Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

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It would be better to teach readers that when scientists say a thing is so, it’s always prefaced with “to our current understanding…”

That saves an enormous load of weasel words, while also helping people understand what science actually is.

Edit:

Your comment rubbed me the wrong way, and I think I know why. It presumes people are too dumb to learn how to read things, but they’re not. Fantasy novels don’t preface every sentence like “in this fictional universe, Frodo handed the ring to Samwise. And then, for pretend, let’s say they ate some breakfast.” Readers would loathe that. Yes, we know this is all made-up. It’s a fictional work. It’s implicit in the name.

Well, science works are no different. “Science” implies “current understanding”. That’s fundamental to it. If we discover a better theory of something tomorrow, we’ll adopt future textbooks to describe that as our new model of that thing. You don’t need to weasel every sentence with “today, we think that…” because it’s implicit in the fact that it’s science writing, just like “it didn’t really happen” is implicit in fiction, and “as far as we know…” is implicit in a newspaper. Rather than “fix” those genres, we should educate people on how to read them.

I almost agree with you. However, I’m being a history teacher I’ve discovered that a lot of history books should have been fiction books because they deliberately tried to mislead us and act as propaganda. So the implication does not always match the intent.

Adding the qualification bring some honesty to the writer for the reader. There was a lot of discussion around Covid that was shut down, because people were assuming that the science was, in fact, a truth, and not a theory or even a hypothesis.

But then when scientist say "there is 99% chance that asteroid will hit", the other characters says "so there is some wiggle room, lets call it 60% and move on".

Some people need to understand science is never exact. Like you are saying, they should understand it isn't exact.

Then others are like, since it isn't exact, then it isn't real.

I've heard arguments that since Climate Models have some range of error, then it isn't real, "see, there is some uncertainty". Climate change isn't real, because the models have some error. So for these people you need to be more forcefully confident in the predictions since they can't handle the nuance in discussing error ranges.

What do you mean by more forcefully confident? Do you mean pretending there's no uncertainty? That will only work as long as every result matches its probable prediction. One can be forcefully confident while acknowledging uncertainty. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/344623-i-know-what-you-re-t...

If something is 99.9% Certain, then act like it is Certain.

Lot of pedantic STEM people will waffle and be like, "yeah, it isn't 100%, I can't commit", or "I'm not 100% confident".

Then the non-STEM run with it and say it isn't going to happen. "Well, they didn't seem that concerned".

Alright, I see what you’re saying there, and agree with the premise. I think the right way to fix it is to tell people what science means, rather than re-write all science publications.

I would say we need to teach them about probability, statistics and risk assessment along with “science.”

but I disagree, by changing the wording we are implicitly teaching them what science means.

I think that's all under the science umbrella.

Thing is, changing the wording makes it more tedious to consume for more knowledgeable readers. It's not like we can tweak a few phrases to make it universally better with no drawbacks.

> It presumes people are too dumb to learn how to read things, but they’re not.

Have you talked to average people, out of the HN bubble? They are often too dumb to read at all, period.

Miss me with that, dawg. We’re talking about people smart enough to be reading science content in the first place. Also, my dad was a mortician, and later an insurance salesman, and he’s perhaps the smartest person I’ve ever met. I promise you HN conversations are hardly the pinnacle of intelligent human discourse.

People are objectively not “often” unable to read. Literacy is extremely high, almost universal, in modern developed nations

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