> A professor once complaint about lab politics and I asked why [given his position] he didn't get more involved. He said: I must try to solve it inside my domain of knowledge - even if that wont result in the desired outcome. If I get involved it will distract me and I stop being a scientist.
This is such a nice quote, and really straight to the point. I love it.
I think social media and how it is designed as a game bugs me a lot, because the more I try to understand the mechanics behind it, the more I feel like I don't understand anything at all. The human species is a very emotional one, and is ragebaited very easily (myself included), given the right parameters are known from an OSINT perspective.
The internet right now is a social system, which kind of implies that it always needs an emotional context, like where the people debating it are coming from, how they've been primed into their opinion with their own experience, and what the context means in a transferred perspective of another area of expertise. And that is somewhat orthogonal to how science works, where the more experience we gain, the more we understand how less we know, which actually means that more experienced people have less intention to do further research, because it's a net negative reward system.
And I think this is somewhat a huge problem, because the lack of transparency of these emotional contexts makes things on the internet attackable in the sense that they can be rage baited, frowned upon, derailed into non-mattering discussions etc. The most rational statement can be shat into oblivion over minor wordings mistakes, which doesn't make sense from the perspective of rationality - as if every human on the internet claims to be perfect by default unless proven otherwise.
And we all know that a lot of people are constantly in the news for something that they said or did in the past. It's like a witch hunt out there, and I don't understand how we as a society can even tolerate that, let alone embrace it by viewing, sharing or liking it.
Social media also does not reflect gains in experience over time, as everything "has to be in the moment", otherwise it would not work as a system. (I wanna point to Chamsky's ideas about propaganda and George Orwell's 1984 here). The optimum social media post is the one with the most ridiculous claims and the least amount of scientific evidence, while also being total hyperbole in an emotional context that's abused for marketing purposes.
So yeah, overall I think I am just frustated by the state of things, but I also have no clue how we can collectively solve it in a sustainable and communital (?) manner.