It is invariably some of the most scientifically illiterate, ideologically entrenched, and intellectually lukewarm people who spout this garbage as a retort to any sort of argument with which they do not wish to engage.
But the argument is so often misapplied that it's become meaningless.
I have argued against 5G deployment for example, not based on outlandish "zomg Bill Gates George Soros mindcontrol!!!11" or "brain tumours!!!11" nonsense, all of that is clearly nonsense. But the science is a lot less clear that there are zero effects than is sometimes made out to be, and there are also the ethical considerations of informed consent. I was, of course, immediately lobbed in with the crazies and called a science-denying conspiracy theorist, by someone with no expertise in the field who said I need to "listen to the science", in spite of my argument looking nothing like the anti-scientific nonsense from David Icke and the like.
Don't even get me started on COVID – any attempt to inject even the slightest sort of nuance was met with "you are literally murdering people with your unscientific nonsense!" and you were immediately lobbed in with COVID-denying anti-maskers or whatnot. At some point this stopped being a debate about trade-offs involving science and medicine on one hand and basic liberties and freedoms on the other and became some sort of moral crusade (and it seems it still is; there was a conference this month where masks at all times, full proof of vaccination, and a PCR test was still required, which seems a bit much for 2023).
A big issue is that any sort of nuance is often met with the most uncharitable interpretation because the genuinely crazy people have been getting so much attention.
It shouldn’t be this way, but there’s a lot of undermining of trust in science because of this stuff.
Take evolution as an example. How many layers of scientific expertise have to be understood to really claim that you understand how evolution works? Archeology, biology, history, geology, genetics…potentially more?
At some point there’s a trust factor involved in accepting evolution.
Now apply that same realization with climate change.
The more complex, the more moving parts, the easier it is to find a part to be skeptical about and people will do exactly that. Especially if they are given reason to believe that the science is just there to support a political objective.
In the end, unless science can be easily replicated and demonstrated (gravity, boiling water, killing bacteria, generating power, flywheels, etc) it will boil down to trust for the vast majority of people.
People take that in and say I just don't trust anything. That is a problem with America because people stop believing in objective facts, saying that it goes against their beliefs. This is a major problem why America doesn't have enough engineers and scientists and mathematicians, because people haven't learned that your intuition can be wrong and you can overcome your strong expectation about something by studying something, debugging a program or whatever.
Your general point is well taken but is severely and gravely undermined by the belief expressed in above.
Most people with a Ph.D. in a field with “science” in the name aren’t scientists. They work in fields that don’t have the same level of rigor as nuclear physics. (My degree is in aerospace engineering, and many real scientists would consider us bumpkins in how comparatively undisciplined our field is compared to their’s.) Those fields confer little to no power to produce tangible and undeniable results.
See: Social science Political science Evidence based naturopathy/chiro
Computer Science. ;-)
Perhaps an appropriate assessment, given that CS seems to be half engineering/tinkering, half applied mathematics, and half nonsense.
Then, folks started invoking the authority of “science” in connection with disciplines that don’t confer tangible power. For example, if “education science” worked, we would know it. It would convey power the results of which people could see with their own eyes without needed to pore through studies, or putting any faith in “education experts.”
_Science_ doesn’t say we should ban fossil fuels, but it does make predictions about what will happen if we continue to use them at the current rate.
It’s not science denial to be against the policy.
Science has nothing to say about what we should set as the objectives of our policy. Science can, however, inform our approach to attaining that objective.
Politics = applied philosophy Science = applied epistemology
Pretending that science can create policy leads to things like eugenics (but Darwin said it would make us fitter so it must be ‘good’!)
Try to voice any skepticism about climate change policy and most people will call you a climate denier.
Same with vaccines; express a skepticism of efficacy and suddenly you are an anti-science anti-Vaxer.
The irony is that skepticism and asking annoying questions is essential to science. Ignoring ‘anti-scientific’ arguments is inherently anti-science.
We collectively know more about everything every year, science has generally given us a self-correcting living corpus.
The argument you're making is the same made by anti-intellectuals: don't trust institutional knowledge and consensus because it's been wrong in the past, look at mistake X. It's something like a systemic ad hominem.
I know what this means from a statistical perspective but I dont know what it means with regard to practical day to day decision making.
> The argument you're making is the same made by anti-intellectuals Isn't there some sort of fallacy that you are yourself deploying here?
This is only correct when we have good evidence and good methods. That is why consensus breaks (like heliocentrism) occur during technological changes (development of telescope).
The critical point the parent is missing is that many fields have terrible data and terrible methods so the ‘consensus’ isn’t likely to be true (eg smoking is good for the nerves, butter is bad for you, the globe is too big for humans to cause changes)
It takes a lot of intellectual integrity to admit that many disciplines are not generating anything resembling ‘truth’. It’s easier to ignore and say: but the consensus is the best we have! Sometimes the heterodox view is the best.
That means that most ideas will end up being wrong in some way. The smoking-gun laws of nature are few and far between.
If you consider what % of ideas throughout history were plain wrong, it’s hard to believe that we have finally figured it all out and the consensus finally reflects reality most of the time.
It's easy (and trite) to cite the extremely limited pool of successful dogma-contrarians over time. Try making a list of the failed contrarians, and then another of all the knowledge (and its contributors) that didn't need fundamental reconsideration at some point in modernity.
Thus deferring to the ‘consensus’ and implicitly ignoring contrarian views stops science in its tracks.
I don’t understand what you mean in your first paragraph, and I don’t support dogmatic positions so I’m not sure why you refer to ‘dogma-contarians.’ Contrarians are usually anti-dogmatic.
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” Unreasonable contrarians are generally annoying but essential.