> so, how do you think we can do this?
For a lack of deep knowledge in this area, I don't think I have answers for this, but if one is interested in working on this problem, my approach would be to start with diving deeply into scientific literature about psychology and sociology to find out
- what convinces people to change their opinions,
- what causes people to take action
etc.
yeah, sure. Do you think all scientific literature is the same though? I am skeptical of thinking to just look at them all equally. Clearly, if theres a class of people being held unaccountable who have been practicing imposing their will and power on the people, that has certainly been done in the scientific community and would show in the literature, too.
So when I think of going through any media like scientific publications, I wonder how to discern and point out the captured and biased media vs the more objective ones (or at least the ones that don't have a hidden financial motive behind them). I wish our scientific community had better disclaimers and traceability for financial influence in every paper we could read.
> So when I think of going through any media like scientific publications, I wonder how to discern and point out the captured and biased media vs the more objective ones (or at least the ones that don't have a hidden financial motive behind them).
This is exactly the hard part: a topic which many people in more applied scientific disciplines worry about. Welcome to the real word, Neo. :-)
Again, I don't have definite answer, but rough guidelines are:
- is a result too good to be true?
- is some result coherent to results that are much more established?
- why would you assume that the author is unbiased or biased? (biases not only have financial reasons)
- which agenda does the author have (yes, deep pursuit for scientific truth is also an agenda? Nobody is free of an agenda)
- does the author make an effort to explain how the findings could be explained in an alternative way that makes the result look much less impressive?
- could the results be reproduced in other labs?
- which is the minimum amount of facts that you must believe in (like axioms) such that the result holds?
- ...
I like that, I can see that being true and working.
The hard part is indeed that we have to exert all this effort to get past the noise that I (and maybe you) feel a responsible author should have already done for us.
And with AI: I was hoping it would help us filter through this noise. So far, I feel lost in how to use AI to help me filter through prejudice and bias, and hidden motives and intentions, when the very filters given to us in the mainstream AIs we are sold are doing that same very bias and incoherency and hidden agendas. I retain my hope, however! Thank you for some solace and inspiration here, friend!