Should something be done about unscientific people?

You always teach respect by showing respect, many times that involves listening to what a person you may not respect is trying to communicate. You might have to guess to gain their understanding or trust, but respect is always given and respect is always earned. I'm still not opposed to metaphorical "name calling" as long as it fits the situation or serves to prove a point. There should be no anger when calling someone else a name. Just be civil, have fun, and show respect at all times.

 

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Solution.
Just counter the incorrect unsubstantiated statements with correct unsubstantiated ones. eg


Chemicals are actually natural
Some are some aren't
and not comprised of foreign substances.
What does that mean?
Everything relating to chemicals occurs naturally right here on Earth.
Sort of True

Actually nothing found on the Earth is completely foreign to the human body.
Some things will kill you though

There is a widely spread myth that says the agents that cause cancers are human synthesized. Not true.
Some of them are

In fact, there is evidence that the presense of carcinogens actually stimulates such mechanisms and lowers cancer rates.
True in a way. Some chemicals, such as the flavonoids, may trigger the immune system and help to protect the body.
People whose diets are rich in them, tend to live longer, but there may be other factors. There is no evidence that flavonoids are themselves cancerous, and no evidence that things which are cancerous are beneficial in low amounts.

 

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I only said the last one was interesting but not true, most likely. He is thinking of living diseases\viruses\organisms\bacteria. Here we are talking about the opposite though.

 

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extermination is the final solution
this is stupid. i hope i'm on the stupid list.
i'd love to see the definition of "unscientific". maybe we could have a discussion about what that means. i bet we wouldn't reach any consensus. and isn't consensus just a little "soft" scientifically speaking?

so let's just drop this whole idea, kay? stick to banning incorrigible troublemakers, spammers, and people who repeatedly make no sense at all. wait. keep those. the nonsense peddlers. they're fascinating.


The stamp of "unscientific" disapproval is already well abused by factions in the "real" world of science and politics. Anyone who doesn't like another's idea will readily tar and feather someone with such phrases as " That's pseudoscience!" or "You may have a PhD in _______ sciences but you're not a scientist!" or "I may have called microbiologist Dr. _________ the world's foremost retrovirologist, but he's not an AIDS researcher, despite having written more than one lengthy book on the subject."
People stoop to credentialism and petty academic dick contests generally as a last resort when they aren't getting their way. Actually, sometimes it's the first resort. Discrediting someone outright because they don't have a certain position of authority or the right letters before/after their name is ultimately a sign weakness. And a distaste for measured, scientific discourse.

I have no clue who would be deciding how to rate a person or argument on scientific methods and virtues. I say don't throw rocks at the creature. Stupid idea.

 

I feel like we have people who have been incorrigible troll-types already and don't get banned.

Remember when the politics and world events forum had a new "zero tolerance" policy last year? I was opposed to that policy for a long time, but it worked well in getting rid of a lot of the people who were assumed to be posting in bad faith (baron max, sandy). But if you look at those two subforums now, people are back to their old habits. There are two people who I have mentioned before: one of them is buffaloroam. He's notorious for defending republicans by ignoring people who pose counterpoints and counterevidence and responding to such things with completely unrelated and offtopic news articles, mid-thread, about how Dems are bad. Search through the post history of Bells and you can see all the places where she nailed him for doing it. What kind of argumentation is that?

Another one is joepistole. He does the same thing as roam, but he's not as unpopular because argues in favor of liberals (or at least pretends to). He also prefaces a lot of his posts with "LOL." On the internet, an all caps "LOL" means "I am laughing at you or your ideas, in your face." What kind of good faith posting is that?

 

What if you have been blacklisted? What if the august peer-review process has a grudge against you from the get go?

What if too much money has a vested interest in one view, and will do anything to silence another?

Of course, that's just hypothetical...

Good heavens, that's a wonderful idea! :thumbsup:

 

Update:

Another example of resistance to science on a science forum:

The idea that almost all organs change as a result of alcohol use isn't conjecture. It's a commonly accepted fact in medical science. Almost every organ in the body adapts to alcohol in the blood on a chronic basis -- including the brain. It isn't just the liver. We know alcohol acts on the neurotransmitter GABA within the CNS. In response to alcohol use, GABA is downregulated and more alcohol is needed for alcohol to act as effectively on GABA. This is one of the ways tolerance is acquired.

 

It does? You may or may not be right about that, but the established paradigm is that alcohol acts as a potentiating allosteric modulator of the GABA receptor. Specifically, the GABA-A receptor, a ligand-gated ion channel. Ethanol binds allosterically to the GABA-A receptor and potentiates the inhibitory effect of GABA on neuronal excitability. Thus, ethanol increases the neuronal inhibitory effect of GABA producing the neurological depression associated with ethanol consumption.

I don’t think that GABA neurotransmitter levels themselves are affected by alcohol consumption. There is a down-regulation of some of the GABA-A receptor subunits. However, it is thought that the main mechanism of alcohol tolerance (from a neurological perspective) is a gradual loss of GABA-A receptor response to allosteric potentiation, thus requiring more alcohol to produce the same effect.

Mind you, ethanol interacts with a range of ligand-gated neurotransmitter channels. The overall acute and chronic effects of ethanol are mediated through GABA, glutamate, serotonin and acetylcholine receptors, as well as effects on voltage-gated ion channels.

 

This is known, hercules. Thank you for getting with the program.

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However, I was talking to a layperson. You and I might know the specifics, but try to remember there is a time and place for being technical. The background of the person who I am talking to demands things be simpler for him.

Downregulation refers to more than receptor numbers. It also refers to receptor sensitivity and a couple other things.

Look, I know some of you are eager to prove you also know what is going on. However, this isn't the thread for that. If you have a specific argument to make relating to the issues mentioned in other threads, take it too those threads. Otherwise, try not to actively search for things to attack. This is directed at you, hercules.

 

Then why didn’t you say it?

I see. You can’t distinguish between a ligand and its receptor, and really basic premise that even a layperson can comprehend, and you’re rolling your eyes at me.

Uh huh. Whatever.

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You were talking to john99 who you are suggesting doesn’t know what he is talking about. That may well be true, but depending on the level of detail, I can point to you and say the same thing.

The point I’m making is that you need to be careful about taking the scientific high ground with a thread like this and criticising others for their supposed incompetence. Reading a few textbook chapters doesn’t make you an expert. I realise you’ve taken some basic chem/bio classes as part of your nursing training. Thus, you know a bit more science than some, and a lot less than others.

 

There was no need, hercules. Acting on GABA into "acting on a GABA receptor" is a duh clarification.

You are addressing tangents and not addressing the spirit of this thread, hercules. There's a word for that: trolling. Saying "uh huh" and "whatever" reinforces that.

Nothing of what you said is complex, hercules. This thread is not designed for show-offs and people who want to go unnecessarily in depth into things in order to prove themselves. If you dig that crap, take it to the bio forum.

This thread isn't about people who simply don't know. It's about people who refuse to learn or seem to prefer believing the opposite, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. That is definitely not something you can point at me with.

 

just when you think you know it all..someone else comes along who knows more..
i think thats a murphy's law..

 

I'm not sure either. He seems to not want to respond.

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What the OP is proposing is a form of on line eugenics, this was
a popular 'scientific' theory of the 20th century, used as a means of
social control by those who considered themselves superior in some way
to the bulk of the population.

 

That's rather delusional, what you are saying. Try getting a grip.

 

Not really, as Sciforums is a science forum (ha ha) and as such can impose and maintain its scientific standards (ha ha).

But first the OP and the likes of course need to wait for scientifc data to come in, in regards to how to properly respond to unscientific people.


Ha!

 

Another example of the person continuing to post nonsense. In spite of someone explaining how drug tolerance develops on an biomolecular level, this person continues to insist that alcohol tolerance (and tolerance for other drugs) is purely mythical and that it plays no factor in the degree of drug effect. Meanwhile, anybody who knows even a little bit about pharmacology knows this to be false. Physicians have to periodically increase the doses for many drugs precisely due to tolerance: opioid analgesics and benzodiazepines are two of the biggies.

Here's the quotation:

Why are anti-science people like this even here on this board? Why do they refuse to listen to reason? I suppose this person thinks drug withdrawal and physical dependence are myths too.

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isn't it like all in your mind and shit?

 

A long overdue response

Well, quite simply, I'm not perfect.

In the past, the moderators have discussed the issue of a culling, and two important results of that are:

(1) We cannot agree on the necessity of such a drastic move.

(2) We cannot agree on who needs to disappear.​

Furthermore, I have mostly regarded my position more in terms of the site. Why me? Well, because I've been around here for a long, long time; I tend to consider issues in detail my colleagues often find excruciating; and, frankly, I have a lot of spare time that I'm willing to spend on this community. That last is important because it means there is someone here who can clean up messes across the board. Previously, when I found a spammer, I might ban him, but could only clean up EM&J and S&S. Then I would have to post a bunch of notes for my colleagues asking them to clean up this or that subforum. Now it's a lot easier; I have the power to not only ban the spammer, but simultaneously delete all the spam threads.

The increased authority does not automatically result in the right to do as I will. To use a police analogy, if I go from small-town cop to county sheriff's deputy, I have more area to patrol, but it doesn't mean I suddenly get to go around shooting people.

Ultimately, if I won the lottery or something, and had the money to buy the site so that it was mine, yes, you could expect I would undertake measures many would find tyrannical. I would require source citation. I would demand a change of focus from simply arguing about ideas toward actually creating a useful body of literature. And I would definitely be willing to shut down threads that I perceive to be stupid. Take Politics, for instance; it is not impossible to discuss politics within the bounds of academic respectability. But it's a lot easier to attract a discussion—or pick a fight, as such—by framing the topic specifically for that kind of argument. More abstract inquiries certainly allow for political argument, but they're not as popular, and my understanding over the years is that if we don't spend a certain amount of time in the gutter, we're being elitist and exclusionary.

By your suggestion, I would certainly be elitist and exclusionary in that way. But that is not, presently, how the site is oriented; it is not what our members expect; it is not what our moderators expect.

We know a bit about what the moderators and administration would like, but at no point have we ever settled on how to pursue that course. Without something of a plan, it seems like arbitrary virtual violence. You know, just slaughter everyone who pisses us off.

And that would be the result. One of the things that tamed my virtual bloodlust was the recognition that my colleagues all have different standards and definitions. We might be able to generally agree on certain concepts, but what those concepts mean to each of us is different.

Lastly, in the period between your question and this response, I became involved in a very interesting dispute with one of my colleagues. In the resulting discussion and argument, I learned a few things about how some of my colleagues regard facts. The issue is, perhaps, yet unsettled, but in the context of your question it reminds me that my iron fist simply would not go over well with fellow moderators or the administration.

Being a supermoderator increased my general authority, range of jurisdiction, and weight of responsibility. But it did not grant me an arbitrary "license to kill".