See also Scott Adams' musings on the subject: http://blog.dilbert.com/post/109880240641/sciences-biggest-f...
Look - I'm an engineer. I use a sort-of Bayesian reasoning: I started from what I learned as a child and then kept adjusting probabilities. You (plural "you") wouldn't be surprised if I told you I believe most politicians are liars. Well, I got to "most scientists are wrong" the same way. Sure, I didn't actually talk to most scientists, or even heard about them; those I did hear about, though, are at best misguided.
In any case, my original argument wasn't about the scientists; my argument was: most people treat science as a religion. They feel very superior to the religious people who are accepting everything they are told uncritically and then turn around and accept everything that is prefixed with "science says". Ten years ago, I used to make fun of people for believing the Earth revolves around the Sun - I have yet to find a single one who could do better than "that's what scientists say". That is arguably worse than those who accepted the Ptolemaic model - for one thing, they could at least see that the Sun was rising and setting.
(I can rant on this subject for hours but I don't think this is the proper forum.)
We had a subject in my lab yesterday that after the experiment had a "heated" debate where he put physics vs religion with one of the volunteers who was religious. While I was in the control room tinkering with the software, I listened in on their conversation and could hear the smugness of the subject as he used science as a tool to try and "convert" the volunteer. I thought the volunteer handled the conversation quite well, but it seemed like quite the inquisition from the "scientist"…
There are plenty of scientists who are fucking idiots.
Yet to uphold what people consider science today, you use one example. As if the vast majority of scientists had anything to do with the development of the cell phone (and use the word testament which has a non zero religious connotations), and give no lip service to how many religious people throughout the times have supported scientific endeavors…
As for honoring the religious who supported science. I say, to the degree they pursued religion, they shortchanged their scientific accomplishments. Consider what else Newton might have done, had he abandoned his alchemy and astrology.
"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[2]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."
From such definition, if I could point at every person and say it was the result of systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of a testable explanations and predictions about the universe, it wouldn't be a stretch for one to think that such seems to be in favor of an omniscient being :P
Consider that there was probably some function of Newtons alchamey and astrology experience that allowed him to put forth other ideas that we are willing accept from testable hypothesis… or that had their been no Newton, the phenomena that he described, would have still existed, yet people at that time would continued to have no testable understanding of it.
The result of some particular branches of science where we do, in fact, have reliable knowledge and the ability to make accurate predictions.
But that is very, very different from "science" in general. There are many more fields that are called "sciences" but do not have anything like that kind of reliable knowledge or predictive power. So it's not enough to just say "science"; you have to specify the field, so we know which category it falls into.
I posit that if one doesn't have time to research the subject themself, one shouldn't form opinion about such subjects beyond that they now know such subjects exist. But I suppose asking that of human beings is too much :P
The rise of a civilization based on technology and information is a towering testament to the successes of science. Lets not fool ourselves.
If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, it means you don't care about the answer anyway. So why should you take any side? Why not just accept that you don't know?
The point is that what is "less wrong" is the understanding we build up by extending the range of our data and our ability to predict what new data that we haven't yet observed will look like. It's not anything we build up by "consensus". So a lay person, trying to figure out what to "blindly follow", should not be looking at "consensus"; they should be looking at what data we have, how reliable it is, what does it cover, and how well we can predict what we will see when we get further data. As you can see, I put "blindly follow" in quotes because you can't do all this blindly; you can't just ask what the "consensus" is. You have to actually look at the content.
Edit: also, I was referring initially to the arguments from other comments, not to Asimov specifically.
This is probably true, at least in fields where we have a reasonably developed science, but you realize, I trust, that it's not a very high bar. :-)
The critical difference between treating science as a religion, and treating religion as a religion, is that the science people have a good chance of being right.
Its rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results - the scientist has already been critical for you. That's kind of the whole point.
The rest of us will do very, very well to believe the results of science. Because its the only game in town that's actually trying to get it right.
_Its [sic] rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results_
I do not believe that this person is sarcastic; I say that because I have talked to hundreds of people with the same opinion. People actually believe this. My authority is better than yours so you uncritically accepting your authority is wrong, me uncritically accepting mine is not only right but obviously so.
Ignoring the absurdity of the statement, and the mind-numbing appeal to authority - this also shows a lack of knowledge of history. When people used Aristotle as an authority 500 years ago, they did it using this same rationale: Aristotle had already done all the thinking, who are you to claim to know better?
This is just painful.
I'm still reeling from "Its rational and reasonable to be uncritical of scientific results"- smh.
Given the available time and energy (or lack thereof) for most of us to examine every scientific result in detail, it can even be more rational (as in best allocation of personal resources) to accept some scientific results uncritically than to study them in detail. I'll note that I would argue for tentative acceptance, with growing confidence over time myself, but the original statement isn't wrong. It's just being interpreted through different vocabularies.
P.S. This next part is not a response to you specifically, just a general comment. I'm really disappointed by the polarizing tone of this thread, the uncharitable readings of others comments, the implications of guilt by association, and the emotionally motivated downvote brigades. HN used to be better; we've discussed this essay before and it wasn't nearly so bad. So I'm disappointed, and I'm disappointed in myself for participating, but feel I must because of how much I like the essay and how important it is for people to understand the concept of the relative wrongness of science.
Assuming that science news corresponds to scientific results will get one in trouble though.
"The foremost scientific authority claims that the Earth is flat. There is no need to be critical of this scientific finding. All opposing viewpoints must be shunned, and proponents of those contrarian ideas ridiculed and ruined."
http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/04/24/jacob-bronowski-asce...
Beware of dogma.
My particular peeve is engineers who kowtow to economics, putting it in a much higher pedestal than sociology or anthropology, because it is "mathy". The implicit assumptions are usually along the lines of "the assumptions seem obvious enough, and look at all those formulae in the transformations thereof!"
I'm not going to defend sociology specifically because I don't know the field or it's state, but in every science (e.g. chemistry), you make a model for some restricted case to fit some data and you make assumptions on the scope of the model. Otherwise you couldn't say pretty much anything about anything: "We tested that proton and that one has a mass of X units. We can't say anything about this proton, thogh." -- the evidence piles up that the model has widespread vality. In the same sense, we can make assumptions on the scope of models. Of course, I imagine we have no hope for the time being of uniting the basic physical laws to that of sociology, simply because we don't have the power to understand the human brain just yet. I don't think refraining from modelling behavior is useful, and it will probably even help us better model the brain and generalize it's behavior towards "better" intelligence (AI).
This is the example used in methodological discussions of economics. I don't know if astronomers do actually perform experiments on some limited scale, but it seems that classicaly they relied on "luck" to test predictions e. g. testing general relativity through observations of eclipses. In social sciences, there is a somewhat similar thing called "natural experiment", which is the main test for the validity of predictions. In both cases, the researcher takes a more passive role in testing his predictions.
This can be dauting to researchers, but overall it's for the best. There are indeed experiments in economics, specially in game theory. But the majority of possible experiments would cross the boundary of what is morally acceptable, and well into morally abhorrent e. g. randomly restricting a sample's access to education to estimate it's effects on wages.
Well, certainly, natural experiments can lead to knowledge. But that's a much slower and more dangerous path, artificial experiments are better in every sense, except that they are mostly not available for economics. Anyway, I don't think the use of natural experiments are the bottleneck currently holding economics back.
It seems like the worst offenders are in biology/pharmacology/genetics/biochemistry. I'm not trained in any of those fields, but it seems pretty obvious that organic life should be orders of magnitudes more complex than mechanics, materials science, aeronautics, or any of the other man-made scientific fields. They are also comparatively young subjects. We don't really understand enough about how all the pieces fit together, or even what all the pieces are, in biological processes to make much in the way of definitive statements.
But seriously, if I hear another nightly news story about how food X prevents cancer based on a study of a dozen people or the current consensus on whether eggs are good or bad for you...
However, your point is valid in that knowledge of, say, digital engineering is easier to understand and investigate as the systems are simpler. Those who are successful in the tech field should keep this in mind when they talk of disrupting fields involving wet-ware.
Wait... what? If the Earth didn't go around the Sun, why would we have seasons based on the angle of the Sun to the ground? Why would that angle continually cycle throughout the year? And what about the movements of the planets in the night sky, relative to Earth?
Sure, you could have a god who designed perversely complex features into the world for no causally sensible reason, but really, the simplest explanation for our available geological and astronomical data is that the Earth orbits the Sun.
You seem to grasp the concept of critical thinking and I believe that's why you would object. To me talking about science implies critical thinking. Somebody having an argument with you about science without acknowledging the certainty of being wrong is not talking about science but pseudo-science. And so you end up discussing with a fanatic, which is not a discussion.
I'm not saying that English Lit experts are everywhere but I feel like they just do not trust "science lovers" to be capable of critical thinking.
edit: It's like you're asking "how to convince science fanatics that they can be wrong" and I'm asking "how to convince English Lit experts that I know science can be wrong but still think it matters"
The funny thing is Isaac Asimov and most of the science fiction writers have their books filled with traditional philosophical problems and literary figures, they just sugar-coat them with enough speculative science and avoid naming the concepts by name to avoid scaring their public.
The article linked is great, but let's not use it to reinforce senseless clichés.
But I don't think it's about assigning blame. He's attempting to describe a situation and how it came about. If all the public sees is the media's irresponsible reporting on journal articles, then for current purposes it doesn't much matter if scientists themselves are trying to correct the media. The public will read the newspaper, the newspaper says science says X, and X turns out to be false. Then they read the newspaper telling them science says Y, and they won't believe Y.