>I'm not saying anything for or against your position by the way. Just "studies show" doesn't cut it any more.
Studies show never "cut it" depending on what your definition of cut it is. I just assume that anyone that cares to look further into it can Google it if they want to.
If it's a particularly contraversial, or unbelievable study I tend to take the time to link to it.
But time a child spends interacting with adults correlates positively with intelligence, is very widely accepted/supported, so a Google search should be easy.
On the one hand I agree that it sort of did never really cut it, but on the other hand, culturally, it really felt like that before the whole reproducibility crisis went mainstream that science, while not infallible, was at least good and it worked and so could be trusted to some degree. And I think in that case yeah, if you wanted to poke further into things then you could just go hunt for the information.
There really has been a three-pronged breakdown in trust over "studies" over the last few decades. First we learned to distrust the phrase "studies show" after we learned Big Tobacco paid for studies to show what they wanted to show. Next we learned to be more skeptical of studies show after the whole anti-vaxxer crowd latched onto fraudulent research. Finally after the reproducibility crisis went mainstream we are now facing the reality that the economics of the industry is bust and is driven it into a pathological state and there are massive systemic failures.
This is a huge problem. Science is a really important part of our sense-making apparatus. It's social science in particular that so many widely accepted beliefs that came from research that turned out to not replicate. So what does it even matter that something is widely believed anymore?
To quote Nietzsche "I'm not upset that you lied to me, I'm upset that from now on I can't believe you."
Culturally, we've turned a corner and we need to toss the phrase "studies show" out the window and push back when we hear it in isolation like that. We need to shine a light on the claims being made so that bad and/or incompetent actors can't hide in the shadows. It's one small step on the journey to mend our most important sense-making apparatus.
Mark Twain popularized the phrase "lies, damn lies, and statistics" over a hundred years ago.
There's never been a time when you could just trust someone saying "studies show", or "experts agree". If you read something like that, you don't already know it to be true, and you have the time and inclination, look it up.
This has nothing to do with a reproducibility crisis, or a societal shift and everything to do with me not having the time to to include footnotes with every 2 paragraph comment I make on the internet.
>Culturally, we've turned a corner and we need to toss the phrase "studies show" out the window and push back when we hear it in isolation like that.
We haven't turned a corner. You're explicitly arguing that we should. Your argument is that society can only be saved if we change our society to enforce your preferred taboos.
>It's social science in particular that so many widely accepted beliefs that came from research that turned out to not replicate. So what does it even matter that something is widely believed anymore?
Tossing out the last century of social science research probably isn't the best solution to the problem. But hey what do I know.
Studies show never "cut it" depending on what your definition of cut it is. I just assume that anyone that cares to look further into it can Google it if they want to.
If it's a particularly contraversial, or unbelievable study I tend to take the time to link to it.
But time a child spends interacting with adults correlates positively with intelligence, is very widely accepted/supported, so a Google search should be easy.