Scientism has become the state religion and companies are paying for indulgences.
At least they made it open access. At first I thought they bought out the entire issue so that people couldn't read it.
At least they made it open access. At first I thought they bought out the entire issue so that people couldn't read it.
I was unfamiliar with that term and googled it: it's described as "excessive belief in the power of scientific knowledge and techniques". I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts. Currently, that's only one small part of our governmental decision making process, with the other notable parts being powerful special interests and public opinion.
Could you elaborate a bit on what exactly you meant by this?
Some people believe in science. They don't take the facts and understand them, they just say "Science says this is true. Anyone who disagrees needs to be shouted down." They will shame people for expressing any doubt against a "scientific consensus". This is actually the opposite of science.
For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity, they will literally get louder and louder until you stop arguing. They won't provide any evidence, they'll just keep saying the same thing over and over.
And it happens for this that are much less certain, too.
Science is a powerful contributor to the sum of human knowledge, but it's absolutely not the only pillar of human knowledge and there's a lot of people who think that scientific advancement means we can just do away with philosophy, politics, and other fields like that altogether, as though one day with the right equations all of ethics or culture is just going to pop out of physics. These people don't just throw the baby but the whole nursery out with the bathwater in my opinion!
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity. I know people who take it to be a law, even though science itself hasn't moved it into that category. If you dare to suggest that there might be some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism for gravity
There is no scientific consensus on the mechanism that is causing gravity, at least not on the level you suggest. There is consensus on how gravity behaves, in regimes we can currently observe.
The problem with suggesting "some as-yet-undiscovered mechanism" is that you can generate arbitrary many such mechanisms, because there aren't good options yet for experimental corroboration. We all have favorite ideas for how gravity might work behind the scenes, and it absolutely is fun to speculate. But if your goal is to actually make a contribution, your need to come up with an idea that can be falsified.
In my opinion you are completely within your rights to make claims that contradict empirical findings or theoretical frameworks. There often are holes in our knowledge, and continuously re-examining established science is absolutely part of the process. Of course, the burden of proof is on you in that case. But science is absolutely meant to be a living process.
Adding to this, belief in science actually means believing in the _process_ of scientific discovery, i.e. believing that _eventually_ the "truth" will be discovered.
As you correctly point out, questioning the current consensus is a fundamental part of the process, but not all challenges to scientific knowledge are legitimate. Many (most?) concerns you hear in the mainstream media are not legitimate but based on logical fallacies, strawmen, ad hominem attacks, etc. I found this list [1] quite useful to guard against such unfounded attacks.
[1] http://utminers.utep.edu/omwilliamson/ENGL1311/fallacies.htm
Doubt based on what? This is the classic “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge”. The scientific consensus absolutely can be wrong on something, but people that read a few Facebook articles and think they’re argument holds any weight whatsoever deserve to be shamed. You want to question the scientific consensus? Conduct a study or get in a lab, have it peer reviewed. If you want to say “I think the major experts and accumulated understanding in this field are wrong ” then you are going to have to bring more to the table than some random doubts and suggestions.
> For instance, the Theory of Gravity.
Wonderful example. As almost every physicist has stories of people that send them their pet theories about theoretical physics models. Have they done mathematical models? Of course not. But they are sure their theory is going to crack this unifying theory wide open. Maybe ask yourself “if I disagree with all the experts, have they all misunderstood what I am seeing or do I not understand the subject as much as I think I do?” Shame is the cousin to humility.
Often it's just an equation that fits some data for a range of values.
Almost all laws are found in the physical sciences. Some examples are: Ohm's Law, Universal Gravitation, Coulomb's law, and Kirchhoff's laws. None of these are perfect descriptions of reality.
"Theory" does NOT mean "unproven". That's "conjecture".
Almost literally every physicist since Newton has believed that there is some sort of underlying theory which explains gravity. Its hard to imagine how anyone could get the idea that the matter was somehow settled.
I'd love it if you could share more context.
To compare it to an actual hot-button issue, we know more about the mechanisms of evolution than we do about the mechanisms of gravity.
We know kind of how it behaves at various scales, but we don't know why it does. We don't know what makes gravity. Why do denser objects have more of it. Why is it weaker than other forces, yet felt on larger scales? Does it actually exist or is it an emergent property kind of like the centripetal force (or is it centrifugal, I keep getting those flopped)?
What a strange example. Has this ever happened to you? Additionally, does General Relativity count as "an underlying mechanism for gravity"?
But you misunderstand what the words "theory" or "law" mean in scientific usage such as the "theory of gravity".
https://www.livescience.com/21457-what-is-a-law-in-science-d...
A suggestion that there may be a yet undiscovered mechanism for gravity isn't useful to science. It's imaginative perhaps, but without a piece of math, or a suggestion for an experiment by which to test it, it's just science fiction. Ideas are cheap.
How do you know the impact of something that's undiscovered? Also how do discover new things but by looking where others aren't?
You mean Newton's Law of gravity [1]?
I'm not sure where you get the idea there are "theories" and "laws" in science and science moves things from one category to the other.
The closest I can find is this distinction: "Scientific theories explain why something happens, whereas scientific law describes what happens." [2]
By this description, laws generally happen first, then theory, because observation makes it clear what happens before we understand why it happens.
In which case law and theory go hand in hand in pretty much every single law and theory I can think of (and the page lists zillions)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_law_of_universal_gr...
What exactly is this link demonstrating?
(This is a hypothetical government official. Any resemblance to real-world government officials is coincidental.)
It really has nothing to do with science.
Just because science says something doesn't mean it's true. Truth must be verifiable. It's possible to easily and cheaply verify basic physical concepts like gravity. This inspires trust. Professors routinely reproduce physics in classrooms:
Reproducing some medical experiment is hard, expensive and time consuming. Once a study is published, a huge number of people will simply assume it is true. Very few will actually check the methodology of the study. Virtually none will attempt to reproduce it.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but if science as a concept 'says' anything, it is exactly that truth must be verifiable.
There absolutely are problems with how study results are weighted. Starting from the way the press reports on findings, up to and including the uncritical acceptance of questionable material by many members of the scientific community.
However, there is no workable alternative to the process of science, because defaulting to whatever people personally like and discarding any inpportune data is certainly not how we move forward as a civilization if we have any ambition to continue our ascent (and we might in fact not have that ambition, but I do like to pretend that we do).
Studies and data in general must be weighted. Sometimes the proper weight is zero. I see little other options but to continue stumbling towards improvement and knowledge. Acting on data will always be an imperfect process on a sliding scale, very few people would disagree with that.
Edit: I would also say that there is a distinction between the opinion that we're generally moving too fast and the opinion that we have severe deficits in how we weigh incoming data. Both of these can be addressed, although the solutions appear to be way easier in the former case. We need to be honest about which camp we're in though.
In science as cumulative evidence, studies can in fact be harmful. If they are wrong or highly ambiguous, or if they make it hard to uncover errors, then they make it more difficult for future research to be correct.
The reasons include publication bias (rejecting studies with null effects and/or contradicting previous literature), p-hacking and so on.
That's why it is so important to apply rigorous standards everywhere: Transparency, data sharing, peer review, replication, pre-registration. In other words: There is no alternative to open science.
On the contrary, truth must be falsifiable [1]. The value of a theory is not in how easy it is to verify, but in how easily it could possibly be refuted.
[1] https://science.jrank.org/pages/9302/Falsifiability-Popper-s...
Over reliance on science as guidance has also lead to some of the darkest chapters of human history, like phrenology and its use to justify racial supremacy.
Could you clarify this? I understand that humans committed terrible atrocities in the name of "racial supremacy". I also understand that the same people used science as a fig leaf to justify their actions. But you seem to be saying that over reliance on science lead to these atrocities.
I simply can't imagine someone saying "I like these people and normally wouldn't hurt them, but the scientific consensus is so strong therefore I will kill/maim/throw them into a concentration camp." It sounds more likely that the racist ideology was there first, which caused both the racist science and the atrocities both. In other words racist people wanted to commit atrocities and they manufactured excuses for themselves to do so.
But I'm far from an expert on human history, so please correct me if I'm wrong.
Take 17th century science... most of it would be ludicrous by any standard today. Now imagine applying that science onto humans/society... Science as a tool to deal with present knowledge, should not be used solely to manage societies or human situations with irreversible consequences.
But of course, evidence-based decision making should not be turned into decision-based evidence making; science alone is not a basis for politics.
Maybe some nice corp would be willing to buy an issue of a journal so that you can publish and distribute the solution!
I have a medium article in draft over 3 months on this exact topic. That's why my wording of the issue came out sounding more complicated. But other commenter saying "science alone" and me saying "using science solely" are basically pointing to same understanding.
There are many examples in history for the said situation leading to social catastrophes; see Malthus (or Thanos' ideology if you like pop-cult), or Darwinian take on managing societies. Some lead to racism, some eugenics etc etc.
Like the original commenter said; science is myopic and highly focused on the present body of knowledge available. But once we applied those results onto people and cause suffering, and 10 years later find some of those were wrong, we can not undo the human suffering.
There needs to be a balance; when science is treading closely to the human dignity, well-being, life in general.
You quoted it yourself: scientism is "excessive", or, more correctly, it treats scientists as authoritative sources of truths that should not be questioned. This form of blind trust goes against the scientific method.
Also scientism can make categorical error in the type of questions that can be answered e.g. journalists asking physicists about "god particles" and such
> I'm struggling a bit to understand how a belief in the importance of scientific knowledge and techniques equates to a religious mindset.
I think the poster refers to dogmatic mindset. Assuming that all religions are dogmatic is incorrect.
Can you give an example? There is something called "the god particle" but a journalist asking about it wouldn't be a categorical error.
This policy by science simply doesn't seem very effective. It largely provides cover for bureaucrats who can say that they followed science while doing what they wanted to do in the first place.
> In the real world it means treating a study on 31 American undergrads as scripture
My opinion is that scripture shouldn't be treated as scripture to begin with.
> This policy by science simply doesn't seem very effective.
As a tool for making policy decisions, science gives you access to solutions that might work based on the evidence. Now, that evidence may be completely bogus, so there is no getting around the need for evaluation. But saying that data is a bad basis for goal-oriented action planning is a self-defeating position.
Policy by science is not a meaningful concept on its own, policy action requires a component we haven't talked about yet: a value system. Science can give you the data, but your goals determine what actions should follow. You're certainly correct when you say that politicians are getting some cover from improper data, but overall I find they seldomly hide their motivations.
The scientific method doesn't include the word "belief" at all. If you reduce it to belief, it's not science anymore, it's religion.
> In an ideal world, I would absolutely prefer my government to make decisions based on facts and methods of finding out more facts.
Science is a process, not a collection of hard facts. The only hard facts (or the claim of them more accurately) come from religion.
Science concerns itself with building speculative models that have predictive power, and trying to match observation with prediction of the models. Redundancy (peer review) is used to REDUCE (not ELIMINATE) errors. Social and cultural factors can result in false positives and false negatives in peer review.
That's it in a nutshell. The models don't reflect reality, they only reflect an approximation of aspects of reality in given contexts.
Anyway, the problem is that people do have a religious instinct. And when they're incapable of perceiving science with all its subtleties, they simply reduce it to a religion, which requires the belief that it's basically flawless, it provides hard facts, the best solutions, and that it's uniform (and any contradictions are just examples of "interests" corrupting it).
While politics are very corrupted and often result in incompetence rising to the top, even it weren't the case, those competent politicians have no single place to turn to to understand what "science" thinks on any given problem of society. Science isn't a guy, so it has no opinion.
A common fallacy is that "absence of evidence is evidence of absence". For a government this might mean "There is no definite scientific evidence that substance X causes cancer, so we do not ban it.".
Let's say a chemical X is used in baby food production. There are no studies that show that it is harmful, because no studies have been done yet. Many chemicals with similar structure have been shown to be harmful.
Scientifically speaking you would be correct to say that there is no evidence that chemical X is harmful. There is no way yet to accurately model the interaction of any chemical with your body without any actual experimentation. You can make an argument that chemical X might be harmful because similar chemicals are harmful, but that would not be science.
I would not buy that baby food with chemical X if given a choice. Best case I don't lose.
Finding conclusive evidence in science often takes lots of time to gather enough data because there are so many different variables to consider. So absence of evidence means a lot more when you have been looking for a long time and invested lots of resources.
I wouldn't say that's true, if chemicals with a similar structure are harmful then there's weak but real evidence that X is harmful too.
There were so many studies for example about cancer along the lines of "eating apples reduces cancer by 5%" and then you see people start eating apples for this reason. Somebody wrote a paper to get a publication with questionable results and people blindly believe in the power of science.
Don't forget that a lot of the papers are also written in unintelligible scientific jargon and that scientists would massage numbers because their writings directly affects their job prospects and salaries.
Religion didn't necessarily start from being a highly politicised power-hungry beast it became in middle ages. Bible says a lot about being a better human being. So is science - the scientific method does allow us to learn new things; but academia is a political entity which is only going to be growing in it's power and thus corruption.
This is the problem with interpreting results... you can set up a study witn n=100k people, and find out that people who eat apples die 5% less from cancer, correlation is shown, and somewhere in the conclusion "more research is needed to find exact cause".
In practice, people who eat more fruits probably take care of themselves better, eat better diet,... etc.
I understood the parent as people believieng in something, without actually looking at data itself, thinking about it, considering other posibilities, and of course, declaring others (opposers) as heretics... for example, spring, last year, my government (and our scientists, and probably yours too, depending on where you live) said that masks are useless for fighting covid, even detrimental, so "believers" called the people who bought and wore them fearmongering paranoics.... then a random saturday came, masks became mandatory "from monday on", and those same people called the "antimaskers" conspiracy-theorists and worse for not wanting to wear masks.
Reality is of course a mixed bag... cotton masks prevent you from spitting everywhere, but don't actually block a lot of virus in the air. Surgical masks were practically impossible to buy back then. Masks outside, away from people are useless. etc.
Science is not a state of knowledge.
Science is a process for getting better (or less bad) knowledge. Eventually.
I think we all agree that many studies are flawed and/or wrong. But I also think most people agree that there is a realistic expectation that we will find out over time [1]
[1] Caveat emptor: With sensible scientific methods, see my other comment on this post.
Querying public opinion is a method of determining facts, even special interests provide facts. 'Scientism' consists of what Feyerabend called 'methodological monism', believing in the notion that there is any privileged authority to 'speak facts'.
Someone who properly understands 'science' understands that the processes to produce knowledge are as dynamic as facts themselves. All efforts to produce some sort of privileged methodology produce bureaucracy and standardization that closes science off from avenues that can produce knowledge. Elevating this bureaucratic caste of scientists to political authority is scientism.
We do see some of that in some of today's arguments, I think.
I mean the current slew of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers/maskers, bleach eyeballers andsoforth also cite Science as their source - lending credibility to their arguments, making their thing not just emotional or gut feeling.
And religious people will take (parts of) the bible as a scientific fact as well.
Capitalism, an economic tool (and a useful one), has become state religion and now capitalists control everything.