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Comment by CivBase | Hacker News Reader

Science is a process. I repeat: science is a process. It is not a collection of special knowledge. It is not "truth". It is not the opinion of some expert or group of experts. Science is a process.

I get so sick of people talking about "trusting science". What they always seem to mean is "trusting some specific scientist or group of scientists". At this point I'm inherently cynical regarding anyone who claims to have "science" on their side.

Science is a process for establishing trust in an idea. It is a process for evaluating theories. It is a process for creating evidence. Science is a process.

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Most people don't know these process.

The notion of what science exactly is, and how to use it isn't even taught in schools. (Stuff like Popper's falsification techniques)

As a result people find that the only way they can verify information is through appealing to authority, which of cause manipulates them to their own will.

Yes, but ... there are degrees of trustworthiness. Results in physics tend to be very trustworthy and can withstand time well. On the other end of the spectrum, there are academic disciplines that have little more to offer than opinions. And there's a lot in between. You can only trust a discipline to the degree it has shown to be trustworthy.

That, of course, says nothing about trusting individuals or daring new hypotheses, which is what the article seems to address rather pointlessly, with some hand-waiving, and avoiding the difficult issues: you might want to apply the proposals to physics, precisely because it is so trustworthy, but probably not to the other disciplines.

I can further clarify that process by saying "Science is the evolution of answering questions."

What worries me the most is when people use the phrase "a majority of experts agree that..." and imply that is the absolute truth. It's not.

A majority of experts, in their day, agreed that the sun is rotating around the earth. A majority of experts agreed that time and space are absolute. And since it's trendy these days to declare absolute medical truths, a majority of experts agreed that disease is caused by imbalances of bodily fluids and that bloodletting is the cure to any disease.

You cannot deny that scientific consensus holds certain weight, though.

Yes, but "trusting the scientists" is not the same as "trusting the science". Humans are self-serving creatures. Processes are not.

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