Not saying the OP was banned fairly, but to do the devil's advocate, there's people with PHD in biology or medicine who still don't believe in Evolution. You can always find idiots with PHDs, even in their chosen fields.
Something like 1/5 of pharmacists believe homeopathy works. How the fuck can you go through that training and still believe in a hyperdilution that's magic if you shake it the right way and never ever touch it with your fingers because that takes the magic away?
(For those who are unfamiliar I'm not even being facetious, this is what homeopaths actually believe)
Pharmacists and General practitioners believing in homeopathy. Physical Therapists believing in chiropractice. Thereâs way too many examples. But at least physical therapists donât tend to have PHDs :D
Pharmacists don't get PhDs, they get degrees for practice, like MDs. A PharmD doesn't require being able to understand or conduct original research like a PhD does. Basically, a PharmD requires a really good memory, not necessarily critical thinking.
There's some amount of people who believe homeopathy is the same thing as essential oils and herbs, and have no idea about the hyperdilution stuff somehow. Granted, that's not much better, but there's at least a realm of slight possibility that you might get useful effects from those, as opposed to literal water with extra steps and flavoring added to make it taste vaguely medicinal.
We're also talking about people who should absolutely know better regardless so maybe that offers far too much credibility to them.
Totally, everyone who continued to a PhD in my area was batshit insane. Entirely fuckin deranged but diligent enough to write thousands of words of cogent garbage that no one could be bothered contesting.
Isn't there some stat that PhD students have 3x the mental health issues than undergrads? Which nowadays is like 100% lol
Isnât there some stat that PhD students have 3x the mental health issues than undergrads? Which nowadays is like 100% lol
Given that academia is an absolutely grueling and downright soul-crushing career, I am not surprised only those with mental issues are wild enough to sustain it.
You misunderstood the statistic. Mental health issues are caused/exacerbated by academia not the other way around.
Many of my cohort and friends were bullied, harassed, abused, taken advantage of by supervisors and senior academic staff who often have unreasonable demands and expect blinding unquestioning allegiance.
People who run research groups are not selected for based on their people skills but rather academic performance/pedigree, which is the biggest issue IMO.
Academia is a tough gig. Peer review and thesis chairs perform the review of candidates work, trust me they are almost always contested to varying degrees.
Those are extremely few and far between, and they aren't evolutionary biologists. Behe, the most famous of them, doesn't have a PhD in biology, but a PhD in biochemistry. Those are vastly different fields, and understanding the evidence for evolution wouldn't have been relevant to Behe's PhD. MDs more commonly don't believe in evolution because MDs are essentially average folks who can memorize stuff really well. MDs don't receive training in research or how to conduct it, so they're pretty poor at understanding primary research most of the time.
Someone with a PhD from a reputable university (essentially, one that funds their PhD programs rather than making students pay, and one that doesn't incentivize publications directly with bonuses) will be an expert in their subject area. Behe would be able to tell you about the biochemistry of sickle cell anemia. Someone with a PhD speaking on an area outside of their expertise is perhaps more likely than the average person to be correct because they could have read and understood most primary sources even outside of their area, but I wouldn't say it's all that much more likely. Basically, PhDs speaking on the topic of their expertise are experts, but they're not experts in everything.
Personally, my PhD made me like the trope of someone who could tell you everything you want to know about some esoteric subject but wouldn't know how to make a meal.
Getting a PhD produces highly specialized knowledge, not general knowledge.
No, there is no coursework past a master's thesis. For the last typically ~3-4 years of graduate training, everything that you're doing is original research. If your research isn't good enough or done correctly, you will never get a PhD. You also have to defend your dissertation. Getting a PhD from a reputable university does mean that what you say, specifically related to your research area, is correct.
Let's not pretend we're in any better of a situation. Same exact thing could happen on any Lemmy server, especially since each server is a small fiefdom run by randos.
Like when people start commenting on the near-east conflict. Hardly anyone knows what the fuck is going on there yet we find many experts on the topic in the comments.
No kidding. I got downvoted a dozen times because I mentioned that diet and practices help with sun burns and sunscreen isn't the win all against the sun. I didn't post sources right away, but when I did the hive has made up it's mind.
I'll recuse myself from giving you an up vote or down vote but I'll make a suggestion. Maybe provide the proof when you make the comment, especially on a topic that might be controversial or have health risks.
I left Reddit after the fuck spez debacle and haven't looked back. I occasionally go to reddit through Google for some specific things. But I don't log in or engage in the content besides reading what I was looking for. And I use my ad blocker so that dickward spez doesn't get anything from me.
But yeah I suppose this is more about mods. They think they have so much power at the end of they day it's a fucking forum, that is not much power.
Mods on reddit didn't have the power to slow down the rate of posting. That sounds like anon was posting so much the site's anti-spam measures kicked in. As always we're only hearing one side of the story here.
If you get mass downvoted your account gets rate limited for ten minutes, too. Happened to me once when I had the audacity to say I didn't think Skyrim was all that great.
In Reddit it doesn't really matter. You can cite the best sources ever, use a pristine logic, and the local irrationals will still find some excuse to believe in whatever.
The other key factor is to not be an insufferable dickhead when youâre posting. You can post the truest facts known to man but if you come across as a smug asshole then people will naturally be inclined to think your wrong.
All that matters is whether you're speaking for or against the prevailing assumptions of the site/the subreddit. Most people on the internet are not experts on the topic but somehow already have their minds made up.
I've cited nonexistent sources before. It seems convincing and nobody actually checks, so the other guy got downvoted because I got sources. I can imagine they weren't happy about it, seemed like they actually knew their shit.
Yes, however Iâve noticed that you may get downvotes dumped on you initially, oftentimes if your argument is decent youâll probably rise to level or even positive after several hours. Not sure what it is with Lemmy, but I seem to encounter some comments that get downvoted right off the bat for no reason I can discern. My life doesnât revolve around internet points, but obviously itâs nice to see upvotes and a good conversation follow a post Iâve added, but lots of downvotes without context are frustrating. Tell my why you disagree or think it doesnât add to the discussion.
All that matters is whether youâre speaking for or against the prevailing assumptions of the site/the subreddit. Most people on the internet are not experts on the topic but somehow already have their minds made up.
Also, Lemmy is not better than Reddit in this regard. Dominant opinion > everything else.
Oh yes, Iâve run into that several times. Worst were the biggest subs like /gaming or /cars. Man, never go against the crowd. Iâm 90% sure that those subs are filled with industry shills and fans that wonât let you besmirch a (brand or game or car) and downvote your criticism or negative opinion for obvious reasons.
The most interesting thing is when something is culturally different from the US way of life, then it's by default wrong.
I was arguing about shopping carts in another sub and, because it is culturally appreciated in the US to return the cart, I argued that we don't do that in our country because it's considered unsafe and was called lazy and got heavily downvoted.
That's unfortunate. So many of these english speaking social media platforms tend to be US point of view dominated. From an American perspective it is difficult to envision a situation where returning a cart is so unsafe that it should be universally avoided and that may have resulted in the downvotes, and it's certainly conceivable that the inconvenience and refusal to returning a cart could be rationalized over "safety". It's not like that sort of rationalization doesn't happen over other things in daily life. The only thing I could suggest is a offer a why. I'm not suggesting people will become less stubborn over the issue, but at least those who want to learn, will.
Not to restart the discussion but: The whole "returning your cart" thing is a very arbitrary metric reinforced by a meme from around 2020 and has taken hold in the fickle zeitgeist of the internet. Personally I think carts need to be returned because they block parking spaces and can roll into and damage cars. Out of curiosity, why don't people return carts where you live?
Right wing opinions are usually wrong. Not always, but overwhelmingly. It's really to the point that if someone mentions they're right wing I immediately take every word out of their mouth with grave skepticism because the requirement to identify as a right winger is either terminal stupidity or willingness to play into fear and anger narratives uncritically. Which is just terminal stupidity with extra steps.
Thing is, around here you have to be very careful to not even sound rightwing. You dare not point out that there's a reason the right believes a thing without being clear to distance yourself from that reason.
You certainly don't point out the left's take on a rightwing opinion is wrong. I see that with gun debates all the time. "Yeah, no one actually says or believes that. It's more like..." "FUCK YOU CHILD MURDERER!"
Here's a related example; I've been beat up for saying that Trump used to be coherent. Listen to some videos from the 80s or 90s, even early 2000s. You might not agree with his words, but at least he could string a sentence together. That sort of thing gets buried in downvotes, as if I'm agreeing with or apologizing for Trump.
Or even better if you're going to post a wrong reply, post it in a patronising, know-it-all tone so not only does it convince people you're right, it crushes the soul of your opponent.
I recently posted accusing a certain company of using dirty tricks to con people and control public perception. To my surprise someone from that company was in the thread and he replied saying, "You always say that" and then lambasted me for being a crazy person with a vendetta.
But actually I'd never posted about it before. His reply was a dirty trick to control public perception.
I think this plays a role, but it's absolutely dwarfed by what people want to be true. Or, maybe, they just equate any disagreement with the hive to being "dickish."
Nah, this shit is real. I've seen it. Once the piling on starts it becomes hard to turn the ship around though I've seen it happen. People are morons and they follow the crowd. They see the downvote, and like chicken, they peck at it because others did the same.
is the phenomenon real? absolutely. is writing vague fake stories about how "This community is better than that other community. I went there, and I got downvoted even though I'm definitely right because I'm definitely an expert. Congratulations on being part of the smart community instead of the dumb one." also real? absolutely. The two things that make me think this is bullshit are:
"I'm definitely right because I'm an expert in that field. No I won't tell you what the field is."
174% of the time "I got banned for having the wrong opinion" translates to "I was a complete and utter shithead to everyone and now I'm trying to pretend the issue is what I said not how I said it."
OP might not have a PhD but this stuff happens a lot on reddit. A lot of people here on Lemmy have an IT background and would get a rude shock looking at some of the dominant opinions on the major technology-related subreddits, particularly those that are heavily astroturfed.
"Just" is the most dangerous adverb in the English language for engineers. I catch myself making sure I revisit anytime I say it to make sure nuance is better captured.
If you really want to have some fun, when an Intel CPU is out preforming an AMD one on the charts go and mention that in a thread related to CPU performance. I'm fairly sure you'll be talking to people paid with AMD money to astroturf the shit out of Reddit who will make up every excuse they can about the situation.
I hop into the selfhosted subreddit every once in awhile and as you would imagine itâs mostly hobbyists that have no clue what theyâre doing, but theyâre also not very receptive to advice from people who do. They have their own set of commandments at this point itâs pretty wild.
Yeah, but users on reddit don't read sources, and that gets people frustrated and bored. Especially on /science or /askscience. Those subs are shitholes.
God I fucking hated ask science. It was a giant feed of garbage pseudoscience that was almost nothing but "NEW CURE FOR CANCER" or "WEED IS AWESOME". Almost every single post and article was bull, or had extremely poor research. I remember seeing some sexist claim and it turns out the study only had 4 male and 4 female participants. The researchers acted as though the claim, and evidence, were definitive, so it was posted everywhere because of the headline.
Yes, effective communication strategies are a vital and required skill set for the most learned among us. It is the duty of the rational to communicate knowledge and understanding to the irrational. They certainly can't do it themselves.
This has happened to me multiple times, whatâs worse is that I have over corrected myself a few times with being a bit too polite. Maybe I come off as sarcastic when I do that.
Yup, I try to post a ton of sources to compensate. That way hopefully they'll see the effort I put in and actually read past my rather direct way of communicating online.
It seems to work more often than not, but unfortunately lower effort posts are more frequently rewarded vs higher effort posts imo.
1,000% agree. Almost as if it's designed to be used by a community of people working together and not by a ruling class deciding what's permissible and nonpermissable for the peasants who are blessed to exist on their server đ.
This transparency does come with the side effect of shattering the hope that moderators in the lemmyverse are any better than those on any other part of the Internet though. It's the same little lords ruling over their little fiefdoms.
Too bad it doesn't do its job of holding mods accountable yet. Look at the mod log and you still see plenty of mods and admins removing valid posts for wrongthink.
Mlem is still under constant development (source: am Mlem developer), but Voyager is the most feature-complete at the moment by far. I donât know of any other iOS clients still in development. Unfortunately Memmyâs development seems to have halted :(
I've been mass downvoted here for pointing out a point in the article that nobody had even read. It's incredible the amount of dogpiling that can happen for something so innocuous. Could have been isolated to that thread but you are definitely right about the hive mentality.
Everywhere. Just look for anything that goes against (even slightly) the leftist perspective, such as:
anything critical of trans people competing in sports - a lot of those policies are bigoted, but there are legitimate concerns
evidence that the economy is not as bad as people claim - e.g. cars aren't more expensive today than they used to be, bottom of the market cars are about the same price as they were 20 years ago, after accounting for inflation (they're actually a little cheaper in many cases, and have way more tech)
arguments criticizing Biden/Democrats
anything anti-socialist
And so on. The quality of the argument doesn't matter, what matters is that it doesn't fit the leftist agenda, so it gets downvoted like crazy.
Go ahead, try playing devil's advocate sometime (and don't say the equivalent of "I'm a leftist, but...") and cite your sources and see how well your post does vs comments that ignore facts and spout common leftist rhetoric, the lower effort post will get more votes and yours will probably go negative.
What you say is never as important as how you say it. I noticed that if I came off as a self-righteous dickhead, people would disagree with me out of principle and if the person was still wrong they'd bring neutral "Sure, but" arguments to avoid the same thing happening to them.
The only time you can be a jackass is if you do it in a funny way or the person is so far gone it's the equivalent of default dancing on their grave.
What you say is never as important as how you say it.
In real life, maybe. But this does not line up with my experience at all on here or reddit. The up and down vote buttons are overwhelmingly used as agree/disagree buttons.
I try to be respectful in my disagreements, and often fail, but they usually doesn't have much of an influence how bring mercilessly down voted for disagreeing with the hive. And I've always watched people I vehemently disagree with, who have made reasonable and respectful disagreements, get down voted tons while people attacking them will get tons of upvotes.
It's nice to think that we respect different opinions if they are represented respectfully, but it does not seem to reflect the reality I've seen.
All that matters is whether youâre speaking for or against the prevailing assumptions of the site/the subreddit. Most people on the internet are not experts on the topic but somehow already have their minds made up.
Also, Lemmy is not better than Reddit in this regard. Dominant opinion > everything else.
You're right, and it takes humility to admit that you're wrong and someone else is right. Personally, I will try to argue for my belief based on the reasons I'm holding it in the first place; but if I can see that I'm wrong and everything I'm googling is matching what the other person says, then I'd rather have beliefs that match reality than be right.
Reddit is great for watching communities being radicalized. Wehther they do it themselves or they get a psyops push is up to everyone's guess but I've watched it several times.
SRS: Started out as a community pointing out misoginy and racism, ended up as a very weird hate group. I didn't watch it that closely, only saw the result.
some tumbler centered sub i followed, I forgot the name: same story, started quite light hearted, making fun of stupid shit said by kids on tumbler, turned into a right wing hategroup. This one I witnessed.
They ran out of material quick, started posting lame shit but now they gave it their own, made up context in the comments.
After a while, people who pointed out obvious satire got downvoted.
Quite often when I see the person who is "technically correct" getting down voted heavily there's usually at least one of several other factors coming into play that would easily explain the down votes.
For instance they edited their comment to add something like "Edit: The down votes just prove I'm right", they're being uncivil or disproportionately aggressive, they're resorting to logical fallacies and arguing around the other people instead of debating with them, or they're just adding confrontational/controversial hot takes in a community that doesn't embrace that type of thing.
And honestly, you can be totally factually correct 100% of the time, but still be a drain on the community or take down the quality of a sub. If mostly all you are doing is punching down on ignorant people instead of building bridges and leading them to the factually correct conclusions, then you are probably a drain on the community and discussion. If you're basically doing nothing but feeding the trolls, then you're also helping to undermine the quality of the sub.
Yeah, I think humans are predisposed to make decisions with our gut rather than objectively reviewing available evidence.
Itâs probably an evolutionary thing. For ancient humans, quick decisive action to do what feels right probably let you pass on genes better than taking time and consideration to choose what IS right.
To be fair, it was only in the last couple years that it became that bad. It's still better than Elon's white nationalist vehicle of a social media site.
Tbf, I think I got banned from a vegan sublemmy for having an opinion that wasn't even necessarily pro-meat, but not necessarily pro-vegan either. I forget what it even was lol
I got banned because I said a transgender person that broke the law (raped and murdered someone) should face the same consequences regardless of what gender they identified as... I have nothing against transgender people but I bet you can guess what rule they said I broke. Honestly when it comes to transgender issues I think that's everyone's personal thing and I have no right to tell someone else what to do in that department.
My favorite is how ignorant people are so certain about some issue that top scientists are unsure about.
If you point out that we don't know whether there's any life in the galaxy except on Earth, folks will say there has to be because look how many other planets there are, or even say you're arrogantly self centered for entertaining the idea that there isn't.
I suspect life is everywhere. I base this on the fact that our DNA complexity is currently around 2.5-3 billion years older than the planet. Intelligent, and more importantly multicellular, life is the variable that can't be determined quite yet. The step from single cellular life to multicellular life has happened a few times on Earth, but all of those times have been in the last billion years. I personally believe that is because we are just about as young as intelligent life could possibly be, since the universe was actively hostile to life prior to about 7.5 billion years ago.
I also like the idea that for a few hundred million years (around half a billion years after the big bang) the entire universe was the correct temperature for life to have developed literally everywhere and anywhere.
DNA complexity is currently around 2.5-3 billion years older than the planet
That doesn't mean DNA existed before the earth. It is possible that at low complexities different factors dominated the exponential increase assumed to reach that figure
"I base this on the fact that our DNA complexity is currently around 2.5-3 billion years older than the planet."
That isn't a fact, it's extrapolation based on a simple exponential fit to rough estimates of present-day genome complexity.
Even if we knew complexity always grew exponentially, which we don't, small changes in an exponential fit will greatly affect an extrapolation.
And we don't know what the genome complexity was of the first prokaryotes, not to mention any number of forms of life that might have gone extinct between then and now.
For example, there was a group a of multi-cellular life that flourished long before the current group, but they lived for millions of years. We'll probably never know anything about their genetic complexity.
The odds of existing within a region close enough to find each other is rather small. The odds of existing during the same time period in history are infinitely approaching zero. Humans have existed for a very short amount of time, and we're currently more likely to wipe ourselves out than we are to leave the solar system in a spacecraft.
That doesn't mean life couldn't possibly exist, just that it's extremely unlikely that we will ever cross paths.
Amen, same with the machine learning haters nowadays, pretending they know exactly how the llms work that not even the scientists working on them understand. And they can extrapolate how useless and bad this technology is
machine learning haters nowadays, pretending they know exactly how the llms work that not even the scientists working on them understand.
I think part of this particular problem stems from experts in the field making pretty wild claims while not still not completely understanding the tech.
Now a lot of this is prompted by market and media interest, but companies like Open AI taking advantage of this interest by making obtuse claims for funding purposes isn't exactly helping.
If you can sound confident in a reddit-y way, being right doesn't matter. If it seems like the threads going that way just disengage, it's not worth it.
Pretty much, seriously, fuck reddit... it's the only service I've ever been banned with in my 33 years of life, and I keep seeing others who have an unfair ban either on the site or from the site.
What's the old saying? If you run into an asshole, fuck him, if you CONSTANTLY run into assholes, you might be the asshole...
The only site I've been suspended in was X (twitter) recently, and it was on a lurker account I mainly use to follow people and rarely ever post on, and it was after coming back to the app after a few weeks of absence lol.
Automated modding seems to fail on those sites, while giving users modding powers is always abused. I guess it's manageable if there's support, which X doesn't seem to have anymore.
I used to use Cunningham's Law to find out expert nuances before a presentation to C-suite execs.
These days I tell people online about the things I'm an expert in and was brought in at ridiculous consulting fees to talk about and get dumb disagreement, especially when it goes against hivemind.
Social media got much worse over the past decade. I've gotten the sense there's a bit of a generational aspect at play as well, in terms of the emboldening to spout BS from ignorance as long as being paid attention to and a thin skin in being debated with.
It's your tone, bro. You can't just keep blaming everyone else for not getting your message across. Doesn't mean you aren't knowledgeable, just that you have poor communication skills
No, it's more confirmation bias and the fact I actively avoid appeals to authority.
I know full well if I pointed out my background in certain situations, I'd get a massive amount of agreement even if what I'm saying is against common narratives.
But the difference I'm commenting on is less about how people perceive what I write about and more the shift in how common it is for people who clearly have no idea what they are talking about to have the confidence and wherewithal to debate a topic entirely out of their element with little more than an appeal to gut feelings.
This is why Quora is so sanitized unlike Reddit: you actually get to see the (alleged) qualification of the OP. I'm not saying this would get to be an appeal to authority, but blatantly contradicting the expert while you're none of it wouldn't be so easy to get away with in the other forums