> “Believe in science” is just a new religion for the intellectual class.
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.
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.
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...
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.