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As The New Yorker points out in a recent piece, people are, generally, vastly uninformed about common everyday things. From how basic technologies and systems function to how political policies actually work. And yet, despite this lack of knowledge, people form (strong) opinions about all of these things.
“As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding,” cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach write in their book, ‘The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone.’
Sloman and Fernbach urge people to preach and lecture others less and spend more time trying to work out the implications of, say, policy proposals. If you do this, then you might realize that you have barely any idea about how things work, and it might force you to moderate your views about the world.
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Yeah.
obox2358:
Aluminum is the one exception. It costs a lot to make new aluminum but very little to recycle it. This makes it the winner in the recycling world.
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According to the researchers, this might be “the only form of thinking that will shatter the illusion of explanatory depth and change people’s attitudes.”
There’s hope that, no matter the (often politicized) arguments you see in the public and political sphere, science continues to advance. The limits of human knowledge continue to be pushed, no matter what.
“At any given moment, a field may be dominated by squabbles, but, in the end, the methodology prevails. Science moves forward, even as we remain stuck in place,” The New Yorker states.
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CaramelMartini:
I took pathogens in university, and it was so, so interesting. Our bodies are being bombarded all the time with microorganisms trying to get in. Like, all the time. You have no idea how many different types are being born, trying to take hold, mutating, failing, dying out all around us. And sometimes they succeed, and sometimes they’re helped, and sometimes they combine in the freakiest way into something new. It’s fascinating and terrifying. And this is why I wash my hands all the time and I’m secretly glad for an excuse to still wear a mask in public.
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The truth is climate change is already here and worsening as far as the effects on humans. The cost to humans will be trillions of dollars as in more than the United States national debt today.
The Earth will be just fine; it will take care of itself. The ability of the Earth to support human life is an entirely different subject.
Which of the science facts shared here genuinely stunned you? On the other hand, which ones did you actually know before? What are some of the most uncomfortable, even frightening facts that you’ve recently learned?
What do you do to fill in the knowledge gaps you have? Let us know what you think in the comments, at the bottom of this post.
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Edit: unless obviously in tools. Which aren’t overpriced at all. I was talking about the overpriced diamonds used in jewelry.
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So make sure you take ALL of your antibiotics and don’t just randomly take them for every little infection. Poor antibiotic stewardship is the reason we’re here in the first place.
someguy14629:
A few points here:
1.) the biggest driver of increasing antibiotic resistance is the use in animal feed. Cows/pigs/chickens grow bigger faster and give a better return on investment than animals not fed antibiotics.
They literally get antibiotics every single day of their lives for no reason than increasing profits. This is far worse for the global health crisis than the occasional prescribing by a PA for a viral infection in a telehealth visit.
2). The reason we don’t have new antibiotics coming is due to profits. If you invent a new drug for erectile dysfunction or heart disease or diabetes you immediately have customers for decades. Each is being charged hundreds per month.
For an antibiotic, you get some customers who get the right infection for 7-10 days once in a while. There is no profit incentive in antibiotics. Unless government explicitly subsidizes research into new antibiotics, research and development dollars and effort are going to go into profit-generating d***s.
In the last, when new antibiotics were invented, there was not regulation and they were used by the agriculture industry so quickly (unregulated by FDA because they are just cows, not people) there was 50% resistance rate in the community by the time human testing had been completed. Thst is a huge turn off when you invest 10 years and a billion dollars into a new drug.
H**h risk of failure, long time line, astronomical cost, low profit margin all add up to drug companies going any other direction but antibiotics. We should not let profitability be the main driving force in pharmaceutical innovation.
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Amoc weakening
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which drives the Gulf Stream and regulates global climate, is weakening and could collapse as early as 2025–2095 (per recent studies in *Nature*).
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