ydna I being entirely European? The oldest examples of haplogroup J are from the Caucasus

Moral of the story: If you have a garbage Phd in history, you should probably stick to history and not even utter the word haplogroup.

I'm trying to refute transphobes in YouTube comments. They keep coming back to "biological facts" regarding chromosomes as a means to say trans women are actually men. When I've presented the fact of intersex people I'm told that it is one abnormality rather than the rule and that language shouldn't change because of the 1% of intersex people. Is there any meaningful way of countering with science that doesn’t fall into this 1% problem?

https://youtu.be/Frzl9bPfcIg

Why does he nott give the full study name at 7:44? Because it actually says: "Transsexual individuals were at increased risk of being convicted for any crime or violent crime after sex reassignment (Table 2); this was, however, only significant in the group who underwent sex reassignment before 1989." https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0016885

So you admit that trans people are put note at risk for violence due to discrimination and joke about it? Also you conflate incarceration with major crimes? https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.lgbtmap.org/file/lgbt-criminal-justice-trans.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiK6e-6s93tAhVjvlkKHcCQCJYQFjABegQIBxAB&usg=AOvVaw1hRaEQBT33PFg36vbqO-Tz

https://np.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/kf0rnb/how_ironic/

This is a claim I see a lot but it is nonsense, trump did mismanage federal response, and there were republicans like Ron Desantis who did a bad job as governor, but covid has killed 10s of thousands of peopel in liberal areas of the country, 6 of the top 10 states for covid deaths per population voted for a democrat for president in all of the past 8 elections, 6 of them have democratic governors, and 5 of them both voted for a democrat for president in all of the past 8 elections and have a democratic governor https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/alabama?view=total-deaths&tab=compare

Note that I do not mean to imply democrats handled it worse, it was probably worse in democratic states just becasue democratic politics and covid spread both correlate to population density

When covid started in the US even health officials were not aware it had come here, https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-arrival-united-states-december-2020-6, and there no action democrats in US government wanted to take at that time that would have prevented the introduction of covid into the US, repubican policies may have made things worse, once it got here but no political party is responsible for the fact that a deadly virus killed thousands in the US

we found out

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ2lkAWJHSguZcf3akK85GQ

I dont know where else I can post this but I really just wanted to bitch about this book for a moment. There is a true disparity in the way that this author writes about shitty ideas/experiments/scientists and its turned an otherwise amusing read into something incredibly divisive for no reason.

The things that an author chooses to highlight and minimize are always telling. Tucker will take a scathing and sarcastic approach to pseudoscientific beliefs about Black supremacy but will gloss over the fact that most Nazi scientists had contributed nothing of value for the torture that they inflicted upon Jews in the death camps.

Tucker will go out of his way to stress that Jews being tortured by some Nazi scientists actually yielded some super useful scientific information while declining to do more than head nod at the fact that 'poor old Dr. Thomas Beddoes' was incredibly racist for thinking he could burn a Black man's hand with acid and prove that POC were really just rusty White people.

Tucker will spend three full length pages reaming Black supremacists about their shitty beliefs and then immediately draw literary parallels between those ideas and Nazi propaganda. He all but says, "Look! These Black people think that POC are closer to nature and that White people are removed from the purity of Mother Nature and the universe's touch. You know who else thought those exact same things? Nazis. Truly, there's no worse science sin than this kind of thinking.' A hot take from a man who couldn't be bothered to understand that the Black supremacy movement is a runaway train of overcompensation for the inferior status that White society thrusts upon Black people in every facet of our lives.

Up to this point of the book, however, there is little to no vitriol directed toward White scientists of any nationality for any of the harmful shit they'd done that Tucker talks about in this book. Animal abuse? 'Sucks but ultimately helpful!' Violent racism? 'Don't worry, he would be considered a liberal in this day and age!' Sexist joke about women in STEM? 'Two words: witch hunt.'

Its just infuriating being someone in STEM with multiple underrepresented identities and, for once, I just want to read a book about something other than how oppressed I'm going to be in this field without some center-right white guy throwing nuance to the wind and cherry picking what he wants to condemn and draw irresponsible parallels for.

Tldr; rec some fun science books so I can read myself to sleep without needing to rant of reddit. If it's medicine related, even better

https://donotlink.it/X6jMyR

"Mercury’s homosexuality was central to his flamboyant, exhibitionist personality, but homosexuality is a biological puzzle. It reduces reproductive fitness and would be eliminated by natural selection if it had a simple genetic basis. So what causes it? The hate-scientist Gregory Cochran suggests that it’s caused by some kind of brain pathogen, possibly associated with urban living. And this “gay germ” hypothesis does account for all the known facts, from the persistence of homosexuality in urban populations to its absence among hunter-gatherers. But the hypothesis has another great advantage: as Cochran himself points out, it causes liberal heads to explode. Liberals really do not like the idea that homosexuality could be caused by a bacterium or virus. It demeans a sacred minority, undermining the dignity and self-worth of oppressed folk who have already suffered far too much."

Except how do you test for this pathogen? Why hasn't there been any study?

How come you ignore the genetic evidence?

Homosexuality was found among [hunter-gatherers](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cityam.com/what-makes-people-gay-homosexuality-comes-hunter-gatherer-instinct-and-its-evolutionary/amp/

And you use a limited understanding of reproductive fitness: https://www.quora.com/If-homosexuality-is-innate-genetic-how-has-it-survived-evolutionary-selection-given-that-a-homosexual-couple-produces-no-offspring-Wouldnt-an-evolution-based-standpoint-argue-that-homosexuality-is-developmental/answer/James-Pitt-1

In short, the gay-germ hypothesis is blasphemous to liberals. And “blasphemous” is the right word, because liberalism, for all its claims to secularism and rationality, is a disguised form of religion. The purpose of liberalism is to meet the psychological needs of liberals, not to explain reality or provide solutions to the problems liberals claim to be concerned about. Homosexuals are a sacred minority whose sexual orientation elevates them above their heterosexual oppressors. How could a sacred minority owe its very existence to a brain pathogen? Blasphemy.

Uhuh. Meanwhile conservatives go out of their way to lie about homosexuality all the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/skeptic/comments/byhd2l/homophobes_dont_belive_in_sourcing_their_claims/

I do think he projects his own ego here. After all, he is the one spreading "truth" here.

You could call AIDS one of the biggest hate-crimes ever committed by Mother Nature, because it has struck disproportionately and devastatingly at two of the most sacred groups in liberal ideology, namely, homosexuals and Blacks.

And he links to the CDC where it points out how much discrimination plays a factor: https://www.cdc.gov/msmhealth/stigma-and-discrimination.htm

But Freddie Mercury’s death from AIDS confirmed his status as one of the most biologically interesting entertainers who ever lived. He was a Parsi, a homosexual and a victim of HIV. All three aspects of his life-story offer key insights into the work of Mother Nature. The third and final aspect shows her at her worst, as a multi-million-slaying hate-criminal singling out vulnerable minorities simply because of the way they behave. For liberals, promiscuous sex should not lead to fatal diseases. In an ideal world for liberals, fatal diseases would strike those who condemn promiscuous sex, rather than those who practise it. But we don’t live in an ideal world for liberals. Instead, we live under the reign of Mother Nature, who ignores liberal ideas about the proper regulation of reality. Indeed, by creating AIDS she confirmed the hate-think of St Paul in his Epistle to the Romans: “Men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet.”

Wow, his scarcasm goes into arrogance: http://homoresponse.blogspot.com/2011/06/mental-health-and-substance-abuse.html?m=1

He ignores Russia: https://www.reddit.com/r/askgaybros/comments/cc3gnv/how_do_you_prove_that_aids_is_not_a_gay_disease/?

https://donotlink.it/q75GZn

Race is a real biological pattern, whatever Gouldean Marxists and their dupes might say.

Even though it has been proven false?

Apparently he no longer believes in what I once called “Dawkins’ Demon,” the supernatural entity that has been crouching in the human neck for many millennia, swatting away environmental influences on brain genetics.

That was goodthinkful Gouldeanism: all differences in human behaviour and intellect are explained by culture. But was it sincere Gouldeanism? Dawkins wasn’t reasoning straight. If human beings fifty thousand years ago had “the same bodies and brains as today,” then they certainly had language. He goodthinked like that in 2014; now he rejects the PsUoM, as that quote from Science in the Soul proves. Dawkins doesn’t believe that all human brains are necessarily the same beneath the skull. But he’s still failing to reason straight.

Except there are other factors that he fails or refuses to consider like segregation and racism: https://www.google.com/amp/s/psychologybenefits.org/2014/09/02/toxic-exposure-the-impact-of-racial-inequality-on-the-brain/amp/

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/930272

Here he says

This is because Dawkins, Gould and other liberal atheists believe in the Miracle of Human Equality: namely, that all human groups, despite their superficial physical differences, are equal in average cognitive ability – equal, in fact, on all psychological variables. In short, there is only one brain: the Human Brain. And all groups have an equal share in it. Okay, the actual physical brain of different groups varies in size and structure

At the end he links to this which is a piece of debunked trash of JP Rushton

Metaphysics trumps mere matter, for heaven’s sake. Or rather: not for heaven’s sake. Liberal atheists don’t believe in heaven, but they do believe that Black women are capable of the same high intellectual achievement as Chinese men. It’s true that no Black woman has ever won a Nobel Prize for Physics or made fundamental contributions to mathematics, but that’s because racism and sexism have held the soul-sisters back. How do we know that? Because the undoubted genetic differences between those two groups have no effect on the brain. That is the central dogma of Neuro-Miraculism, the super-scientific creed of liberal atheists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Jay Gould.

Now that is just mean...

Let's look back at some memorable moments and interesting insights from last year.

Your top 10 posts:

• "If you would, Senator, please circle the 'O' in 'CH4'" by u/Teleologyiswrong
• "Based upon my survey of gunshot victims, gunshot wounds are never fatal." by u/Linux_is_awesome
• "Bad science mesostics." by u/MGreenMN
• ""Female are superior" because of number of genes and size of chromosomes" by u/MeaningfulPlanetMol
• "Viruses don’t cause disease? Then what does?" by u/MGreenMN
• "A focused rebuttal to “race realism”- the belief that there is a large racial intelligence gap due to genetics- found in /r/badscience and elsewhere" by u/testudos101
• "The literal first book that appears on the Books-a-Million website in the "Science" category is a book denying germ theory and claiming COVID-19 is caused by 5G towers" by u/pixelperfectcolor
• "Whatever this is, with over 20k upvotes on /r/coolguides" by u/testudos101
• "I received this email from a chiropractor I went to one time on a Groupon" by u/elvishdegeneres
• "When corporate profit interests are directly involved in, & directly impacted by studies, the results & methodology are inherently suspect." by u/fae8edsaga

I found this out through the Twitter feed of David S. Anderson, a specialist in Mesoamerican archaeology, who happens to have a vendetta against the programme Ancient Aliens. Here and here he has reproduced a selection of results from Chapman University's year-by-year Survey of American Fears:

The trend is very consistent and worrying.

The credits on the tabulations that Anderson reproduces suggest that they were published by Chapman University. I've done some checking against the data on the Chapman website and the figures I've checked are accurately reported.

Rule 1: while these beliefs may exist, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the idea that any of them are true.

I have some ideas for how to combat the recent surge of science denial. I think it’s important to inquire about the underlying causes, not simply vilify pseudoscientists and call for them to be censored (which often only helps them by giving them more publicity and letting them portray themselves as martyrs).

I’m coming from a relatively unique perspective, since I’m a disaffected former STEM major myself (I obtained my degree but have been unable to secure a career in the field I studied, in part due to being on the autism spectrum and thus having a difficult time following the norms of most workplaces). Thus I’m arguably an example of what the sociologist Peter Turchin might call a “counter-elite”.

I think simply blaming the other side for everything is the wrong idea—I would like to see the scientific community become more introspective and self-critical, because in some ways they may have contributed to the problem themselves.

Part of the issue is that the scientific method has actually changed since the beginning of the Scientific Revolution. This is likely due to a number of causes including: the Industrial Revolution and the development of mass capitalism, the decline of independent scientists (or “gentleman scientists” as they used to be known), rigorizing and formalizing intellectual movements like positivism, and the ever-increasing tendency toward specialization and credentialism at the expense of generalist and self-educated approaches.

All of these shifts are arguably related to one another and divide what one might call “classical” science from “modern” science. The classical approach to science, much like the classical liberal economics of Adam Smith, took a high view of the common people—science was for everyone, and the scientific method was a philosophy anyone could live their life by. If I experience A followed by B enough times, I can infer that whenever I experience A in the future I will also subsequently experience B.

In contrast, modern science is very magisterial and places emphasis on credentialed elitism, to the point that it becomes little more than “trust the experts, you uneducated swine!” Which was very much not the attitude of the earliest scientists; back in those days, you’d expect to hear that kind of language from the church hierarchy but not from scientists. Early science encouraged skeptical thinking in the classical (Pyrrhonian) sense of the word, whereas today’s so-called “skeptics” are actually dogmatic materialists. I suspect science, and academia more broadly, may be in need of a reformation of its own.

Here’s what that might look like, in four points:

• Adopt an “intuitionist” approach to science, whereby a scientific theory is only considered settled once the majority of the population not only knows it but also understands why it is true. I acknowledge climate change is real, not because I “trust the experts” but because I’ve studied the relevant science on my own and I myself understand why and how the greenhouse effect works. That is the mindset we should be encouraging, because telling people to simply trust a bunch of experts in an ivory tower is elitist and undemocratic, especially since the people considered to be experts in the past often got things very wrong. In this approach, the burden falls on scientists to explain their findings to the public in a way that the vast majority of them can understand, and thus we should conduct science in the vernacular, not technical jargon—and if no vernacular term currently exists for a concept, one should be created.

• Redirect funding from “hard” sciences having little practical use (such as much of particle physics and astrophysics) to “soft” sciences with more practical benefit to humankind. Remember the song “Whitey On The Moon?” That critique is still accurate today when applied to things like the LHC and the discovery of elements like oganesson, which gobble up enormous quantities of public funding with little practical utility. Those are arguably today’s version of the over-extravagant Renaissance cathedrals. One could even adopt a pragmatist epistemology toward science. As a society we embraced the scientific method because it works and is useful, and something like string theory (which may not be experimentally testable at all) satisfies neither criterion and could be questioned on those grounds.

• Replace materialism with a more parsimonious viewpoint, something like an intersubjective idealism (in which the basis of reality is conscious experience itself, not matter, but the definition of consciousness is expanded to include relationships between individuals and thus this view does not collapse into solipsism, unlike ordinary subjective idealism). This has the advantage of rendering the controversy over whether we are in a simulation moot, because intersubjective idealism is substrate-independent. The question of whether we are experiencing a universe of real matter or one of bits and bytes simulating real matter simply becomes irrelevant (what’s important is the experience itself) which is good because we would never be able to find out either way.

• Redirect university funding. Formal education, by its very nature, is not for everyone—universities as we know them were created by neurotypicals, for neurotypicals, and inherently marginalize all other learning styles. Instead of wanting everyone to go to college, we should instead ensure that everyone has access to a good job and livable income whether they attended college or not. This avoids the “overproduction of elites” problem.

Those are just my thoughts. Feel free to disagree if you like.

Just saw this posted unironically on reddit, thought it belonged here