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Comment by sandworm101 | Hacker News Reader

No. Believe in science is very different than believe in scientists. I believe in science. That does not mean I inherently trust any scientist. Science is different than the people who practice it.

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.

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> core of science is repeatability

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

The 'priesthood' mostly isn't interested in telling you what to believe and how to behave. The vast majority of the 'priesthood' would much rather just return to their lab and do exciting research.

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.

>The 'priesthood' mostly isn't interested in telling you what to believe and how to behave. The vast majority of the 'priesthood' would much rather just return to their lab and do exciting research.

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.

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