After decades upon decades of teaching Western society to “Trust The Science”—where “Science” means “published academic research papers”—you can't unteach society from thinking this way with a simple four-word appeal to logic.
The damage has already long since been done. It's great that people are starting to realize the mistake, but it's going to take a lot more work than just saying “stop hyping single studies” in this comments thread to radically alter the status quo.
I once knew a guy who ended his friendship of many years with me over an argument about “safe drug use sites”, or whatever they're called—those places where drug addicts can go to “safely” do drugs with medical staff nearby in case they inadvertently overdose. Dude was of the belief that these initiatives were unequivocally good, and that any common-sense thinking along the lines of, “hey, isn't that only going to encourage further self-destructive behavior in vulnerable members of the populace?” could be countered by pointing to a handful of studies that supposedly showed that these “safe shoot-up sites” had been Proven To Be Unequivocally Good, Actually.
I took a look at one of these published academic research “studies”—said research was conducted by finding local drug dealers and asking them, before and after a “safe shoot-up site” was constructed, how their business was doing. The answer they got was, “more or less the same”—so the paper concluded (by means of a rather remarkable extrapolation, if I do say so myself) that these “safe shoot-up sites” were Provably Objectively Good For Society.
After pointing this out to my friend of many years, he informed me that I had apparently become some flavor of far-right Nazi or whatever, and blocked me on all social media platforms, never speaking to me again.
You're not going to get people like him to see reason by just saying “stop hyping single studies” and calling it a day. Our entire culture revolves around placing a rather unreasonable amount of completely blind faith in the veracity of published academic research findings.
I was intrigued and took a Quick Look at the top studies on this subject and the metrics used are things like relative overdose deaths in an area, crime statistics, and usage of treatment programs. They say that by virtue of a number of epidemiological metrics that safe consumption sites appear to be associated with harm reduction in terms of overdoses, while not increasing crime stats. I don’t see outsized claims of objective truth being made, more of the standard, “here’s how we got the numbers, here’s the numbers, they appear to point in this direction.”
I’m not doubting your claim but I’m wondering how that very weird paper you’re citing bubbles up to the top, when there’s some very middle of the road meta analyses that don’t make outsized claims like access to objective truth.
It's not that the paper itself made the claim of having access to objective Truth, it's that papers like these make conclusions, and these conclusions get taken in aggregate to advance various agendas, and the whole premise is treated (in aggregate) as being functionally identical to building a rocket based on conclusions reached by mathematics and physics research papers—because both situations involve making decisions based upon “scientific research”, so in both situations you can justify your actions by pointing to “Science”.
Philosophy has all sorts of different ways to study this complex, multifaceted problem. Too bad it got kicked to the curb by science and is now mostly laughed at.
No idea—all I know how to do is recognize patterns and program computers.
But admitting to the existence of a problem is the first step toward fixing it, and, judging by the downvotes on various comments on this story here, we still have a ways to go before the existence of the problem is commonly-accepted.
You are threading into one of those areas that seem to replicate very well.
The difficulty or risk of using drugs does not appear to be a bottleneck on the amount of it people use. This probably does not hold all over the world, but I'm not aware of anybody actually finding an exception.
The damage has already long since been done. It's great that people are starting to realize the mistake, but it's going to take a lot more work than just saying “stop hyping single studies” in this comments thread to radically alter the status quo.
I once knew a guy who ended his friendship of many years with me over an argument about “safe drug use sites”, or whatever they're called—those places where drug addicts can go to “safely” do drugs with medical staff nearby in case they inadvertently overdose. Dude was of the belief that these initiatives were unequivocally good, and that any common-sense thinking along the lines of, “hey, isn't that only going to encourage further self-destructive behavior in vulnerable members of the populace?” could be countered by pointing to a handful of studies that supposedly showed that these “safe shoot-up sites” had been Proven To Be Unequivocally Good, Actually.
I took a look at one of these published academic research “studies”—said research was conducted by finding local drug dealers and asking them, before and after a “safe shoot-up site” was constructed, how their business was doing. The answer they got was, “more or less the same”—so the paper concluded (by means of a rather remarkable extrapolation, if I do say so myself) that these “safe shoot-up sites” were Provably Objectively Good For Society.
After pointing this out to my friend of many years, he informed me that I had apparently become some flavor of far-right Nazi or whatever, and blocked me on all social media platforms, never speaking to me again.
You're not going to get people like him to see reason by just saying “stop hyping single studies” and calling it a day. Our entire culture revolves around placing a rather unreasonable amount of completely blind faith in the veracity of published academic research findings.