Why it’s as hard to escape an echo chamber as it is to flee a cult | Aeon Essays

First you don’t hear other views. Then you can’t trust them. Your personal information network entraps you just like a cult

On Merveilles

When old friends ask what I’ve been up to lately, I usually start by saying “Well, I joined a cult.” Which is a satisfying thing to utter in the moment because, objectively, it’s a more interesting answer than an asker of this mundane question has a right to expect. There is an additional layer of surprise involved for those who know me well, since I’m an inveterate non-joiner. But as a secret admirer of actual weird cults, it is on some level what I have longed to be able to say since I was audited with an actual e-meter in a Scientology tent.

Science rightly impinges on Virtue Ethics

Iris Murdoch, C. P. Snow, Alasdair MacIntyre, and the role of Truth

Jay Van Bavel, PhD on Twitter / X

I think it’s extremely unhealthy for any academic field to make it taboo to critique publications from senior or junior scholars or to critique certain popular methods. This makes the field worse or makes us look bad to people outside our field (including the public). It erodes…— Jay Van Bavel, PhD (@jayvanbavel) October 13, 2024

Agnotology : the making and unmaking of ignorance

viii, 298 p. : 24 cm; "This volume emerged from workshops held at Pennsylvania State University in 2003 and Stanford University in 2005"--P. vii; Includes bibliographical references and index

Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?

There’s a lot to like about the Rationalist community, but they do have a certain tendency to spawn — shall we say — high demand groups. We sent a card-carrying Rat to investigate what’s really going on.

Breaking the silence

Research on science communication has largely focused on teaching scientists how to describe their studies in ways that interest the public while deepening their understanding of scientific exploration. However, there is another, often overlooked side to science communication—how scientists respond when questions arise about the integrity of their research. Often, the tendency has been to stay silent and wait for any controversy to pass or be resolved in professional forums. But in an age of growing, intense attacks on science, silence can be detrimental to both public trust and the careers of scientists who are under scrutiny. For better or worse, journalists, social media professionals, and the public may take a response of “no comment” as a concession that the critics are correct, so forthright communication about research questions is more urgent than ever.

Sciences perceived as precise and consensual are more trusted

Research focused on the United States shows that people’s trust in science varies considerably between disciplines. Existing explanations of these trust gaps stress the role of ideology: when people perceive scientists of a particular discipline to be ideologically like-minded, they tend to trust them more. Here, we report two findings: first, trust gaps between disciplines also exist in France—a representative sample of the French population (N = 1012) trusted researchers in biology and physics more than researchers studying climate science, economics, or sociology. Second, the more precise and consensual participants perceive scientific findings to be, the more they tend to trust the scientists (across and within disciplines). While these findings are correlational, they align with a non-ideological explanation of trust in science: the rational impression account. This account proposes that people can come to trust scientists by relying on basic cognitive inference processes, which tend to be generally rational.

The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults

What is the deal with Rationalism and cults?

The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults

What is the deal with Rationalism and cults?

Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Clergy Study Found to Have Multiple Counts of "Serious Non-Compliance" with Federal Human Subject Protections

Unauthorized donor involvement and unauthorized study team members "significantly compromised" human research protection program, per JHU, citing other concerns for participants' rights and welfare.

Some Contemporary Heresies

I define a heresy as: something you believe that the people you most admire and respect don’t believe and reject out of hand.

So maybe now we can agree that having an unchecked research integrity militia who unfortunately has the ear of the press and increasingly that of the the publishers, but who fiercely rejects any… | Ioana A. Cristea

So maybe now we can agree that having an unchecked research integrity militia who unfortunately has the ear of the press and increasingly that of the the publishers, but who fiercely rejects any minimal ethics or code of conduct, is a (growing) problem? Also, that 1. problems have to be investigated before deciding they are are legitimate and serious; 2. this investigation is not social media, blogs and the press; 3. this investigation should not be on the front page of journals and Retraction Watch; 4. there are degrees of seriousness and some things can just be corrected or are simply not very consequential (no, it's not a house of bricks where we have to check every brick, that's a dumb analogy), so being absolutely hysterical and overdramatic about any lie, inaccuracy or mistake is purposeful at worse and should be ignored at best and 5. it is not only unnecessary, but harmful, to also go into other, non-academic things the person did or does to complete "investigations" that you (press, sleuth, blogger, etc) do not have the tools and information to do completely and accurately (this fixation would be called harassment in the before times). Others will justly write about what the institutions did or did not do, but what I want to say is that we really should end it with the blank credit we give to any and all allegations that come from the establish research integrity truth fighters.