(02-10-2014, 10:48 PM)zenmaster Wrote: If someone is unwilling to learn due to lack of time, then how can they be helped?
I'm not sure you understood what I was trying to say. Modern life almost requires that a non-expert rely or trust experts/scientists because of complexity of modern technology.
It's not realistic to ask everyone in modern society to learn the actual mechanisms, theories, and studies involved in every piece of technology we have or use. That's why we have experts - if everyone understood everything, everyone would be an expert (or no one would be) and that term would have no meaning. Having specialized experts or scientists serves a very real purpose of allowing others to benefit from their discoveries and research without the time needed to learn the concepts involved, so that the saved time can be put into learning things more interesting or important for a given individual (for example - spending time learning lessons of balance stemming from an argument that day with a loved one instead of digging through studies about MMR Vaccine safety.)
The problems arise when the non-expert considers that reliance or trust of experts in general to be questionable or potentially misplaced in the light of previous bad advice given some particular expert.
To show some personal lack of trust and/or personal biases: I think many psychologists are full of BS. This is mostly from my personal experience of working with forensic psychologists and a small part from reading random media articles and random summaries of psych studies. I try to keep an open mind, but in general, I am very skeptical about any psych claim. If it's important to me, yes I read, and study it. But because of my own personal experiences with crazy psych evaluations of my clients, I can totally understand why someone who is has spent less time in math and science to feel "burnt" by some science recommendation (see above), and then decides to disregard the bulk of scientific finds due to a lack of trust. Understanding vaccine or drug studies is no trivial task and it would take me a lot of time (though I definitely do heavy research before deciding how/when to vaccinate a child given the stakes involved). People these days have trouble finding time outside of working; it's understandable that they don't dig deep into scientific claims and findings and choose to live their life without them.