#while being wholly ignorant of sociology of science & the social and economic factors that go into scientific knowledge-production

[gothhabiba]

I saw this whole long thread of people hand-wringing about "anti-intellectuals" on tiktok and how scary it is that they're believing sourceless claims other people on tiktok tell them, because they claim they have the same chance of being correct as anything that "science says."

and said hand-wringers were waxing poetic about the scientific method and replicability and how everything that's published in an academic journal is guaranteed to be true and correct because of a little thing called peer review whereby scientists (naturally a petty and pedantic people) are encouraged to tear each other's conclusions apart.

and I just have to say. if you believe (in the midst of a major replicability crisis amongst scientific journals, no less) that everything published in a scientific journal is de facto factual or trustworthy, and if you believe that peer review of all things is a process that is guaranteed to prevent papers with anything from flaws in experimental design to full-blown fraud from going to print (as if publishers don't have a literal profit motive to publish studies that yield novel, startling conclusions),

then you are 100% as "anti-intellectual," foolish, & averse to thinking for yourself as the tiktokers you're making fun of. actually I think I like you less. at least their ideas might be bizarre enough to be interesting

#while being wholly ignorant of sociology of science & the social and economic factors that go into scientific knowledge-production #is very common and boring