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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or is there a growing appeal to science coupled with a decreasing literacy in science?

I remember Nietzsche had an argument that due to the success of Science that new things would be structured as if they were scientific, for example, that if a new religion arose it would pretend to be a form of Science. But that of course there are many things that cannot be scientific and these things would have to pretend to be while actually not being. As such Science would be subverted by the followers of its own success.

This memory is about 25-30 years old, so not sure how accurate it is.

Not surprised, during Nietzsche’s time we had the rise of Spiritism, which presented itself as a “science” first and philosophical doctrine second.

Also see Marxism (not the economics part, but the "history" and the "scientific socialism" part) and Scientology.

Even the Dalai Lama is on board with that sentiment.

If science proves some belief of Buddhism wrong, then Buddhism will have to change. In my view.

He is well aware which side of the bread the butter's on.

That said, the scientific method is not without its gargantuan biases and filters. It looks through a pinhole.

Interesting, sounds like a possible influence on L. Ron Hubbard if nothing else.

Many, many people are forced/have chosen to 'believe' in science. (Just as, in the past, they 'believed in' whatever the prevailing orthodoxy was... with or without gods.) Being dogmatic is the easier path for those without the time/access.

Of course, professing 'belief' doesnt confer actual knowledge about that faith. EG. anyone who's ever said that science 'proved' something or other.

If this misstatement about phytoplankton is misleading (gee I hope so), if it gets people to start carrying that canary into the mines, that's a positive outcome. We probably aren't aware of all of the tipping points.

Definitely seeing a trend in decreased literacy in science. Voters are more easily manipulated, and proposed legislation increasingly has a misleading title and not enough voters can understand the details.

Things like the Florida governor banning state use of the term "Global Warming", as if that's going to fix the problems Florida faces. Or maybe the view that the USA government shouldn't back 30 year mortgages for places expected to be unusable in 30 years.

I had a little taste of this when my city's schools decided to kill off a major academic program based on a "peer reviewed publication". Parents were shocked, layoffs were made, the decision was made after normal meeting hours when the video recording was off. People asked for more clarification. Turns out a parent wrote up an opinion piece that boiled down to, if their kid didn't get in, they wanted the program gone. They showed it to a friend (the peer) who liked it. They thought that counted a "peer reviewed publication" and thought it was justification for killing off AIM/Gate, despite the success of the program and minimal cost (the AIM/Gate classes had the same teacher/student ratios).

Another sad case was a new development that set aside some land to make room for burrowing owls, after a year or two that land was sold to developers. The reason? They didn't think any owls actually lived there, it didn't occur to them that you'd only see the owls at night. I walked the perimeter every night with my dog and would often see the owls on fence posts.

It's not just an "appeal", it's a "belief". Not based in fact or logic but in faith. They seem to think that if scientists said it, it must be real, and anyone that tries to say otherwise is just wrong.

Media propaganda promoting that view of "science" isn't helping much.

We crave an authority that will give us knowledge and control of the unknown.

Even bad information gives us a small sense of power and security.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

I think this observation is mostly overblown. I'm sure some people "worship" science to an irrational degree, whatever that means in each case, but it seems like in most cases what we're seeing is actually this: If you see two opposing opinions, and one is ostensibly derived in whole or in part by science, and the other isn't, then, prior to further information or extenuating circumstances, it makes sense to defer to the latter when making decisions or forming opinions. That doesn't mean you are sure it is correct, it means you are sure it is more likely to be correct than the alternative, which is far more reasonable. It might look like people are picking the ostensibly-science-backed choice with unthinking faith, when the majority of them are simply making the more statistically likely choice given the information available. In most cases, it's impossible to tell the difference, and this gives rise to a lot of political rhetoric that exploits that ambiguity.

I think it’s more political.

If you agree with the political conclusion of a study then it’s science. If you disagree then it’s fake news.

To the extent a study has a political conclusion, it's not science, but relatively few really do.

(Some have conclusions that policy entrepreneurs find useful to support a political agenda, either because of what they actually say or because of what people can be deceived into understanding them to say, but that's a different thing than actually having a political conclusion.)

Is Plankton dying political? You would not think so but it definitely is.

Republicans would be quick to dismiss the article assuming it is another attack in economic success, global warming etc... Democrats would be quick to point to the article as support for reasons to support progressive policies.

Literally everything is political today

I disagree that it's overblown. For every study that's utterly failed to replicate over the past however many decades, people have been "sure it is more likely to be correct than the alternative" and that's literally not the case. The word "science" has been invoked in a way that makes people believe that they have more information about the world than they do. Updating towards a study that wasn't properly conducted is worse than the study not existing, because it removes uncertainty that you should still possess, but it is touted as "science" in popular media all the same.

Especially in areas like psychology or sociology, where studies over the past few decades are more likely not to be replicable than they are to be replicable. Compounded with the disgusting state of pop "scientific" "journalism", it's probably a better heuristic at this point not to believe most scientific news to be correct.

Updating towards a study that wasn't properly conducted is worse than the study not existing, because it removes uncertainty that you should still possess, but it is touted as "science" in popular media all the same.

This is why I try to pollute as much as I possible can. "Science" keeps telling me that climate change is an important issue and that we need to curb pollution to fight it. As you just said, since it comes from a place that can't be trusted, the logical choice is to take the opposite stance.

Definitely what I said

> and one is ostensibly derived in whole or in part by science, and the other isn't

So as long as the shit is wrapped up better we should eat it?

I had an argument with an old friend a bit ago over the efficacy and possible nth-order effects of publicly-funded "safe shoot-up sites" for drug addicts. my point was that lots of progressive liberal ideas about policy come from a place of feelings about what the "morally right" thing to is ("give homeless addicts a place to safely use drugs, to prevent spread of disease etc."), while not necessarily thinking through possible nth-order effects that could result from such policy decisions, specifically with regards to factors of human incentives and motivations ("if you provide a taxpayer-funded safe drug use facility, how will this affect inherently dangerous & self-destructive intravenous drug use in the long term? decrease it, keep it roughly the same, or increase it?"). as a means of arguing his position ("safe shoot-up facilities are good and effective"), he referred me to a nearly decade-old study that was done over the course of three years, and to him, that was slam dunk proof that his position was the better one. I pointed out the questionable research methods ("drug dealers in the area didn't report higher sales in the three years after opening the facility"), the length of the study (three years), and the time that has passed since the study (an additional seven years), and asked if maybe this was cause for at least further investigation, but to him, The Science Was Settled, someone did a research project and published the results in some journal, so That's That, Everything Is Good, Confirmed.

I want to stress here that in this instance I may still be fully in the wrong and he may in fact be correct with regards to our assessments of the overall situation—my point is merely that my friend took the mere existence of a research paper in a journal with findings that affirmed his beliefs as if it were Gospel, because it's a Study in a Scientific Journal, you see. never mind that social sciences are far more fuzzy than hard sciences, never mind the methods used in the study, never mind following up and seeing if anything changed in seven years. no, a Study in a Journal asserted that his Beliefs were Correct, so that might as well be a Science stone tablet with Science written on it that some Scientists were directly told by Science God from Science Heaven to write.

this friend is, of course, an atheist, basically an anti-theist really, and the degree of Faith he places in the Gospel of Science (even Social Science!!!) being comparable to that which adherents to conventional religion place upon their holy books remains completely lost on him.

I don't think this is a particularly uncommon way of thinking these days.

In my experience I think it usually comes from a mistaken idea that all fields of science are equally predictive, which I think comes from a popular misconception that "science" = "physics".

I think we colloquially get drawn into thinking that science-as-in-physics is the same thing as science-as-in-biology is the same thing as science-as-in-economics, especially when it comes to what they all mean by "fact" and "proven". Media then takes advantage of this general misunderstanding to make "weather facts" sound like they are just as concrete as "fundamental physics facts" because it gets more attention. Then we find ourselves arguing about climate science with the same level of self-assured veracity we might argue about billiard balls on an ideal surface in a vacuum.

A lot of people forget that science is "a process", rather than "a priesthood". There are plenty of grifters, cult leaders, and crazed street preachers benefiting from this.

I highly doubt it and don't think you'd be able to quantify this claim. Poor science literacy is one thing, but the idea that producers or consumers of popular media were more scientifically literate in the past doesn't pass a basic sanity check. People were less formally educated, the resources to become informally educated were less accessible, the general push for statistical literacy and data-driven approaches to anything at all largely didn't begin until 10-15 years ago. Where would this greater scientific literacy of the past have come from?

Those concepts are too vague to draw conclusions from. If producers had higher bars for scientific/statistical literacy, and reasoned, unbiased reporting, then that's all you need for it to have been better in the past.

And in this particular case, even a less well known publication's lies can go around the world via social media sharing before the truth gets its boots on.

People are right to trust science more than opinion.

However the media amplifies bad science to capitalize on narratives and make money.

Good news media is supposed to put things through a critical lens and explain to people things are currently a theory or just a small subset of a bigger picture... but they media has become click bait and unreliable.

They will take the tiniest shred of evidence and use that to make some wildly sensational claim.

I'd say it's more that there is an increasing desire for science and science literacy, but those are expensive public goods that our current system has limited incentive to provide. That leaves the window open to interest groups and marketers do bad science or push pseudoscience that simply imitates the form and makes people feel informed and fact based again.

So science literacy is slowly increasing, but the amount of bullshit masquerading as science to nudge you to buy more Camel cigarettes or vote whatever policy the charlatan wants to push is increasing a lot faster

So are you claiming that the 90% claim is indicative of decreasing literacy or the rebuttal?

I think moreso that people took the 90% headline to heart, me included, is a sign that we're less skeptical than we should be.

Sure we should be skeptical. We should also be skeptical of this rebuttal though.

The main claim that this blogger uses before calling the article rubbish is that it had a sample size of 500. This is a good sample size. It vastly weakens the credibility of the blogger to imply this is insufficient.

It’s really problematic to have a reaction decrying the decline of literacy because some blogger said something was bad. If there is a decline of literacy, it ought to start with the blogger and the Hn poster here.

Scientific literacy is and always has been low. Armchair experts decrying its decline is just ironic.

I was mainly going off this.

David Johns, head of the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey, describes it as "a literal drop in the ocean." Johns would know—the Continuous Plankton Recorder Survey has been running since 1958 and has accumulated more than 265,000 samples.

The Continuous Plankton Survey has indeed cataloged a loss of plankton over the years—but nothing close to the 90 percent loss claimed by Dryden. "We have noticed long-term changes—northerly movements of plankton species as surface water warms, changes in seasonality in some taxa, invasives, etc.," Johns told Ars by email

Well johns’ framing is poor. Or at least the blogger’s presentation of it is. The drop in the ocean comment is wrong. That’s not how stats works. You may want to argue that your samples have superior collection methods, but don’t attack the size.

What’s worse, as far as I can tell the actual preprint doesn’t make the 90% claim. It’s referring to the risk of loss from ocean acidification in the next 20 years.

As far as I can tell it’s just bad science naive bloggers and journalists all around plus armchair experts criticizing each other.

If anyone is going to talk about skepticism and scientific literacy, step one should be ignoring pop summaries in the news.

https://deliverypdf.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=327083003119119...

I think the number of folks turning away from science or appreciating a scientific thought process or in simple terms logical thinking is increasing in this country. You cannot expect folks who look down on education or “educated folks” in general to appreciate the benefits of a scientific thought process. They might be in fact more prone to accepting disinformation and conspiracy theories that aligns with their worldview than listening to scientific facts that doesn’t align with their world view and accepting those scientific facts.

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