Real. Curiosity is such a desirable trait in folks.

The 'research' that the "do your own research" people are referring to isn't peer reviewed scientific literature.

It's other fools' social media rantings.

Hard disagree, if research findings were more accessible, NOT PAYWALLED, and published with some degree of intent for a wide audience then WAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY more people would dabble in reading scientific research and the benefit could have potentially saved science from such rapid collapse in my country (the US).

So, we need required classes, early, like in elementary school, that specifically teach problem solving, critical thinking, how to detect misinformation, and what I’ll call empathy.

Good luck. The 2012 Texas GOP platform specifically opposed the teaching of critical thinking skills. Needless to say, the entire GOP feels the same way to this date. Also, empathy is now considered a weakness or moral failing in those circles.

Face it. The federal government and the state governments of a large fraction of the states are diametrically opposed to our desires.

Don't get me wrong. I think you're correct about what our goals should be. But calling it an uphill battle to achieve them would be an understatement of epic proportions.

Edit: 2012, not 2021

But how do you teach those skills directly

we should teach them these things directly, instead of relying on science classes

Ok, so by "these things" you mean logic, argument analysis, media literacy, critical thinking, etc.

Yes, I had classes like that, and I think they're much more important than science and math classes. You can learn science and math on your own from YouTube videos, but you need the media literacy to know which YouTube videos you can trust.

I hear children in France are taught philosophy from around age 5 or something.

Imagine that...

Starting education with a firm footing in epistemology. Learning the ability to discern the difference between what's merely a valid argument, and a sound argument. Learning the ability to discern what's true and what's not.

Now contrast that to what's happening in various other places (especially you-know-where)... Where it's pure indoctrination, that they do not want you to have the ability to discern truth from lies... Because they're peddling almost nothing but lies.

Also all of the insects covered in Roundup, making ecosystems collapse

You're absolutely not alone with GMO concerns.
Celiac enters the chat.

Unfortunately you don't really have a choice. Organic and GMO free doesn't mean herbicide free, and plants with natural tolerance to herbicides either have genes to detoxify or sequester them in their cell walls. If the sequester them, then you get to eat nice bioaccumulation of herbicide. Glyphosate itself is pretty safe mechanistically, however everyone forgets about the adjuvants its formulation.

Sounds right

As someone who's graduating in biotechnology, we want and we do, but there are a few things that make this not reach the market.

Round-up ready plants are incredibly easy to make, you insert only one gene (effectively, there are some little extra things but details) and now your plant can resist glyphosate, which means you can make many different species resistant to it much more easily, or make all of the different lines of whatever crop you sell also be restaurant to it.

For making drought resistant plants, there isn't exactly one gene that makes the plant resistant. Just one example would be root length. If a plant has longer roots it can access moist soil for longer periods of time and thus making it more resilient against droughts, but to make the roots grow longer you have several genes that interact and changing one might not result in deeper roots in a drought environment since that gene is activated by a phytohormone that is upregulated during long days (summer time) but this location only encounters droughts during early spring when the days are still short, and for you to regulate that gene to change when the phytohormone is upregulated you'd need to change a BUNCH of other things on the plant that would result in a complete mess of how the plant develops as now it acts like summer during spring but only for the roots and the roots send signals that the leafs must ignore until the correct time of the year and that changes when the seeds are going to be released because the plant is now blooming at a completely different time and oh fuck we've developed the equivalent of ancient Egyptian inbreed pharaohs but for plants, which is horrible but incredibly impressive given that most plants can self fertilize... This is one route of trying to just make longer roots, if we go through giving the root growth gene sensibility to another phytohormone that is upregulated on short days, the roots now will release other phytohormones in higher levels than the plant is used to (more length = more roots = more cells making said phytohormones) and since plants develop through gradients of hormones and the proportion of one vs another, the amount of work to make it so that the plant actually develops correctly will also be huge! And this is just for one single characteristic that we think would help in many cases but wouldn't actually make plants fully resistant to droughts, just able to get a few extra days of water, unlike how roundup ready is still just add this gene that allows the plant to break down glyphosate fast enough that it doesn't die.

Now the other side of the issue is funding. Yeah, droughts are a really bad problem for farms, but the BUG farms are either in places that they don't suffer from droughts that much, in places that they can buy a lot of water cheaply (government subsidies) or can produce a lot of crops even when there's a drought vs what they'd loose against weeds competing with their crops for water, nutrients and diseases spread by those weeds

In the end, we have the same reasons that tuberculosis and malaria are not funded and researched flash much as they should, it just doesn't make sense (commercially) to do so for big corporations like monsanto/bayer and the subject is complex enough that several universities having small teams researching it will tackle it from so many different angles and have such a difficult time with it that progress is really slow. The researchers want to work on cures for malaria, tuberculosis and to make plants resistant to droughts, soil acidification, nutrient content of the final produce and much much more, but we're fighting against capitalism and spaghetti code with no annotations written by thousands of not millions of different coders that didn't talk with each other through the millions of years of development of said code

fucking this. fuck the person commenting TINA: there is no alternative. because permaculture crops grown locally over years are far more resilient than GMO and without the fertilizer needed. no vendor-fucking-lock-in on crops.

when shit hits the fan GMO crops are another vector of extortion onto independent family homesteads. simple fact of history, look up what Haiti did to "gifts" of GMO crops from american GMO producers. how's that for real-world research into politics of GMO

Worse now.

Glyphosate's not just used as a weed killer, but as a desiccant.

Sprayed directly on our "food".

Oh but don't worry, our obedient STEM dogmatists can reassure us that it's no harm to us because humans don't have the shikimate pathway that it acts on. Pay no attention to our microbial biome, where the majority of our immune system is, and how nearly all of it does (nor other pathways, nor the cumulative toxicity of the other breakdown products, and certainly not any attention to the man behind the curtain with his Codex Allimentarius plans to own all life). ... Cherry picking like that is at least as bad as "because it's got electrolytes". Socrates, Socrates, where for art thou Socrates? Not in the minds of those who pre-decided the answer and presume to know.

I think chemistry is APPALLINGLY bad at this to be honest.

Gets me wondering which type of "Christian".

Reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8swSkk9yeV8 .

There are many christians (not of that^ ilk) who very much are into the sciences, and are undogmatic in their approach to either religion or science. ... Which was a surprise to me and my teenage militant aitheism that had swallowed the false dichotomy whole.

Learning some chemistry basics is probably still good though. Not that we're using it daily but just in the "hey mixing this stuff can kill you" or, in the same vein, seeing how it only requires small amounts to make big changes.

We're surrounded by chemicals in our everyday lives, learning a healthy fear of them is probably for the best.

Also high school is meant to prepare you for further education, if you want to pursue that, so it really does cover a lot of ground for basic concepts you need to learn to understand and gain further education in whatever field applies.

Kids are wired to ask that, so what, basic chemistry knowledge is extremely useful.

We learnt to titrate in later high school, played with acids and bases and crystallizing crystals in earlier high school

Sure we learnt to calculate mols of chemicals but we also learnt why — so you can balance an equation, so you have no more acid (for example) than you need.

I bailed out of chemistry though. I had a bad teacher in year 10 and moved to botany in yr 11 and 12 (working with scientists testing salt tolerance of eucalypts to address dryland salinity) (I went to a school that covered high school and college (years 7 to 12))

Yeah, like an German Comedian said, while the Teacher shows how an Morse communication works, the childrens with their Smartphones already are logged in his Pacemaker.

Kiss my piss

Nice quip.

I usually go with

If ignorance is bliss, give me agony

or even

The ignorance that dies is not you

LOL, school curriculums are part of the "billionaire conspiracy" too?

FFS.

I thought Interned contained mostly porn :D

There is so incredibly much knowledge that isn't on the internet.

I often share the story how (as the story concludes)

after I renounced formal education, I learned more in my first year alone with an internet connection and a library card, than I learned in the entire 14 years of formal education prior.

... I would not have so successfully done so had I not had the library card.

... And that was back when the internet was more like a library than like TV. And long before the big corporate search engines censored about 99% of the results, like they increasingly did over the past decade.

Do not over estimate the wealth of knowledge the internet has (even with LLMs now). Blind biases lurk. We do not know what we do not know, nor how much more there is to know. Easy to fall into arrogance. And what is arrogance really, but ignorance of our ignorance.

But understanding how science works is key to having trust in it. If you lack that understanding you may just think it's a bunch of stuck up eggheads who pick whatever truth is convenient to them.

People like this argument, because they can then hate autistics. They could say we are inherently broken and need to be "fixed" or genocided.

At this point, I only respect people who were discriminated/abused/mistreated in their childhood.

Do they also teach how to spot fallacies? Or do we have to get that from elsewhere? Evidence suggests elsewhere.

Ngl I like learning from textbooks now that I am out of highschool. I learn faster too.

And weirdest part is that I still can't study through my highschool textbooks.

I am geniuenly wondering if they were just simply terrible at picking good textbooks and overall using them to teach.

One of my high school's two chemistry teachers was missing a hand... due to an (undisclosed) chemistry incident.

We made some ether in my HS chemistry lab for a lab exercise, and I was goofing around pretending to inhale it but accidentally did get some in, and I got a loopy dizzy feeling for a minute or two.

AI is a great idea and everyone in our company must use it!

GM is just a technology, which can be put to many uses, and there are many methods. All pasta wheats, for example, are derived from radiation mutants.

Most of the foods you eat are GMOs and have been for centuries because that’s another term for selective breeding. Modern GMO tech simply speeds up the process.

The problem with GMOs isn't the GMOs themselves, it's why they've been GM'd. If they've been modified to be "roundup resistant" so they can dump a truckload of glyphosate on them, or something similar to that, that might be a problem.

If I'm buying fresh produce it's not a problem, I can can make double sure to wash it properly. But if it's processed food, I definitely do not trust food manufacturers to get all that shit off the vegetables.

Looking for GMO free canned fruit/vegetables, frozen fruit/vegetables, or anything with fruit/vegetables in it is, in my opinion, a good idea. But a fresh cucumber? Just wash it.

It's funny how as adults we become interested in elements of stuff we were taught and found boring before. But I'm not sure how you'd teach science without "shoving it down people's throats" because most teenagers simply don't give a shit about any of it, so pretty much anything you teach will be shoving it down someone's throat. The better solution would be explaining why electron structure is important foundational stuff. About 98% of the time, in HS, they didn't explain why we needed to know it, how it would be contextualized in later life - it was simply "learn this so you can pass next week's test." And for me, knowing why is crucial to me caring enough to learn.

I hated chemistry in school, because it was teaching us irrelevant shit like the electron structure of atoms.

It's only unimportant because you don't care. Reading random facts on Wikipedia isn't learning, it's just reading. You can read the Wikipedia page on juggling, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juggling) but I wouldn't expect you to understand (much less, perform) a 3 ball cascade, reverse cascade and waterfall after just reading the page. Those are very basic juggling patterns and fundamentals to more advanced patterns, such as juggler's tennis, mills mess, boston mess etc... and that's the difference between learning, and reading.

Not ripping on going on a Wikipedia dive here, it's one of my favorite things to do, but recognize that it's not the same as learning

I used to think like this until I found out you can explain a lot of chemical interactions by just knowing how the electron structure of atoms lead to those reactions. Helpful when you try to wonder if anything could be toxic.

There are as many irrational science fanatics as there are religious fanatics.

I really doubt that.

Also, how are they to judge information presented to them if there is no agreed upon valid source?

I agree (e.g. think how many billions were thrown at string theory). Critical Thinking is an essential skill and must be included and encouraged from an early age.

Maybe many students are just trying trying to pass am exam or get a degree. There's far too much to know about too many things to expect everyone to have even a basic understanding of everything. Knowing how to spot bullshit (aka critical thinking) is a lot easier than becoming an expert in every subject.

Loooooool

Vaccines could cause autism since they contain immune system steroids...

Source, LIAR?

no.

steroids are a specific thing, and are not used in vaccines. steroids can’t cause autism even if that was the case. vaccines can not cause autism at all. vaccines work by incapacitating a viral or bacterial agent, sprinkling some red flags on it and dumping it in your system for the immune system to stumble across

autism is a developmental issue, either selected genes at conception mess with developmental plans, or something interrupts development before birth. vaccines do not have a chance to be administered before that period is over.

also!

GMO’s are a meaningless designation to determine harm in any regard. all it dictates is whether humans have in any fashion altered the organism. you might as well have said “red foods can also be dangerous although not likely”

also,

there are people who do believe in flat earth, because otherwise their religion is false.

There is some evidence that autism is a combination of hereditary natural variation and diet

The evidence of diet is many anecdotes that some ancient food diets make autistic children less autistic (moves them closer to neurotypical)

"Adults" who act like children.