There is a growing need in this country for rationality and reserve for impulsive thinking. As someone who hears quite a bit of baseless conspiracy theory day to day, I'm often surprised in how quickly people come to conclusions based off of skant evidence at best. Isn't it odd that in the climate of "question everything" that it goes out the window when confirmation bias becomes an enticing drug that can not be ignored. It is often tempting to buy into a conspiracy theory in general if it remotely links or loosely ties in with a hunch or notion that there may be something amiss or corrupt about a particular topic.
For example, people are quick to say something such as "Steven Hawking was a fraud for globalist pigs" without any real way to qualify that whatsoever. In fact, the amount of people I have seen demonize this man /after/ his death is quite telling as most of these people were silent when he was alive. What this tells me from a logical standpoint is, when he was doing science they couldn't understand, they didn't have much to comment on. But once he passed, it was easy to look back in retrospect and not see much accomplishment. Well, this would indeed be the case if you don't keep up with scientific literature correct? If you aren't used to reading scientific journals and peer reviewed research, it's easy to dismiss his work into the unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity through the relation of the big bang and evaporation of matter at the point of the event horizon of black holes as total nonsense. You might say that Hawking Radiation is a ho-hum discovery and proposition and that it doesn't really make you impressed. But what does that say if you don't understand even the basics of the work he was doing? Wouldn't effort be better spent learning the fundamentals of his work and trying to appreciate him first before laughing at him from the comforts of computer chairs not even understanding what a proton is? Ignorance is not harmful, it's natural in such a large world, but willful ignorance is usually inexcusable especially when you use material you don't know to develop a superiority complex to say something like "Hawking was an idiot".
But this extends far beyond just this one incident. Everything from cellphones causing cancer definitively (https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/radiation/cell-phones-fact-sheet --spoiler alert, they don't), and many other things like HAARP controlling human emotion are some other examples. There has been no link between nanoparticles in the air dropped by airplanes that contribute to dementia or Alzheimer's disease, yet a slew of people think they're being flooded with aluminum to make them more susceptible to harmful microwave band radiation. These are unsubstantiated claims based on little to no evidence whatsoever, and instead of championing scientific advancement, contributes to the poor reception of scientific discovery. I have spoken to many people who think CERN (which runs experiments designed to understand energies near the Big Bang and the subatomic constituents of nature) is in the business of opening portals for Sheva worship and Satanic spirits. Have there ever been any demons or spirits, even portals witnessed by anyone with any conclusive evidence? Of course not, but people still believe this as gospel.
It makes you wonder why in the midst of so much scientific progress do we have so many people ready to ball it up and throw it in the can without even taking a passing glance at it. Artificial intelligence and DWave are often lumped together without /any/ and I mean any reason to believe quantum computing will give rise to sentience or independent consciousnesses. Rather than reveling in the possibilities that quantum computing can contribute to the solving of Alzheimers disease and cancers, also answering questions like "where did the universe come from", we'd rather chalk it off as an agent of of the devil, mostly by people with zero IT/computer science/AI education at all. Why is this? It is a perplexing mystery, and one I think will endure even after science itself has saved millions of lives and helped humans live much more comfortable lives. Sad really.
