To know what I am talking about, let me give you an example. I have this friend who went crazy over the vaccine issue. She's done so much research into it that I feel like I can't talk to her about her vaccine skepticism. Whenever I start to talk about something, she would drown me with a ton of articles and youtube videos and most of the times from the actual websites of UN health and stuff. It would have taken me a day to just go through that stuff. So I gave up on convincing her about vaccines. Might seem cruel but even I lost my certainty about vaccines after I met her. There's just too much to know and I don't completely trust the institutions either, but I do trust the institutions enough to vaccinate myself and my kids but not enough to you know, hold a debate about it with someone who has spent days researching this stuff.
You can take any topic which is divisive, which basically looms over the media all day and you can find a ton of articles to either support it or "debunk" it. I think 9/11 wasn't caused by Bush, I am almost certain, but I won't bet my house on it. I mean, this is almost a certainty, but yeah.
On other issues which are not this much of a certainty I fail to see how to convince a person who thinks something that they are wrong.
Stuff like earth is round or not, I can prove. But was the virus from Chinese market or from a lab, I can't.
Have aliens visited earth? I don't know. It would be wicked if we make first contact, but as awesome as this is, I am not motivated to search about this on the internet. I don't think I would search anything about the not so cool topics of life. I don't know enough to hold an informed debate about capitalism vs socialism or any other hot button issue for that moment.
What do you do in these situations?
I can sense that this is poorly written, but I hope you get the gist of what I am trying to say.
To me you either 1) have the many years of specialized education required to understand (for real) how vaccines works, or 2) trust the national and international institutions that vouches the work of estimeed scientists, or 3) do your research and perhaps watch your children die of fucking measles.
Trying to convince someone that chose no.3? Your only hope is to make them understand that they cannot understand, a very very hard task.
that's rather depressing isn't it. I trust the scientists but when politics gets mixed into science, it's hard to know who is lying and who's not.
Understanding who is lying is also impossible for the majority of us not having the specialized education etc etc (see no.1), so I just trust the scientific consensus. It's so easy!
that's the last thing you can trust rn. Scientific consensus. But that's getting out of hand too. Corporations funding research that shows them in a positive light, perverse incentives for some streams of science and media misrepresentation of facts are concerning.
Cool, then do like your friend and trust youtube. Good luck!