[citation needed]
more information =/ better informed, the same way drinking from a firehose doesn't allow you to ingest more water than drinking slowly from a glass. This point missed ironically by a website called "slowboring.com"
If you consume enough misinformation, it doesn't matter who you are or how smart you are, it's going to affect the way you think. Just as in terms of physical fitness, "you are what you eat", in terms of mental fitness, "you are what you read/hear/consume".
I can see from your other comments that you have some beef against expertise, and all I can say is that I hope you find a way to reason.
You said it yourself, so how does it not logically follow?
> I can see from your other comments that you have some beef against expertise, and all I can say is that I hope you find a way to reason.
No, I have a problem with ego and narcissism.
No I did not, unless you choose to interpret my words in the most uncharitable way possible.
Meanwhile, on more important matters, acceptance of vaccines (which used to be nearly universally viewed as safe and effective) have plummeted.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...
Similar numbers can be found about faith in democracy, views toward fellow citizens, etc. It's not just lack of knowledge, it's the embracing and polarizing extremes.
> When I asked Twitter followers to suggest the best evidence they had that misinformation has become worse than it was 30 years ago, a lot of people expressed their frustration with the people who won’t get Covid-19 vaccines. I also find this extremely frustrating.
> That said, vaccination rates for kids have actually risen since the mid-1990s [...]
> A lot of people know that the licensing of the polio vaccine in the 1950s was widely greeted with celebratory headlines and the ringing of church bells. [...] Eighteen months after authorization, vaccine uptake was still slow, and that was after a much longer development process.
Accounting for both these facts, how is vaccine hesitancy justified ?
Actually the 1960s, and yet I’m still not wrong as the first mRNA vaccine approved for use was Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. So an actual large scale usage of an mRNA vaccine just happened.
> and has been arguably studied far more than other types of vaccines
Gonna need a source for that.
> Also, there are non-mRNA COVID19 vaccines available as well, if that is your issue.
> Accounting for both these facts, how is vaccine hesitancy justified ?
And this is covered by a lack of fear of the virus. Many people have caught it and recovered, substantially more than have died. So therefore the vaccine is not needed.
The result is, people are becoming more confident in false conclusions.
https://twitter.com/_cingraham/status/1493987804442812416
The promise of the internet is more information will help our accuracy, this doesn't take into account the nature of some to want information that confirms their beliefs, not info that is confirmed accurate.
But hey, anyone can do that. Here's a poll that shows the opposite - that right wing people are better informed about COVID than left wing people:
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimat...
Except that's actually a professionally done poll.
The "Covid State Project" is an academic consortium (so we can guess that their work won't replicate anyway), and these people REALLY want to believe that left wing academics sit at the top of the informational totem pole. This sort of polling is a waste of time because you can get any result you like, it has confirmation bias all over its design. Want to show that <outgroup> is stupid and dumb? Find the most extreme and stupid beliefs held only by a tiny minority of members of that outgroup and poll everyone on only those questions (an actual question they asked about, "do vaccines contain microchips").
In fact not all of their questions are even correct. They only asked four, and one of them was "is there any impact on fertility" which was rated false. This is itself a lie and I know this, because my fiancés best friend lost her period for nearly six months. No periods = no fertility, so I have seen with my own eyes that this can happen. Not surprisingly, this is the question in which the highest number of people said yes to, yet they rated this belief false and claimed anyone who believes it is "misinformed".
This probably explains their otherwise unexplainable finding that young parents are amongst the "wrongest" people. Young parents are exactly the sort of people who are most likely to know lots of women who are caring about periods and fertility, and thus who will be the first to pick up on widespread disruption to menstrual cycles. When they answer correctly that vaccination can affect cycles and thus fertility, they get graded as misinformed.
It's garbage-grade research like this which makes academics look so corrupt and terrible. 14 academics worked on this and a poll with four questions, one of which has the wrong answer, is the best they can do.
I'm not sure what you mean by that (perhaps just a simple case of discrediting the messenger in order to ignore the message), but this fact:
> The single biggest predictor, by far, of belief in vaccine misinformation? Identifying as a Republican, reflecting the widespread misinformation and conspiracy theorizing about Covid on the right.
Is supported by polling, hospital rates, death rates, etc. Denying it because it makes your 'side' look bad is not only silly, but dangerous. People are dying.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/briefing/covid-red-states...
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2021/07/29/covid-19-is...
https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/prevention-c...