Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dilap | Hacker News Reader

This conflates "official positions of authorities" with "science".

It's like a modern religion, with three tenets: (1) science made everything around us (iPhones and airplanes!) (2) we speak for science (3) therefore you must believe our conclusions.

But in fact, that's the opposite of a proper scientific attitude, which always admits doubt, and believes experiment over authority.

As for why authorities are increasingly losing trust, I think it's because they've been rather unreliable recently.

To use just one glaring example, the official advice on masks went overnight from, "they're useless!" to "you're killing people if you don't use them!".

Both positions were condescendingly presented as "the science". A lot of people will start to lose trust when you so glaringly contradict yourself in such a rapid amount of time.

In general, the approach seems to be when crafting public advice to not worry about presenting an accurate picture of our current knowledge, but just pick a position, pretend we are certain it is true, and hand it down as the infallible words of Science. (See also: our ever changing dietary recommendations.)

If it's real science, you would expect advice to change as more data comes in, so perhaps you should find a better example.

Can you share an example of real science where advice changed as more data come in?

The answers to this are so numerous and the logic so obvious that we as citizens may be to close to even see them.

Pretty much every bit of advice in the health sciences has been changing over multiple generations (lead and xrays are two easy examples from over 50 years ago)

But if you have witnessed that, wouldn't it be prudent to remain doubtful about any new advice coming from the field? After all, the probability of it being thrown out in the future seems to be almost 100%?

This is the fundamental misunderstanding of science. Science is a process, not a library of knowledge. You do the best you can with the info you have right now. Every time science changes, it means it’s getting better.

Anything else is religion — wanting to have a single unchanging answer forever. That’s the appeal of religion, and in the short term it might make you feel better, but in the long term it cannot adapt and eventually is out of sync with reality.

Science always wins because it can change.

But you mentioned things that were flat out wrong or harmful. I think the fundamental misunderstanding is that scientism is science.

The problem is science almost always (except maybe in physics??) pretends it has arrived at the ultimate truth this time. It’s easy to detect too: just watch for the phrase “but now we know...”

It would help tremendously if new information was presented with some humility.

100% agreed. So much so that I was compelled to expand on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26634484

Read some Feynman and I think it'll open your eyes. You could certainly engage with the fatalist nature of some of his writing, but it basically means we're always on an iterative journey of refining our position. The way I read it is that "science" is not a thing to believe in, it's merely a practice or process. You either believe the scrupulousness with the data we have today or you can guess about what will be next, but that doesn't really invalidate today's stance until it does.

Thoroughly confused? Welcome to science.

With physics perhaps it is refinement, but the example of the OP was diet, wasn't it? Changing from "fat is bad" to "fat is healthy" or whatever is not refining or iterating.

I missed where the example was diet, but even there:

Old science said “we observe that people who eat excess fat die younger, therefore we conclude that fat is bad”

Later, science said “Now that we understand more about the body, we now know that we need a certain amount of fat to live because among other things our brains are made of fat and we efficiently use fat as fuel. We have also found that there are different types of fat and that some people process each type differently. In addition, the previous conclusion was too broad. Those people who died younger also had inactive lifestyles and ate mainly processed food that’s full of sugar so we threw out most of that old data and started over with a better method. We have now observed that people who consume only healthy fats live longer than people who don’t. Therefore we conclude that a certain amount of healthy fat is good for you.”

Smoking tobacco would be the simplest example.

Anything related with astronomy, for example.

Pasteur, Galileo, Einstein, Wegener...

Ulcer provides a pretty startling example.

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/the-doctor-who-drank...

And the WHO just doubled down on the zoogenesis hypothesis of covid. Yarvin put it best: Covid is science's Chernobyl https://graymirror.substack.com/p/covid-is-sciences-chernoby...

The mask thing was a Noble Lie to prevent PPE shortages:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/yes-experts-will-lie-to-yo...

I agree that that erodes trust, but it was for "a reason".

I’ve found it very hard to find the original news sources saying not to wear masks, despite remembering how prevalent that messaging was.

Here’s reasonably old document repeating the N95 & exposure concerns. It definitely happened but I think there’s some selective memory feeding a lot of the criticism.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/dont-panic-the-compr...

Then look at astral codex for the matter, he called it out as a noble lie and had the documentation.

The larger issue is how the “science” changed on the whim of the politically expedience of it all.

Look at hydroflouriquine, the drug is perfectly safe, a politico said it was good and wham, just like that opposing political parties say that the doctors cannot use it. The trained medical professionals whose judgment in time of crises are now told by politicians at state levels to not prescribe something. We have lost our minds and the singularity cannot come fast enough.

> Noble Lie

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Lying is lying. Instead of lying they could have simply said, "Here's how to turn a tshirt into a mask. If anyone can mass produce masks, start now!"

No lie needed. In fact the lying made things worse. Saying masks arent needed means people didnt work to produce masks early on.

At the time, it was pretty clear to me from the guidance given that:

1. The efficacy of masks for protecting against SARS-CoV-2 was unknown; 2. People in high risk professions will need to wear them as a precaution even if they might not be as effective as we would like, so the advise to the public was to not buy them for this reason

Same as the "now you should wear 2 masks" bullshit, right? Tell them to wear 2 because that means they'll at least wear 1, right?

These "white lies" are why I'm done with it.

An intentionally false statement from an authority on a current event of extreme importance, no matter how noble, is extremely counterproductive, even if we leave aside moral aspects. Indeed, it will cause further statements from the authority be perceived by the public as another potential lie. Since this seems very obvious to me, I can not believe it was a "white lie".

I call it "Science with a capital S." It seeks to find and destroy an outgroup, always, like a bad cult. It portrays non-believers as harmful. There's no exceptions. Outsiders are always portrayed as dangerous with many lives at stake.

It's never about the science but about rooting out the people who disagree. It's purely a political movement and has almost nothing to do with science.

As a religion, it's the worst religion ever. Science is a tool for attaining the truth, not a top-down ideology for defining it. People who adopt the ideology ultimately lose science as a tool.

Science as a religion is known as "scientism".

(A greentext user was posting this valid point and seems to have been zapped)

Yeah but I don't like it. If only someone hadn't taken "scientology"...

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