Maybe I am in a different environment (particularly not being American), but the old scientists still exist and are still hard at work. In fact, all scientists I know (and I work in academia) care very little for misinformation on their day to day lives. They’ll make fun of it, but don’t have any more contact with them than anyone else. They still spend most of their time working on their actual projects. The only thing that changed is that now they’re bending over backwards to include AI in their grants to make sure they’re accepted, but having to include the latest buzzwords is nothing new.
Science communicators, on the other hand, yeah, those probably have their hands full with fixing misinformation.
all scientists I know (and I work in academia) care very little for misinformation on their day to day lives.
Well in the US, that misinformation “won” and is coming for scientists now. Their funding is no longer a given, especially diverging from orthodoxy. Self-censorship is becoming the norm.
It can happen elsewhere, too. Use us as a warning.
Yeah op you’re right, people who hate science are definitely liberals with dyed bright hair
I mean, everyone knows were on the back of a turtle, being held up by elephants
There’s !discworld@lemmy.ml
But, being on .ml, not everyone has a guarantee of access, since it gets defederated from a few instances. There’s a couple of others, but they’re really not active at all.
I’d suggest literature.cafe, if anyone was to start a new one. Kinda their focus
COVID was somehow the visceral turning point. Variations on visitor restrictions in hospitals still exist since then due to the extraordinary and amazing displays of bad behavior from that time.
People could always behave badly. Direct care staff, as one example, have been wearing panic buttons linked directly to security and calling a violence code over the announcement system, since around 2015 on the medical side of things.
But COVID was a severe escalation point. Families screaming in hallways that the diagnoses was “fake news” or part of the hospitals “corporate conspiracy” escalating to the point of pulling medical equipment off their loved ones, who could not breathe without that medical equipment.
Behaviors that could potentially kill people wrapped up in an inexorable belief that science was lying. No trust of medical personnel who are there to help whatever the system around them contrives to do with care.
While the behaviors are not like COVID times any more, there’s a residual skepticism of, well, everything since that time. Sadly, one that is preyed upon by politics to keep us fighting one another instead of punching up.
Forgive me, maybe “punching up” is now a ban-worthy turn of phrase.
I’m in a very conservative state and until recently I worked in hospitals around the country. You would not believe the amount of times I’ve heard covid conspiracy shit from actual healthcare workers. The most common one is that it’s just the flu, but when anyone died for any reason at the time they put down covid as cause of death. Why would anyone do this? I guess it doesn’t have to make sense. Just to hazard a guess I’d say more than half of the people in my state believe some form of covid conspiracy or disinformation.
I used to live in Seattle and while I didn’t work in the medical field… I knew quite a lot of nurses and other, fairly entry level kinds of medical workers.
Most of these people, again, in Seattle, a supposed bastion of lefties… were vaccine skeptics or outright antivax, when COVID happened.
A lot of these people came from the more conservative areas outside Seattle, and then worked in Seattle because it was the only area hiring… but yeah, my anecdotal experience was/is that many medical staff themselves succumbed to vaccine conspiracies, and would freely admit and bitch about masking and vaccines when off the job.
my anecdotal experience was/is that many medical staff themselves succumbed to vaccine conspiracies, and would freely admit and bitch about masking and vaccines when off the job.
Not even just off the job. I worked at a surgery center during the first few years of COVID, and I still distinctly remember at least one surgeon walking around the clinical areas with a mask that read “this mask does nothing”. And I’m pretty sure he was seeing patients wearing that too.
I am still baffled by that, because this fucking window licker had to have taken microbiology, and literally wore a mask every goddamned times they did the thing they trained for.
I have heard of and witnessed an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance, horizontal and other ableism, anti-science, anti-masking, anti-vaccine and anti-health behavior and misinformation in my “thank god we live here” blue state, most often by folks who are less marginalized and otherwise less effected by the problems I listed above (but not always) and I don’t necessarily blame these people for being overwhelmed and confused because they’ve been intentionally captured in a disinfo bubble that is the result of being the target of concerted efforts by multiple actors at up to and including the state level to keep them that way for their own purposes, although I do hold them individually responsible for harm they are directly causing as a result, or partially responsible for harm they help to perpetuate that is done by systems or groups which can be massive. The work to undo the programming/socializing needs to start asap on an individual level or if we ever have the chance to make something new it will end up having the same problems. Deconstruction of harmful behaviors and thoughts is necessary, with professionals or loved ones or on ones own, whatever the case, the point is to stop doing the dirty work for corporations and billionaires and anyone else who benefits from these hierarchies by reinforcing the values they want us to have such as obedience to authority and individualism.
Most of the skepticism was rooted in the shorter testing period of the initial mRNA vaccines. We have the data now to prove they’re safe, but that initial fast-tracking spooked people.
