How Americans Came to Distrust Science
bostonreview.net
bostonreview.net
If I want to be a good scientific reader, I have to add in 'We have evidence of' to nearly all pop science articles. Article writers either tend to omit this or it ends up being edited out for either obvious or obscure reasons depending on what you believe.
the•o•ry thē′ə-rē, thîr′ē► n. A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena. n. The branch of a science or art consisting of its explanatory statements, accepted principles, and methods of analysis, as opposed to practice. n. A set of theorems that constitute a systematic view of a branch of mathematics.
Yes, but theories are not /themselves/ facts. A theory is just one way to explain the facts, and though a given theory may explain the given facts well, a new theory may come along which explains the facts even better, or new facts may come along that the existing theory cannot explain. In either case, it's obvious that the theory is not itself a fact, because we may eventually have to discard it as inadequate.
I think that often the arrogance that people perceive in scientists (or at least in scientific reporting) is from the fact that the best known theory is described as a fact when it's not. It's just a model. Like any model of reality, all theories are wrong, but some are useful.
So I don't find it helpful to keep beating the dead horse about how the technical scientific term "theory" differs from the colloquial version. I think a more helpful approach is to try to educate people on how to skeptically evaluate the usefulness of any kind of claim/model/hypothesis/theory for themselves. Even if people understand the technical term "theory," it still doesn't matter unless they can evaluate a theory's usefulness.
And you have science used as a tool when it supports ones agenda. But immediately thrown away when it doesn't align with their emotions and agenda. So we have a pandemic, people trust in the science and the policies to respond, but are all too quick to throw that all away so people can protest, go to church, or let companies film movies. So you believe in science but you are ok with making exceptions for certain things? How consistent.
If we allow the agendas of mobs to disrupt science, it becomes a lot less useful.
Many leading scientists and groups don't have the courage to stick behind the science either, lest they ruffle the feathers of those who donate.
There are plenty of scientists that are bought and paid for just like politicians. We have a long track record of this with cigarettes, pharma, the sugar industry, war on fat, etc.
I don't think the problem is with any hubris in science. It is the general population that is the problem. Most people will completely disregard a statement which has any qualifiers or accept it as gospel truth (anything with "evidence suggests..." will either be taken as gospel or completely disregarded). Very few people have the ability to understand and appreciate the nuance in a scientifically correct statement.
Heck, just this year we saw WHO, CDC, and other experts gravely pronounce in February and March that wearing masks was useless in fighting COVID19, in May say the exact opposite, and the press and bien-pensants repeat this without ever examining how or why the counsel changed, all the while denouncing those who said the opposite as "not believing in science"! It's not quite WE ARE AT WAR WITH EASTASIA changing to WE ARE AT WAR WITH EURASIA in the middle of a Two-Minute Hate session, but it's close.
The best thing we can do is remove politics from science before it’s too late.
Hence some scientists happen to recommend things (ways to solve a practical problem) and are used by some politicians (through mass-media) who promote those things (far various reasons), and silent counter-arguments from other scientists. Note: consultants also often act as such "excuses", forking a "report" recommending actions which were secretly planned before their mission began.
Those scientists may shoot themselves in the foot by doing so if, as I believe, their job is to explain how things work (nothing more).
I spent ten hour a week, during 3 months (lookdown helped) parsing data for global warming as well as economic data for model like DICE and others. Which data was held back please? I would really like to know? I might have been fooled by the treasure trove of data publicly available.
Is it that the atmosphere overall have the same average temperature[0]? Its not held back. Is it that the low troposphere warming is causing the artic circle to break more often? Nah, i still found the raw data too.
What was really surprising to me about the climate change denial is that the most well-know of "solar forcing" was debunked by physics college students circa 2004, and that despite that (and the cycle ending a while ago) it is still the argument i found the most often. The better argument, low-troposhpere CO2 concentration have a low effect on radiation, i hav seen exactly twice. Without the corollary, a c02 surplus at the surface level take between 20 and 30 year to reach the hgh troposphere/low stratosphere, so every emission right now will have almost no effect until 2040. This data is not held back, and is discussed quite often too.
Did i miss something important?
[0] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
2. On a related note, is the thesis that Americans (as opposed to New Zealanders?) distrust science, or scientists, or the reporting of work by scientists. My observation is the mistrust increases as you go down that list, but it is only the last item that most people ever really experience.
to know if the author intends to include by reference, for example, "the dismal science"
Thinking about this the conclusion that is arising is Science has become more of status thing and less of an entrepreneurial tool. This is pretty evident in the reason why the really cool code is always not open source.
When we are told by scientists that masks don't work, and then, with no new research being done, we are told by scientists that we must all wear masks, it is not science being performed. It is propaganda. I distrust propaganda.
In any field in which I am not an expert it takes time to determine if something that is claimed to be science is really science, or if it is propaganda. I trust the scientific method but I don't trust that people claiming to be scientists are using it.
Which study was that?
I do think how "science" at once proclaimed that masks don't work so don't wear them we need them for hospitals made me fairly incredulous at the obvious contradiction. So I defied science. Worked out.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/masking-scien...
You can not trust something you don't understand.
Now enter some bought-up politicians who tell people "Science is a hoax believe us. You don't have to feel stupid because you don't understand it because you don't need to understand it because it is a hoax. And keep smoking your Marlboro it is good for you,
"Postmodernism" (a terribly indescript term if I might add) had nothing to say on the order of David Hume like "hey just because the sun came up today and yesterday doesn't mean you can prove it'll come up tomorrow", which is how we got Kant arguing that you can't perceive reality without fundamental laws being true, and so began modern philosophy.
The writers that are grouped under "postmodernism" were more like post-marxists: they were interested in describing social production independent of the traditional Marxist theorem that all social production (culture/ideology/religion) is a reflection of the dominant mode of the production of material things.
Michel Foucault, a pivotal writer for many other writers on post-colonialism that have become of consequence today, was explicit in interviews and his writings that the model of the "hard" sciences was what he aspired to, which is to say describing reality indendepent of human narrative interpolation.
It was the "soft" sciences of anthropology, psychology, criminology, and others, that Foucault was after. These he saw as social productions and he wanted to describe their cause, how they came about, without referring to some inherent rationalism (these studies are possible because we can make an assumption about the nature of human cognition) or Marxist historical materialism (they are Capitalist apparatuses of control).
This is what all his work is about and I hope it helps dispel this myth that "the postmodernists" are responsible, it would be more accurate to say that the interpretations and applications of those writers by American Humanities departments that the contemporary "identity politics" (post-colonialism seems more accurate to me) derives from.
Now, sometimes the experts are wrong, but that kind of situation doesn't get resolved by someone running a PR campaign on Facebook to support their pet theory. It gets resolved by hard data from careful experiments.
Sure, it just strikes me that you're willing to sorta handwaive an entire body of work that you likely only have a passing understanding of when that looks eerily close to people waving off the body of work that is science, which they likely in turn only have a passing understanding of, if that. Hard to demand people hold a higher standard when you don't do the same.
You attempted to explain a social antagonism by posing some corrupting Other badly influencing the youth, figuratively speaking, that's no different than people being anti-science which appears to them to also either be some corrupting influence or controlled by such. Social problems require more rigor than that.
They distrust scientism; the abuse of people through fear and manipulation masquerading as science.
One isn't going to engineer societies without bending the scientific method way beyond what it stands for or merits, no matter the PR methods applied.
Eugenics! The scientific management of society through experts. Scientific racism. The rise of the corporation as a new empirical organization of people.
This is so painfully obvious especially now: that science empowers political people and individuals with moral sure-footedness.
Instead of imbuing people with a doubt and skepticism (for science is bound to change with new information), science is used as a sort of license to micromanage and extend power over people and silence criticism.
Putting both of those wackadoodle groups aside, the core issue in America is a lack of trust between the major political camps. This lack of trust is unfortunately justified, as both camps often show a willingness to act in bad faith, to do "whatever it takes", ignoring the long term effects (of erosion of trust in the institutions of society).
Dr Fauci said masks didn't work in order to prevent a run on masks. Unfortunatly in the current environment the cost of that decision is very steep. The news media ran with the Russian Collusion narrative with far too much certainty. The cost of that decision, a near utter lack of trust from conservatives, is far too much. Lies about Hunter Biden's laptop being Russian disinformation... a blatant revolving door between the CIA propagandists and the media... social media banning or automatically editoralizing many widespread conservative opinions... and more trust evaporates. Trust is easily squandered and hard to regain. A media telling folks to shelter indoors due to COVID-19, and then immediately praising street rioting exacerbated an already near utter collapse in trust.
If American conservatives refuse to believe that COVID-19 is serious, or that lockdowns can work, or that climate change is a serious issue... the American progressives need to take some large measure of responsibility for that. They taught them time and time again "you cannot trust us" while saying "the most trusted source in news." Liberal/progressive institutions shirked their societal duty to actually be fair, balanced, cautious, do investigative research, and for God's sake to tell the truth rather than trying to manipulate votes.
The end does not justify the means, in no small part because few are bright enough to see the more complete set of ends.
To restore trust you must first start with respect. Allow the wingnut ideas to be spoken and spread. Put forth counternarratives and reasoned arugments rather than silencing "misinformation" (silencing alienates and drives deeper tribalism). Don't fall into the trap of believing that arguments never convince anybody -- they don't seem to because few people openly admit to being wrong or having been changed -- but they do have an effect. Respect the people while arguing the ideas. And that's just the first step. If you can't take this first step of showing respect by cherishing free speech again, America will just sink deeper into tribalism and all that it breeds.
Full disclosure: I write from New Zealand, consider myself classical liberal centrist and atheist, believe in lockdowns and socially distance, and take personal action to do my part to slow down climate change.
Are Conservative institutions incapable of doing any of this? I don’t understand. How can this only be the fault of the progressive side? Is science only the responsibility of liberals?
Most insitutions of public influence lean left by a large amount, and that lean is getting more and more extreme according to the researchers I've paid atttention to. Conservatives prefer roles in business and industry which are quite a bit less about influence. Conservative news media is an exception here, but the situation is not symmetrical: right-wing media has been utterly rejected by progressives right from the start and so nobody on the left feels betrayed by the news media like the right does. But is right wing media complicit in leading their own further astray? Absolutely.
Science is hopefully mostly populated by people much less tribal and much more skeptical than the average person. But few people get their science from scientists directly. The mostly leftwing media stands in between scientists and the populous. Science coming through a media that conservatives don't trust gets automatically binned along with everything else coming through that media. But rather than ignore it, they go hard opposite... I think it's actually to the point where reverse psychology would work very well.
It's the internet.
Anything before is historically interestingly but now meaningless.
Pre-internet I'd passively watch science shows on physics and lap String Theory up.
Now I can hear the dissenting voices and see how the String Theorists don't address the simple issues raised.
Science is dead to me and I don't think it should be revived. I think we need something better. Science doesn't have to be the best way forward. There are alternative frameworks to science.
The proposal of testable hypotheses, rejected if the tests fail? How is that "dead to you"? Is there some reality in which you can continue to successfully live a life based on beliefs that are invalidated by failed tests? A reality in which "science is dead"?
There does seem to be a weird societal belief growing in something other than evidence-based reality. Let us know how it works out for you all, in a couple generations. Personally, I remain ... unconvinced.