Yeah well you can prove anything with science
badscience.net
badscience.net
Then I have to find out their real motivation for holding that view. If their views on sexuality are tied to their religion, I need to proffer a religious based explanation for changing that viewpoint.
Most people don't put a great deal of logical thought into their views, and they are amenable to being "converted" given an understanding of their reasons, which they themselves may not be clear on.
It depends on whether your goal is to determine the truth or to convince someone of your viewpoint.
If you read "science" as "survival of the fittest for theories", then there is indeed room for people to have all sorts of biases. There are always folks who watch out for these biases. The big pool of those biases evolves towards some consensus about "reality" through argument and evidence collection. Over time, the most persistent of these ideas become "intuition".
... but that's probably a gross simplification of affairs. If it can take science 20 years to confirm some simple causal relation such as "smoking causes cancer", it is not at all surprising that people might doubt the power of the scientific method. If skepticism is healthy, isn't it also healthy to be skeptical about the completeness of science? Is the "scientific community" saying "you have to skeptical about everything ... except science"? Isn't that a religion then?
Psychology and medicine probably have the hardest time here. It seems particularly easy to read "lack of evidence for X" as "evidence for absence of X".
Not at all, which is why gravity and evolution which are both understood well enough to be labeled accepted facts (especially evolution) are still called "theories". Religion is inherently based on faith, not observation, testing, and proof which supports its tenets or claims -- a key distinction.
It is perfectly acceptable in science to use observations of natural phenomena that can be used to build explanatory frameworks that have some predictive power. You can then formulate, ex ante, an event that either works towards confirming your explanation, or disproving it. By observing the outcome of that event (or even finding that event in a historical data set! Although you must be certain that it did not enter your hypothesis), you can gain useful scientific data.
Hypotheses-based predictions need not come from controlled experiments. If that were the case, the scientific method would be much less generally applicable.
I appreciate that the term 'scientific' is thrown around with gay abandon, but if you intend to educate people on the true meaning of the term you should not exclude what is arguably the oldest of the pure sciences.
Seriously, I can imagine a scenario where, in an argument, someone presents scientific evidence. Their opponent responds in the usual dismissive way, and then the first person presents this very argument.
I agree. Something very pretentiously meta about it. The author writes that the findings are shocking, but I'd have been shocked only if people ended up trusting "science" (whatever their notion of that is) in both groups.
The effect on general belief in science is clearly evidence of bias, but the bias of the writer also shows, in his one-sided condemnation of the folks whose faith in science was decreased by the exercise. After all, they just had a reminder of how easily (from their point of view) science can be hijacked for political (or economic) purposes. They also may have a more pragmatic approach to the question than geeks like us; when we are asked if science could be usefully employed to answer a question, we imagine designing and executing a valid scientific study. A normal person is more likely to imagine reading about a study in the newspaper or hearing it on television, in which case it's much more reasonable to think, "Science will never answer this question for me," because they have no authority they trust to tell them which studies are valid and which are distorted by commercial or political interests. The validity of a study is irrelevant unless you can assess it yourself or trust an authority to assess it for you.
That's not all that surprising if the sample group didn't feel very knowledgeable or comfortable about how science works to start with. For example, I'd wager a group of non-computer literate people would hold more favorable or less favorable views about the merits of computers if results for some computer experience gave them a very positive or negative experience. I mentally walked myself through that study, and presented myself with the "scientific results" that contradicted my existing view. My reaction was simply "are you sure?" I'd likely be skeptical of the testing/measurement methods, but not the merits of science itself.
Given that, people's strategy of ignoring scientific studies is smart. There are usually studies that "prove" both sides of the issue, and people have no way of telling which is more accurate.
"All computers are based on a trifle, the "chip" or "CPU" people talk about is just a biscuit on top of the jelly layer coated with blancmange ..."
Good luck!
Both are a lot of work, but only one is a joy. One makes you stand on your own two feet, while the other makes you want to stand on the feet of others.
I find articles like this -- where the underlying premise seems to be "people are stupid, science is not" to be deeply flawed. People use the word "science" to cover all sorts of things. In this example, it was used to cover the results of a study. Guys? Studies are inherently non-conclusive -- for lots of reasons, including the correlation and causation problem. I can show you studies that will show correlations between about any two things you would like. What's the old saying? "If you torture the data enough, you can get it to confess to anything". The stats on medical studies, in particular, are very concerning. The proper response to being presented with any study is to say something like "That's interesting. What other pieces of data do we have?"
It's not to change your world-view. If your world-view is so flimsy that you'll change it on a dime, you're not exactly being a critical consumer of information.
Secondly scientists are people too, just like the ones studied.. Everybody seems to overlook this fact. We all have these wonderful gems of how people act irrationally, self-reinforce in groups, are slow to change opinions, etc., and nobody asks "wonder how all of that affects the study of science?"
Why? Because the purpose of such self-congratulatory bullshit like this is to tell ourselves "I am a creature of reason and science. These other people are primitive non-thinking dweebs"
It's all just so much intellectual self-stimulation.
I'm all for studies in human irrationality to continue. This is a very interesting and fruitful area of research. But the picking it apart and trying to make social or political observations out of it? Not so much.
I disagree that people overlook that fact. Humans are certainly not infallible, and that's why peer review is an important part of the process for confirming scientific discoveries and claims. That's what is so great about science; claimed results must be reproducible independent of the scientist, otherwise the claims are generally discarded.
Peer review compares to the literature and does some minor arithmetic checks. It rarely redoes the statistics, let alone verify that the measurements were real.
That's part of why peer review is almost useless in detecting fraud. It has other failings as well.
It is better than nothing.