I'm not convinced, I haven't followed that particular event closely but as far as I know it was mostly about opposing the anti-science views of Trump and his administration. Given that he said multiple times that global warming was a chinese conspiracy I'm not sure this reaction is particularly extreme or uncalled for, regardless of your opinion on the topic. Using this to say that this million of people participating are adepts of scientism is a bit of a stretch IMO.

Using the same logic I could say that the 62+ millions of Americans who voted for Trump are climate change deniers but I don't think that would be fair either.

> opposing the anti-science views of Trump and his administration

> I'm not sure this reaction is particularly extreme or uncalled for

But opposition can easily veer into defining, and then rigorously defending, a 'pro-scientific' dogma that actually ends up opposing new, legitimate research.

As a complete hypothetical, what if an esteemed climate scientist discovers evidence that global temperature increase estimates actually are too high by, say, a factor of 2? Will people take that evidence seriously, or write it off as 'climate change denial'?

Similar to Twitter, it's hard to nuance a complex thought on a garish protest sign. With the example of a sign reading "Sciences isn't wrong", that's not literally a statement of science's infallibility, it's just something some guy wrote on a sign. If you had a conversation with the individual I'm sure they would espouse to you what they meant with their sign.

It feels like an act of willful ignorance to interpret the few words or catchy phrase on a protest sign and ascribe them as that person's core beliefs.

You're not presenting your opinion on the subject of vaccines though, you're presenting your opinion on the subject of having opinions about vaccines. Give me your nuanced thoughts on vaccines if you want to have a productive discussion with someone.

I think we're seeing a completely different trend, spurred on by social media and the ability for people to broadcast their own messages/opinions about a topic, and that is, everyone has a loud, and often spurious, opinion about everything. This is something that's always been true, social media is just amplifying this aspect of human nature.

It's so wild how certain topics will trigger a response. Your comment was about nuance, and I replied with (what was meant to be) a mostly complimentary comment, expanding on that topic. But you latched on to the vaccine part of it that was meant only as an example. Something about that subject really gets people's blood pressure up; I notice my comment above was downvoted as I predicted - although not by you, as far as I could tell. (FWIW a nuanced discussion about vaccines isn't germane to this topic, so I will respectfully pass on that.)

Anyway, I think you're right about social media amplifying human nature, but I don't think it's about opinions. I think most people don't really care too deeply about most things -- one major reason why voting turnouts are so low! Sure, they care about one or two things passionately, but they're mostly moderate on most things. More universally though, people care about attention. They love attention. It's wired into our DNA; babies do everything they can for attention, because attention is survival.

But it turns out that having moderate views isn't really all that interesting. It doesn't demand attention the way having (or representing to have) extreme views does. So are the extreme views genuine, or just a show for attention?

My problem with your previous comment is that while on the surface it's perfectly reasonable, it's also unsubstantial and the type of fluff you hear as an introduction to a flat earther youtube video. The good old "show both sides of the issue" that's used by all fringe theorists ever to get people to discuss their side of the story.

Of course that's a complete strawman on my part here, you didn't say any of this. But consider this for instance:

> For instance, the GP mentioned young earthers. There are many different kinds of "alternative" stances on the age of the earth, and only one (very) extreme position is "earth is 6000 years old". But if you mention anything about the age of the earth that isn't exactly *the universe is 13.8 billion years old and the earth was formed around 4.5 billion years ago" you are considered a "young earther", lumped in with the creationist crazies.

I could do the same thing about flat earth or, if I wanted to heat up the discussion even more, the holocaust.

You can and you should question everything all the time, but at some point we have to reach a consensus and move on. We can't spend all of our time proving again and again and again that the earth is round, that Earth is not 10000 years old and that vaccines do not cause autism. If new evidence surfaces it should be reconsidered of course but the case for the anti-vaxxers is pretty weak as far as I can tell.

Not sure if memes are diagnostic here. Even a sane moment these days has to resort to low quality clickbaity stuff if they want to get social media (or real life) traction.

I would say that much of this is directly related to how anti-science many leaders are now.