Hacker News Reader

Comment by cronix | Hacker News Reader

> The only time it really stops working is if people start treating it as doctrine, and demanding that you accept it on faith, and take any questions as evidence that you are an enemy of science. If anything destroys science, it is this line of reasoning.

I wonder where we'd be today in science/physics if the Catholic Church (the authority of the day) was successful in stopping Galileo Galilei, in 1615, from "spreading misinformation/disinformation" that the Earth circled the sun, and pushing back against the prevailing "science" of the day.

If he were alive in 2021 and pushing something that went against "current wisdom," of that magnitude, he would be banned from media, ridiculed, and cancelled.

It was a lesson I had thought the West had learned. It appears not. Censor and treat science as a religion at your (our) own peril.

View on HN

We would be exactly where we are since Galileo didn't do that much to prove the heliocentric model.

Galileo also wasn't jailed for the heliocentric model, Galileo was jailed for writing a book, where The Pope was the stand in character for an idiot, overtly. And while we are more liberal, at the time insulting the pope in published material, in Italy, was a rather poor choice.

Yep. Galileo got himself into trouble not for his work on heliocentricity, but for publicly attacking an authority figure in the church.

It's interesting to see how we today project our science/fundamentalism schism onto culture of the past, when in reality, there wasn't that much of a dichotomy before the Scopes trial in the 1930s.

You are making a pedantic argument to a philosophical point. Extrapolate the concepts.

Just to point that the prevailing science of the day was completely divided between Earth and Heliocentrism, and the Church supported research of both sides.

The Galileo story is a very nice tale of what happens when you mix science and politics.

Not being snarky, but it started with Aristarchus (his parallax work) and Ptolemy (the other one), so I'm pretty sure it would have continued in countries that weren't under Catholic oppression of science. Persia was pretty much the engine of science while Europe languished.

To say this would not have progressed is to ignore the important work of non-European scientists.

Science actually progressed in Europe as well during the supposed dark ages. The whole notion that science just laid dormant between the fall of Rome and the renaissance is enlightenment-era propaganda that unfortunately has become part of the western cultural narrative.

Ironically the notion of a Muslim golden age of free thought and science followed by a long dark age of no progress and oppression is also largely imagined.

Correct. Which is why I said "languished", in comparison to what immediately followed with the Age of Enlightment, and what came before it, in Greece and the early Roman empire.

It also is a bit of a misnomer to blame it all on religion, it was mostly just an assload of war.

> If he were alive in 2021 and pushing something that went against "current wisdom," of that magnitude, he would be banned from media, ridiculed, and cancelled.

The problem is, for every Galileo who is thinking against the mainstream understanding and right, there are millions of others who are outside the mainstream and wrong.

I don’t see how any society could function if it didn’t have a strict anti-bullshit filter, even if it may accidentally filter out geniuses who are ahead of their time.

What's wrong with being wrong? If we are to be honest with ourselves, we must admit that we are wrong about things, each and every one of us. We may be right about some things, but even those are for the most part incomplete truths.

It’s ok to be wrong. But you should also expect that you may be ridiculed or ignored sometimes if your theories aren't conventional

Basically, I don’t think the BBC refusing to give time to flat earth era is cancel culture. Even if there’s a non-zero chance they were right all along

Are the content teams at FAANG ridiculing and ignoring the people they consider to be wrong? Or are they going out of their way to censor perfectly legal and possibly correct things they just don’t like using an ever changing and intentionally ambiguous terms of service to do so?

> Basically, I don’t think the BBC refusing to give time to flat earth era is cancel culture

No one is making that argument. Talk about a Wuhan lab leak and see if it doesn’t get a lot harder to speak from your position.

Do you have specific knowledge of a Wuhan lab leak? Are your arguments regarding a lab leak reasonable? Will you cease making your argument if it is not supported?

>> Even if there’s a non-zero chance they were right all along

What does a non-zero chance that the Earth is flat look like? That we live in a simulation fooling us into thinking the empirical evidence is spherical? The evidence is overwhelming. There's not really any chance for it being correct, short of some odd metaphysics being the case.

Scientifically speaking, it's 100% wrong. Some beliefs are simply at odds with the vast empirical data, and can only be right if something else is producing false empirical results.

> I don’t see how any society could function if it didn’t have a strict anti-bullshit filter

I don't see how science can ultimately function if you aren't allowed to push back and legitimately question things. All things. How many times have we, years or hundreds or thousands of years later, come back and disproved something that was a "scientifically proven" thing in the past? How would you accomplish that if you aren't allowed to talk about it? Relatively few things in science are actually indisputable, and I question even that. Some things that we think are indisputable today we might laugh at a thousand years from now, just like we laugh at some of the primitive thoughts our ancestors had, but were cutting edge for the day. Science is the pursuit of truth through rigorous testing and pushback. Eventually, if proven enough times, we call it a law. You have to be open to being completely wrong to actually obtain that level. Free speech is paramount to science, as well as society.

Society, as a whole, has worked fairly well without "bullshit filters." It's when you start putting them on that you start having issues, and often in areas that you didn't anticipate, because at that point you're acting on a belief and not a fact.

I highly recommend reading Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Here's an interview to give a preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JpQFVXGzUI

> Society, as a whole, has worked fairly well without "bullshit filters." It's when you start putting them on that you start having issues

When has society ever not had bullshit filters? Intellectual debate goes both ways. The more your ideas go outside of the mainstream understanding of your peers, the more push back, ridiculing, and “cancelation” you will likely be subjected to by the scientific community

Very few geniuses are appreciated until after their death. scientific consensus takes time

> When has society ever not had bullshit filters?

I absolutely accept "I don't have to listen to you" as a bs filter. "That guy's nuts, I don't believe a thing he's saying." I don't accept "we won't allow others to listen to you question things" as a filter.

What about "we don't think we will publish that"?

Sounds good on face. Do Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and other platforms that dominate the planet in information/thought exchange, consider themselves publishers?

"I don't see how science can ultimately function if you aren't allowed to push back and legitimately question things."

Can you demonstrate an understanding of the things you are questioning? Do you have reasonable arguments to support your questions? And most importantly, are you doing your questioning in good faith?

> And most importantly, are you doing your questioning in good faith?

Worrying about "good faith" is a pointless waste of time. You don't know, and can't know with certainty, whether a question is in good faith. Your assessment of good faith is based on feelings and those don't have a scientific basis. If you reject or criticize a question on the basis of an actor's "good faith", then that actually makes you the one who is unscientific.

But the great thing about this is that this doesn't even matter. Bullshit questions will be easily refutable. And if they're not, it's because those doing the science haven't done a thorough enough job yet.

"[Tobacco smoking] has been a major health problem for many decades. For the entire 20th century it is estimated that around 100 million people died prematurely because of smoking, most of them in rich countries." (https://ourworldindata.org/smoking)

The world is a constant battle of rights and wrongs. Getting something wrong, is a major part in arriving to something right. Now society wants to shun, filter, and cancel all the "wrongs", which removes skepticism of the popular "rights".

What is the scientific process if not an attempt to filter and “cancel” wrong ideas, and propagate the right ones?

Ideas will be attacked relentlessly by society until proven useful. That’s how it all works

It's not a problem at all. For example, people do mistakes in calculations all the time but since Math is not faith and/or consensus based nobody flies off the handle and runs a public ostracism campaign on them. You think Bloomberg spent 500M on his campaign so he spent more than if he had given 1M to every citizen of the US? You just look like a fool but there are not going to be 1000 Math professors signing letters to excommunicate you and your bank accounts are not going to be shut down and you still keep your job in New York Times.

If you feel that your science won't stand without harassing heretics, perhaps it is the problem with the soundness of your science and not the folly of the heretics?

What happens when there are 10 million citizens demanding their million dollars, who won't take "but that's not how math works" for an answer?

They don't get their million dollars.

And then we call out the National Guard to put an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.

I am a bit late to your train of thought so it seems to have left the station without me. Are you saying we solve mathematical problems with the National Guard? Correct grammar with it? I honestly cannot understand what are you trying to say here.

I think he's saying that if there are 10 million citizens demanding something, and they're certain that they're correct, then it might require the National Guard to prevent them from taking what they believe to be theirs. In a society where those 10 million people accept the authority of the world's greatest experts in arithmetic, there presumably wouldn't be 10 million people making unreasonable demands because their thinking would have been set right by experts. I'm not 100% sure if this is a water-tight argument, but I think it's what the parent comment was getting at.

I see. This seem to be a narrowing of the more general idea that suppressing wrongthink will get rid of wrongdoers but applied to science specifically. If history to be believed the general idea had failed in its numerous implementations.

I think the problem was that it takes much more resources to react to the wrongthinkers while simultaneously selecting the most capable wrongdoers to the point that the wrongdoers are able to overthrow the government.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com