genericusrnme said:
I heard a guy, when I was waiting at a bus stop, talking with his friend about how science is a load of rubbish and how anyone can sit on their.. bottoms.. all day and come up with stupid theories.
I've heard this kind of thing before too so I don't think distrust in 'science' is as scarce as you think it is
You'll get people who say that because they don't understand it, are ignorant, or choose to want to believe something even with enough evidence for it to be worth considering (doesn't mean it's "right", nothing is "certain" in an absolute way) in which they are just stupid. These people will always be like this and no-one should care about them because they are their own worst enemy.
It's the people that don't want to be ignorant or stupid, but yet don't have the understanding and would like some of that so that they can choose where to go from there.
For these people, it's important that in the same way that a proper journalist has a responsibility of telling people what is really going on and being a force that challenges the official account given by people who may have incentives contrary to those of the public, the scientist also has the same job in that their public role is not abuse their position by using their situation to deceive the public for someones gain (their own in the end, but might be who they work for, who signs their paycheck, their political or other affiliations and so on).
When you get a breakdown for something like this you get chaos, and chaos is the stuff that we had when we had idiots fighting wars over this and that because they couldn't think straight, and because they were all looking for a cause to believe in because they couldn't use their own brain and initiative to think for themselves.
So for the people like the one you spoke to, don't try and think that its a bad thing when you get people that think like that: if they choose not to consider there everyday experiences of cause and effect, and even just a second opinion of any kind, let them be in their own ignorance. Trying to help people like this is like trying to start a fire using wet wood: it's a waste of precious energy and it won't work unless the wood dries.
They have the right, as funny and as ridiculous as it is to believe whatever the hell they want to believe, but if they want to become less ignorant, they will eventually like everybody else who changes their perspective end up in a situation where they can see a new perspective.
The other thing is that we don't know their background. If you get people who are brainwashed into a particular paradigm regardless of what it is, then who are we to know what it's like to be fed this crap for the moment they were born. This is another reason to understand why people need to come to their own conclusions because we just don't know the kind of crap that they have been dealt in the past.
But I wouldn't worry: you have a lot of like minded people right here on these forums with very good intentions for the internal and even the external community at large, so it's not by any means a lost cause :)
