You would think cold hard data would be lead everyone to the same truth of a situation, but the problem is that in reality, data can be tortured to confess to anything. Data is constantly weaponized by everyone to push the narrative they want to believe, whether the data is about guns, violence, education, covid, racism, drugs, etc, data can be tortured to tell nearly any story by people wanting a specific narrative.
How often do people see a graph or something on twitter, and the data seems to go against what they believe, so they examine it and conclude that the graph is misleading and that actually the data says the opposite? Nearly every graph posted on twitter experiences this phenomenon.
But data can't encapsulate values. My friend sent me a chart asking why were pushing vaccines for kids when only .001% of kids were dying from COVID. I looked at the chart and saw that 1000 kids had died from COVID and thought 1000 kids have died from COVID!?! There's no objective way to agree on whether a number is high or low. A lot of values transcend the underlying data, even when "the science is on your side". I can't imagine any data that would change my values around abortion access or gay marriage.
> There's no objective way to agree on whether a number is high or low
But emotional responses to absolute numbers aren't a good mechanism to inform policy making either. That's why absolute numbers are usually normalized to a "per capita" figure. If 1000 kids die in modern India (pop > 1 billion), that is less cause for concern than 1000 kids dying in a rural town in Pennsylvania (pop < 10000). But just looking at the raw number "1000" can't tell you that, you need to give it context. Yeah, 1000 kids died either way, but in the Pennsylvania case something very bad is clearly happening (poisoning, disease, etc), whereas in India a freak one in a million accident could have happened 1000 times.
I don’t think we’re really disagreeing here, I think my point was just that in addition to your point about people misreading data, some people read it correctly and come to different conclusions. Not to mention the issues we have no data on like people believing who believe in vaccine shedding. I think people believe in this stuff precisely because there is no data and you can come to whatever conclusion you want.
The even stranger thing is that I’m not sure we even all agree on what knowledge is. I think some believe more that knowledge is about what you can argue, sort of a rhetorical/debate centered argument vs a scientific observational/data centered argument.
How often do people see a graph or something on twitter, and the data seems to go against what they believe, so they examine it and conclude that the graph is misleading and that actually the data says the opposite? Nearly every graph posted on twitter experiences this phenomenon.