Wait, are you seriously arguing that people shouldn't be skeptical of scientists? I was a scientist at doctoral course level and I sure didn't blindly believe whatever was written in a paper, or said by another researcher: a lot of papers are weak, biased in their protocol, or even straight-up arrangement with reality. This last point is quite obvious for anyone who worked in a lab. Also career has to be built and objectivity is not something rewarded by the system, so there is a lot of bullshit spread around.
A paper is a data point. Can be a weak or a strong one. The opinion of a scientist is another data point, not "science".
For the general population the choice is between the voodoo man, or a professor. I prefer people to choose to blindly believe the professor (which carries a risk) than the voodoo man (which is always crap)
Do you remember peak ivermectin? There were many articles published by real medical doctors in real journals. Is that a professor you should trust? (I read a few of the articles. Most of them were just awful, and I was ignoring the non statistically significant ones.)
The list of food that babies can not eat before they are one year old changes from country to country, and even from one medical doctor to another. Find a few friends abroad and compare.
What if a military expert tells you that a normal looking truck is a secret mobile factory of weapons of mass destruction? Should you invade?
What about cold fusion, aka low energy nuclear reactions, aka [I don't remember the new name]? I think they are published by people with real degree. (I recommend to ignore the heat measurements because it's too difficult. Look for the data about neutrons or isotopes.)
I'd like too that people follow the advice from serious professors instead of voodoo man, but sometimes the distinction is not so clear. At one point people must choose the expert to follow.
For some topics there are easy rules, like "preregistered double blind randomized controlled trial published in a serious peer review journal or it didn't happen", but each word there need a long explanation of the meaning and a long explanation of why it is there. (And remember to read the details, because some papar have weird exclusion criteria, like dropping the death cases.) (And defining which journal are "serious" is a very difficult task.)
> In many countries you can study Homeopathy in the university. Is that a professor you should trust?
Absolutely not. In order to be a homoeopath, at least in France, you have to study medicine. Then some of the graduates who apparently were mostly partying when studying go for that and this is why I always double-check what my MD prescribes. She is really great but I have a limited trust in everything.
But see, I have a PhD in physics and I have been running the skeptics branch at my university. So again I am special.
> The list of food that babies can not eat before they are one year old changes from country to country, and even from one medical doctor to another. Find a few friends abroad and compare.
My children were raise in three countries (one in Asia, two in Europe). I've seen that but these are nutritionists - a branch of "science" that is at least laughable. A friend of mine who is a tenured professor in nutrition, when she was doing her PhD, asked me to review the statistics. I could not - it was such rubbish, and she was such a good friend that I told her to find somebody else or just give up - the people who will be reading her thesis are as clueless as she was regarding statistics.
> What if a military expert tells you that a normal looking truck is a secret mobile factory of weapons of mass destruction? Should you invade?
If I had to make the decision? I would ask several of them and then yes, invade. Are you able to tell the difference between a MIS-45 X and a normal truck? I cannot (and made up the name).
> What about cold fusion, aka low energy nuclear reactions
Cold fusion popped up, and then disappeared when more people started to test it. I was studying at the time this happened and I think it went on foe a month or so. And then nothing - exactly because the scientific community called bluff.
> At one point people must choose the expert to follow.
As you see I agree with most of you points (and I guess you have a scientific background because of the (very good) examples you gave. But I do not see your point.
You need to give a simple rule for the general population. Between choosing the scientific community that sometimes fail and the bozos in pseudoscience I say - blindly trust science.
:)
Anyway, the 10% of crackpots are overrepresented in the news coverage, and there are many "institutes" and "associations" with serious names, that sometimes it's difficult.
I think that there are courses of homeopathy in some German universities, but it's difficult to find and I don't know enough about German universities to know it it's a big serious one or just a minor crazy one.
So I used Google to search in my university. I knew it was a mistake. The first two links are
* http://www.ffyb.uba.ar/POSGRADO/contenidos-secretaria-de-pos... (autotranlation https://www-ffyb-uba-ar.translate.goog/POSGRADO/contenidos-s... )
* http://www.fvet.uba.ar/?q=homeopatia (autotranslation https://www-fvet-uba-ar.translate.goog/?q=homeopatia&_x_tr_s... )
It's the bigest university in the capital city of Argentina. My university is split in 13 faculties, each one is quite independent. Both page look like serious pages of real courses, for graduate students or specializations. I can try to search in the other 11 faculties, but I don't dare, because I expect a few more. (I don't expect to find results in all 13, for example the Engineering faculty probably has no course about homeopathy, I hope.) Can you try searching at your university?
About cold fusion, it reappears from time to time. This was popular a few years ago from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Catalyzer but the degrees of the inventor are ... strange.
The last interesting case I remember is https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03603... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24795744 (80 points | Oct 15, 2020 | 71 comments) It looks like a serious team in a serious institution in a serious journal. But the list of new elements that appear after the "fusion" makes no sense at all. Suspiciously, they are very common in the plumbing and other parts of the device, so my guess is just involuntary contamination instead of fusion.
I am French and I am ashamed that my country is THE country of homeopathy (together with Germany). You see homeopathy everywhere and I am tired discussing with people about that. I once took part in a radio broadcast with some crackpots and ate 5 tubes of Oscillococcinum (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscillococcinum) when they started to tell how important the right prescription is.
There was also a guy who was channelling something something energy something quantum with his hands and was afraid of how powerful it was. He came with a lady who fainted when he touched her head. I asked him to concentrate as much as he could and fry my brain. He did not want to do it because he would kill me. After some back and forth he touched my head and obviously noting happened. I had bad waves or something mike that, apparently.
As for the "education" for homeopaths in France, this is done after medical studies which is completely crazy. These people are idiots.
Those categories are not mutually exclusive. Universities are filled with gender or other crackpot theories "academics" that don't follow scientific methods. Even in the real science realm, having academics credentials is a more effective way to turn into a voodoo man in an unrelated field than starting from scratch.
And this is a good thing because the first two things on that list, given the impact it has on the living style population, must be discussed publicly. Politics exist precisely to address those kind of broad impact topics.
The last and lasting blow done to scientific credibility was precisely about the so-called vaccines. A barely tested medical product based on a tech that never worked previously released by a big company known for corruption was decreed to be "science", all while changing the definition in dictionaries to make it a "vaccine". No discussion on the subject even by experts was tolerated, the big internet companies erased opposition and some governments went as far as stripping basic rights (movement, expression, business) to citizens, all in the name of science.
The fact is, this isn't a data-based or scientific approach at all. It's only power-tripping. A data based-approach would have shown clearly about 3 months in the crisis that the population at large isn't even at risk. Explaining to the population the risk ventilated by age would have been 100 times more scientific than the fear-mongering broadcasted continually on TV. Science needs to be used as a justification carefully, and using it dogmatically for pushing something that was ironically not even scientifically proven to be effective nor without risks (I'm pretty sure the newspapers in my country never reported the thousand or so dead directly imputable to it) is the exact opposite.
Politics doesn't exist precisely to address those topics, politics exists for people to obtain power. Discussing those topics may be a route to power. Without a respect for science as a more objective truth than rhetoric, power will be secured by the most appealing rhetoric, whether or not that voice conflicts directly with the science that we know.