Comment by InterviewFrog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by InterviewFrog | Hacker News Reader

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Ironically, being anti-science is pro-science. Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method.

The main reason being scientific consensus can lag reality significantly, especially when career incentives discourage dissent. The history of science includes many cases where consensus was wrong and critics were marginalized rather than engaged.

Deference to science as an authority is the opposite.

Feynman has a quote on this:

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, 'Science teaches such and such,' he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, 'Science has shown such and such,' you might ask, 'How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?' It should not be 'science has shown' but 'this experiment, this effect, has shown.' And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments — but be patient and listen to all the evidence — to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at."

Somewhere there's a quote about how the old guard has to literally die out before certain new ideas can take root; even if the new idea is obviously correct.

I think we've been pampered by a few hundred years of rapid "scientific advancement" and now we're firmly in the area where things are not grade-school science fair easy to see or prove.

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck

>Ironically, being anti-science is pro-science. Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method

skepticism is necessary, but not sufficient.

if they merely nay-say institutions and then go with their gut, it's certainly not.

only when someone attempts to rationally disprove a position, offering alternate testable theories and actually performing those tests is science done.

if you suspect an institution is wrong, that's fine, but it's just a hunch until someone does a test.

Skepticism should be norm.

I was a witness of wrong prescribing medication by doctors many time. For example Novalgin for mother releasing from hospital after painful birth. This medicament is not suitable for breastfeeding mothers!

> Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method.

Which is why one of the core tenets of practicing Science is “trust, but verify”.

Science is based on the trust of what came before.

But the fallible, ego-driven, and dishonest nature of humanity means that trust alone cannot be relied upon. Hence the “but verify”. That is why replication studies and falsification tests exist - to cull that which cannot be reliably replicated.

Unfortunately, capitalism has stepped in and f*ked up even that, when for-profit universities who rely on public funding place “publish or die” mandates on researchers. This makes any repeat experiments untenable because it takes researchers away from publishing new data. So they just cite prior papers and chase the latest shiny -- because their continued employment is predicated upon publishing.

We have perverse incentives in place that have distorted science, sure. And almost all of these distortions come directly down to a violently coercive economic system that forces you to be profitable to someone else least you suffer homelessness, destitution, and even death.

But what else is there? Belief in an insane, evil, and omnicidal sky-daddy?

Sorry, but no. We should counteract the sources of distortions by crushing capitalism and the corrosive influence of money, not switching over to systems that have always proven themselves to be supremely untrustworthy.

Skepticism needs to be calibrated based on the weight of the evidence. There's a broad spectrum from being skeptical about the latest overhyped study in subfield X to being skeptical about quantum mechanics. If you want to challenge established science, you need to bring the receipts. To quote Carl Sagan, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".

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