Important Note Number 1: I was eaten alive by exams
Important Note Number 2: Today I had a rant on ADAD about scientific literacy. I have put the post for you to read below.
It will be hilarious if people like me suddenly get people being all “STOP COMPLAINING ABOUT DINOSAURS, IT’S JUST A MOVIE, NOBODY CARES“ over stuff like Jurassic World and The Good Dinosaur when so many on this website actually do value the impact media has on us all and are willing to call out things like racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia whenever they see them. People representation isn’t the only thing that matters -representation of current scientific knowledge does too. When the most reliable method of obtaining information and its findings is consistently ignored, we end up with a very misinformed society.
Tumblr is indeed a very social justice centric platform - this comes at a cost for the perpetration of correct perceptions and attitudes in other fields (science, in particular, as demonstrated through the Neanderthal post). It’s a tough environment for scientific advocacy to thrive in and be widely recognized in whilst there are other major discussions occurring that completely eclipse the true significance of science.
Like I get that social justice affects people’s lives and trust me you only have to spend five seconds on my personal blog to see I agree it’s important. But really, caring about scientific accuracy is actually in the same general problem that society has with information.
Opinion is valued greater over fact.
Whether it be “dinosaurs with feathers are uncool” or “I just don’t think bisexual individuals face persecution,” people like to think that their opinion - their perspective on the world - is more important than what can be tested and observed with data and fact. Yes, things can be biased, and it’s important to be able to detect bias in research and understand it - but people often completely disregard statistics and data by saying “oh you’re just biased” because it’s something they disagree with. You have to look at the research methods and underlying assumptions that they worked with before you can say that - and you have to say why they’re biased, to boot.
A lot of things aren’t biased. Dinosaurs had feathers, whether you think it’s cool or not. That isn’t biased. Bisexual women have a 46% of experiencing sexual violence compared to lesbian women at 13% and heterosexual women at 17%. That isn’t biased. And yet, people who want their pre-supposed worldview (that dinosaurs didn’t have feathers and bisexuals don’t face persecution, in these examples) will ignore this and say that the person stating these statistics is biased or wrong.
It’s all about people being unable to modify how they see the world in favor of their own personal comfort and complacency. People don’t like to change (I tried to find a good paper on this but they were all paywalled). They don’t like to think that the natural world is something other than what they thought - in the case of science - or that society is something other than they thought - in the case of social justice. They want dinosaurs to be scaly (and you can apply this to a lot of scientific misconceptions - they want birds to not be dinosaurs, or climate change to not exist, or evolution to not be real, or vaccines to be dangers, etc. etc.etc.), and they want bisexuals to just be whiny (and you can apply this to any oppression - they want black people to just be thugs, homosexual people to just be sinners, Islamic people to just be terrorists, women to just be inferior to men, etc. etc. etc.). They don’t want to change their opinion in the light of evidence, and our society encourages them to not, by prioritizing the opinion of people over facts - celebrities, politicians, what have you.
It’s, ultimately, the same exact problem, so why not fight for both? Why make fun of people for being passionate about one side, but so staunchly defend the other? Why cut corners trying to make lives better for people by spreading scientific misinformation (the neanderthal post) when that has the same underlying human-nature problem as societal oppression? Science, when done right, is on the side of truth, and ultimately, supporting science will help support the rights of oppressed individuals, because it is truth that they are oppressed. Support scientists for being passionate about their work, because they’re helping fight the good fight. Don’t make fun of them.
Also, I think that this probably contributes on some level (meaning they don’t know enough about the scientific topic so they just make fun, and they are more passionate about their well-researched social justice causes [especially when the problems directly affect them]), but I haven’t done a study, so take this as an opinion:
tl;dr: Scientific illiteracy is a huge problem in society and needs to be solved, and solving it will help with things like fixing societal systems of oppression, so if any group should be in favor of scientific accuracy, its social justice people.
~Meg
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