Those who know science are less likely to accept it if it’s controversial (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Those who know science are less likely to accept it if it’s controversial (2017)

arstechnica.com

27 pointsTomte24 comments

What a dogmatic article.

Science is a process, not a set of truths.

It’s good that more educated people are more skeptical.

I totally agree that Science is a process and skepticism is essential, but is maintaining skepticism in the face of overwhelming evidence part of the scientific process or is it just being dogmatic/contrarian?

There is sort of a 2-faced nature here. Scienitsts themselves should be maintaining intense skepticism over even the most fundamental beleifs of their field. Here is the "science as a process" that is constantly changing.

However, science also plays a role in public life, where it might make a lot more sense to appeal to the authority and the track record of science. Here is the "science as a set of truths".

Separating the two is difficult though. Some scientists will inevitably become dogmatic about theories in their own field, whereas some in the public will take advantage of internal scientific debates to cast doubt on the whole thing.

I agree. To restate or extend: Communication by Scientists in the popular media is challenging. For example, scientists always qualify conclusions, they are trained to avoid using "all", "always", "never", or using concepts like "theory" with mean different thing to scientists vs public--All of which is leveraged by those not in the art to imply "weak" or "uncertain" concepts or conclusions.

Appeal to what authority, though? "Science" isn't an institution with a clear hierarchy, and the public institutions and individuals who lead them tend to be bureaucrats, not actually great scientists, because they've risen to the top of a bureaucracy.

Just as an example, look at "attacks on me are actually attacks on science" Fauci, who is obviously more politician than scientist, openly and admittedly willing to lie about "the science," if he feels like it's for the little peoples' own good, but leans on his status as a Scientist and as "The Good Doctor," as one cover story called him, to prop up his authority.

This isn't how a rational, objective, truth-based tradition like science is done, this is using science as the religion of the State, for the purposes and goals of the Regime, whatever those are.

Science is not a religion and should never be believed on faith alone. Since we, as individuals, cannot duplicate every experiment we need to take all studies with a grain of salt and look out for, errors, bias, influence etc. Most hard science answers are not very controversial as those have actual overwhelming evidence. The scientific results that are controversial, generally do not have overwhelming evidence, which is why they are controversial. In this case, extra skepticism is required so we don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. That is if science stands behind all scientific claims that are controversial, and lack strong evidence, then belief in all science will decline. This is the danger of science on faith, and is evidenced by the current replication crisis.

> "overwhelming evidence"

Unless you're going through _all_ the source material yourself, and making educated judgements on the quality and implications of the data, I don't think you can ever claim there's "overwhelming evidence" for any side, especially if the topic is controversial. If you're consuming information through secondary sources, basically every source will look at subsets of the data, will misinterpret data, and will have a bias, either intentionally or unintentionally.

I have yet to meet the person who takes that position consistently, and only believes that which he has personally verified. Anyone who only adopts this view in response to selected issues is motte-and-baileying those issues.

Note that my response here does not rule out being skeptical over particular claims for definite reasons, only the blanket use of "Unless you're going through _all_ the source material yourself..." (your emphasis on 'all'.)

And why stop at source material? We know there is a replication crisis in science (the open discussion of which has, somewhat ironically, encouraged a wave of blanket dismissal of science), so surely this level of skepticism can only be assuaged by personally verifying all the original sources?

I agree with your points, which is why I think people should almost never be sure of one side or another. Necessarily, they should have some self doubt, just because it would be impossible to do all of the above. The only stance I think is indefensible is to think that one side is definitely correct (outside of extremely well defined problems).

I guess I agree from an academic point of view where absolute truth is nearly hypothetical and overwhelming evidence is rare. From a logistical point of view, I guess its risk/benefit balanced by evidence. For instance, Wearing a mask, very likely helps reduce indoor SARS-COV-2 transmission. The cost or hassle to me is minimal. That is in that risk benefit balance, I found the evidence for mask to be overwhelming. And yes, Skepticism is always healthy and the core of scientific thinking.

I would agree. To be pedantic, I still wouldn't say that the evidence for mask wearing was overwhelming, but rather, the cost benefit analysis clearly put mask wearing ahead, regardless of how clear the evidence was, just because the cost was so low.

I think your comment aligns with the article’s findings :). It seems the author has the idea in their heads that #{insert_topic} is settled. And, they’re shocked that in there is ongoing debate among the scientifically literate.

You saw this a ton during covid with things like masks, lockdowns, etc. People who knew the actual science were called all sorts of names when they pointed out actual data didn’t support policy - particularly with masks which had been heavily studied and shown ineffective for stopping viral spread.

“Science” has become somewhat religious among those who don’t understand it.

Some of the constructs in this paper are pretty tendentious, without much self-awareness about it. For example, one of the six measures they use for alignment with scientific consensus is: "should the government fund stem cell research?", which is a moral and political question rather than a scientific one. Two parties could agree on all of the positive facts about stem cell research while differing over whether the government ought to fund it.

There seems to be an assumption in the article that skepticism about The Big Bang is as irrational as the belief that Bill Gates has contaminated vaccines with microchips; that humans didn't evolve; or that climate change is a hoax.

I realise that there's a scientific consensus that The Big Bang occurred; but the fact is, the earliest evidence is the CMB ("evidence", as in "what is evident, observable"). That's 350,000 years after The Big Bang. Everything before that is informed speculation. There are plausible theories about what happened before then, that don't include Big Bangs.

That is, a scientifically literate person without strong political or religious biases can still maintain a reasonable skepticism about The Big Bang.

I suspect the big bang was meant as a code for believing the universe is more than several thousand years old. It's true that the scientifically minded participants could've interpreted it to mean something quite a lot more specific though.

The article makes a bunch of assumptions but it does point, indirectly, at an interesting element. Ideology.

Empirical science via the scientific method is one thing. We can have a hypothesis, show through experimentation that the hypothesis is true or not in a repeatable manner, and come to understand what's going on.

For things that happening in the past we cannot do that. We end up doing forensic science where we mix observation with assumptions born out of beliefs (ideology). Sometimes there is no observation but there is beliefs that a scientific idea is true.

This second part is where we often end up with the divide. Yet, we don't talk enough about the assumptions and because they are often coupled to beliefs it's hard to let people with different beliefs run wild with their ideas.

I wish there was more discussion on the assumptions.

> In terms of stem cell research, evolution, and the Big Bang, those with a stronger general education showed greater political polarization, with conservatives more likely to reject them. For those with a strong science education, those topics were also polarized, as was climate change.

This indicates the polarisation is not a consequence of whether people understand and apply scientific methodology, but rather is a consequence of network effects.

Even working scientists who practice scientific methods do not have first hand knowledge of much science. Time precludes them from working on anything other than their own respective special sub-disciplines. Rather, their knowledge comes from reading accounts by other scientists, or people they trust.

What people are trusted by conservatives? People who may be very well versed in scientific and engineering methods, such as mining company executives, and investors in mining companies. It comes as no surprise that for economic reasons, such people downplay the importance of climate change research. As a consequence, people in their networks don't rate climate change as a threat.

Likewise with the Big Bang vs Creationism. These are just proxies for social and political status that office bearers in churches, and anti-churches, enjoy, which gives them the power to communicate with and influence vast numbers of followers and acolytes. When you read about the numbers of people who believe the Big Bang vs those who believe in God, you aren't reading about a scientific evaluation. You are reading about political groupings in society amongst people who compete for power and resources.

.... or the next best explanation:

- If I know nothing, I'm likely to defer to authority

- If I know a little, I know enough to at least distrust questionable authorities

The declining trust makes sense, with the replication crisis, grandstanding, intentional p-hunting, and all the other stuff happening today. I've been affiliated with an elite school for most of my life -- more weakly in recent years, and it just feels sleazy at this point. These things have gone from accidentally wrong results to games to win academia points (high impact factor publications, etc.) and get jobs and prestige.

The political split makes sense too. Trust in authority goes, in part, with representation. Conservatives are not welcome on elite university campuses. It's not just conservatives; other groups (like African Americans and some, although not many, immigrant groups) who have been excluded have historically had a hard time trusting those establishments. I'm from an ethnic group about a fifth of whom were killed based in part on eugenics research at Harvard.

Thanks Harvard!

That was in my parents' time, so the distrust from that has faded, but it at least give empathy for why skepticism is reasonable.

I think one of the things I find painful in reading an article like this one is how self-centered it is. It comes off as "Why don't they trust us?" with two presumptions:

- everything we believe is true

- so there's something wrong with them and not with us

If that were true, eugenics wouldn't have happened. The scientific establishment is just as susceptible to politics, biases, and everything else as any other establishment. I think it did pretty well around 1950-2000. Sometime in the nineties or early 00's, a gradual decline started, which is now a freefall.

Distrust in things like climate change and vaccines are very dangerous consequences of that. However, it takes a very high level of scientific literacy to sort truth from fiction in a post-truth era.

It's undermined by a history of very intentional dishonesty in both of those domains too. Throughout COVID19, the scientific establishment often exaggerated -- now obviously (see: masks) -- to bring about the behavior it wanted. Why would people believe them about vaccines? And climate change predictions had (knowingly) exaggerated timelines and impacts in the eighties and nineties, which are now being cited as reasons for distrust.

It's the boy who cried wolf.

Climate change is real, but if you have a history of lying about it, some people won't believe you.

I don't see this changing without fundamentally realigning incentives in academia.

To add to that there is also outright commercial corruption too.

For example a lot of governments made policy based on nutrition research on the US that later was found out to be fraudulent and corrupt, it caused a great damage to nutrition research, a lot of it is deeply distrusted now even when it is correct, and millions of people worldwide have bad diets based off this literally evil corrupt research that been destroying lives, sometimes literally killing people as they eat awful stuff thinking it is good for them. I was almost a victim of that too (when I was teenager, around 16, my Chrolesterol spiked to emergency levels, of the point people would want me to go into surgery to check if my heart was OK... medics and nutrition professionals only made it worse, giving me bogus advice, like giving me diets based on the "pyramid", I got better when I started to ignore them and do my own research).

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

>I don't see this changing without fundamentally realigning incentives in academia.

I think the corruption in science is a manifestation of Goodharts law. People started to believe everything with the science label blindly. Like if something that starts with "research has shown", then it must be true (now it is "overwhelming evidence"). And whenever that happens, what ever the label is, tends to get bought. (This is why we have toothpaste commercials with people in lab coats).

So the long term solution is to actually decrease the trust of people in "science", the label. Then it will come to a point that just the label of science is not enough to sway the people. Then it has a chance to progress, un-disturbed by these corrupting forces.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

That's part of the solution.

Another part is to somehow change incentive and organizational structures.

MIT, Harvard, Stanford, and similar schools made their reputations decades if not over a century ago, and the current people and structures aren't the same as the people who built those institutions. These are big institutions, with big money and big egos. The people at the top are politician types good at climbing corporate structures.

It's hard to overstate the distorting impact billions of dollars and those levels of brand recognition have.

It's also hard to overstate the degree to which Goodhart's Law is exaggerated when you have 1000:1 competition for faculty slots, among otherwise qualified applicants. It's Goodhart's law on steroids, turbo, and overdrive. You CANNOT get a faculty position at some labs without cheating, at least a little bit.

I don't see this changing unless federal and philanthropic funds are radically redistributed.

Except for physicists. They latch on to all sorts of crazy hypothesis to explain stuff they don't fully understand yet.

Physics isn’t immune to latching onto an idea dogmatically. From what I understand, string theory relies on elements which are impossible to verify experimentally.

Probably more accurate to say that all of string theory is verifiable experimentally (or falsifiable) at energy levels which are 10s of orders of magnitude larger than we can now achieve. The end result is the same though.

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