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In recent years, trust in science has declined markedly. The reasons are considered to be the low quality of education and, of course, social networks that disseminate false information, provoking stress and increased anxiety. But in reality, everything is not so clear.
According to the American Pew Research Center, the average trust in science in the world is 35% (and in Russia - only 27%). And over the past 10 years, this figure has almost halved. In the US, for example, about a third of the population does not trust either researchers or scientific methods, believing that a scientist can easily get the result he needs. In 2020, one in four adults in the US believed that the "information" about Bill Gates and the insidious plans for microchipping with anti-virus vaccines was the truth. In Russia, the situation is even sadder: according to a recent VTsIOM poll, half of our fellow citizens believe that scientists are hiding this or that “truth” from the general public.
Theoretically, the decline in trust in science and scientists could be ignored. However, public skepticism towards science and scientific data is beginning to affect the health and safety of society itself. For example, a study by an interdisciplinary team of scientists from Oxford, the University of Michigan and others has shown that in 2021, people who do not trust science, in the midst of a pandemic, do not comply with epidemiological safety measures and actively oppose vaccination campaigns, not to mention the spread of fake news. and whipping up conspiracy panic.
It came to mass attacks on scientists who spoke publicly about the pandemic and coronavirus: according to the journal Nature, more than half of the researchers faced accusations of inadequacy and scientific dishonesty, and some even with direct threats.
So what to do?
In recent years, only the lazy have not written about post-truth and digital media that destroy critical thinking and provoke dopamine addiction. Increasing number of interpretations of facts and data; confusion of the concepts of "fact" and "opinion"; preference for personal experience over statistics; the decline in trust in official sources of information - all this, of course, affects the trust in science and scientifically established facts.
All this is exacerbated by several points:
As unfortunate as it may be, not everything that is published in scientific journals is true. When it turns out that falsified data were used in the studies, errors or plagiarism occur, the journal announces the retraction of the article and publishes a retraction. Between 0.02% and 0.04% of scientific articles are retracted after publication. Genetics studies have particularly high rebuttal rates. From 1970 to 2018, 975,000 articles from the field of genetics and medicine were published. Of these, 1582 were withdrawn. That is, the percentage of fake studies was 0.15%. If until 2000 the reasons for recall were mainly falsified data, then in the 21st century this is mainly due to plagiarism.
The perception of science has also been significantly worsened by the emergence of overtly biased research focused on the needs of big business and giving rise to the so-called culture of doubt (David Michaels. The Triumph of Doubt. Oxford University Press, 2020).
The devaluation of knowledge. Any information is available online to any person - and, even worse, in social networks all statements are equal; therefore, any student can teach a person who has been accumulating his knowledge for decades, and at the same time look “cool”. The Internet has acted as a great equalizer, made everyone "as if equally smart."
The era of digital media has led to the fact that the degree of "correctness", "fidelity", "adequacy" of information is evaluated by how bright and interesting it is presented. Therefore, scientific and expert knowledge, not reinforced by interesting stories and infographics, is not perceived. Anyone who has seen “purely scientific” presentations (Times New Roman font, 50 slides with text, unreadable graphics, three-story formulas) will confirm this.
Finally, the world in human perception has become much more complex. If 30 years ago the tools to simplify the world, available to everyone, were few and authoritative: the church, two or three major TV channels, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper, then the abundance of information and the loss of trust in authorities suddenly put a person face to face with a very complex reality, what he was not ready for (Philip Pond. Complexity, Digital Media and Post Truth Politics, 2020).
It turns out that in the modern world we are surrounded by information, it comes from different sources and needs to be rethought and checked for reliability. Thanks to critical thinking, we see inconsistencies and contradictions, we can weed out inaccurate data and separate facts from their interpretation.
Exorde is a web3 protocol that allows developers to collect and link all public data on the web. This protocol collects all possible information from articles, videos, audio, social networks, in a word from all places where there is at least some minimal data. And at the output we get data that connects all similar facts. Thus, the goal of the project is to find the original source of viral information in its original form, before this information becomes viral. And then the person himself decides whether to trust the information received or not.
At the heart of Exorde, one of the components is artificial intelligence, aimed at working with unstructured text. AI will be able to recognize objects in the text, extract sentences, facts, compare them with each other and perform similarity checks.
Written by Bimevox
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