“Believe in science” is just a new religion for the intellectual class.
Obviously, knee-jerk doubt is no better than knee-jerk trust, but there needs to be a balance, and recently the marketers & manipulators (even those employed by governments, corporations, international organisations, …) have caught up on the fact that labelling misinformation as “science” makes it much more viral…
Most (many) people have no (basic but proper) understanding of the scientific method and statistics.
When I hear "trusting since" it's most times not "trust the scientific method but be wary about interpretations of results yielded by it" but instead "fully non-questioning trust a specific interpretation of some scientific results" worse often a biased speculative interpretation based on some other speculations based on the scientific results.
As such "trusting science" because "it's science" is in many peoples vocabulary something I can't say is good. Especially if politicians use the terms.
You should also understand that scientists are human and subject to all of human foibles like racism, sexism, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
Not to mention politics, such as when "jewish science/math/etc" rejected.
You should trust the replicable experiments, not the scientists. Especially so when "science" and politics gets intermixed.
When a "scientist" says "trust me" or when a politician says "trust the scientist I say to trust", that's when you should be the most distrusting.
Amen. Credentialed scientists are now the high priests of yesterday.
The layperson is expected to defer to their authority and all cases, and ignore that they too, are human.
Witnessing knee-jerk reactions (recent and not-so-recent) by laypeople who have no clue what they are talking about but feel entitled to criticize specialists who have dedicated their lives to studying a phenomenon, just because they manage to catch one or two words of vocabulary, is... frustrating.
Whenever (some fringe of) media decide to hold (some piece of) science as controversial, said specialists find themselves the object of an intellectual DDoS whereby they are put in a loop of permanent justification and rejustification to people who simply do not understand the arguments, nor typically care.
Now, the solution is of course not blind trust. It's probably making sure that more laypeople have a clue about science.
But knowledge can also be misused. Those are exactly the people most capable to deceive you (if they want) (e.g. Peter Daszak)
Sure it’s ego-preserving to instead blame the rubes and look down on them, but it’s also counterproductive. The “uneducated“ masses may not understand the scientist’s field, but they easily comprehend condescension and contempt and it amounts to efficient anti-persuasion. Also plenty of non-scientists have considerable subject matter expertise in bullshitting. They may not understand the science, but they know when a scientist is communicating with the intent to persuade rather than inform.
Then of course there’s the possibility that an inability to explain something to lay people indicates a deficiency in the scientist’s understanding. Feynman certainly thought so and he was probably the most publicly trusted scientist of his generation. His QED[1] is a shining example of explaining a very difficult subject to the lay audience.
Edit: Einstein is another example of a publicly trusted scientist who made every effort to clearly and completely explain his work to lay people. In his Relativity[2] he mostly succeeds, and where he falls short he acknowledges it and still communicates the concepts of general relativity pretty well.
It's a misconception that scientists gather in their ivory towers and spend weeks and months scheming, how they can rub it in to the plebes that they are smarter. Most are not interested in that, and, I'd say, all have something better to do.
There are many, much easier, and much better ways to get into a position where you can live out your inferiority complexes. You think that's the motivation of someone going through grad school, doing a PhD, a couple of PostDocs, then tenure track, etc.
I admire Feynman and Einstein as the next guy, but they lived in an academic environment that is vastly different from what we have today.
Persuasion is part of a good scientist's responsibilities to his/her community.
What is not is: "Here is our explanation, add it to the list of other explanations you got from your hairdresser, neighbour, priest, chief, etc. and choose which ever one makes your feel better."
I think "feel entitled" is the wrong way to think of this. People's skepticism of scientific experts or scientific facts is a failure of both journalism and science:
1. Science journalism is almost universally terrible, so people already get sold half truths and sometimes even outright falsehoods from allegedly reputable sources. Messaging needs dramatic improvement.
2. The replication crisis has shown that up to 50% of published results in medicine can't be replicated (and up to 66% in social sciences), and there are virtually no incentives to replicate or publish negative results, and too many incentives to data mine/p-hack and publish sensationalized results. There are now some efforts towards correcting this, but it's only just beginning.
Depending on the field and the topic, someone questioning expert advice actually has a coin flip's chance of being right and the expert wrong.
> Now, the solution is of course not blind trust. It's probably making sure that more laypeople have a clue about science
I don't think that will fix anything. Having a clue about how science should work and then seeing it's failures only validates science skepticism.
For example, Fauci said early in the pandemic that people had no reason to wear masks, and in fact, that mask wearing could be worse than not wearing them. He later publicly admitted that he lied to allegedly avoid PPE shortages. So a public health official whose duty was to convey accurate scientific information admitted he lied to the public, thus breaking public trust. Exactly what additional knowledge about science do you think will correct this violation of public trust?
You see science is not the problem here, but journalist' and scientist' public conduct is the problem.
The fundamental core of science is repeatability and prediction. Belief in anything else, belief in things that are not repeatable and offer no external predictions, THAT is religion. When faced with a new phenomena I will to my last breath believe that there is a scientific explanation. That doesn't make me a fanatic. It makes me rational.
It is indeed. But with experiments and theories getting ever more complex and difficult to verify [1], we are edging towards just having to believe what we are told. Verifying Newton's theory of gravity was relatively simple, just throw stuff from your balcony and verify that s = 1/2 g * t^2!
So we are deep inside the second Middle Ages, where the priesthood tells us what to believe and how to behave, without us having any chance of verifying their claims.
I greatly wonder if and how humanity will get out of this one, and what a second Age of Enlightenment would look like.
You're writing this on a device developed using physical insight into quantum mechanics. I am sure you can, without understanding the theories (neither do I), verify, that your device does, indeed, work. Surely, you are able to verify that your GPS works, without understanding the intricacies of neither general relativity nor literal rocket science to make this happen.
Politicians on the other hand are more than happy to use science and the social credibility of science to coerce and manipulate though. It wasn't too long ago in terms of human generations that "the science" was that we should chemically castrate those who didn't fit traditional society's norms (like Alan Turing), or that the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels were worth the ecological catastrophe for future generations.
I think a discussion on scientific ethics needs to be had by the general public as well as better scientific education all around. It's not good enough to blindly trust "the science" when there's an ethical dimension in play which there almost always is.
I, for one, refuse to defer to the authority of so-called experts, 'so-called' merely because of decades of experience in the field. Pah. For questions about cancer treatment, I typically just ask someone else in the Walmart aisle standing in front of Sauerkraut; for investment advice I ask the feral cat outside, when my car makes funny noises, I just throw a dart at a printout of an amazon page after I searched for 'car funny noises'.
Edit: Also, fuck pilots. Why do they think they can do anything better than I can? They hide behind their locked doors and just Google stuff, I just know it!
2.) What do you think the impact of our current economic system has been on science? About the way science has been commoditized and feedback loops of the collective learning of humanity have been enclosed/black-boxed and made artificially scarce (innovations in the forms of patents, and other commoditized knowledge)? [1]
> Exactly! Fuck those people who studied a topic for 40 years -- why would they know one iota more about it than I do, or the facebook group of my crazy uncle -- they all have access to Google, after all!
I'm glad to see you state that access to Google and the 'commercial' web (can't think of better word) is not a good benchmark for access to humanity's shared inheritance. I see that claim too often.
[1] https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-pur...
Here's the thing: people love to trust experts and, also, love to not think for themselves.
And they do trust experts, i.e. when it comes to having their cars repaired, getting medical treatment outside of COVID, etc. It's not like millions of people came up with using malaria medication and horse dewormer on their own after conducting studies in their basement. They are following other people, while, ironically, praising themselves for being independent and most certainly not sheep (it's horse dewormer, after all).
Great description, loved "It's an algorithm, not data." especially.
> Here's the thing: people [...] love to not think for themselves.
Wtf? I agree with what you write before, but then in this comment you're grossly generalizing and calling people dumb. Why? Does it make you feel better? Maybe you could try to dig into your judgement here and share what emerges? Why do people 'love not to think for themselves', and then why are you different? Or what makes you and a few others uniquely able to see this?
I tried to honestly and state my personal state here if you're interested or need inspiration to describe your lens or your experience: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28661179
So in your experience, people don't read movie reviews, don't listen to sports commentaries, don't read amazon comments? People don't listen to TV personalities telling them that malaria medication is good against COVID? In your experience, people read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer all day long, and discuss existentialism, rather than watching Netflix? Etc.
Your words, not mine. The question I'm trying to get your perspective on is: despite all this (movie review, amazon comments, TV personalities), why do people make bad decisions? You keep saying that they do (and I agree with you) and I'm asking you why you believe that this is the case. Why do they make bad decisions?
And a follow up question: why aren't people more hungry to learn (e.g. reading Nietzsche and Schopenhauer all day long and discussing existentialism if they want to)? Why do they instead watch Netflix, etc.?
Am I misunderstanding you somewhere? Please let me know.
Oh, I am not claiming I have answers! A lot of things can be explained by people not having time and just rolling with whatever other people have strong opinions on (ever been in an organizing committee, or in a group trying to figure out what to watch on Netflix - at some point you just want this to be over).
I think another aspect is simply vanity. It makes some feel special when you have "inside information", and you're "not a sheep" (TM), when in reality, all you do, is run after some other leader.
Edit: Systematic misinformation. Have you compared FoxNews and CNN during the Trump presidency? It's like they were reporting about different planets. One group has a significantly better outcome when it comes to COVID, for example (the motivation behind this is, however, a complete mystery to me).
Agreed. I fear that deeply traumatized people like Tucker Carlson aren't able to care much about people.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9E0NcmcGdSI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQwP0XRBjq4&t=37s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzUC4FUTKII
> Have you compared FoxNews and CNN
or is there more? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--TsGaNyr0U&t=1785s
Plenty of studies have shown that liberals and conservatives can read the same studies, and both come away thinking the data supported their positions. And they were both wrong. Nuance is dead.
People are bombarded with contradictory expert advice, so it's hardly surprising that they decide experts don't know what they hell they're talking about.
1.) Most of us are trained to have to expect to defer to authority, because that's what today's school teaches, due to the commodification and artificial scarcity of science, and to the division of labor of our profit-seeking economic system.
2.) They expect not to be able to understand things in depth, because capital controls the amount of knowledge workers that are 'allowed' to reach expert status, so as to control the labor supply of knowledge workers.
Let's not forget that you brought politics into this, not me. Let's not forget that I did not talk about who I like at all. Finally, let's not forget that this group, that you (not me) associate with a political side, is performing mass suicide by following TV personalities rather than experts, accepting massive collateral damage to others. Hundreds of thousands are dead, more than died in the Civil War, hundreds of thousands could have been saved had one not taken medical and epidemiological advice from TV personalities.
Not to be confused with the FDA...which approved horse steroids for COVID treatment[1][2] at the same time it was lambasting the population via its Twitter account for taking horse dewormer. This sort of conflicting messaging is again why people are ignoring "experts".
[1]https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/coronavi... [2]https://www.zerohedge.com/covid-19/never-say-neigh-fda-lists...
You really need to go into political manipulations of them - like taking worst case scenario model and claiming it was wrong because situation was not worst case.
You could do much worse, given monkeys throwing darts outperform average investors.
Not trusting science by default is what makes science have to be trustworthy. Scientists don't "trust" scientists. That's why every paper goes through rigorous questioning before being published-and even then lots of bullshit results still get published. If anything we need to trust science less.
Also, do you trust politicians even when they have over 40 years of experience?
As I wrote somewhere else, Science is an algorithm, not data. That algorithm was honed over hundreds of years. That algorithm is the reason that the ideas of some patent clerk in Switzerland were able to dethrone the ideas of one Isaac Newton, who some consider the greatest genius who ever lived. It's not about trusting scientists at all (ideally).
My whole spiel here is that you should ask experts in their field of expertise. Would I take medical advice from a career politician like Hillary Clinton or advice on climate change from Ted Cruz? Absolutely not. Would I take Obama's advice on how to raise money or negotiate a deal with Netflix? Maybe, he seems to be good at that.
Edit: Haha, what's with the downvote? Hillary being worried that I negatively impact her side-career as a chiropractor?
Medicine is complex, the track record is inherently muddier. That's why generally it's a good idea to get several independent opinions, for example about an expensive irreversible procedure. And then there are cases where medical experts do something else than what they recommend to their patients, e.g. end of life decisions.
Then there are places like certain social sciences subfields, where there is no track record and is just a disgraceful naked politics fest parasitising the word 'Science' in order to gain unearned legitimacy.
> Study Suggests Medical Errors Now Third Leading Cause of Death in the U.S.
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su...
> It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.
https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2011/11/30/how-doctors-di...
In popular discourse "trusting science" can be better understood as an appeal for conformity of thought. Scientists naturally disagree about a great many things. When people are asked to "trust The Science", the speaker is asking for unquestioning faith in the experts they feel are truthful. Scientism is just another way denigrate dissent as dangerous heresy.
The core of the issue revolves around the lack of trust in government and media institutions. It is a poor substitute for reflecting upon how the trust deficit came about and attempting to address those issues. The process would undoubtedly involve addressing past misdeeds, accepting responsibility and attempting to make amends. Understandably, this is not palatable. In lieu of this we are offered more divisive finger pointing and comically inept generalizations of the heathen unbelievers as "flat-earthers".
The end result is a doubling down on the trust deficit, digging us deeper with further divisiveness. At a certain point this approach and the institutions advancing it must be recognized as bankrupt.
It's not that I think people should be religious but that humans have the following proclivities:
- Mystical thinking
- Defensiveness against ideas that threaten the ego at the individual scale
- Slowness or lag against canonizing new information
- Poor introspection
A current day example of many of those attributes are many of the intellectual liberals of my generation whom are ironically quite conservative in the true sense of the word, just not in the way that most visualize conservatism. Challenge any ideas that they consider to be common sense, especially if they are ordained by authority figures, and they speak as if you have committed blasphemy against the holy church. It doesn't even matter if you agree with them on 99% of points; there's something wrong with you for disagreeing with The Science.
Experts themselves fall prey to these flaws. As someone who is freaking obsessed with nutrition and digestive science, it's baffling how many authority figures ignore information that either doesn't support the establishment or doesn't support a theory that their ego is riding upon. I can't help but conclude that the current axioms around human health are legging at least 20 years behind where they should be.
This is why I use science as a compass, and why it's not something I simply just believe in. Science isn't even designed to be a system of belief. Belief can only come from within, and society gets closer to the truth faster when there's a confluence of true individual belief, not because everyone believes in a system.
The mistake we've made IMO is the mindset that, by simply dumping knowledge on people, they will make better decisions and be smarter. In other words, the greatest tragedy of our time is in telling people they are smarter than they actually are without requiring any sort or rigor before they can reach that level of "smartness", if you will.
How else would "believe in the science" work if we didn't remove religion and didn't essentially tell people they are smart enough to understand enough science that they can believe in it? We threw science at the masses, from intelligent to mentally-challenged, and they turned into a cargo cult.
In fact, I often find intellectuals to be worse in this regard because the rationalization of cognitive dissonance requires intelligence. Many intellectuals will do anything to defend The Science os the one true way to examine anything, often turning philosophy into some sort of historic curiosity that shouldn't really be taken seriously once you've passed your humanities prerequisites in college. At least Forrest Gump would have the openness to consider the meaning that "Life is a box of chocolates". Some intellectuals would scoff and spend time coming up with reasons to conclude that life is entirely predictable, often not even to consider an idea themselves but to use the other party as a neuron-treadmill.
> Obviously, knee-jerk doubt is no better than knee-jerk trust, but there needs to be a balance,
If the knee-jerk leads to everyone running off a cliff, I fail to see how knee-jerks are "obviously" preferable to essentially doing nothing. There are problems that resolve faster without intervention, or are at least not made worse when people don't do what they think is obvious. It's obvious to many that if you get stabbed that the first step is to pull the knife out, but immediately pulling the knife out can make an already bad situation 100x worse.
Certainly, there must be trust, or else you don't have a society. Trust doesn't come from condescension or having information withheld. That can work for a period of time, but isn't sustainable, just as most despotic dictatorships don't last long in the 21st century (American invasions notwithstanding) in the face of another regime or a revolution. With a globalized world that efficiently propagates information, you can't proselytize The Science without a significant number of people disagreeing for any number of reasons. The only way for The Science to get its way is to suppress the scientific process and to cut individuals off from information channels for their own good.
I'm pessimistic. The Science is too profitable from all angles. Ironically, it's becoming the next step in religiosity. We went from many gods with specific roles to believing in one more amorphous and omnipresent God to an even more abstract system that doesn't specifically describe any universal truth. When the people know too much, religiosity has to become murkier in order to survive. Science turned out to be a superior host for religiosity because, the more research you read, the more you realize you don't know; black holes and white holes of knowledge can be manufactured at will.
Skepticism has become a tainted idea, in my eyes, and too often becomes "The Skepticism", but it is the only way forward that I think there may be, at least for individuals. They have to understand that skepticism doesn't mean knee-jerk disbelieving in everything but that gnosis is arrived at from both questioning and faith, or not having a position in an idea until a position is justified.
We have to choose to teach this as a virtue to our children. But will we do so?
Its is not possible on top of the social media/news media landscape. Whatever gets the most attention "wins".
Its not that people have "caught upto it". Its that its the only game worth playing in town and there are no other games that can get you influence as quickly.
What does that even mean? If I believe the earth is round, then science is my religion? If I believe it is flat, then I am an atheist?
I know the concept of religion is hard to define unambiguously, but come on.
The problem is in this brave new post-pandemic world we've elevated scientists to the social position of prophets without the general public really being aware of how the scientific method is supposed to work or the limitations of things like statistical modelling. Science is a mere process that society has foisted the role of a priesthood onto, and I really think that this is asking for trouble because for the most part people have trouble differentiating science from pseudoscience. This rising tide has lifted all boats, including the quacks and charlatans of the world.
It seems like almost any human interaction involves a level of trust - but if everything is "religion" then the word is meaningless.
I wouldn't ask a plumber OR a scientist about making moral decisions as though they had some special advantage.