The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
nature.com
nature.com
This article is ironically akin to the 'The Preaching of St Paul', except that instead of burning Galileo's work, the author is trying to burn religious texts and dissenting viewpoints to their "settled science".
When one can't trust the information they're looking at without having to dig into the political backing of the study and the results and without having to wonder which outliers have been trimmed to further hammer home the point of the stakeholders, we're no longer looking at science, we're looking at propaganda.
So the problem isn't science. The problem is the manner in which science is being subverted for financial gain. That's not science.
This is why science is losing credibility and authority outside of scientific circles.
If you want credibility and authority, you have to not only act with integrity, you have to be seen to be acting with integrity. It does't matter how honest your study or how objective your results, if people look at your study and see that it was funded by Monsanto and makes Monsanto look good, it looks like Monsanto paid for a study to make Monsanto look good and therefore it's biased and can be ignored.
This is life. If you want to be seen as having integrity, you have to act with integrity. And when people who were already distrusting of the way science is presented in the media are being told that they can't trust the media by authority figures, as ridiculous as those authority figures may be, eventually people stop listening until the furor abates.
* Is 'Oumuamua an alien spacehip / solar sail?
* Does the Tabby's star have a alien megastructure / partial Dyson sphere?
You can't blame to Monsanto for them.
The article appears, get a huge press coverage, the authors get interviewed, and somewhere the fact that it's only an improbable weird hypothesis is lost.
A few month later the new evidence refute the paper, and people get the idea that scientific discovers are not reliable.
(And there are batteries breakthrough that increase your battery capacity a 80% before disappearing, nutrition recommendation that get reversed after a few years, ... but these are more motivated for money.)
> A few month later the new evidence refute the paper, and people get the idea that scientific discovers are not reliable.
And do this a few dozen times and people stop listening to science because they know a couple of months from now, this study is going to be refuted.
Among the public, science has always had some portion of people who understood it's processes as those of a secular priesthood and those who understood it's processes as discovering the truth through skepticism and experimentation. Even among this working scientists, this division has existed (and given a society that never discarded religion, anti-science along with anti-intellectual views have naturally always been part of American thought).
The problem today is two-fold. Aside from the corruption of scientific processes others have noted, the other aspect is the majority of people aren't seeing the material gains that science offers the world - science is broadly part of progress and when the average American's life expectancy and median income isn't increasing, why would they believe in progress?
When the studies say so many different things, all contradictory and all purporting to be good and then bad and then good again, people give up trying to understand.
Why should I believe that anything I eat today is bad when tomorrow you're just going to tell me that it's good for me again?
People are tired of listening to science that appears to ebb and flow like the tides.
News outlets are eager to 'report first' and don't bother correctly framing the science in a proper context of one study //which suggests more research and confirmation is necessary//.
Publish or perish, along with the lack of replication rather than trying to find something exciting to publish, or even enshrining the effort of replicating results (repudiating or confirming) to more strongly establish fact and carefully observe to see if there may be other causes/effects; is ruining the integrity of the scientific methods.
Finally, a lack of stable funding for maintaining and improving what should be public domain (established facts about nature) and the work of students of all ages to re-study and double check as they learn, is nearly the ultimate root cause. The true root cause being greed and the increasing likelihood that as we as a species approach 'abundance' that capitalism ceases to be a good means for wisely allocating resources. Surely that is the case when we are to the point of automated micro-transaction harvesting HFT and fractions of a second of advantage translating to profits in a financial sector that is a vastly over-sized portion of the GDP.
The problem of science is that it doesn't have the outlet of, say, high school students learning real science and knowing how it works, that the products of science and technology is wind-up cut-off from the broad processes of experimentation that gave rise to them.
Too many of the studies today are funded to look for evidence to support a narrative instead of chasing the evidence to find the truth. The former is propaganda. The latter is science.
When I say too many, I mean to say that there are enough that people are very very aware of this. This fact alone is a problem because it damages people's perception of what is going on in the scientific community. If people cannot trust scientists to deliver truth rather than deliver support for a narrative, we have a problem. Whether this perception is fair or not, it is so.
If perception is that we cannot trust the scientists delivering the test results, nor the providence of the testing, then how can we trust the information we're being shown?
People need to see integrity before they can trust anything else.
I'm afraid this last bit is a big problem. I suspect there is a certain lag from discovery to perception. And then starting in the 1800 we had wave after wave of discovery, from electricity, magnetism, cars, airplanes, wireless, nuclear bombs, computers... stopping around the 1980s. At this point we can keep talking up science all we want but I fear something like fusion reactors or true AI would be needed to boost the faith.
many of those responsible for science as a discipline throughout the centuries sought to know more of their creator rather than to debunk religion
Even if as most atheists agree the Bible is a fallacy, that still doesn't prove there isn't a God, or multiple Gods. Nor does it even prove our own existence. It just proves our abilities to contemplate and interpret the laws of the physics we appear bound inside this universe.
The only rules we can discover and prove are the ones that constrain the environment we are confined to. Anything outside this environment is opaque to us, which may include a God... or not.
I see it differently. The problem isn't the public. The public has actually done a commendable job sensing what's been going on. It's not fair - however unintentional - to tie the public to the problem. It's bad enough Science keep denouncing the public, when it's Science who has mucked up it's own reputation. The pubic is a mirror.
Science, much like journalism, has been drinking too much of its own Kool Aid. It has forgotten it can't just talk, but it needs to walk that talk, as well.
Science would also be wise to show some humility and admit when it's gotten something less than perfect. Yes, that is part of the process. Does Science understand that? Instead, it just sweeps those aside and keeps self-professing it's eternal greatness, and how we should bow our heads, etc.
Bill Nye? Neil deGrasse Tyson? These are the face of Science? Me thinks they got the wrong end. They are doing more harm than good.
FWIW, I'm about to defend my PhD in a STEM discipline. In my eyes, science has far less credibility to me now than it did five years ago before I saw how the sausage is made. That's an N of at least one that this not only a problem outside scientific circles.
You have the perceptions you have because of the ideals you were sold in school and in your childhood. The role models you choose are those that make you aspire to be the very best human being you can... at least, this was my world. Integrity means something. Honour means something.
So to come out and find that the science I was taught, chase the evidence to find the truth, has been subverted and is now chase the narrative, find the evidence to support the narrative - that's a fundamental problem for me because what is being sold as science in the real world is not what I was taught science was supposed to be in school.
It seems that many others were taught to manipulate the world around them at everyone else's expense to get ahead. They were taught that their own goals and objectives were more important than those of humanity. Are they any more wrong?
Can I blame people for trying to get rich when we're taught in the West that money is success? It buys freedom and happiness. When all the propaganda fed to us by the media every day brainwashes us into believing this narrative, can I really blame anyone for doing whatever they have to, to get rich?
I'm not blaming the public. It's not a trivial problem to solve. We don't live in a culture that rewards integrity. We live in a culture that rewards behaviour that makes people rich.
If you don't put authenticity and integrity at the heart of your cultural beliefs, how can you blame anyone when they ignore it to chase money, which you will be rewarded for?
This is why none of us are masters of everything and we tend to specialize in niches. We want to be told the truth by an authority because we don't have the time to dig into everything ourselves. We want happy fulfilling lives. That means we can't look at everything with our own eyes, we need to be able to trust authorities. The less we can trust what we're being told, the more we have to research ourselves, the less time we're able to spend doing what we love with the people we love, the more miserable and disconnected our lives become.
We need to be told the truth by an authority and we need them to have the integrity to chase the truth and deliver it to us honorably.
It's not that we're not good at looking at the world with our own eyes, it's not that we're not capable, it's that we just don't have the time and we've run out of the energy to do so.
People will and have corrupted every institution ever created.
Having doctors and hospitals getting kickbacks for promoting certain drugs is an ethical problem that needs to be curtailed. This all feeds into public perception.
If you want to be seen as having integrity, you have to act with integrity.
If the situation was that there was a strong evidence-based disagreement about scientific findings, those signs wouldn’t be necessary. The situation is instead that a vast number of scientists are producing findings that contradict certain political preferences, and the response has not been a deeper investigation made in good faith — but rather an outright political rejection of the findings. “I support science” is not shorthand for “I take every scientific study as fact because scientists are gods,” but rather “I am inclined to give weight to scientific arguments in either direction as opposed to political arguments that reject those findings based on non-scientific reasoning.”
Political biases in every aspect from results interpretation to what questions we're allowed to ask, historical "just so" arguments that are sometimes falling flat (much to the detriment of the health of the planet), the lack of "negative results" studies due to funding biases and the replication crisis work together to cause a profound skepticism of the body of scientific institutional knowledge to be in some ways _more scientific_ than just reading and accepting the latest scientific news.
How does a layperson make a deeper investigation on their own? The research is typically paywalled, the jargon is inaccessible, the experiments are prohibitively expensive, etc etc. In effect, there is a priestly caste, and one which arguably excludes from the debate members of the skeptic's tribe (i.e., "people the skeptic might trust to address their concerns"). This is why heterodoxy and political diversity in the academy is soooo important.
You might be inclined to say something like "conservatives select out of the academy" or "it's not my fault reality has a liberal bias" and you might even be right, but I don't think you'll find climate change very sympathetic to your position. In other words, this isn't affirmative action for conservatives, it's affirmative action (of conservatives) for the benefit of humanity.
Disclaimers: I'm picking 'conservatives' and 'liberals' here because that's clearly the bent of the article. I'm also picking climate change since it seems to be the favorite example of science denialism. Of course, contrary to the angle of this article, science denialism isn't even an exclusively conservative phenomenon (blank slatism is a favorite of anti-science leftists--including leftist academics--and flat-earth and anti-vax are bipartisan beliefs).
My friends sometimes try to validate conclusions of the papers or just re-run the data crunching presented in those papers.
They never succeed. Either the data sets don't actually match the data sets in papers, or something in the formulas is off, or the code does not even compile.
I did computation physics in college. We had to write code as the paper of homework/tests. Our TA would never run our binaries. He would take our source code, compile it, feed it two of his data sets (we had one) and check the result. If the student's code did not compile, the student would get an F for that homework. If the student's code bombed on the data set that was shared with students, the student would automatically get an F. And only if the second data set got different results than he expected would he go chasing the errors and potentially still give a good grade. By the end of two semesters everyone knew one never tweaked the code to just run the known data set and get the known result.
Science would benefit tremendously if this was the approach.
This is just the original idea behind science as developed in the renaissance. The resistance to checking each others work is a recent phenomenon.
Edit to add a source:
> "the foundation of scientific societies compelled scientists to change the way in which experiments were presented so that not only members of the scientific community but also the inexperienced reader would be able to repeat them by following the same steps.
[...]
Robert Boyle also played an important role in the evolution of scientific writing (Gotti,1996, 2001; Hunter, 2007). Fulton (1932: 78) has highlighted the contribution of the scientist, describing Boyle’s undertaking “to establish science as an integral part of the intellectual life of ordinary men”. He encouraged scientists to write in a language that their contemporaries could understand, and he undoubtedly did more than anyone of his time to make scientific methodology part of the intellectual equipment of educated men.
[...]
According to Gotti, one of the features of experimental essays is brevity, but this brevity of form does not imply brevity in the exposition of the subject. On the contrary, experiments are usually reported in full, furnishing the reader with all the minutest details. The aim of such a report is, after all, to make it possible for the experiment to be repeated, making the precision of the description an important factor." https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2007.20.06
For example, there's a fairly nasty and debilitating condition called CFS which respected British psychiatrists long ago decided was psychosomatic. So a few years ago, they ran a high-profile clinical trial called PACE which tried to prove this by testing their preferred psychiatric treatments, and naturally it concluded they were right. It was also fairly shoddy, which shouldn't surprise anyone on HN. In particular, the results in the final paper used a different and much weaker criteria for success than they'd intended to use at the start, which is a no-no. (There were a bunch of other issues with it too.)
A few trial patients and some outside scientists noticed this tried to get enough data to see what the results were if the researchers had done the scientifically valid thing and used their planned methodology, and that's when things got nasty. The researchers loudly cried to anyone who'd listen - and plenty did, because they were respected psychiatrists and the patients were officially nuts - that this was dangerous, vexatious harassment of scientists by activists, using their position to frame their pre-existing beliefs as science and questioning them as unscientific. All the proud, clever supporters of science bought into this and kept on doing so.
This was almost a decade ago now. The reason it springs to mind is that a few days ago, Reuters ran a long-form piece uncritically repeating the position that opposition to them is a dangerous attempt to silence scientists through harassment and abuse, and it made HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19377986 Discussion ensued as to whether suing the evil people discrediting their research into oblivion was enough or whether they needed to be jailed, and why universities hadn't fired staff who disagreed with their results yet.
Oh, and the punchline to all this: the researchers were almost all male, the condition in question primarily affects women. It turns out that science, at least as experienced by poor disabled women, might be more accurately described by all those pesky postmodernist complaints from the women's studies department than it is by the scientific method.
2. Even if you’re not qualified to do the science yourself, you try to reject implausible ideas like the notion that there’s some grand scientific conspiracy against your preferred ideas. If you’re inclined to believe in some scientific result that is also the result that would be vastly preferred by industry and the richest people on earth, then you should be pretty confident that scientists who are willing to consider that outcome are getting resources to investigate it, and if those resources were producing credible results they’d be making waves in the scientific community. And if the scientific community was somehow censoring those credible results, we’d be hearing all about it.
You mean like academics who push blank slatism to prop up dubious political outcomes? Or people who push notions of racist math or sexist physics?
The questions are 1) how/why do our institutions allow these frauds to be so prevalent/powerful 2) how do we make the necessary changes 3) how do we help laypeople distinguish between ideologues and real academics?
PS Scientists almost uniformly hate the predatory scientific publishing system, want it destroyed, and aren't trying to prevent you from reading their work.
Or maybe those people, even if they don't have much of a grasp on the scientific method, see the material progress and results of scientific work and conclude that they're going to place trust in scientific authority?
This is an entirely false equivalence. One can trust scientists even without understanding science, on the fact alone that research produces results that everyone can observe.
To suggest that we have too uncritical of an opinion of scientific research in an age were medieval diseases make a comeback because people aren't getting vaccinated, climate change is routinely ignored, and an atheistic scientist would likely not be able to run for high office based on that fact alone, is a joke to be honest.
Hence, if any authority, 'scientific' or otherwise, asserts their authority instead of providing individually verifiable evidence of its claims, then we can say they are being unscientific, regardless of title.
The difference between scientific and religious institutions is not that the former functions without authority or trust, it's that the success of the former is measured against observable and replicable results and material progress and not based on infallible spiritual promise.
So if someone understands nothing about science at all, and worships it like a religion, at least they had the good sense of picking a religion that puts food on their table, makes their planes stay in the sky and makes them healthy again when they fall sick.
Religion has proven capable of welding large communities together, and that sort of shared belief system wins wars.
If you ignore the fact that the doctrine is more allegorical than factual, religion has a lot of utility when resources are scarce. Being part of a large group is frequently more important than being part of a technically correct group.
I think the last 200 years of history has demonstrated that science is a superior strategy, but it isn't obvious enough to be hand-waved. There is some evidence that to successfully abandon religion societies have to first have an ungodly surplus of resources. The new trend towards no religion hasn't been tested in a war yet either; back in WWII religious/nationalistic sentiment was famously high.
If you're talking about wars, you really think a hypothetical civilization with a technological development level of ca.1819 would have even a sliver of a chance against modern weapons?? I think history shows that not to be the case.
But I think that misses the point. The real issue is that the world doesn't care what your belief system is. You may have the most solid shared belief system ever, but if you ruin your environment, a la "Collapse", you won't stand a chance.
Your phrasing makes it sound like you're conflating science and physical reality... that's kind of a pet peeve of mine (sorry). Science provides some of the knowledge required for engineers and doctors to do their jobs, but it's the work they do with that knowledge that accomplishes those things. I think that's an important distinction. We can't credit science with creating the natural world or its mechanisms, though it has enabled us to understand and work with it.
However, in general discussion no one is going to say
> "potentially flawed but workable approximation of natural 'rules' that allow us to to manipulate natural phenomenon in a manner that results in food on our table, planes in your sky, and cures for our sicknesses"
No, it's much more reasonable to say
> science that puts food on our table, planes in our sky, and cures for our sicknesses
Really, it doesn't. Science is exactly the process that does all those things, because science is the process which forms the methods and artifacts we use in such a way that they successfully exploit the mechanisms of the natural world.
> but it's the work they do with that knowledge that accomplishes those things
That is an obviously nonsensical statement. Yes, that work is a component of accomplishing those things, but so is the science. An engineer or doctor that did not use scientific results nor scientific methodology would not accomplish anything either. And arguably, what engineers and doctors do, when done right, is also science. An engineer building a plane is building a (physically represented) hypothesis of how something can be made to fly, and then tests that hypothesis. The only difference between what you would call a scientist and what you would call an engineer is the generalized applicability of their result, not the fundamental methodology they are using to arrive at that result--in particular in comparison to the "alternative", namely a faith-based epistemology, which is what is generally proposed by those sceptical of the scientific method.
It is no longer fine when public policy decisions potentially costing trillions of dollars and affecting billions of people are riding on scientific conclusions. Then the claim that "well, we're just discovering facts about the world" no longer holds water. Nor does the claim that "well, science requires institutions, trust, and authority, so just trust us, the scientists". Members of the public have to be able to independently evaluate the claims so they can make informed decisions about what public policies to support.
Indeed, the motto of the Royal Society is "Take nobody's word for it".
The very nature of science means that there should be no such thing as "scientific authority."
(I say this as a person with published papers.)
High level science is on the borders of vast body of scientific knowledge. It's only to be expected that people who work there don't know much about the things they try to figure out. What they know a whole lot about is the foundation of that vast body of scientific knowledge they try to build new understanding upon.
Nobody expects reverence at high levels of science. But a little bit of reverence for scientfic method and for what vast knowledge science was able to establish without a dubt so far would be nice.
Established science is not what's in the news. It's mostly what's in the textbooks. News pretty much broke the public relationship towards science.
The discovery of more objects in the solar system led to defining additional categories of objects, most relevant the category of “dwarf planets”.
That's evolving terminology not a change in the science.
Same with the definition of mental conditions. Yet people wield the DSM as science and use it to bludgeon people who are not politically in line with their worldview on mental health
However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion.
The same is true of pure knowledge. You introduce a new paradigm. You don't know how it will effect all the other knowledge that depends on it. Once it's adopted careers of many scientists depend on it... it's only after those scientists die and a new paradigm is found that the next generation can build its career on that old knowledge dies.
None of this is due to wisdom. It's just the way the political economy works. Wisdom only applies to individual action about things that have a small enough scope to have some idea about their impact on decisions. For anything bigger than that, it's political... and I highly doubt the crowds have wisdom especially about untested things.
What other areas of inquiry would that be?
The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable.
Another problem is that the popular media publishes inconclusive studies because they are click bait. People read them because they are interested in living longer and losing weight and being happy.
Fear also turns studies into clickbait. The latest was the blizzard of articles on if bugs are dying off or not.
Then there is the fact that negative studies tend to be ignored and when the study failed or it introduces data that does not conform to general knowledge.
All this makes people question studies where the data is conclusive.
Psychiatrists paved the way for the Holocaust:
Many common points exist - showing your reasoning and evidence rather than to appeal to authority, and the idea that hypotheses should be falsifialbe (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) to be central ideas. Both of these very good idea in all situations in which you're actually interested in the truth, rather than having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later situation where you need to act on imperfect information.
There's no disaster waiting to happen, at least not in comparison to other tools of reasoning being misused. Sophism (i.e. people playing mind games to make their claims look better) exists inside and outside of science, just as self-interest and wanting to increase your own sphere of influence do, but that's no fault of the scientific method (any more than it is a fault of religion when it occurs there). Any system that lends credibility and authority to people will (loosely mis-citing Bourdieu) attract power-mongery.
2) excepting this, science in the ideal is indeed a wholly different beast. So you could say it is this the weakest form of religion, or, at least, the religion with the fewest dependencies.
3) in practice, the edifice of science is quite full of people who are hypocritical and flagrantly breaking the rules which you expect would be necessary to maintain the high standard that marks the difference between religion and science. These violations are often swept under the rug quietly and even when they get really big the organization is incredibly good at closing its ranks. I'd say there are a lot of parallels between the science industrial complex and, highly organized religions (such as megachurches and hierarchical institutions like the Southern Baptist or Catholic Church) than most people who see science as a source of power ought to be comfortable with.
That's actually wrong, albeit widely believed. In a purely random world with no patterns that could possibly be discovered, empiricism still gives you the optimal result. The only difference between such a world and a world with patterns is that in a purely random world, any other method would also give you the optimal result, because no method has any predictive power. Empiricism gives you optimal results no matter whether the world has patterns or not, in contrast to all other methods, which only give you optimal results if the world has no patterns. So, if you want to have optimal results, empiricism is the way to go, there are no alternatives unless you already know that you are in an unpredictable world.
A scientist doing science isn't religion. A non-scientist believing everything someone says "because science" is.
They are not incompatible, as the pope John Paul II states: Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.
Perhaps you can find something analogous to this structure in psychology, but I just don't see it in the rest of the scientific landscape.
I will agree that I don't see this structure elsewhere in science...
Afterwards students were discouraged from original thought around logic and just forced to learn the following mnemoic
Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris. Cesare, Camestres, Festino, Baroco secundae. Tertia Darapti, Disamis, Datisi, Felapton, Bocardo, Ferison habet. Quarta insuper addit Bramantip, Camenes, Dimaris, Fesapo, Fresison.
Scholasticism then went onto have terrible connotations as a scholarly system.
For the average person to look at the scientific method, conclude it (at least mostly) works and believe in the fundamentals of the process, I think, is a good thing.
But the scientific method is based on the idea of an unchanging God / reality. Without that fundamental belief, theres no point in determining how physics behaves in an experiment, because if everything happens at the whims of anthropomorphic gods, then there is no reason to expect the same experiment will produce similar results.
Thus, I don't really see the huge step up, especially given the inhumanity science has sometimes promulgated, and for which it frankly gets a free pass.
Written by Albert Einstein
Some other quotes:
"The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition."
"Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion."
"His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages."
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." -- Albert Einstein, 1954, letter to Joseph Dispentiere.
Scientific methods differ a lot between the sciences - especially between the physical and special sciences, for example.
"Some philosophers and scientists have argued that there is no scientific method; they include physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Paul Feyerabend (in his Against Method)"
And even the previous paragraphs are not complete either. It says there:
"Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable"
Which is not necessarily true - for example, many arguments against the theory of evolution question whether it is a falsifiable theory (which is not saying that it is not true, but if there is no way to falsify it, how can it be said it is a scientific theory?). Many fields within Biology also have no predictive, but only descriptive power.
Scientists who stick to a rigorous scientific method, such as seen in physics would have to reject most other branches of science. For a realist to accept scientific results in multiple fields, they have to use some philosophical reasons to accept the differing methods as valid ways of exploring reality.
The “theory of evolution” is a large composite explanatory story wrapped around a large number of testable (mostly thoroughly tested) hypotheses. It's falsifiable by falsifying any of the components, though the replacement is liable to look remarkably similar but for who the falsified piece is addressed, and still likely to be called the “theory of evolution” even though the content is different.
This would be fine. But this is not what people mean when they say "science is real." They mean: "Believe what scientists say," and the definition of a scientist is... a person with a post-graduate degree that is popular on Facebook, probably, like Neil deGrasse Tyson.
If you spend a cursory time searching for that statement, you'll find that it's associated with the March for Science, which is, itself, a reaction to active and successful attempts at having persons in government distort, remove, and ignore science that flies in the face of moneyed interests.
By the way, just about everything you know about Galileo re: perception and persecution is wrong.
People so often miss this. Science is a slow, evolving and never ending process. The day a new study comes out, people want to use it as evidence that something is 'settled science'.
Even things as fundamental to our knowledge of the universe like gravity have evolved over time and are still being understood at deeper and deeper levels.
Unless it is AGW. That's settled science and 99.9% of scientists agree with Al Gore even though in 1970s we were heading for Global Cooling and that was settled science.
That's the fundamental problem: how difficult is it to say "Based on the data that we currently have we are coming to a conclusion that there's X% likelihood we are heading towards a period where the global temperatures would be rise by Y degrees by year Z. Should we get different data we will re-evaluate our prognosis"
Similarly all climate science today does in fact have to explain how global cooling observations in the 1970s were found.
No one denying AGW though has ever shown any interest in explaining the data.
That's the catch is that even things that have overwhelming scientific consensus are not "settled science".
There's always more data to collect and more theories to test.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't believe the data or act on the conclusions, far from it. I just don't agree with using the absolute term "settled science". It's not like there's an equation everyone agrees on or a reproducible experiment we can run.
We're still learning as we go and revising projections frequently. But there's no shame in making personal or political decisions based on our best scientific understanding of the day, we do it all the time and it would be just as big of a mistake to act like we know nothing about climate change as acting like we already know everything.
When the predictions do not pan out one should not expect the population to trust one's future predictions as much.
It's trivial, which is why that's exactly what scientists are saying?
What was your point again?
No, "the scientists" don't get on TV. TV selects some scientists who are willing to dumb things down far enough to be compatible with their business model. If you want to know what "the scientists" say, you have to read their papers and reports, and you might be surprised to find that they are scientists.
Yes; and, it's weaponized for political discourse. It's as though we're in some kind of new Puritan era -- this reminds me of how John Cleese was blasted for tweeting on this very topic (3 years ago)[1]. He blasphemed.
[1] https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/683681888687538177?lan...
"I would like 2016 to be the year when people remembered that science is a method of investigation,and NOT a belief system" @JohnCleese [1] 8:10 AM - 3 Jan 2016 [2]
[1] https://twitter.com/JohnCleese [2] https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/683681888687538177
Even Sagan, now and then, recognized the necessity for caution ... and he put it on videotape.
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows clear that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources. - Cosmos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MlN7iVIuhk#t=4m09s)
Science is a network of knowledge [1] where central nodes can be assumed to be more likely an accurate representation of something predictive. The literature critical theory claim that it is arbitrary does not acknowledge those relationships, effectively missing the forest for the trees which also explains the shoddy science done in critical theory’s name.
Science is progressed by building new leaf nodes and supporting them through other nodes as evidence, or by showing that core nodes are not as predictive as you thought they were.
"Bacon suggests that you draw up a list of all things in which the phenomenon you are trying to explain occurs, as well as a list of things in which it does not occur. Then you rank your lists according to the degree in which the phenomenon occurs in each one. Then you should be able to deduce what factors match the occurrence of the phenomenon in one list and don't occur in the other list, and also what factors change in accordance with the way the data had been ranked."
Thus we see that predictive is less important than reproducibility, which is currently in this era approaching a crisis point. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baconian_method [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Due to this layered interdependence, the computer is in fact a shining example of scientific achievement just as much as it is one of technological advancement.
The laws would still be there without physics, but our tools and capability to manipulate them would be greatly diminished.
It is actually a bit intellectually lazy to use literary critical theory To critique things outside literature, because it is obvious it has no explanatory power outside the subjective reading of a book.
From first principles technology is definitely applied science through engineering, but technology is progressed through pushing the boundaries of science and science is the map of where to look. Eg quantum mechanics and optics helped create a map of where to look for new nano scale technology innovations. Technolofy shows the reproducibility of the theories it’s build upon.
The computer is build by innovations created using the predictive powers of material science, quantum mechanics and chemistry.
How do you think the optics used to create the processors were created? The advanced etching technologies to get to decreasing nm processor scale? Materials that respond reliably to store energy in batteries or power puxels in your screen?
The whole "but science is just as bad as religion" argument rings quite hollow.
At the end of the day humans really only have techné, everything else is political... and it's also obvious that the political is generally dysfunctional scientifically -- i.e. inability to manage stability of the environment through science... and also scientifically managing the political is fascist or totalitarian. We get stuck with a set of choices that don't lead to good outcomes... maybe can never lead to good outcomes.
At the end of the day, as usual, those things aren't as much independent entities as classical ideas leads one to believe.
Some of Robert Moses's schemes are a great example. Consider, for instance, how he hoped to deny whole segments of the population in NY access to his parks by making overpasses en route to the spaces too low for buses (which serval poor folks relied on to get around) to travel under. The application of technology and techniques is fundamentally entangled with the wills of the subjects employing said techniques.
I'd go as far as to say human life is inherently "political" in all its aspects. You can't really live and not be politicized in some way--the really baad state to be in is to be unconscious of the political implications of the way you live, which primes you for manipulation by parties that are more 'in the know'. This idea that certain realms of life are free from political influence or external factors doesn't really have any representatives in the real world. I think people often confuse our ability to treat something abstractly and divorced from the concrete situation of present reality with the ontological claim that said thing itself is abstract and can be wholly treated and solved in an abstract manner. That doesn't even hold in the case of a domain as fundamentally abstract as algorithmic time analysis, in which the concrete inputs have a direct impact on the performance of algorithms. In the jargon of historical materialist philosophy such a process is sometimes called reification--thinking the abstract representation of a concept is the thing itself, ignoring all its concrete manifestations. This leads to certain errors. E.g. thinking we can solve problems with schooling in a particular district without having to look at other issues, such as the population dispersion, the distribution of finances, the district's layout, etc. etc. We have to be vigilant of 'nounifying' abstractions and keep in mind that they are the products of thought and a helpful intellectual tool, and means of orienting and structuring the world, not latent realities.
IIRC, the term for this is "scientism," and I don't think it's restricted to just members of the general public.
At least in the South, that sign would be in opposition to "teaching the controversy" of Creation vs. Evolution in high schools.
Would it be "reverent" to fight to keep non-scientific and indeed proven bad faith attempts at undermining science out of the science classroom?
Also, the Simpsons did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vxHkAQRQUQ
I find it hard to believe that you've found such a specific correlation in a domain where the numbers are large and half the equation is so nebulous ("these people", i.e. people who often say out loud "we believe in science in this household"??). This is ripe with identity politics, and you're almost certainly projecting your feelings about "those people" as though there is a real correlation that makes "those people" worthy of condemnation.
Similarly, wre can't really expect everyone to know or care why evolution/heliocentrism is a settled topic but it's really helpful for them to trust the scientific process regardless.
This would be fine (mostly). But this isn't what they mean. They believe scientists. Not the methods. This defeats the entire purpose of science.
If the data were available, it would be interesting to see the correlation between this distortion of science and the size of the government in relation to GDP.
The trend of virtue signaling through yard signs is the most ridiculous thing I've seen in an era where ridiculousness has become the norm.
Well, there's just as much of a trend of claiming your position is "science" when it isn't, simply for political reasons.
For example, by any reasonable standards, economics is not a science; yet people who question the current orthodoxy in economics, for example by questioning whether having the Federal Reserve print money is really a good idea, are routinely castigated. Ron Paul became a nonstarter as a Presidential candidate for precisely this reason.
You don't get it in Congress/Senate/Parliament. You don't get it on the news channels. You sometimes - very rarely - still get it on the radio.
I want to see two people with opposing views debate a single issue for 2-3 hours, without being allowed to evade answering a question. Would happily pay a subscription fee to get that.
However, in many cases, better debate won't fix the problem, because the problem in many cases is not that the "right" views aren't getting air time. The problem in many cases is that we can't even do controlled experiments in the domain, so our understanding is very limited and we simply don't know enough about the domain to give useful input to public policy decisions. For example, I think that's true of economics; nobody knows enough about economics to give useful input about most public policies.
We already know that hyperinflation relative to growth is a way to ruin an economy quickly for instance. Similarly the issue with federal reserve denialism is that they have rhetoric but not much understanding about economic history.
Precious metal backed currency has lead to countless expensive wars and travesties because it effectively started to be a brake/cap on growing economies. Essentially saying you are against the federal reserve period is like admitting you are a homeopath - it goes beyond a difference of supportable opinion and into a sign of incompetence.
I can understand some unease about the role of the federal reserve but it should have some role even if it is stuck on "try to map to economic growth instead of attempting stimulus or bubble deflation".
The federal reserve is a terrible choice because unaccountable bureaucrats with their own agenda are given the power to juice or crash the economy, and they appear to threaten/reward presidents with this power.
Just printing money is a terrible choice because the executive can just run the presses instead of taxing, and thereby cause hyperinflation.
The USA has tried all 3 methods.
That last one has the most potential I think. It could be restricted to reduce misbehavior, perhaps with a time delay before changes take effect.
The primary function of central banks when they were established was to prevent bank runs, acting as a lender to banks. But what if, for example, we had full reserve banking instead of fractional reserve? Would that not eliminate bank runs, make the economy more stable, ensure interest rate serve as a valid signal of consumer time preferences and of the demand for capital, and eliminate the need for a central bank?
I'm not sure either part of this is true. The evidence of the 20th century doesn't give much support to the thesis that fiat money helps prevent wars. Nor is it clear that a fixed, or at any rate slowly growing, quantity of money acts as a brake on economic growth. Current economic orthodoxy says it does, but current economic orthodoxy doesn't make good predictions.
> I can understand some unease about the role of the federal reserve but it should have some role even if it is stuck on "try to map to economic growth instead of attempting stimulus or bubble deflation".
You wouldn't need a central bank to implement a policy of "keep the total quantity of money in some defined relationship to the total size of the economy". In fact you wouldn't want a central bank to implement that policy, because a central bank wouldn't give newly printed money to everyone in the economy in proportion to the amount of money they currently hold, which is the only fair way to print money.
Go further into the past and you'll see plenty. The Opium War was from the terrible twos of mercantilism and metallic standards - the British Empire feared the effects of trading silver for tea and had found a substitute agricultural good - opium. Many empires before then engaged in conquest for precious metals only to either hyperinflate themselves or lose the war. There were accounts of terrible attempts to tame inflation with price controls after the Roman empire seized too much treasure.
The 'fairness' in distribution of money based upon holding is also missing the point on several levels. Not only would that be de-facto regressive it would encourage /not/ investing resources but speculative hoarding which isn't a good thing for the economy. It brings to mind a fundamental misunderstanding that is very common. Money isn't wealth. Money is a medium of exchange for the goods and services which are actual wealth.
It is part of why Bitcoin did so terrible as an actual workable currency - everyone just grabbed onto their Beanie Baby 3.0's and didn't use it for actual exchange and it was very unstable.
Fiat currency is essentially 'superficially crazy/stupid but it works' (it isn't so crazy if one understands the role of money is to be a medium of exchange and is thus arbitrary but can serve the systems for good or ill) and a lot of people get hung-up on it.
That's true, but it's the best we've got.
Not believing in science is different from disagreeing with conclusions of studies based on data. But just saying "science is flawed so I'm not going to believe it" makes no sense at all, because all other alternatives are worse.
When you wrote that, what were you thinking of, specifically? I don't know what you are referencing. Also I'm curious, are there any big mysteries left in the field of biochemistry?
"We believe science is real" is such a modest, uncontroversial statement. The idea that you'd see it and rail against some imagined dogmatic strawman really says more about you than it does about them.
No, it's not.
Heck, the way the public considers religion today is closer to the way the public considered religion during the time of Galileo than is the way the public considers science.
But when we are talking about vaccines, flat earthers, etc, then how can you possibly justify that it's bad for
>people are castigated for not believing in scientific "truths".
?
Perhaps flat earthers is a silly but harmless phenomenon, but there is real pain and suffering from other kinds of science denial such as the antivaxxers.
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There's a beautiful article that I think serves as a model example. In the field of education, there's a certain idea that's believed by many teachers, but which scientists (in cognitive psychology / learning science) know to be a myth. Against this background, this article (“Why mythbusting fails”) discusses why the scientists' approach towards transmitting this knowledge fails to convince its audience. It is worth reading, because it is really about persuasion, about dealing with disagreements between people: https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-...
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Science is many things:
1. A wonderful method for arriving at reliable knowledge. The best we have.
2. The set of facts accumulated via that method. This set will always be tentative, incomplete and contain some fraction of false positives.
3. The set of facts believed by professional scientists today.
What would be good for people to trust would be (1) > (2) > (3), but for people taking sides, the priority is inverted: they care more that people be on the side of science (against religion or whatever), than that they apply the scientific method wherever possible.
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In his books like The Mosaic Distinction and the Price of Monotheism, the author Jan Assmann discusses the idea of “counterreligions”. Though many people in Western society may no longer be religious in one sense, they still retain certain attitudes picked up from it, like the missionary/crusader zeal of treating those who do not believe in the same things as them as enemies needing to be either converted or fought, general condescension towards “heathens”, etc. We see this in discussions about politics or nearly anything, where people neatly get polarized into opposing sides rather than a gradual spectrum as one may expect.
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In this very article, see things like:
> Science denial, however, is like crime: combating it requires…
(treating disbelievers as heretics to be fought)
> Galileo cleverly acknowledged the values of his enemies.
I don't know about Galileo's views, but why view acknowledgement of others' values as merely a “clever” device? How about replacing “cleverly” with “sincerely”, and “enemies” with “real people we'd like to persuade”?
I don't really know of any science enthusiasts that want to burn the religious or their texts (well, I did as a teenager, but they grew out of it), but I know more than a few religious who want science out of their schools, deeply believe religion should be more involved in our government, and let's not forget the anti-vaccination movement. These people are neighbors and co-workers, and while they themselves are generally not horrible people those sorts of ambitions feel dangerous at best.
Anyway, my point is - I would rather have a problem with overenthusiastic science fans that could use some perspective, than a problem of people not vaccinating their children and "rolling coal"
When people have lost faith in every institution, it is hard to trust the govt. to work nicely with massive corporations to inject needles in their children, especially in an environment where half the kids aren’t living in iron lungs.
People not "believing" in science is a huge freaking problem, and is just one of many symptoms of the hellbound handbasket America finds itself in right now. Science by definition is not something you choose to have faith in or not. The only way to disagree with science is more science that disproves the previously accepted science, it's not a choice of faith or belief. The way you can tell that science doesn't function as a faith-based enterprise is the fact that one of the greatest accomplishments a scientist could have is disproving long-held scientific assumptions, which itself can only happen with reproducible results.
For example, a Pew Research poll from several years ago showed that fully 2/3 of self-identified Republican voters were Young Earth Evangelicals, meaning they believe that the planet is ~6000 years old and any evidence to the contrary is either wrong, or a literal test of faith by an apparently insecure deity who will only be satisfied by the basest, most unthinking fealty imaginable. That's obviously going to have an impact over the long term.
What does this lead to? People like Lamar Smith being made the chair of the House Science Committee. Someone who literally doesn't "believe" in science, who has used his authority for the last 6 years to literally squash scientific research that didn't lead to the predetermined conclusions that his faith (and more likely, his donors and voters) assures him are true.
TL;DR I am not at all remotely concerned about people putting signs on their lawns stating that their household believes in science. It's a couple decades too late but whatever. It's a sad world we live in where that's something that anyone feels like they need to publicly state support for.
I wish. In the US a huge number of people (large enough to be dangerous) reject climate change consensus, think that evolution shouldn't be taught in schools, are "skeptical" about vaccinating their children (I use quotes because skepticism implies reasonableness), think that the earth is 6000 years old, or think that abstinence-only sex education is effective. Blind adherence to current scientific consensus (whatever that may be) would be better than the hot mess is going on in the US right now. Not enough people in the US actually believe in scientific consensus in general for this to be a significant problem yet.
There have been a few incidents of fraud committed in support of that consensus, undermining credibility, but the biggest problem is that the consensus comes with a plan of action that is completely unacceptable to many people. If accepting the consensus would lead to that plan of action, then the consensus can not be accepted.
Climate change consensus wouldn't be worth rejecting if it didn't lead to a plan of action.
You might think this violates the purity of science or something (which was already violated by that fraud) but science is not the issue here. At this point, nobody is doing science. The issue is a struggle for/against imposing heavy-handed economic control that severely changes the world's balance of economic power. Most likely the enforcement would require war. The control itself can be objectionable, even without the issue of international competition, because many people insist on a high level of personal economic freedom.
>At this point, nobody is doing science.
Do you have a background in scientific research? I see no point debating further unless you do.
To be clear: the people you see as being on "your team" are totalitarian, and you are cheerleading for them.
If the only way to stop a totalitarian take-over of the economy is to reject a claim, then that is what must be done. How else? How would it be possible to accept that global warming is human caused and also possible for humans to stop, yet ensure that nothing is done about it?
In other words, the requirement is to prevent eco-fascist totalitarian control of the economy. How can that be realistically achieved without rejecting the claim? If accepting the claim leads to eco-fascist totalitarian control of the economy, as it seems to, they the only possible solution is to reject the claim.
I suspect you actually want a totalitarian take-over of the economy, no matter the science. Global warming is a convenient excuse. Your desire for that political change gives you a bias toward believing that global warming is both disastrous and avoidable. It also happens to be a belief expressed in the New Zealand shooter's manifesto; he was an eco-fascist.
Also, LOL, I'm not going to dox myself with a credential war with an x220 on the internet.
You just proved the parent's point...
How did we prove that it doesn't work? I agree that it doesn't work, but I have a very hard time imagining how to make a study to prove it.
edit: these studies consider "effective" to mean "reduces teen pregnancy + STI rates". Many organizations including WHO consider what they call comprehensive sex education to be a human right, in which case abstinence-only education can never be effective.
Also, they classify the states according to the legislation about abstinence-only education:
0: no mention of abstinence
1: mention, but no promotion
2: promotion of abstinence
3: stressing abstinence as the fundamental teaching standard
It's very interesting that the pregnancy rates for 0 is very similar than 2. 1 is better, 3 is worse. Perhaps the states that don't mention it apply a strong implicit social pressure?
About the second one: I didn't expect this result.
(Also vaccinate your kids dammit)
"Hanging in the Louvre Museum in Paris is an imposing painting, The Preaching of St Paul at Ephesus. In this 1649 work by Eustache Le Sueur, the fiery apostle lifts his right hand as if scolding the audience, while clutching a book of scripture in his left. Among the rapt or fearful listeners are people busily throwing books into a fire."
Okay, but in the USA, over the last 60 years we've seen an astonishing loss of religious authority, as well as parental authority, as well as teaching authority. There is no way to bring back scientific authority without also discussing the wider loss of authority.
Nor is the USA alone, but it is not the entire West that is effected. Anyone who wants to see the contrast can visit Britain, and then Poland. In Poland, you can still see the older social structures, and older notions about both religious authority and teaching authority and parental authority.
In the USA, in the year 2019, it is common to see these things:
1. a person at a party says they are "spiritual, but I don't believe in organized religion"
2. a parent spanks their child because their child misbehaved, and the parent is then investigated by the authorities
3. a teacher goes off script to offer their personal opinion of the Vietnam War, and then finds their whole career is at risk
Every single profession is now under attack in the USA. The older spirit of independent professions is now under attack.
I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just pointing out it is a fact of life. There has been some progress made in stamping out certain abuses of power, but at the cost of stripping most of the professions of their previous independence.
If you'd like to bring back scientific authority, you need to address the wider issues.
There used to be institutions that were regarded as the gold standard for truth: the FDA, top science journals, the CDC, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and so on.
These weren't necessarily regarded as infallible. But it was widely recognized that they undertook a best effort to get at the truth, and would tend to err on the side of caution.
That trust is falling apart. Many people, including in the HN community, cheer this decline. They see it, not entirely unreasonable, as the downfall of despised "elites" and opening the discourse to other voices, making it more democratic.
But while the tearing down of institutions is well ahead, there is little indication that the envisioned surge of bottom-up publishing is anywhere as successful: almost no structures have appeared, for example, that provide the nitty-gritty coverage of local politics.
Nor can I think of any actual corruption by these organisations exposed by amateur sleuths. Even Snowden relied on traditional media to get his message out. Just today, the Seattle Times (old media) revealed their investigation of the broken process of Boeing's certification of the 737 Max.
"Critical thinking" is what's usually recommended in these times of information overload and bad actors. But the term just seems to give license to everyone to make up their own facts as needed. The result is a discourse devoid of agreed-upon facts. If you cite inflation data in economic discussions, the most likely reply is a conspiracy theory about the data being corruptly influenced. "Think critically", they say, "who profits from <X>, I bet they get a big fat payoff from <Y> for telling this lie".
Wouldn't the simple fact that the CDC now owns patents on vaccines qualify at least as a conflict of interest that would justifiably erode trust?
Trust is power and power corrupts. Its part of a natural cycle that occurs. This is why we develop organizations with strict constraints and methods of accountability such as the separate branches of government.
How many times have you seen this statement on this board alone: "Given the passage of enough time after your death, anything you did won't matter." or some form or fashion.
Ok, maybe transferring authority to individuals as in (1) could be counted as a loss, but in a topic so personal that it would be ridiculous for somebody to claim authority over others in it anyway.
Nope, all of these are in simultaneous rapid decline in esteem and status.
A lot of times one can actually undermine the other because they have two conflicting views of the world.
You can make an argument that as older forms of authority (family, church) have weakened, we have been placed at the mercy of the remaining forms (governments, employers). But in this mixed picture how do we know whether science goes in the winners or losers column?
Some of the problems lie closer to home than the content of scientific journals. Henry Gee is a senior editor of Nature. He wrote an article for the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/science/occams-corner/2013/sep/1...
Rashly, he attempts to explain p-values, and gets it wrong, saying "For example, one might be able to accord a value to one's conclusion not of "yes" or "no" but "P<0.05", which means that the result has a less than one in 20 chance of being a fluke."
Respect for scientific authority has fallen because of self-sabotage by senior figures.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/plan-replicate-50-hi...
https://elifesciences.org/collections/9b1e83d1/reproducibili...
It was common for people in the US to reject the idea of smoking as a cause of lung cancer until like the 1980s. Scientific consensus on this fact was reached in the 60s and was suspected for a while before that. Yet, it took like 40 years for the public to agree.
Think about what's happening now with climate change. Scientists aren't undermining their own position, their authority and credibility is under direct attack; originally by moneyed interest, but today mostly through political indoctrinates. People view scientists as left-wingers out to undermine conservative policies and seek to undermine their authority and influence. Today, these people have much more reach and influence than in times past.
I guess that they would disbelieve that smoking caused lung cancer out of loyalty to the version of feminism that was current in their youth. If so, then the reluctance to accept the authority of science about tobacco is an idiosyncratic tale, specific to a powerful, pre-existing social meaning.
You're exaggerating.
It did not take until after the year 2000 for the public to believe that smoking causes cancer.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894634/
> The public relations campaign -- which would extend for over 40 years -- was designed with the goal of reassuring the public, especially current smokers, that the question of whether smoking caused harm was an “open controversy” (1, 4, 14).
> A poll conducted in 1966 found only 40% of Americans recognizing smoking as a major cause of cancer, while 27% said it was a minor cause and one-third said the science was not yet able to tell (2). In 2001 Gallup re-asked this same question and found 71% of Americans naming smoking as a major cause of cancer, with 11% saying it was a minor cause and 16% unsure (26).
The way I think of it, for us to believe physicists to the extent it affects us is easy. We just buy gadgets, and they seem to work. We outsource the vetting of the science to companies, who outsource to engineers, who outsource to scientists. The engineers should be able to see pretty quickly if the science is somehow wrong.
Medicine affects us as well, and it's a bit harder. Cause and effect is a lot harder to determine, and as such there's a lot of controversy. Since there's ambiguity, there's an incentive to sell us bogus cures, and as such a (in my mind) reasonable skepticism of what we're being sold.
Climate science is even worse. There's only one climate, so cause and effect is really hard to determine, at least for the "consumer" (voter). There's not only business motives, but political motives.
I think science advocates should think in these epistemic terms, rather than throwing a tantrum because the ignorant masses don't believe them. Maybe there's a way we could set up credible institutions that could vet the scientific establishment for us. "Peer review" is not credible, especially given all the bad stories I hear about how that system is broken. Can a maverick get in there and publish something completely contrary to the "consensus" and be taken seriously? I have no idea. All I hear about is "quack scientists" who don't believe in climate change, and I get real suspicious.
Politics corrupts what it touches. It's corruption itself so it looks for sources authority to accomplish it's goals. When it finds one of those sources it uses it and then turns it into itself.
We design our scientific curriculum based on the philosophy of Popper, who was all about the scientific method. We teach that there are rules which lead to progress. There are counterpoints to Popper that don't appear in the modern curriculum.
There was Lakatos, who said that scientific "progress" was more about regime change, and Feyerabend who thought that science was a fundamentally anarchic activity.
If there were a little more Feyerabend in our curriculum, and a little less Popper, I think we'd be in a much better state. It's a scary step to take--to admit that all facts are alternative facts--but once you take it you find you're faced with the same old problem, just without the authority: which facts to use? Well, that depends on theories are available for the combination and utilization of these facts, and as it turns out, the theories that the "authorities" champion happen to still be the better ones.
But we don't teach people to evaluate competing theories, we teach them to settle down and apply the right theories, because we have the authority to do so. It is that very attachment to authority that is undermining our ability to educate people about science.
That's easy: the ones that are confirmed by experiments.
Feyerabend was correct in calling science "anarchic" in that there is not one "scientific method" that will always point you at the right facts. Scientists do whatever works.
But Feyerabend was wrong in thinking that, because of that, "all facts are alternative facts". It is possible to establish facts. You do that by experiments. It's just that there's no rule that will tell you in every case which experiments to do. You have to figure it out each time.
But it gets tricky in cases where you're deciding between facts whose enclosing theories are incompatible. Is gravity a force, or is it an acceleration? Each is a fact in its own theory--the more relevant question has to do with your situation: which theory is more useful?
Your epistemology appears to allow for the absoluteness of facts to be itself an absolute fact. Mine doesn't. From your perspective I must appear to be out of touch with reality, and from my perspective you appear to be resting an awful lot on circularity. People have been having this debate for millennia, I don't think we're going to resolve it this year.
I think that a more fruitful question would be this: If one highschool uses textbooks that acknowledge that the philosophy of science is not itself a science--and presents the various competing views, and another highschool uses textbooks that assert the absolute truth of scientific facts without justification--which highschool produces more parents that opt their children out of vaccinations?
The nature of facts meta-epistemic, and therefore can't be a matter of knowable truth--in that domain, utility is all we have. The vaccination debate, however (I just picked an example from a hat, feel free to substitute your favorite pseudoscience) is a clash between two theories, one with great justification, and one with hardly any. It only persists because we don't educate people to evaluate competing theories, so low-effort alternatives appear to wide audiences as viable contenders.
I would call that a model, not a fact. And, as the saying goes, all models are wrong.
If it's impossible to do an experiment that shows one model to be better than another in a situation, then the choice is meaningless. Both are fine.
As science gets more complex, we either need to create a way for people to perform this bottom-up reasoning themselves, or we need to appeal to authority.
Appeal to authority is dangerous and anti-scientific. IMO, people are right to reject that.
Also, there are still judgments involved even with this task as you describe it. How is it decided which experiments support or refute a given theory/hypothesis? How widely do we cast our net for what theories/hypotheses get included? Do we impose requirements on the experiments themselves, and if so, what?
In my experience, the HN crowd will heavily downvote comments that question the metaphysics assumed in other readers' posts. Without regard to the validity or applicability of such a comment, it's likely to cost you karma. I don't think this forum will entertain the kind of discussion you're trying to have, sadly.
This isn't deciding between facts. It's deciding between different theoretical interpretations of the same facts. The facts of gravity didn't change when Einstein discovered General Relativity. All that changed was the theoretical model.
> Your epistemology appears to allow for the absoluteness of facts to be itself an absolute fact.
I don't know what you mean by "facts" if facts aren't absolute. Once you do an experiment and record certain results, those results don't change. That's why we call them facts.
If you are claiming that those facts can change when we change theoretical models, I have no idea why you believe that. If you're agreeing that those facts don't change when we change theoretical models, then at least we agree on that, and then it's just a matter of me thinking your use of language is highly idiosyncratic.
> If one highschool uses textbooks that acknowledge that the philosophy of science is not itself a science--and presents the various competing views, and another highschool uses textbooks that assert the absolute truth of scientific facts without justification--which highschool produces more parents that opt their children out of vaccinations?
You're assuming that opting children out of vaccinations is necessarily a bad thing. But it might not be.
Consider: when you vaccinate someone, there is a balance between two risks. If the person is vaccinated, there is some probability that they will suffer harm due to the vaccination. If the person is not vaccinated, there is some probability that they will suffer harm from catching the disease the vaccine protects against.
In the world of half a century ago, when I was getting all the usual shots as a child, the second risk was demonstrably much higher than the first, because all of those diseases were common enough that the probability of catching them if you weren't vacccinated was significant, while the probability of suffering harm due to the vaccine was small (but not zero).
But in the world of today, where all of those diseases are extremely rare--precisely because of such a huge fraction of the population getting vaccinated in the past--the probability of catching the disease if you aren't vaccinated is much lower. So now even a much lower probability of some kind of harm from the vaccine itself can justify not getting vaccinated. And since probabilities that low are very hard to assess anyway, it is by no means unreasonable for some parents to be unwilling to vaccinate their children without having to have any wacky beliefs. For example, if a parent has a concern about the mercury in thimerosal (a common preservative used in vaccines), even if the risk of that harm is low, it might still be enough for a reasonable parent not to take the risk.
Note that this logic also allows parents to adjust to further changes, such as the recent increase in incidence of a number of diseases like measles. Such an increase pushes the tradeoff back towards vaccination even if there are low probability risks from the vaccine that haven't been fully quantified.
I think this is also a good example of the exact opposite point, however, that there is a decline in authority.
What you describe here is a rational assessment of risks, but it is also a collective action problem: the individual risk of infection is low precisely because everyone else vaccinates their children.
A Nash equilibrium generates a suboptimal outcome, where disease prevalence increases to the point where the perceived risks are equal. Worse yet, this has negative externalities for others, such as those too young to take a vaccine or who are allergic, since they can no longer rely on herd immunity.
Collective action problems like this are usually resolved with some kind of coordinating authority. In some environments that authority can be normal social suasion, but in others it needs to be explicitly regulatory.
Yes, this is true. However, this is easy for individuals to take into account as the percentage of vaccinated individuals changes: if fewer people get vaccinated, the incentive for a particular individual to do so increases. So I don't see this in itself as a collective action problem.
> A Nash equilibrium generates a suboptimal outcome, where disease prevalence increases to the point where the perceived risks are equal.
Not quite until perceived risks are equal; until perceived costs are equal. In other words, the equilibrium (which can change over time as the percentage of vaccinated individuals changes--see above) is where the expected cost of getting vaccinated exactly equals the expected cost of not getting vaccinated.
This in itself does not mean the outcome is suboptimal. However...
> this has negative externalities for others, such as those too young to take a vaccine or who are allergic
...this does, since the externalities are not considered by individuals when making their risk-cost calculations.
> Collective action problems like this are usually resolved with some kind of coordinating authority. In some environments that authority can be normal social suasion, but in others it needs to be explicitly regulatory.
The main coordinating authority in our society seems to me to be schools requiring kids to be vaccinated. That sets a hard ceiling on the percentage of non-vaccinated children, since parents who do not want to vaccinate have to either home school or pay for some form of private tutoring.
The question would be whether this needs to be a hard requirement, vs. simply an assessment of how many kids are actually vaccinated in the population and whether that percentage is low enough to have a significant negative impact on herd immunity.
But even that's not really the question, since, as I noted above, individuals can factor in how much herd immunity there is when making their own vaccination decisions. The only real coordination issue is due to the negative externalities: some percentage of people can't get vaccinated and so herd immunity is the only thing protecting them. So the real question is whether the percentage of people vaccinated because they voluntarily choose to get vaccinated after considering their individual costs vs. benefits is low enough that the risk to the people who can't get vaccinated is unacceptably high because of decreasing herd immunity.
I don't know if anyone has actually tried to analyze the issue this way.
You seem to believe that facts are like rocks: You can look at a rock with one pair of glasses, and then you can put a different pair of glasses on and be reasonably assured that you're looking at the same rock. This works because the laws of physics give us a context in which rocks can be individuated. Reality is a convenient authority for this sort of thing.
So far as I can tell, there is no such authority for facts. What wider context is there to appeal to if you want to know whether you're looking at the same fact in a different light, or a new fact? If you know of such a method, I am sincerely interested to know it.
Consider the Michelson Morely experiment. Initially, it established that the velocity of the aether relative to the Earth was 0. Now, we look back on it and say that it established that the speed of light in certain directions does not depend on certain orbital characteristics of the earth. I don't think it's so crazy to imagine a future where a new means of interpreting experiments has taken hold, and from which we would give yet a third description for the experiment established. I think this situation is simpler if these all count as separate facts.
> The facts of gravity didn't change when discovered General Relativity. All that changed was the theoretical model.
Do "the facts of gravity" include the predictions made by the theory of gravity? Because in a number of notable cases they did in fact change when Einstein's theory became the one we use for gravity.
Speaking of Einstein, before he pubished his paper on special relativity, wasn't it a fact that the velocity of a bullet fired from a train (relative to the track) is the sum of the train's velocity and the bullet's velocity? (i.e. the only relevant transformations re: velocity are galilean transformations)? We may not have noticed that this seemingly absolute fact was actually only a fact according to the galilean theory of motion, because no competing theories were available. But once alternatives became available, it was necessary to relativize the fact and add the "according to" part.
Given that we can't know which facts might later need to be relativized, isn't the safer move to assume that all of them are in scope for this kind of change? If we managed to install in everyone a proper respect for scientific authority, would Einstein have had the courage to disregard the fact about how velocities are added?
Huh? You just described it: reality is the authority.
> I think this situation is simpler if these all count as separate facts.
No, they are different theoretical descriptions of the facts. The facts are the particular experimental apparatus Michelson and Morley used and the particular numbers they recorded when they made their measurements.
> Do "the facts of gravity" include the predictions made by the theory of gravity?
Of course not. Predictions aren't facts. They're things that you compare with facts in order to test theoretical models.
> Speaking of Einstein, before he pubished his paper on special relativity, wasn't it a fact that the velocity of a bullet fired from a train (relative to the track) is the sum of the train's velocity and the bullet's velocity?
No. As far as I know nobody at that time had made accurate enough measurements of the velocity of anything to be able to test the Newtonian prediction vs. the relativity prediction. But that doesn't mean the Newtonian prediction was correct before relativity was discovered. It certainly doesn't mean that something changed about the world described by physical models when physicists switched from using the Newtonian model to using the relativity model. All that changed was the model: the world the model was describing didn't change.
> Given that we can't know which facts might later need to be relativized
Facts never need to be relativized. Relativizing is something that happens when you switch theoretical models. You seem to be consistently confusing facts with models.
The most disturbing part isn't not trusting scientist but not trusting evidence, even that gathered by themselves.
It is one thing to say believe light has infinite speed but after playing around with a laser and a receiver noticing the reflection time varies. It is another to insist it has it even after doing research and experimentation.
I suspect Sophism is the main culprit really - arguing based on feelings as opposed to facts. Now feelings have their place but their role is to guide goals. Not wanting to take another part time job on top of a full time one for more money is fair. Denying that taking an extra job would boost total income is delusionals (the sustainability of doing so is another topic).
It does seem that for some big ticket items like global warming the way to go would be have an open sourced app people can download and play with the simulations themselves.
The scientists working on this stuff do make efforts to put this material together in a comprehensible form, so it's all out there. But it's very hard to trace anything back to the original data, and it seems like we're getting to the point where enough tools to do this are becoming ubiquitous.
> I suspect Sophism is the main culprit really - arguing based on feelings as opposed to facts.
I think that's very much our default behavior. When I've seen policy discussions it seems overwhelmingly that people look at it through a personal lens, and then they've set themselves up so criticism of their position is criticism of them. And then it's bloody difficult to deescalate without seeming condescending.
It all depends on who writes the simulation. Tweak a few parameters and you have a balmy, lush green paradise in the Midwest without any winter snow.
No where in the damn fine article is the phrase "books of nature" mentioned. The article is describing the context in which modern scientific thought gained currency among the educated and the powerful, both in 17th century Europe and the 19th century Ottoman Empire, how that authority waned in the mid-20th century and today, and how we can work to use those historical examples to "break the whack-a-mole" machine rather than playing whack-a-mole with vaccine deniers, flat-earthers, and so forth.
Here is the context from the fine article the poster is upset with:
"Hanging in the Louvre Museum in Paris is an imposing painting, The Preaching of St Paul at Ephesus. In this 1649 work by Eustache Le Sueur, the fiery apostle lifts his right hand as if scolding the audience, while clutching a book of scripture in his left. Among the rapt or fearful listeners are people busily throwing books into a fire. Look carefully, and you see geometric images on some of the pages."
In the context of 1649, a painting that depicted the burning of geometry books had a very particular meaning. However, instead of noticing that the discussion is focused on Le Suer's painting, phd413 decided that his religion was being attacked.
Does this context make phd514's comment make any more sense? If not, in what context does it make sense?
The only context that I can see is that of a religious person who didn't read the fine article before getting upset and commenting.
As an aside, so what if the bible says those books were full of sorcery? So what if they were? I don't reckon at any time that burning books has been a considered a great idea by people who read, you know, books. (I might make an exception if you found an authentic functional Necronomicon.)
The people were destroying their own books after hearing a new way of looking at the world. How different is this from some kid throwing away his Joel Osteen book after taking a philosophy class? But I agree that this was impulsive and they should have given them away instead of destroying them.
phd514 makes a valid point: this article needlessly provokes conflict between science and religion, even saying with concern that "St Paul is making a comeback", the horror, as if encouraging people to burn books and "reject science" is his main work in history.
Compared to this Nature article, Ataturk was very direct. Read these quotes that I found using 3 seconds of difficult googling, and then decide on what side of the debate he would land.
"I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. He is a weak ruler who needs religion to uphold his government; it is as if he would catch his people in a trap. My people are going to learn the principles of democracy, the dictates of truth and the teachings of science. Superstition must go. Let them worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him against the liberty of his fellow-men" [1]
"It is known by the world that, in our state administration, our main program is the Republican People's Party program. The principles it covers are the main lines that illuminate us in management and politics. But these principles should never be held equal to the dogmas of books that are assumed to have descended from the sky. We have received our inspirations directly from life, not from sky or unseen." [2]
--------------------------
[1] Quoted in Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey, by Andrew Mango; "In a book published in 1928, Grace Ellison quotes [Atatürk], presumably in 1926-27", Grace Ellison Turkey Today (London: Hutchinson, 1928)
[2] Atatürk'ün Türkiye Büyük Millet Meclisi'nin V. Dönem 3. Yasama Yılını Açış Konuşmaları (in Turkish). "... Dünyaca bilinmektedir ki, bizim devlet yönetimimizdeki ana programımız, Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi programıdır. Bunun kapsadığı prensipler, yönetimde ve politikada bizi aydınlatıcı ana çizgilerdir. Fakat bu prensipleri, gökten indiği sanılan kitapların doğmalarıyla asla bir tutmamalıdır. Biz, ilhamlarımızı, gökten ve gaipten değil, doğrudan doğruya yaşamdan almış bulunuyoruz."
Now, if you're making an entirely separate argument that the author went out of his way hurt people's feelings and "provoke conflict," that's another story.
I don't think that's the case, but maybe I've got a tin ear for that sort of thing these days. I'm not persuaded.
Let's say that, hey, maybe he did. My response is, "So, what?"
The target audience for this article or this book isn't the sort of person who is going to get their feelings hurt by suggesting that the St. Paul depicted in the painting (which had its own context, the 17th century European context, which is the context described by the article). The target audience of this book is the set of people who commonly think, "Gee, I wish I could convince lots more folks that global warming is real before large swaths of the world become uninhabitable by multi-cellular animal life."
Frankly, the kind of person who would let this up their nose is probably not going to be persuaded by anything we have to say, anyway.
"...how that authority [of scientific thought] waned in the mid-20th century and today..."
The high point of the authority of science in the United States was probably between ~1950, after Sputnik, and ~1980, say before Reagan's "Star Wars" proposal. Certainly, the descent had started by the early '90s, when a scientist went before a congressional committee and couldn't find anything more useful to say about the SSC project than "the God particle".
The latter brings up a good point: the authority of science would probably be more respected if scientists didn't spend so much time fighting each other.
Regarding the article being poorly researched, maybe you have a particular part that you felt was wrong? I'd hope that the author wouldn't need to research his new book before writing about it.
I have no idea how an author would submit a book preview for peer review.
For a counterpoint: Galileo went to prison for his convictions. Do scientists nowadays project the same force of argument and power of will? There is widespread distrust from scientists themselves about a lot of the science being published. Most sciences leech off credibility from the success of physics. But credibility ranges from "most findings being published are likely false", to being unable to reproduce, to liberal arts where "everything goes". When scientists can't be even arsed to publish their preprints on a public repository, are they willing to stand by their science like galileo, and is it a surprise that laymen have started having their doubts? Also, I follow a bunch of scientists of my field on twitter and half their tweets are political. Perhaps if some scientists were not so overly political, the public would not respond in kind.
> The authority of science rested on people, not on tools or methods or charts and data.
But Mustafa Kemal was a military general, and it was the military that took it upon them to guard the secular state in Turkey, up to this day (last coup was 2 years ago). It's not easy for science to win over people. it takes work
It is similar case with science, maybe it is not that perfect as we used to view it. It is very good at where the incentives are well aligned - but they are not always 'adequate': https://equilibriabook.com/inadequacy-and-modesty/
Climate change skeptics often question the financial motivation of climatologists. It's certainly something to consider, but they rarely propose alternatives.
For example, a committee could be set up to investigate climate change science. The members would be already-retired volunteers from non-climate STEM disciplines who get the same stipend regardless of their findings, and are not permitted to receive money for books or speeches on the subject afterward. Their background would have to be mostly apolitical, meaning any political opinions in the public record are fleeting and incidental. The selection process would be similar to jury duty.
I don't think this argument is being made in good faith.
More importantly, it's kind of absurd on face. Science pays horribly. See: literally any thread on HN about PhD programs. See also: levels.fyi vs. the starting salary for asst. profs at your local state university branch campus.
Whenever someone makes this argument, I show them a picture of the apartment I lived in during grad school and then point out that even the "winners" of the rat race who get professorships can leave academia and double their income over night.
So participating in a giant fraud would actually be the most dangerous option for them, financially. Instead, they could expose it and, if convincing, would at the very least make a lot of money on book deals and the lecture circuit. Maybe even a Nobel.
Alternatively, they could switch their focus. With a solid foundation in physics, dynamic systems, etc. there are any number of topics they could easily work on.
Thus, I'd like to ask that 40%: what kind of commission or study technique would you be satisfied with?
Meaning, the article doesn't say science is supposed to be an authority? Let's see:
"It is tempting to think that scientific authority is natural and will soon reassert itself like a sturdy self-righting boat knocked over by a rogue wave. The ugly truth is that science is more like Facebook, whose positive features are also vulnerabilities. Precisely because it allows us to connect and share, Facebook creates opportunities for misuse. Similarly, science is an exemplary form of enquiry because it is technical, fallible, done in communities and able to reshape our values. But these very features allow detractors to reject the authority even of eminent experts."
Sure sounds to me like the author thinks science should be an authority.
"Early proponents of the authority of science had to understand the machine and develop countermeasures. Galileo, a rhetorical bulldozer, was a master at it. When his enemies appealed to theology, he went right back at them by citing their own authorities in neat ripostes, such as “The Bible tells us the way to go to heaven, not the way the heavens go!” This strategy is harder in today’s world."
In other words, bullshit arguments from authority are harder to make today than they were in Galileo's time. And the author thinks this is a problem.
No, what I am doing is giving meaning to the word "authority" according to how the author actually uses it.
There is no excuse for a scientific magazine to publish articles with methodology that has been shown to misrepresent the problem at hand so many times. It certainly doesn’t help people’s trust in science when they do so.
While doubtless describing many, this is a straw man when it comes to broad mistrust of scientific expertise. Issues like psychology's replication crisis and the continuously flip flopping advocate-science in areas like nutrition make people justly suspicious of the scientific establishment, regardless of how they would feel about an ideal scientific process.
Take all "I f-g love science"-like websites that portray research as people spending public money on if chocolate makes you better at sex.
Science is the rejection of authority in the 'authorial' sense of the word. Pre-scientific thinking relied almost entirely on authorities to determine what was right or true. Science is thus the rejection of the notion that an authority of any kind is a substitute for evidence.
Scientific knowledge, when presented as an authority is thus just as abhorrent as text from any other authority. We scientists trust it because we often have no other choice, but also because over decades of training we have all done the labs to actually see these principles operate first hand. Thus we accept the principles based on our own experience of them.
I hate to say it, but if someone hasn't had at least some exposure to a laboratory setting of some kind, or experimentation of some kind, then the fact that scientific knowledge is "right" is completely lost on them, and it is indistinguishable from any other knowledge from authority. Belief in the scientific process might be a substitute, but at that point it is no different that belief in revealed truth -- right for the wrong reasons means failure is just as likely.
There shouldn't be an appeal to "scientific authority" but rather to empirical replicable testing and theories.
Also, the basis of science is the humble admission that what we believe to be true today is only true until further testing disproves it. It's the basis of scientific theory that it is true ( not forever ) but only until future tests may show it to be false. And this is why modern science has continually progressed since there isn't an "authority" to prevent new discoveries and thoughts and ideas. It's why the current "lamarckian" epigenetic studies can happen which goes against the "darwinist orthodoxy" of biology the past 150 years.
The problem with science today is the same problem with news, media, religion, schools, etc. Politics. Somehow politics has pushed its way into every facet of our life and politics tends to ruin everything it touches.
And yet, is not Turkey still struggling with that same question, 100 years later?
"[Authority], [Hannah Arendt] thought, is neither innate nor automatic, and facts alone don’t have it. It is possible only thanks to institutions that create what she called public space. Without that, it is possible for people who are not personally accomplished, who pontificate in recycled stock phrases, who polarize situations and who are insatiable braggarts coveting media coverage, to acquire power and influence."
And how often have proponents of science been guilty of those same actions?
This is almost perfectly personified in the form of Bill Nye the Science Guy post-2000 or thereabouts. I also feel this applies to practically all figures in the "pop science" scene to a lesser degree. Few meet the standard of being an "insatiable braggart" but most are attention hungry and willing to abandon their stated principles in pursuit of furthering their influence.
And just like with basic medicine people are now saying "Show me!" and "What about this?" and the scientists are either unwilling or unable to defend their positions.
That's why the trust in science is eroding.
Science that depends on authority for success is the kind of science that attacked Galileo. It's the kind of science that attacks people today for not caving to whatever prevailing consensus holds sway.
Science questions the status quo to see what reality really is, and is not threatened when questions are asked.
Right now science is automating their jobs, nagging them about driving their cars (CO2), and generally making the world complicated. Others tell them that it's someone else's fault, and all they need is the will to attack that enemy. Science has no counterpoint to this marketing message. So why buy into a product that doesn't tell you it has a solution to your problems?
Science isn't producing, so the ever-fickle public looks for market competition.
How to teach one to think critically? And do so truly without bias or prejudice?
Scientific authority is dying because it's not in people's interest to take scientists as an "authority". That's not to say that the cynicism that's replacing it is better, though.
I’m not sure that’s settled.
The collapse of the news (economically-classifieds, technologically-fake news from Russia, literarily-the best jobs are outside of media organizations, locality - no local news, etc.) has caused people to lose faith in every institution.
The fun is in predicting where this ends up...
Especially now that fake video news will easily be disseminated soon.
The scientific authority is that belief instilled to the public that there is an advantage, or a reason for doing things in a way backed by science, as opposed as doing things backed by authority.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hip-hop-and-mozart...
>Scientists Played Music to Cheese as It Aged. Hip-Hop Produced the Funkiest Flavor
:3
The victors of WW2 were countries that invested heavily in science and technology, and they won because they invested heavily in science and technology. Radar, sonar, flight, automatic fire-control computers, industrialization, oil refining, steel, penicillin, synthetic rubber, codebreaking, nukes - it's very likely that without them, the winners of WW2 would be very different. And many of those innovations were made by scientists who ethnically were born into "the other side", but left Europe because of Hitler's persecution of academics and scientists. This was not lost on either the US or USSR during the Cold War - we invested heavily in science & science education in the 50s and 60s because it was a way to gain a military advantage over our adversaries.
Most of the people who fought in WW2 are dead now, the institutional memory is fading, the idea of a future war for survival is largely unthinkable, and so many people don't see the point in better understanding the natural world through rigorous observation. When you're alive, you're free to have all sorts of different opinions; when you're dead, the only fact that matters is that you're dead. The natural world doesn't care whether you're alive or dead, and selection bias is the most powerful force in science.
This is not an argument that we need another war to get people to believe in science! The biggest success of science is in building a world where people are free to not believe in it. But it's worth remembering that that world might very well be temporary, and if it disappears, I'd rather be on the side with the better models of reality.
So were the losers. But you are right, both sides were forced to concentrate on developing new technologies by the mutual struggle. The more capable side won.
IMO this is one of the reasons we are observing an epistemic crisis in our political sphere, "post-truth" if you will. Where it isn't about what is said, but about who says it and the manufacturer of such knowledge. A lot of modern "woke" thought (anti-vax, flat earth, climate change denialism) centers around an opposition to modern institutions of knowledge manufacture. So anti-vax is less about believing that vaccines are harmful, and more about being opposed to the western medical establishment and forced medication by the government. Climate change denialism is less about holding the view there is no change, but more about opposing the "progressives" and the "NWO lobbyists" who are trying to force change down our throat. Flat earth movement is less about believing that the Earth is flat, and more about being opposed to anti-christian sources of knowledge as well as being opposed to information manufactured by the government. I won't say that they don't believe these things, but when we are talking about scientific authority, we need to understand why these people choose to let certain knowledge manufacturers have authority over others. In some respects, their heart is in the right place, being opposed to centralized institutions of knowledge production, it is just sad that a lot of them are prone to irritating theories like these.
Another issue with current science is of course funding difficulties and publication bias. The feedback loop of needing to have something to show for your work that is going to provide immediate benefit somewhere isn't doing any favors.
We have "scientific studies" being paid for by companies with a vested interest in the results. (Disclosure, I am writing this on an iMac with my iPhone sitting next to me). Today you can read how the Apple iWatch will detect AFIB. It is a study paid for by Apple, published by Stanford Medicine. From med.stanford.edu "The results of the Apple Heart Study highlight the potential role that innovative digital technology can play in creating more predictive and preventive health care". And who can argue with the truth of that?
But certainly the study is presented with the expectation of encouraging people to buy Apple products. Neither the Apple site nor the Stanford site make it clear that false positives for AFIB can result in unnecessary medical procedures along with their financial costs and health risks.
I'm not singling out of Apple or Stanford - I have great respect for both of them - but I have less trust in them than I did yesterday. There are far worse instances: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074....
Bringing back scientific authority requires earning trust.
a) Academia must rid self of clandestine corporate sponsorship (so make it very transparent, or do not use it)
b) Academia must rid itself of 'Coins-for-grades' systems of grading academic progress of the students
c) Academia must rid itself of so-called-new humanities that are basically preparatory schools for political activists
It is also fairly exhausting to read these maniacal conjectures, as presented by Robert P. Crease in the article, linking US President Trump with various fringe movements.
It will not work, it will not change the public view of his achievements, successes and his progress on dismantling the corrupt, do-as-we-say-but-not-as-we-do conglomerates in business, education, politics and entertainment industries.
"... The same is true of the ebbing of scientific authority, seen in everything from denialism over vaccine utility to the ambivalence in US President Donald Trump’s administration over the Iran nuclear deal, hammered out by scientists. .."
But it's impossible to have an evidence-backed rational conversation about these topics with scientists, let alone the general public.