Post by Arlon10 on May 2, 2019 6:10:55 GMT
News writing is necessarily "artless" in that sense. Everyone needs to know what happened. That's all, just the plain facts. The underlying causes might not be readily available or muddled by lies or misunderstanding.
Children need to learn to be plainspoken first. Only after can they learn more artful methods. Elementary school children are typically not taught to debate. It is best if they just accept as facts the basic foundation they will need later to debate anything else. Without that foundation they are in no position to debate the issues in society at large.
Testimony in court needs to be plain and unambiguous.
Like a good novice journalist Wikipedia deals in facts without assigning any meaning to them. That's why people use it. There are times when Wikipedia strays beyond that and repeats things that are not as certain as portrayed, usually with things on the frontiers of math and science.
Although religious radio takes "lessons" from Bible stories, it usually operates like most news media at a low reading level with a healthy proportion of simple facts.
Many people on this board believe they have reasoned out their opinions when in fact they have never advanced to a level where they can. They continue as in early grades in school to repeat mindlessly, only following a herd instead of a teacher. An example is how they repeat "correlation is not causation." Actually there usually is causation for almost everything. That people have free choice can mean this number or that happens with no apparent cause, but those things are not often the reason for an investigation. If something is being investigated there are suspected causes and those can be more or less strongly identified by careful surveys.
I meant to answer you earlier but several real life things needed more attention than usual.
In my opinion (and those of many others), the methods of science (at least at its best) are most suited to overcome these limitations, by marginalizing the role of personal opinion or dogma and relying instead on observation.
Going into the election season there is a "lean toward" (for lack of better description) science. That is partly Trump's fault. He does not represent religion well. He also does not represent capitalism well, but that's another topic.
Ordinarily religion fares much better. The faith you don't realize you have is the worst faith there is. People who believe in science don't realize theirs is as much faith as anyone else has. Ordinarily people who believe in a god are perfectly aware they can't do anything miraculous, that there is little or no evidence for their beliefs, that theirs are indeed beliefs. People who will believe in mind reading so long as the claim is based on what they think is "science" are on this board and you can see how wrong blind faith in science can go.
A desire to rule the world doesn't make anyone scientific at heart or better at math, it just makes makes them invoke the most powerful thing they can imagine, which to them is "science," but they aren't any good at real science because they don't have the heart of a scientist.
Science can be powerful and have the last word in some disputes, but not on most issues in society. I've said it many times, but here it is again. If everyone agrees they want to build a birdhouse, science can help. It can even help attract a specific kind of bird. If people cannot decide whether to build a birdhouse, a lawn sprinkler or a badminton court there is really nothing science can do. Most issues in society arise because people cannot agree on what must be done and science is really useless in politics.
I suspect that when you develop the true heart of a scientist you will realize that religion is a good and necessary thing. You will realize that Donald Trump is not religious. You will realize that there are many important things even science cannot do.