Cigarette smoking might slightly help ulcerative colitis according to some old studies. But it probably worsens Crohn’s disease plus is a risk factor for developing that and many cancers including bowel cancers. It certainly is harmful overall (including a seven times or more greater chance of lung cancer) and the fact it may have a few modest benefits is no reason to recommend it. Interestingly, some of its problems may be worsened by the fact tobacco was often cured using sugar.
Interesting point, we can’t be experts in myriad fields, so we often defer to people who are. Or that’s the idea anyway. Critical thinking or reasoning skills aren’t fully developed in children, but that’s one reason among many why they go to school. Sometimes though, the people who hold expert positions, or a position of authority, experience has shown they may not necessarily be all that and a bag of chips, so to speak.
Stripped of the jargon, critical thinking skills are practical tools anyone can use in their day to day life to help make decisions about the veracity or reliability of information being presented for important issues or decision making, but also mundane things, reliably identifying likely hucksters or con artists - “If we can get the monthly car payment down to $X, are you willing to buy the car and drive it home today?”
It’s just axiomatic in my observations that decent people with integrity, operating or negotiating in good faith do not resort as a rule to elaborate verbal gymnastics, obfuscations, mind games, half-truths and rhetorical fallacies. It’s also useful to know who signs their paycheck. There’s nothing wrong with honest work, but it tends to skew perspectives sometimes.
As the old saying goes “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it.” A corollary to that is people who go to great personal or professional risk and having nothing to gain financially or otherwise. I tend to take their opinions more seriously. They could be wrong - but they aren’t being paid to be wrong.
As a veteran of the “moon hoax” debates, one has to agree.
For example, one notices that profit was one big reason that FOX decided to give a wide audience to the hare brained idea that the moon landings were a hoax. Our own Bad Astronomer take on that:
Of notice was how a lot of gymnastics from the deniers come from pointing at good science and research about the Van Halen Allen belt being a danger to astronauts, but the lack of critical reasoning comes (as it is usually the case) from ignoring what the rest of the research told to the scientists and to NASA.
Bad: A big staple of the HBs is the claim that radiation in the van Allen Belts and in deep space would have killed the astronauts in minutes. They interview a Russian cosmonaut involved in the USSR Moon program, who says that they were worried about going in to the unknowns of space, and suspected that radiation would have penetrated the hull of the spacecraft.
Good: Kaysing’s exact words in the program are ``Any human being traveling through the van Allen belt would have been rendered either extremely ill or actually killed by the radiation within a short time thereof.‘’
This is complete and utter nonsense. The van Allen belts are regions above the Earth’s surface where the Earth’s magnetic field has trapped particles of the solar wind. An unprotected man would indeed get a lethal dose of radiation, if he stayed there long enough. Actually, the spaceship traveled through the belts pretty quickly, getting past them in an hour or so. There simply wasn’t enough time to get a lethal dose, and, as a matter of fact, the metal hull of the spaceship did indeed block most of the radiation. For a detailed explanation of all this, my fellow Mad Scientist William Wheaton has a page with the technical data about the doses received by the astronauts. Another excellent page about this, that also gives a history of NASA radiation testing, is from the Biomedical Results of Apollo site. An interesting read!
It was also disingenuous of the program to quote the Russian cosmonaut as well. Of course they were worried about radiation before men had gone into the van Allen belts! But tests done by NASA showed that it was possible to not only survive such a passage, but to not even get harmed much by it. It looks to me like another case of convenient editing by the producers of the program.
And so on, the point here is that when experts disagree, one has no critical reasoning if one ignores (besides the nonsense) the incentives that some “experts” have. Many times the profitable books they made were created not only for the money to be gained, but because the authors can’t get most experts to agree with their nonsense.
In the United States, the hoax claim was originated by libertarian writer Bill Kaysing (1922–2005) in his 1976 book We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle.[4][5] It’s a shame he is mostly remembered for that, because he also wrote some great books on cooking.
Nowadays, a lot of the conspiracy minded folks have blogs and online support to keep them going, they capture a lot of people in their nets by misleadingly pointing at good research, but making others ignore the real point of the research or ignore issues that make their declarations to be poppycock.
Speaking of being critical with myself, here is a better cite for the health issues when increasing the CO2 concentrations to more than 1000 PPM:
It’s generalizable: the little knowledge as a dangerous thing.
To continue with the Climate Change illustration. Our resident critical thinker gets ahold of a couple of actual facts. Dozens of millions of years ago volcanic activity made for very high atmospheric CO2. During glacial periods CO2 has gone as low as an estimated 180 ppm including during the last glacial maximum. Plants need CO2. Industrialization raised CO2. Those are accurate facts. Concluding that human activities raising CO2 have kept us away from those too low levels is where the lack of thinking hits.
The simple fact that CO2 levels were fairly stable far above 180 for most of modern humanity’s history until industrialization resulted in rapid increases approaching tipping points is skipped.
That said @Dr.Drake I experience what you do as well. There are times that some fear delving into details out of concern that things will be used to twist from the big picture, be used as those out of context correct but misdirecting details. That’s … unfortunate. And occurs across belief systems and religious and political tribal identities.
Sometimes critical thinking is used as tool to support a preferred conclusion more than its own end.
Teaching about conspiracy theories and how to avoid going down that rabbit hole is part of critical thinking education.
I discuss this with my wife quite frequently - including just this morning. She teaches business law at a community college, and constantly struggles with how much more she has to dumb down her class so as to get through to the majority of her students.
A good percentage of her students - she estimates up to 60%, seem to not read a straight-forward question and follow the specific prompts. It is unclear whether they are incapable of doing so, or whether they just don’t care to put forth the effort. Instead, it seems many/most students just conduct some sort of on-line search and present whatever comes up as their response.
Today’s example: the assignment says (paraphrased), Article 1 of the US Const gives Congress the auth to regulate interstate commerce. Give and example of interstate commerce. My wife gives on-line access to her power-points which give a direct answer.
Instead of students saying, “A company makes a product in State A and sells it in State B,” or “A trucking company carries product across state lines,” she gets answers discussing taxing authority, regulation of roads, and even one seemingly about organic farming.
Now her students may not be the best and the brightest, but they are all HS grads. Our impression is that they expect their devices to do their thinking FOR them, rather than to supplement their independent thinking. And they apply no critical analysis of whether or not the responses they get from their devices “make sense.”
She considers trying to teach/encourage critical thinking as important as any of the subject specific course materials. But it has become an increasing issue over the past 30 years.
On edit: She recently opined that her students do not expect to be SPOONFED. Instead, they expect to be FORCEFED - and entertained in the process. And her employer pretty generally presumes the students/consumers are correct.
This is been a huge issue for me in education. My employers over the last twenty years (all universities) find student satisfaction to be more important than student education. I try to do both—who wants dissatisfied students?—but sometimes you just need to prioritize “suffer, but learn.”
At this point I would just like to point to my classroom motto, which has been prominently displayed in every classroom I’ve ever been assigned:
DISCE AUT MORERE.
From one point of view, the students are the customers, but from another point of view, the students who graduate from a college or university are its product; and prioritizing student staisfaction but not quality education can result in a school that puts out a crappy product.
It’s actually not a new problem. Check this out from 1964’s How Children Fail:
PDF:
https://www.schoolofeducators.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/HOW-CHILDREN-FAIL-JOHN-HOLT.pdf
Yes you should be skeptical simply because there is no such thing as a climate scientist.
I know where what HBDC is saying is coming from, regurgitated denialism propaganda that is floating around still, it is the same as the Tobacco industry pointing out that there were no cancer-tobacco researchers. The reason in the beginning was that experts in other fields noticed the connection, and then later more relevant researchers confirmed and expanded on the research.
The point here is that there already were critical reviews done of that research. Many contrarians just ignore that past criticism that was dealt with many times in the past regarding many science topics.
I think scientists would have a harder time educating the public about the health risks of smoking today, sorry to say. The gap between the science being unequivocal that smoking was a risk factor for a number of diseases, and widespread public acceptance, was much shorter than with climate change, at least in the US.
If the link between smoking and cancer were found today, tobacco companies would have a much easier time selling concepts of an anti-freedom agenda, and spreading conspiracies about the true cause of lung cancer (I know when it comes to cancer than the word “cause” can be misleading, but you know what I mean; they would deny smoking as a risk factor and claim something else as an actual cause).
I am NOT intending to bring a specific discussion of vaccines into this but I’ve been in pediatrics for a long time now and the character of the refusers has very much changed.
Used to be that there were a few hardcore but many who were reachable after you established a relationship of mutual respect with them. They were willing to listen once they experienced being listen to. Now the decliners are much more dug in. Distrust of “science” and “experts” is an integral part of their tribal identity. There’s no conversation possible any more.
Conspiracy beliefs and anti science and anti intellectualism have been normalized. It’s broad.
It’s fascinating. I have a relative who, at the beginning of the pandemic, got the vaccination and then one booster shot. In just about a year, she went 100% anti-vax, to the point where she is now blaming the vaccine for causing health problems that were predicted thirty years ago as complications of other long-term conditions. She is, in general, a quite intelligent and capable person, but I sometimes think conspiratorial thinking is easier to fall into if you’re intelligent and have a healthy imagination. The emotions make you want to believe; the brain finds a way to make that belief work.
Would you mind clarifying this statement?
From what I understand they currently have a graduate program that will produce accredited climate scientists. But that will be a few years off. Considering we are looking at a 50 trillion dollar price tag and life altering changes I think it is quite reasonable to base decisions on actual science instead of models that even the scientists who made them admit to their limitations.
I don’t understand what you are objecting to. Are you saying that no one is an “accredited climate scientist” ? Let’s just say that is so.
-
When you have a PhD in the sciences from an accredited program, that credential allows you to do science. You’re not confined to the label on your diploma. Your expertise is what you make it: you have your grounding in a specific discipline, but you can study anything. Loads of scientists study aspects of the climate already.
-
When you say “actual science instead of models,” it sounds to me that you don’t understand how scientists work. The models ARE actual science. That’s how science gets done. The scientific method doesn’t establish facts; rather, it rules out things that are not true. The models are an important part of that process, because they use information gained from rather narrower scientific experiences to produce broader knowledge.