The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science | Hacker News Reader

The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science

motherjones.com

35 pointstlb64 comments

If HN has taught me anything, it's that it's trivially easy to trick people into taking the wrong side of any argument, at which point they'll continue to defend their position indefinitely even if they had no strong prior beliefs on the subject.

It's kind of sad that we live in a society where posting factually accurate comments/information is the most effective form of trolling.

It's also sad that people typically spend a small fraction of effort determining what it is they believe, then expend vastly greater effort arguing and promoting those hastily-formed (or most often, inherited) beliefs.

Nicely put. I personally find this frustrating to deal with. I've also learned that the most open of individuals are usually in the least amount of need for a good thought-provoking debate.

I believe that one shouldn't try to debate an idea until you can understand why a reasonable person might come to the opposing conclusion. Solves the empathy problem and "what if I'm wrong" problem in one stroke. Many people are incorrect, but few are actually crazy (and it is mostly pointless to debate those who are).

This has been my basic frustration with what I call "YouTube logic," which seems to take this form:

1) Determine what you would prefer to be true. 2) Spend your time absorbing and referencing supporting evidence, at the expense of verifying its credibility. 3) When presented with contradicting evidence, spend your time dismissing or discrediting it, at the expense of verifying its credibility. 4) Re-affirm your belief successfully through willful or accidental intellectual dishonesty.

Perhaps there's a formal name for this. YouTube logic works for me, though, because that makes it sound appropriately juvenile.

I like Information Saturation. The idea that for some people, instead of using the internet as an intelligent, character building resource, the internet uses them with it's strong polarizing and insular force of saturating them with distractions and half-truths.

The individual may think they have choices of what to think, but ultimately the specific forum and/or resource may already be tailored to their biases. We even have our most popular English search engine, google, tailoring your biases at the discovery phase of research.

I can't remember the specific presentation, but I seem to recall an example of the search "Egypt", which displayed revolution in one user window, and vacation opportunities in the other.

If you think this is interesting, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo1qzjC_5xI

If Hacker News has taught me anything, it's that people try to masquerade a lot of conclusions behind a wall of "Science" when in fact the process is neither scientific nor conclusive.

Not to mention how easy it is to forget the historical track record of science being overturned by better science: http://arbesman.net/the-half-life-of-facts/

I was thinking the same thing, though I didn't have a citation.

Like probably most HN readers I think of myself as reasonably well educated in science and engineering. However, when it comes to interpreting the vast majority of scientific discoveries I have to rely on my sense of scientific authority, not on firsthand knowledge.

Now put yourself in the average person's shoes: how can you trust anyone when there's so much contradictory information and, frankly, so much bad science around us?

Also, people love to argue so they will often take extreme positions just for the heck of it.

Why we don't believe in science?

Besides the illegitimate reasons, also because science is not some magic oracle but a process.

A process that can be (and HAS been) falsified for profit, fame, ideology or current fads.

A process which one can selectively take parts from, to push further agendas.

A process which lots of times, even in it's purest and well-intended form, arrives at bullshit conclusions (like lobotomy, the cures for homosexuality, thalidomide, etc).

And it gets worse: a lot of things that are political and ideological in nature are also considered sciences (History, Sociology, Economics, etc). Things which are not even close to "black/white" as hard sciences are.

One should not "believe" in science. One should EXAMINE and VERIFY science, with the scientific method (which in itself is mostly: systematic experimentation).

Merely "believing" or "trusting" science is no better than mediaval people trusting the priests of yore.

While I agree with much of what you wrote, I have to point out that it is impossible to "examine and verify" anywhere near enough of the science that is relevant to our daily lives. That's both a physical impossibility due to resource constraints and a mental impossibility due to lack of domain knowledge required to correctly interpret the data.

We have to choose which "shortcuts" to accept. One way or another we end up trusting in something greater than ourselves -- the nebulous scientific community, political analysts, priests, neighbors, etc -- to inform us. Unless you disbelieve basically everything in life you put your faith in somebody or something. Not necessarily 100% belief but some level of certainty is necessary and that doesn't make it less a faith-based decision, for example even priests have a tendency to doubt the existence of God.

I really wish we had a different term for "prevailing consensus of the current practioners of science". The word science itself should refer specifically to the scientific method, not to its conclusions.

I think William James summarized TFA's thesis most succinctly when he said, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices."

> Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as liberal Democrats.

What about hierarchical communitarians or egalitarian individualists? What about people who are near the middle of one or both scales?

Why even bother having two supposedly independent traits if you're really just asking people about their political party?

The author may be distorting the study's methodology or results, in order to support the narrative he wants to tell. (Or the researchers, but from the information presented here, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.)

Well, at one time, not so long ago, there were such animals as moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats (although an argument could be made that the current Democrat party is somewhat more conservative than Nixon was).

The fact that the examples of disbelief given in such articles are always lefty pop-topics (climate change, Obama's birth certificate, death panels) is the real hint into why people don't examine things with pure rationality. I could lead off a similar article with "Why don't people realize that human races, to some degree, have different average intelligence stemming from genetics?" That would never be published in MotherJones, and honestly, if they had their way, I would go to prison just from saying that.

So why don't people "believe" in climate change? Because they realize it's a political, not a scientific, topic. It has winners and losers to the order of trillions of dollars. Science can't compete. Sorry.

Do you really think the vaccine-autism thing is a "lefty pop-topic"? As far as I can tell the sets of people who deny climate change science and those who deny vaccine-autism science are nearly disjoint.

You will find legions on homeschoolers in the intersection, if you go looking.

Since you're someone who seems to belive in multiple human races could you give me a list of those races?

Human races are not a matter of belief. Look at the people around you, look at different cultures and their trends across centuries. You're one of those people who could take a lesson from this article.

In a discussion about public ignorance of science you are telling somebody the best way to get an answer to something is anecdotal evidence from looking at the people around them? On a topic where we know people have great difficulty objectively comparing things?

I honestly can't tell if you are joking or not.

What race is the President of the United States?

> Human races are not a matter of belief....

Oh. Then please provide the list asked for, and while you're at it, list the genes and loci you use to classify members of a "race".

I mean, if human "races" are not a matter of belief but are a matter of science, that should be really easy for you and the parent commenter.

Right?

You're setting me up for a trap with the list thing - if I linked somewhere you'd simply say it was racist data and question the validity of the sources.

Instead I'll go for the route of scientific analogy. If dogs have races, why wouldn't humans? After all, humans are not biologically above or separate from animals. Why would basic evolution stop applying with humans?

Mind you, the existence of races doesn't have to imply inferiority or superiority between them. People seem to be afraid that would happen, so they throw the baby out with the bathwater by denying the whole concept of race altogether. Much like the article says.

Evolution does not work that way. It is a purely pass/fail system.

Also, since the invention of boats and planes, humans have been interbreeding like crazy, so it's pretty much ceasing to matter.

So any justification for race-based admissions and government minority preferences programs is coming to an end, you'd say?

Frankly, I consider it a different issue that has more to with history than evolution. I do believe such programs should end, but whether now or later is up for debate.

Of all the injustices in the world, extra scholarships for racial minorities hardly seems like a high priority, though. I'd rather cut through the Gordian Knot with free education for all (not as an entitlement, but rather as an investment).

We're about 1.5 generations away from race not mattering at all; young people simply don't care. Like so many vestiges of the old world, race-based entitlements will eventually disappear.

Ask any admissions officer at any elite university for the list he uses when defending the need for race-based admissions policy. Ask him what racial categories his major, world-class scientific research institution has chosen to put on their admissions application.

Ask any university humanities department whether their African-American Studies program isn't just as bogus as a Unicorn Studies program since neither group actually exists, and see what they say.

Ask the US federal government what categories they include on the census under "race".

Ask a liberal supporter of minority business set-aside programs for a list of who these so-called "minorities" are. Are they proposing setting aside contracts for businesses run by left-handed people, or do they have a different set of categories in mind? Ask them for their list of who should be given preference over whom.

I recall a story of an expat living in South Africa with his black wife and their daughter, during Apartheid. I believe the very confused racial classification officials finally decided their daughter was "Indian".

African-Americans (or blacks, in the context given) certainly exist as a group. The question is whether you can define them as a race.

To top it off, your first example is incredible. Universities usually lump all Asians into one category though most people would consider an Indian and a Japanese person to be of different race. If that is your list, you have done your argument a grievous injury.

Well, here at Stanford they put Indians and Japanese in different categories, but that's hardly the point. These groupings represent political categorization based on racial categorization. I had thought the tongue-in-cheek nature of my reply would have been more obvious, but I'll make it more explicit: those who most strongly advocate the "no such thing as race" position tend to most strongly advocate race-based preferences when it suits their political agenda without, apparently, seeing a hint of irony. When someone who denies that races exist demands to see my list of races, I suggest he try using the list of races used by his own political allies.

There are different races in the sense that there are different colors on the visible electromagnetic spectrum. There is no "correct" categorization on the spectrum itself, but you can observe clearly different clusters in many situations. Take all the red, green, and blue elements from several video monitors and graph their frequencies and despite that fact that there is a lot of diversity, there won't be a uniform distribution. Three clusters will be easily visible, and you can call them clusters red, green, and blue. In the application, unlike the theoretical spectrum, these categories do exist.

History has clustered human beings, too. Nobody here really denies that humans have descended in a complex tree with lots of crossovers. There is no right way to categorize all leaves of the tree itself into sharp "races". Even so, historical accident has resulted in a lot of clustering of genetic affinity where members of a cluster share lots of relatively recent common ancestors but have mostly very distant common ancestors with members of other clusters. The fact that there are individuals of all sorts on the human tree doesn't mean that there is no clustering.

So Han Chinese, Central American Indians, Northern Europeans, and West Africans diverge long ago and don't intermix genetically for a thousand generations, then history brings them together recently in the Americas where they begin to interbreed.

Nothing wrong with that (at least IMO). Eventually this interbreeding may reduce the clustering to mere random clustering, but today there are still strong, clear clusters of genetic affinity. You can call the clusters races or call them foo, but they aren't just figments of the imagination. The admissions department at Stanford has no difficulty in most cases distinguishing an Indian from a Japanese by genetic affinity with other members of these groups. Whether they then make that two different racial preference categories or assign them to the same "Asian" group is just identity politics.

If you can't provide a basic list of races, and a repeatable procedure for determining which race(s) a given individual belongs to, then I don't see how you can claim this has anything to do with science.

The Stanford and Berkeley admissions offices have basic lists of races and seem to think that they can determine the race of their applicants well enough that there is some justification for their race-based admissions policy. Are you claiming that what these major scientific research institutions are doing has nothing to do with science, that it's all, say, politics?

It certainly has nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with sociology/history and yes, even politics (shocking that a research institution would be involved in politics, I know).

There is, however, a systemic bias tied to things like skin color, or accent, and not at all associated with the ability of such applicants to do well in the institution. As a result of this systemic bias, applicants that would, were they white, be admitted in a heartbeat, are judged significantly more critically, so we attempt to correct this problem by giving them more 'points' or whatever in the admission process for possessing physical attributes that incorrectly hold them back.

I'm not sure what other system you would propose in such an environment?

"Look at the people around you, look at different cultures": are you talking about races, or cultures?

By the way, when I was younger and there was very little immigration here in Italy, I looked around me and saw people - whole families - with blond hair, with dark hair, with red hair. I saw people (and families) with blue eyes, green eyes, hazel eyes. I saw very tall people, very short people, very smart people, pretty dumb people. And there were people with very pale skin, medium skin, and pretty dark skin. So, how many "races" where there already?

I'm under the impression that, when you talk about race, you really mean something like breed[1]. But there isn't selective breeding in humans - at least, that I'm aware of.

So, the question is not moot. If you have to define "race" scientifically, how do you go about it?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breed

Motherjones does have a left bias that makes me cringe sometimes, so i see where you are coming from.

Where I disagree with you is that while science can uncover issues (such as global warming or gmos) that can be politicized, that doesn't mean that the underlying questions are somehow no longer scientific. Politics can't compete. Sorry.

The society of science is inherently political. There's several issues - who controls the funding? Who controls the publication axis? Who controls academic appointments?

This is the problem with reifying "science". Even the "scientific method" itself - as in the way that it is practiced - is suspect. Why are certain conventions of running null controls the ones that are accepted versus others? Why in some instances is "eliminating variables" good (I often take the position that if you can consistently measure a result under sloppy conditions that means it's robust)

This is why we gain a consensus based on repeatability of results, peer-review and the ability for a model to make a prediction.

who gets to try to repeat those results? Experiments don't do themselves, and they're not free. Who gets to publish results so they can be peer-reviewed? Who sets the "consensus" about if a "model makes a prediction". Who gets to decide whose opinions are included and disincluded in this consensus? What is the punishment for making an incorrect prediction? Do you get to be disincluded from "consensi" for a spell if you get it wrong?

>who gets to try to repeat those results? Experiments don't do themselves, and they're not free.

Scientists are from all walks of life and funding comes from many different sources.

>Who gets to publish results so they can be peer-reviewed?

I think this is how it works... Anyone with a paper can submit it to a journal, then the journal decides if they are going to publish or not. There are many journals with different amounts of specialization and reputation.

> Who sets the "consensus" about if a "model makes a prediction". Who gets to decide whose opinions are included and disincluded in this consensus?

You will find the answer to those questions in the definition of the word "consensus".

> What is the punishment for making an incorrect prediction? Do you get to be disincluded from "consensi" for a spell if you get it wrong?

Its kind of like other communities (including this one)... the better your reputation the more seriously people take your input.

If you have a better approach to understanding the universe, I am extremely interested in what it could be. I do like the idea of open journals (aaron swartz style), but i honestly don't know what the ramifications would be.

>if they had their way, I would go to prison just from saying that.

Your post reminds me that this research seems to miss another way that people delude themselves: persecution-complexes.

Once you believe that others want to do bad things to you for your beliefs, you become far more entrenched. And ridiculous exaggerations such as yours allow you to more fully insulate yourself from facts: because you're under attack and your freedom is at risk, you have to protect yourself from these terrible people, and therefore, their beliefs.

>So why don't people "believe" in climate change? Because they realize it's a political, not a scientific, topic. It has winners and losers to the order of trillions of dollars.

How can you possibly say it's 'not scientific' when it's entirely scientific. The responses to climate change are political, but the topic itself is minimally political.

But you do enforce the point that people will cut themselves off from reasoning logically, if the conclusion is one they don't want to face. If your political buddies may be hurt, one is much more likely to fight the truth.

>How can you possibly say it's 'not scientific' when it's entirely scientific. The responses to climate change are political, but the topic itself is minimally political.

The topic becomes political the moment it has political ramifications. The bigger those ramifications are, the more of a political topic it is.

The parent knows it is a scientific topic, but when it's brought up, it's likely not. When it's argued, it's likely being argued by people who arn't looking at evidence, but looking at effect.

Before you get downvoted and shadow-banned for posting this, I wish to thank you for making this accurate comment. I know we will both be captured by the FBI for taking this position, but it's important to speak truth to power.

Well done.

> persecution-complexes

My favorite example of this is how the left attacks and ostracizes those who dare to oppose the gay rights agenda in any way (two examples which immediately spring to mind are [1] [2], but there are many more).

It's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.

I could go on at length about the importance of defending someone's right to state unpopular opinions even (or perhaps especially) if you disagree with them, but I hope HN'ers are smart enough to fill in the details of that argument themselves.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chick-fil-A_same-sex_marriage_c...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_Scouts_of_America_membershi...

> Why don't people realize that human races, to some degree, have different average intelligence stemming from genetics?

Because it's a truthclaim that's outside of the ability of science to test, short of jesus coming back to earth with his fairy wand to endow you with platonic (and measurable) definitions of race, intelligence, average, and genetics. Whatever definitions you choose there is going to be some difference, even if that difference is zero, but that difference is going to differ wildly depending on what definitions you choose.

"Outside the ability of science to test"? Nothing has been so thoroughly tested throughout the the world as IQ, and the measurements of climate data don't come close to IQ differences in terms of predictability. Whatever fuzziness there is in IQ measurements pales in comparison to the fuzziness in climate measurement, yet an outfit like Mother Jones would declare the former "unsettled" and the latter fully proven except to wacko right-wing "science denialists".

IQ is not synonymous with intelligence, nor is IQ a measurement -- it's normalized by definition. In fact IQ itself isn't even a 'thing', since there are dozens of different tests.

And yet there is a high and repeatable correlation among all those tests indicating that they are all proxies for some real "thing". Call it by whatever name you like--g, intelligence, IQ, whatever--but there is a real "thing" that causes these proxy tests to have highly predictable results.

The science itself is just a set of measurements and is apolitical. The politics start when people apply their conclusions to the results.

no measurement is free of bias. why did you choose a particular instrument to take your measurements on? Why did you use a bruker NMR instead of a varian NMR? Was it because one manufacturer is german and the other is american? Why did you report your measurement in kcal/mol instead of kJ/mol? How does that affect the ability of a reader to glean insight from your report? Why did you even do experiment X at all? Was it because a reviewer told you to do it otherwise it wouldn't be published? Was that reviewer a former post-doc of a vicious competitor, who had a petty dislike for your previous advisor that had to do with the way that he answered a question she posed at a conference fifteen years ago?

So in subtle (and usually insignificant but always nonzero ways) politics can creep into these "measurements".

Did you read the article to the end? It addresses this point.

Many people don't believe in climate change for the same reason many don't believe in the findings of cigarette companies' scientists or drug company scientists or Department of Agriculture scientists: they don't trust the institutions that employ the scientists not to filter their employees' results through their own institutional agendas.

> I could lead off a similar article with "Why don't people realize that human races, to some degree, have different average intelligence stemming from genetics?" That would never be published in MotherJones

Because it is not a scientific statement.

Funny how articles get traction on HN:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22don...

This could have just as easily been applied to disputes inside science itself.

So here's the secret you should learn by your 20s, but some people never do: human beings are wonderful at rationalizing. Most of the time they do not know they are doing this.

There is a bedrock falsehood that somehow wrapping the word "science" around something prevents it from this problem. It does not. Science history has taught us that for the most part, the social part of science works just like the social part of any other industry: there are cool people, there are weirdos, there's folks who have amazing ideas, there are fads, there are things the group feels strongly about, and so on. In other words, scientists, like all of us, operate in clans and herds. (Their herds just have much better names!)

Pay attention: I am not trying to trash the entire field of science. Far from it. Science is the light we have in the darkness. It's mankind's only hope. But what I'm trying to show is that reading articles like "the science of why we don't believe in science" is bullshit. In it, the writer will just put his own misconceptions, or popular opinion, in the place of what is right and show the various ways people do not agree with him and how they are broken. The subtext is clear: we, the cognoscenti, know the truth. It's those poor other rubes that aren't getting it.

I've long said I do not know what the climate is going to do. Looking at some of the models' performance and the lack of any other planet-sized biological systems to study, I have my doubts that others do either, but that's just my own bias. What I can say is that the discussion around climate science is full of horse shit so deep that you'd need an excavator working 24/7 for a year to dig your way out. It has become politicized, and scientists have crossed the line between telling us what is and telling us what we should do.

This politicization of science is not good for politics or for science, because Average Joe Sixpack is going to start lumping in all information he receives under the rubric "science" as being suspect. He doesn't have the time nor inclination to sort out the different types of proofs we have for Newtonian physics versus evolutionary psychology. To him, it's all just "science". And when one of these sciences promotes something that later on turns out to be highly-opinionated BS, it hurts the entire field. It's bad enough when journalists do this with poor science stories, but when scientists themselves start playing the game of "who's right and who's wrong" in the world, it destroys the very thing they're supposed to be promoting. Very bad.

So when I read articles about how one political party has differently-organized brains than the other one, or about various forms of cognitive bias influencing politics, or how denialism and being a crank has a scientific basis, I wince. This is not helpful. Please stop. You are not the scientific, reasonable-minded judge of rationality you think you are. None of us are. If you absolutely must say something, make the general point and move on. Otherwise you are creating the very problem that you say you are just trying to point out.

I wish that more people understood the difference between science and scientists. It is a shame that so many people give a bad name to science and the scientific method - the best way we know how to discover truth. It's engineered to discover truth. That's all that it's about, the only thing. It's independent of (and unfortunately, quite possibly beyond) any one human scientist's ability to correctly employ it.

Sometime back in the 70s, some scientists tried to popularize science by becoming quasi-famous people themselves. Sagan comes to mind, but I'm not trying to single him out.

I'm not so sure this was such a good move. Science is a wondrous thing and amazing. Scientists are just a bunch of normal schmucks like the rest of us. Once you start playing the hero-worship game, it's easy to start drifting from science promotion to self-promotion. The lines get blurry. Likewise, it's easy to start drifting from where the science is currently to what your opinion of the science is currently. Most media consumers are not savvy enough to pick up on that difference. Most science promoters are not so great at pointing out the provisional nature of science and the humbleness required when addressing the history of how science is actually carried out.

I saw one of these science promoter guys on the net the other day answering questions. One question was something like "Is there a God?" Since I spent some hours on epistemology and philosophy, especially around this topic, I was intrigued.

I wasn't too impressed by his answer, but what really astounded me was the fact that he was more than willing to answer a question like "Is there a God?" right alongside one about the speed of light, without making any caveats about the different kinds of information he was relating. This is not a good thing.

The main reason is that people don't understand science, but they will still appeal to it as if it were the law of the universe. It's an appeal to authority: Much like people used to say "X is true because God said it", it is now "X is true because Science proved it". Science is a continual work in progress towards an objective understanding of the universe. But it's so easy to see a news story saying: "A new study shows that global warming will melt the ice caps before 2012! More at 11". People have been lied to before and don't trust these studies, because they may have faulty conclusions. We need to look at the data and make our own conclusions, because we may all have different perspectives on what caused a result.

Relevant reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics

I disagree that it is simply an appeal to authority. I think this is more accurate: "X is likely true not just because the current scientific consensus says it is, but because we as humanity literally can not know better".

This is why I feel so uncertain about almost everything. How can one go through life confident about anything if they must not only research everything for themselves, but also overcome their own biases? What makes somebody qualified to evaluate or research anyway?

I feel like after over two decades of living, I don't know a damn thing, and I don't mean that in a "I'm so young and naive" sense either.

I have twice as many decades of living as you do, and my certainty has only continued to decline, for all the reasons you mentioned.

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