https://www.minds.com/CorbettReport/blog/mit-covid-skeptics-champion-science-1243196579867037696So you know how anyone who points out any problems with the rush to inject everyone on the planet with an experimental form of gene therapy is portrayed as a stupid, scientifically illiterate, COVID denying, grandma killing anti-vaxxer by the dinosaur media?
And you know how any of your attempts to articulate these problems to your (former) friends will get you labeled as an anti-science loony and castigated from society?
Well, imagine if a team of researchers from a prestigious scientific institution infiltrated the COVID skeptic community to expose their scientific ignorance . . . and instead ended up discovering that the skeptics by and large care more about science—and are more knowledgeable about the scientific process—than their critics?
Guess what? You can stop imagining, because that's exactly what just happened.
The first clue comes in the abstract, where the paper's authors note "an epistemological gap
that leads pro- and anti-mask groups to draw drastically different inferences from similar data." (Bonus points if you recognize this point as the central conceit of my Same Facts, Opposite Conclusions episode of #PropagandaWatch from last November.) But buried further down in the article are a raft of observations that cause problems for those trying to assert that "anti-maskers" and "anti-vaxxers" are scientifically illiterate.For example, we are told that "anti-maskers often reveal themselves to be more sophisticated in their understanding of how scientific knowledge is socially constructed than their ideological adversaries," that "their approach to the pandemic is grounded in a [sic] more scientific rigor, not less," and that "anti-mask users in particular were predisposed to digging through the scientific literature and highlighting the uncertainty in academic publications that media organizations elide."
The study even admits that, "calling for increased media literacy can often backfire: the instruction to 'question more' can lead to a weaponization of critical thinking and increased distrust of media and government institutions." (Yet more bonus points for those who recall Forbes' infamous Don't Do Your Own Research! pronouncement from last year.)
And, in one particularly remarkable passage, the researchers outright admit that the COVID skeptics are not only scientifically literate, but in fact pioneering new ways of incorporating data visualizations into their critiques of the scientific establishment:
"Arguing that anti-maskers simply need more scientific literacy is to characterize their approach as uninformed and inexplicably extreme. This study shows the opposite: users in these communities are deeply invested in forms of critique and knowledge production that they recognize as markers of scientific expertise. If anything, anti-mask science has extended the traditional tools of data analysis by taking up the theoretical mantle of recent critical studies of visualization."
More at the link.
