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Comment by VikingCoder | Hacker News Reader

I heartily agree with your core point.

> encouraging people to trust untrustworthy sources for information which doesn't necessarily square with the scientific evidence

To offer up some compassion to those people, you have to remember that we're daily barraged with p=0.05 experiments getting breathless coverage in the media. "Scientists say peanut butter cures cancer." "Scientists say peanut butter causes cancer."

Remember back when it was going to be a new Ice Age? Now it's "Global Warming?"

The media's coverage of science does not portray research in the proper light, does not give context, etc.

So I have a lot of sympathy for people who are skeptical of trusting "science."

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Remember back when it was going to be a new Ice Age? Now it's "Global Warming?"

No, I don't remember that, because that was never actually the case. If you "remember" it, it is a false impression and you should really deeply introspect why you hold it. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-the-global-co...

I'm relating the perspective some people have on science. To them, it's chaotic. Answers change constantly. "Theory" is a derogatory term to them.

The conversation here is not how any given fact is right or wrong. The conversation here is that "scientific facts" seem to change at a dizzying pace to them, without being tethered to reality. "Global warming?!? It's SNOWING right now!"

Do cell phones cause cancer? Do vaccines cause autism? Was there cold fusion in that fish tank?

Also see:

https://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2012/11/qa-samuel-ar...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

https://gizmodo.com/why-scientific-americans-predictions-fro...

http://www.aei.org/publication/18-spectacularly-wrong-predic...

Okay, sorry I didn't pick up on that. My fault for not paying better attention.

I agree, but I guess I'm both pushing a bit back on people to have some common sense when ascribing credibility to a source and also push some blame on deliberate bad actors (muddling what is true, and also reducing peoples' trust in the system overall).

You are falling into the same trap described by @chiefalchemsit. Saying normal people should have common sense only makes matters worse

What's "common sense" to you undoubtedly relies on your culture, and core assumptions you make. The things you value, and the things you discredit. Your world view.

I have bought lottery tickets, even though I know it's a "Stupid Tax." And apparently many other people do, too:

"Americans Spend More On Lottery Tickets Than On Movies, Video Games, Music, Sports Tix And Books Combined" [1]

Even though there's ample evidence that:

"Here’s How Winning the Lottery Makes You Miserable" [2]

A cynic could conclude that people are stupid. I'm not sure what an optimist would conclude, but I think I'd encourage them to consider their peers from the perspective of an anthropologist... View the culture as "different," not "wrong."

[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-08-12/2016-americans-spe...

[2] http://time.com/4176128/powerball-jackpot-lottery-winners/

We'll have to agree to disagree. Perhaps both of our approaches have merits in different situations, but in the case where something is concretely falsifiable then people can be wrong not different. Perhaps convincing them otherwise is a job best left to kinder people than me.

I'm genuinely curious:

Can you name anything interesting which is concretely falsifiable?

Just to list a few things that I believe in, and they're very important to me, but which I assert are not "concretely falsifiable":

Anthropogenic Climate Change

Evolution as the origin of species

Reducing (not necessarily eliminating) access to guns is effective at reducing gun deaths

Bombing Nagasaki was the wrong thing to do

Torturing people is not an effective way to gather intelligence, and it's bad policy

Waterboarding is torture

The US has committed very many war crimes in the last thirty years

Abandoning the Gold Standard was a great decision

You don't get falsifiable in the real world in a computability sense. But > 99% confidence is completely reasonable and should be synonymous in an epistemological sense.

1, 2 are falsifiable and true. They are observed, modeled, and predictions have been demonstrated accurate. 3 is falsifiable and true, but I believe misses the point in the controversy there. 4 is not, ethics are not falsifiable. I lack the knowledge to say on 5 (people who I trust agree on both). 6 is just stupid, it tautologically is - not a question of falsifiable or not. I lack the knowledge to say on 7. I agree 8 but don't believe it's falsifiable (or I cannot prove it).

Newtonian physics was observed, modeled, and predictions were demonstrated accurate. Until Relativity and Quantum Mechanics showed us that our models were too simple.

This whole argument you're making that things are "concretely falsifiable" is still entirely about trust, and faith, and "good enough" in practice. It's nowhere near as rock solid as you're portraying it.

With guns, if you can't even agree that reducing access would decrease gun violence, it's hard to then debate whether we should, and whether we would need to modify the Constitution in order to do so. We can't even start the conversation.

"Abandoning the gold standard was good" is theoretically falsifiable, but you'd need to explore the multi-verse, or you'd need to run grand experiments in other countries. (Other countries DID do that for us, and it was bad for them.)

In the specific example of the lottery, if people could intuitively grasp what the odds really meant, few would play. It may not be a tax on stupidity, but a tax on how many people fail to understand how probability works. It’s also a tax on the impulsive, the desperate, the uneducated and people who have a predisposition to gamble.

Then difficulty in explaining to people these facts, or convincing people of them doesn’t imply some broader cultural relativism. The lottery is stupid, it’s just very challenging to get people to understand that consistently.

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