Social media has a lot to answer for. Whilst my own current direct interaction with it is fairly limited, talking to people nowadays often amounts to interaction with social media by proxy. Last year, social media became the primary source of “news” for UK adults – it had already been the primary source for younger people for some time.
I say “news”, because social media doesn’t offer news at all. The algorithms are not optimised for truthfulness. Instead, they drive engagement by manipulating emotions, particularly anger (in the case of Twitter/X) and envy (in the case of Instagram).
People who think they are getting news from social media are mistaken. What they are really getting is emotional manipulation plus a dose of “validation” from being sucked into an echo chamber of people with the same prejudices as themselves. It then seems to them that there is only one right view.
I mention this because the clinical trial that I am currently participating in is quite a distance from home. Big pharma kindly pays for me to get a taxi there and back, but this involves spending three or four hours with an assortment of taxi drivers. It seems for some reason that taxi drivers are particularly susceptible to social media driven conspiracy theories, and of course they have not been shy in sharing them with me. Not one of them so far has believed that covid was real. Several have offered unhelpful advice on cancer and its treatment, including the old favourite that the cure for cancer has been known for many years, but has been suppressed by doctors/big pharma. One driver was fully committed to the whole Illuminati/Jewish people/Lizard people thing.
The nuttier the views people present to me, the more likely they are to tell me to “do my own research” when I ask them why they believe in such stuff. When I ask them to point me in the right direction, they do not point towards an accredited expert, or peer-reviewed literature. It’s pretty much always some huckster on YouTube. This is not what I call research.
Back when there was real journalism, there was the “yellow press”, more about provoking emotion than sharing factual information. The quality of news most people receive from social media is far below even that, and somewhere around the level of the Sunday Sport (see pic above). The difference is that few people ever thought that the Daily Express (for example) was unbiased, or that the Sunday Sport was factually correct. They would go to work, and interact with other people who read other papers, and know at least that there was more than one view on some issues.
It's not however just the direct effects. No one seems to recognise that there is such a thing as expertise any more, and it’s not just the taxi drivers. Many of my fellow chemical engineers have some pretty firm views about (for example) chemical engineering education, despite having never really given it any thought and having no qualifications or experience in the area. They tend to know as much about chemical engineering education as they do about piloting an aircraft, but in both cases they actually have been a passenger, not a pilot. The most common views for practitioners to hold about education are usually very obviously those that they were given by academics back when they were themselves students.
Academics, on the other hand, think they know all about engineering practice, despite having never practiced engineering. Most of them have not actually undertaken formal study of teaching either, so they don’t know much about that, either. They at least have the defense of occupying their own bubble which thinks it knows. Academics write the literature, so they can readily point to some publication by another academic which confirms their prejudices. That they have never practiced the thing that they think they are teaching, nor studied teaching itself seems not to occur to them. There is also an unfortunate tendency amongst professors to think that they are professors of everything. The truth is, the nature of specialisation is such that all professors are experts in practically nothing.
If you think that these are not mainstream views, I actually did my own research. It didn’t consist of watching a YouTube video. The subject of my PhD was chemical engineering education, and it was very challenging. My initial view was close to that of the average practitioner. I had assumed that chemical engineering education was aligned with the needs of the profession at a deep level not necessarily evident to the casual observer. This is not however what I found.
What I found is that chemical engineering education is an essentially unplanned mishmash, one of the main aims of which is to spot the students who can be suckered into doing a PhD in a different subject altogether. The staff who deliver it overwhelmingly never practiced as engineers, and a very high percentage of them didn’t even do a “degree in chemical engineering”. What I found, in essence, is that there is no such thing as a degree in chemical engineering.
This is quite an unpopular view, but if you don’t like it, may I suggest that you do your own research?
