[HN Gopher] Why "Trusting the Science" Is Complicated
___________________________________________________________________
Why "Trusting the Science" Is Complicated
Author : robtherobber
Score : 149 points
Date : 2021-10-13 13:39 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lareviewofbooks.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lareviewofbooks.org)
| cletus wrote:
| Here's the problem:
|
| 1. Science is a process. If you've ever seen the typical graph
| explaining the scientific method it's important to note that it's
| a loop. Science is iterative;
|
| 2. I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of
| falsifiability here as making predictions that can be proven
| wrong. The essence of scientific theory is to make testable
| predictions, that is the theory can be used to make predictions
| that can be experimentally tested. Scientific theories are never
| proven right per se, at least not without making assumptions.
| They simply become accepted given enough of a track record of
| testable predictions and continued failure to find a
| counterexample;
|
| 3. By (2), creationism clearly isn't science. It makes no
| testable predictions. Efforts to conflate creationism as science
| continue the long losing trend of religion pitting itself against
| science (eg Capernicus, Galileo) and it's not science;
|
| 4. There are an awful lot of people who don't understand or have
| no interest in understanding that science is a process and are
| merely looking for confirmation of what they already believe.
| These people tend to reject anything that contradicts their world
| view;
|
| 5. In the US in particular, there is a long history of anti-
| intellectualism that's deeply tied to religion; and
|
| 6. Ironically, the people who reject accepted science are
| typically the most easily manipulated by religious dogma,
| jingoism or the like; and
|
| 7. There are people who are quite willing to manipulate others
| for financial gain and/or power. It's why every living president,
| all but ~3 Senators, all but a handful of Congresspeople, all
| governors and the likes of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are
| all vaccinated but continue to fan the flames of anti-vaxxers for
| their own gain.
| iammisc wrote:
| > Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are all vaccinated but
| continue to fan the flames of anti-vaxxers for their own gain.
|
| Sean Hannity has continuously supported vaccines (has
| unequivocally stated he thinks they're the best way to deal
| with the pandemic); he's just against mandates, and believes
| you should speak with your own doctor about them. If that's
| being an anti-vaxxer, then most people are.
| cletus wrote:
| It's a milder position than Tucker Carlson but Hannity also
| pushed hydrochloroquine.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Trusting science is antithetical to science.
| [deleted]
| serverholic wrote:
| Speaking of trusting science, I have a bone to pick with the
| "soft" sciences like psychology, and sociology.
|
| These sciences are much more open to interpretation than, say,
| physics. Yet people will link research papers in these fields and
| push them as 100% fact without thinking critically about these
| papers.
|
| Let's say that your paper claims "X reduces negative behaviors in
| children such as aggression". In my experience on Reddit and
| Hacker News, people will link papers like this and claim you are
| anti-science for questioning anything.
|
| Yet there are some important questions that should be answered
| like:
|
| "How do you even measure aggression?"
|
| "Did X also reduce assertiveness (which is linked to
| aggression)?"
|
| "Is aggression always a negative behavior? Who decided this was
| an appropriate classification?"
|
| "Holistically, is this a better outcome overall or were there
| drawbacks to doing X?"
|
| It's to the point where I have serious doubts about the validity
| of papers in soft science fields. Unless of course your paper
| measures something directly like serotonin levels.
| tenpoundhammer wrote:
| I haven't seen this comment yet, so here we go.
|
| I live in a rural community of about 15,000 people, attend
| church, and sports for my kids and generally spend a lot of time
| with people in the community. These are people who don't trust
| the science.
|
| They aren't stupid, they aren't uneducated, and they mostly
| aren't believing radical misinformation. There are two really
| important things to consider though.
|
| 1. They don't have experience with Science or Statistics. Outside
| of a high school classroom 20 or more years ago. [It's easy to
| get through college without any meaningful science education]
|
| 2. They have been screwed by the medical system, government, and
| economy.
|
| Their decision making and behavior is primarily driven off of
| their intuition and second hand information from people they
| trust. The vast majority of unvaccinated people that I know don't
| believe in microchips or that the vaccine will kill them. They
| just think they don't need it cause they aren't at risk or
| because they have already developed natural immunity.
|
| Some of them are right and some of them wrong. They are just
| people and doing the best they can.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > they aren't uneducated
|
| > They don't have experience with Science or Statistics (...)
| It's easy to get through college without any meaningful science
| education
|
| Maybe understanding science/statistics needs to be higher on
| the list of criteria used to determine if someone is
| "educated".
| pessimizer wrote:
| Only if we want to exclude 99.5% of people. Plenty of
| successful scientists are also bad at statistics.
| [deleted]
| xaduha wrote:
| United (sic) States of America is full of people who think that
| they know better. If no matter what question or problem comes up
| you have an answer ready, then your problem isn't with science,
| you have a problem with logic.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Can you list countries in which this type of person doesn't
| exist?
| pumaontheprowl wrote:
| North Korea.
| xaduha wrote:
| It's a quantity turning into quality type of situation.
| rhema wrote:
| It would be easier to "trust the science" for the plebs out there
| if they felt that institutions valued their needs. Insulin could
| cost $15 per vial, but they can cost $300. The financial
| institutions (see 2008 crash) caused no problems for leaders of
| institutions.
|
| When I hear someone say "trust the science", I hear,
| "institutions have worked out for me so far". As much as we wish
| it were based on rational belief, it is almost certainly personal
| experience.
|
| George Carlin was right: "they" want you to be smart enough to
| keep the system moving, but too dumb to see how inequitable the
| system is.
|
| EDIT: Addressing the "that's just capitalism, not science" point.
|
| You can't really separate the funding from institutions from the
| products / science. Governments limit the possible research that
| can be done, media brings in attention and recognition,
| universities placate their owners (corporate, government,
| academic, investors). None of the institutions are really
| motivated by what the base needs or wants apart from avoiding
| actual anarchy and chaos. It's not a conspiracy. It is power
| getting more power and power corrupting, quite naturally and with
| people making rational choices in their own self interest.
| sonicggg wrote:
| Insulin does not cost $300 in >90% of countries out there. You
| are just cherry-picking examples to fit your narrative.
| hammock wrote:
| The example of institutional failure and its effects I always
| come back to is autoworkers unions. An entire generation of
| millions of autoworkers have left Detroit (once the richest
| city in the world per capita) and become anti-establishment
| conservatives as a result of broken trust and mistreatment.
| cletus wrote:
| This is a swing and a miss.
|
| While I agree insulin prices are way too high and the
| government allows Big Pharma to profit off death and the
| taxpayer, this is really nothing to do with science and all to
| do with the legislation around intellectual property that, for
| example, prevents the import of cheaper and equivalent
| substitutes from Canada and elsewhere.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I agree with this. Relatedly, the media's portrayal of "who
| trusts the science" (with respect to vaccination rates in
| particular) has been really interesting. It seems like they're
| deeply invested in giving the impression that conservatives
| don't "trust the science", and the coverage seems particularly
| unsympathetic. But when one digs in further, it seems that
| _poor people_ don 't trust the science, including poor liberals
| and progressives, which is why even blue cities hardly
| outperformed the national average for vaccination rates for so
| long. Of course, when the media broaches that, the reporting
| becomes sympathetic, e.g., "why is science failing communities
| of color?" and so on.
|
| And of course, these kind of shenanigans further discredit the
| media-- _including the science media_ --to the poor,
| minorities, and conservatives thus propagating a cycle of
| division. It's not enough to have a media that shares our
| (wealth, predominantly white liberals and progressives) biases,
| we really need to get back to a media that aspired toward
| objectivity and neutrality.
|
| EDIT: to put a finer point on it, when we politicize science,
| we make it harder for people on the outside to trust science.
| And we have some pretty big problems to tackle right now--covid
| and climate with the latter being orders of magnitude more
| serious than the former--and we should want to make it as easy
| as possible for people to trust the science and do what they
| can--specifically _vote_ --accordingly. And with respect to
| climate and covid, it's not liberals who are _primarily_
| responsible for distorting the science, but we do distort it on
| a wide array of social issues and it 's hard for lay people to
| know which science is distorted and which is reliable. If we
| care about these things, we need to put on our grown-up pants
| and stop using these issues as political footballs (this means
| not responding to this comment with some variation of _" but
| the other side is worse than us!"_ as though it absolves us of
| our own responsibility). /soapbox
| [deleted]
| whatshisface wrote:
| Okay, look, science has some ups and downs but unless you
| expand its definition to include all components of modern
| society, it's not charging people $300 for insulin. That's a
| result of the various problems of the US medical system. We can
| check this claim by comparing the price of insulin in different
| countries, where science (being the same everywhere in the
| universe) is the same but business works differently.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Right - "Trust the science" means that if your doctor
| prescribes you insulin for high blood sugar, it's likely to
| work and to help you live longer and healthier.
|
| There are political decisions that cause it to be ruinously
| expensive in the US. The messy bit is where science
| necessarily interacts with politics.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Doctor's prescriptions aren't really scientific although
| they are a lot more science-adjacent than price setting.
| giantg2 wrote:
| They aren't really talking about science. They are talking
| about "trust the science", group-think, and trust in societal
| institutions.
|
| You're right that insulin price has nothing to do with
| science, but rather economics and societal
| institutions/policies. The trust in the institution
| presenting the science is important. The purpose if science
| is to answer questions in fact objectively through
| reproducible observations. Telling people not to ask
| reasonable questions and just "trust the science" is
| appearently antithetical to people who understand the
| process.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Telling average people to "trust the science" in practice
| means telling them to trust the guy who says "I am speaking
| in the name of science". Often, he is just lying. The
| average people are not going to "trust the science" by
| reading peer-reviewed studies.
|
| Then there is the fact that someone can be a respected
| scientist in e.g. linguistics and simultaneously a crackpot
| in e.g. quantum physics, or vice versa. So you need to be
| careful even with trusting the actual scientists.
| (Similarly, the doctor talking about covid... is he an
| epidemiologist, or does he just fix broken legs?)
|
| Trying to think about best solution to make the actual
| science accessible to average people... the "ask science"
| subreddit is probably the best currently existing option.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| You don't even have to go that far. Scientists are just
| people. They are intelligent and experts in their fields
| but to be a Phd means you have a very narrow slice that
| you are an expert in.
|
| The problem is when these people try to public support
| certain government policies. Knowing climate science or
| quantum physics does not qualify you to be a policy
| maker. It does qualify you to inform policy makers on
| your narrow area of expertise.
|
| I've seen a lot of scientists pull appeal to authority
| fallacies by saying, I'm an expert in X and I say the
| government should do Y. Most people aren't scientists but
| they are smart enough to know that scientists don't know
| everything and usually not any more adept at politics or
| government than anyone else.
|
| Politicization of science by scientists has done more
| damage to the public trust in scientific institutions
| than anything else.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| Criticizing "trust the science" isn't the same thing as
| criticizing _science_. "trust the science" is a euphemism
| for "trust the system" i.e., the media, special interest
| groups (e.g., pharma), government, etc. "Trust the system's
| portrait of 'the science' irrespective of whether or not it
| accurately represents the views of a quorum of scientists".
| In other words, "trust the system" is about _institutions_
| broadly, not science in particular. That said, "trust the
| science" rhetoric works precisely because science is so
| complicated for individuals to tease out--we depend on
| _someone_ (our epistemological institutions) to synthesize it
| for us.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I agree with you in the abstract level you're operating on,
| but in the two cases I know of where the slogan "trust the
| science" is applied (vaccine safety/efficacy and global
| warming), the claims about the opinions of scientists are
| mostly true and the question is whether the studies are
| right. The big studies do say that the vaccine is
| effective, and they do say that global warming is real, and
| you don't have to trust the Institutions(tm) because, well,
| you can read the studies yourself.
|
| Disclaimer: I have not read anywhere near every news
| article published on either topic, and if you want to make
| the case that the media is presenting a consensus different
| from scientist's, that would be worth looking in to.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| I'm generally in agreement with you about those two cases
| as well, but it's hard to ask the public to "trust the
| science" in those cases when "the science" (i.e.,
| epistemological institutions) don't seem trustworthy more
| broadly.
|
| Moreover, my understanding of the _actual_ science (and
| it 's hard to say for certain because again, science is
| complicated and institutions distort) is that natural
| immunity performs at least as well as vaccine immunity
| (and maybe even quite a lot better), but a lot of people
| are (perhaps understandably) upset at "vaccine passport"
| policies which don't make exemptions for the naturally
| immune. Moreover, "the science" i.e., the media,
| governments, etc seem (or at least _seemed_ --I haven't
| kept up with the issue recently and perhaps the media has
| finally picked it up?) very reluctant to talk about the
| merits of natural immunity. So even in what seemed like a
| slam-dunk, happy path where "the science" and the
| _actual_ science seemed to align, the picture seems
| plausibly distorted. :(
| whatshisface wrote:
| Here are the facts about that which I know:
|
| - Someone who has been vaccinated is several times less
| likely to catch it than someone who has not.
|
| - Someone who has had it and gotten better is several
| times less likely to catch it again than someone who has
| been vaccinated but has not caught it yet. (This is one
| definition of "natural immunity.")
|
| - For some reason, many registries won't count a positive
| test followed by a negative test as evidence for
| immunity.
|
| The first two are clearly laid out in the Israeli study
| and are what I'd call "the scientific consensus,"
| gathered by reading what actual scientists are saying.
| I'm lost at the jump from the first two points to the
| third because I can't see why it's done that way. The
| media is not _completely_ silent on natural immunity, I
| think I saw one article about the Israeli study
| somewhere.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| The media is never _completely_ silent about anything,
| but for many, many, many months it was very difficult to
| get any information at all about natural immunity from
| the media. I recall Googling around about it because
| everyone was talking about vaccination numbers and
| progress, but for the better part of a year, no one was
| talking about how many people had natural immunity much
| less how effective it is. Even if you 're inclined to
| argue, _" but what if no one knew the answers to those
| questions?"_--first of all, it's unlikely that
| epidemiologists and virologists had no estimates at all,
| and even if they did, that itself would be newsworthy.
| Moreover, it's the media's job to dig up these answers.
| sjwalter wrote:
| Everyone knows about "regulatory capture", the mechanism via
| which regulators who are supposed to work for the people
| become captured by the elite few who control the
| organizations they ostensibly regulate. But what I think most
| people fail to see is that the ruling class have effectively
| captured every major institution in the west, possibly the
| globe. From the academy, to the science industry, the press,
| government, the courts, everything, all the way down, is
| completely and utterly captured by a tiny elite.
|
| That anyone, after the past couple years, could think that
| the elite are in any way well-meaning is absurd--I think the
| most charitably you could interpret the data is that they are
| so incompetent they shouldn't be trusted to judge a high
| school gymnastics competition.
|
| When it comes to the scientific institutions, I think Horton,
| current editor of The Lancet, sums it up well: "The case
| against science is straightforward: much of the scientific
| literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by
| studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid
| exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest,
| together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of
| dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards
| darkness."
| ashtonkem wrote:
| What I think GP is hinting at is that low trust in science is
| part of a general low trust in elites. If you don't trust
| elites for whatever reason, personally I think it's more
| complicated than $300 insulin, then you're also not going to
| trust scientific elites either.
| whatshisface wrote:
| In what universe are researchers elites and where do I
| apply for their work visa?
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Elite is not equivalent to rich. In particular their high
| level of training and education puts them into a special
| social class that very much makes them elite compared to
| the rest of society.
| dls2016 wrote:
| You could replace "elite" with "professional class."
| sjwalter wrote:
| Researchers and scientists are absolutely not elites.
| However, they almost exclusively rely on the ruling class
| for their funding, for their platforms, for their
| careers, and thus they become de facto toadies of the
| elite.
|
| Just go see how well the ruling class is treating the
| doctors that are actually fighting covid on the front
| lines, showing it's a treatable ailment, saving lives.
| Since their perspectives don't align with Team Elite's
| clear agenda (inject everyone, boosters forever!), they
| are ridiculed, shamed, relegated to alternative or "low
| status" press.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| > Researchers and scientists are absolutely not elites.
| However, they almost exclusively rely on the ruling class
| for their funding, for their platforms, for their
| careers, and thus they become de facto toadies of the
| elite.
|
| You're confusing economic class and social class. PhDs
| might not be rich, but they have a much elevated social
| status compared to the vast majority of the populace.
| sjwalter wrote:
| PhDs in general may have a very minor elevation in status
| compared to other social groups. There are many, many
| PhDs, many of them working shitty jobs outside their
| fields. Think outside STEM, wherein generations of poor
| saps were sold on the professorial life when entering
| their PhD program but now have their Gender Studies or
| Literature PhD proudly on their shared apartment wall
| while they drive bus for the city of Columbus.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Elite doesn't mean wealthy. It means superior, and when
| we talk about scientific research we're talking about
| work being done by people with elite training compared to
| the layman.
|
| This is why we talk about peer review including the
| scientific community, not the community of all people. It
| is an elite group with specific skills.
| geodel wrote:
| Maybe PhDs or PostDocs are not elites but professors they
| work for, definitely are elites. If you need work visa
| you are not in elite category. It is like asking how to
| apply visa to be senator, governor, member of congress or
| millionaire entrepreneur and so on.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I would say we shouldn't trust institutions on just the
| fact that they are an institution (elite, other
| credentialized thing/person). That people will/should build
| trust based on demonstratable answers to the questions they
| have. If it's based on credentialing, then we'll end up
| with people choosing which credentialed person to
| believe... and taking veterinarian ivermectin because some
| figure they trust told them too.
|
| In general, I think questioning (within reason) government
| and other institutions helps weed out bad policy and hold
| them accountable.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| Dont conflate science with capitalistic empire built on top of
| it
| duxup wrote:
| >. Insulin could cost $15 per vial, but they can cost $300.
|
| I guess the lesson here is to educate folk that "science"
| doesn't set insulin prices?
|
| Is that a widespread belief?
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think the OP is saying "high modernist science-imitating
| central planners" when they use the word "science." They're
| talking about the people who give prions names like
| "Shawshank Diagnostic and Treatment Center."
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| I mean we can't really spend decades systemtically ruining
| people's lives then hope they beleive whatever we say about
| thier health/research can we?
|
| catchphrases like 'trust the science' don't even make sense
| everyone knows it really means just 'trust who ever is in-
| charge'
|
| credibility problems all-around
| duxup wrote:
| >I mean we can't really spend decades systemtically ruining
| people's lives then hope they beleive whatever we say about
| thier health/research can we?
|
| I don't really know what that means.
|
| Dude working on COVID research didn't create the medical
| industry...
| rajin444 wrote:
| How do you know you can trust dude working on COVID
| research? It's impossible for an individual to verify
| everything.
|
| Trust doesn't scale. If somebody could solve this society
| would be a lot better off.
| duxup wrote:
| I don't know where this idea is going.
|
| If we're talking about people who think of medical prices
| as part of "science" but apparently also are worried if
| they can trust a given researcher who happened to be
| working on COVID?
|
| I don't think any of this is how people actually think /
| what motivates them.
| drbojingle wrote:
| If we want to say science is a byproduct of the social system
| we have in place, then I understand your point. We don't need
| that system to have science tho. You can practice science
| yourself. That's kind of the point of it really.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| > You can practice science yourself
|
| Being a gentleman scientist, back when it was a thing,
| required you to be a gentleman, that is, rich... and well,
| usually a man too, but that was how it was back then.
|
| Science needs years of study, training in the use of complex
| machinery and strict methods, access and being able to
| understand scientific publications meant for _peers_.
|
| Chances are you're not a peer. With much effort, under the
| right circumstances, maybe a stroke of luck in your youth,
| you could aspire to be one of such.
|
| But you probably aren't, and trusting the science means
| trusting scientific institutions, men and women in white
| robes delivering what's, at this point in time, accepted as
| truth.
|
| That's a big responsibility to bear of them, and if there's
| an erosion of trust in social institutions, then people won't
| bestow it upon them either.
| hammock wrote:
| (deleted)
| rhema wrote:
| Yes, fixed. Thank you.
| Dobbs wrote:
| The insulin issue is purely a broken American issue. It isn't
| an issue anywhere else that I'm aware of.
| tenuousemphasis wrote:
| The cause of that problem is capitalism yet people trust that
| system blindly.
| Rucadi wrote:
| Do you even know what capitalism is?
| [deleted]
| jccalhoun wrote:
| It is a complicated subject. I teach college and I try to include
| some media literacy. We tell them to be skeptical but then they
| say "you can't trust the media" but then they believe every
| stupid conspiracy that confirms their biases and then in papers
| they cite "google" because they can't be bothered to take the
| time to figure out where something actually comes from. (This
| literally happened in one of my classes yesterday.)
| black6 wrote:
| "...when President Trump proposed drinking bleach as a cure for
| COVID-19..."
|
| Never. Happened. Disingenuous comments like this are why
| institutional trust is at an all-time low.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I do not see why people should reduce trust in
| CDC/FDA/FTC/USDA/other civil agencies because a writer for a
| blog or publication makes an error.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Why should people trust what that blog or publication who
| made an "error" claims that the CDC/FDA/FTC/USDA said?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I did not imply they should. I would always recommend
| cutting out as many middlemen as possible, and reading the
| source material.
| parrellel wrote:
| When president trump suggested people inject some undefined
| disinfectant or shine UV lights up into their guts, then.
| That's more accurate, less of a ring to it of course.
| sjwalter wrote:
| This is absolutely false. Trump spoke about experimental
| covid therapeutics that involve shining UV lights inside
| patients' bodies, and these therapeutics are still
| purportedly under development and showing promising results
| to this very day.
|
| "The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal
| Advances in Therapy, were based on five days of 20-minute
| treatments with ultraviolet A (UVA) light using a catheter
| inserted into the patients' tracheas."
|
| https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-
| se...
|
| You have been proven totally wrong. Now, does your media-
| driven hatred of Trump trump your ability to admit you were
| wrong, and you've updated your beliefs, and you're ready to
| move on more educated than you were before you read this
| comment? If not, you lack the basics to make you able to
| engage with scientific thought.
| parrellel wrote:
| I just went back and watched the clip on YouTube again, so,
| no. No.
| sjwalter wrote:
| Link?
| parrellel wrote:
| https://youtu.be/QtgVxGkrX1Y?t=102
|
| I mean, we can all wonder what was going through the
| man's head, but there you have it.
|
| You can literally watch him come up with the idea all on
| his own in real time.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| I definitely agree that his comments there were
| irresponsible and harmful but framing it as him making a
| suggestion that people try the things he's describing
| doesn't seem like an accurate representation of what he
| said.
| sjwalter wrote:
| So after watching that, you think Trump was NOT speaking
| off the cuff (during a 2.5 hour press Q&A he was doing
| daily at that point, versus a very adversarial press),
| you think he WAS NOT describing the UV therapy I linked
| to above? He was just making up lies to hurt people?
| parrellel wrote:
| The problem with that clip is that he was speaking off
| the cuff, as he tended to do, and he didn't even consider
| whether or not what he was saying could hurt people. He
| had the idea "Maybe we could wash people's insides out"
| and out it came.
|
| I think most people watching that clip wouldn't ascribe
| malice to him, but it does demonstrate why the man was an
| incredibly Dangerous person to have as president.
| notahacker wrote:
| According to Trump himself, he was "being sarcastic" with
| those comments.
|
| Maybe he thought a _sarcastic_ reference to ingesting
| disinfectant would liven up his advanced knowledge of
| obscure experimental UV therapies?
|
| I'm going with the alternate hypothesis that he was an
| layman with a very limited grasp of what he'd been told
| would kill the virus fumbling around trying to find
| reasons for the public to believe that a cure was
| imminent. That is _sort of_ his job, and whilst I think
| most politicians would convey such messages less ineptly,
| to be honest I have less issue with Trump in this
| particular instance than the people who actually ingested
| bleach to own the libs, or continued to insist _even
| after Trump himself had walked back the remarks by
| claiming they were [very inappropriate] sarcasm_ that
| Trump was passing on advanced medical knowledge and the
| only problem with those remarks was that the media and
| medical didn 't appreciate them enough.
| rob_c wrote:
| Yep this started with last mistakes in the evolution of sciences
| and moved onto attack something about modern studies and covid...
|
| I'm fairly sure the goalposts moved here somewhat...
| efitz wrote:
| When people tell me to "trust the science" they are usually
| trying to convince me to a political point of view. Real
| scientists don't say that during discussions about science.
|
| "Trust the science" is a dismissive statement intended to
| terminate discussion/dissent and denigrate the dissenter as a
| simpleton.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A...
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=thought+terminating+cliche
| president wrote:
| In colloquial conversation where most lay people have no
| scientific background it basically means "trust me, I heard it
| on TV".
| 650 wrote:
| For me the 'science' and covid related issue comes down to the
| major point of risk perception. In the early days, there were
| videos of people collapsing on the streets in Wuhan, and the
| disease was thought to be extremely deadly with a CFR of 10%+(1).
| As the months went by we realized its not really dangerous at all
| to kids, with death and hospitalization rates extremely tilted
| towards the elderly and obese.
|
| The main insight I have is that say we found out COVID or one of
| its variants had a 30%+ death/hospitalization rate as the months
| went on. I firmly believe more people would get vaccinated due to
| the obvious severity of it. This current ~1% IFR is at a point
| such that some think its not deadly enough to warrant the
| hypocritical restrictions and mandates, and some believe that it
| is.
|
| Lets say on the other hand that as the months went by, we
| discovered COVID had a 0.000001% IFR. 1 out of a hundred million
| people that caught it died. [assume long COVID does not exist].
| We could see that ~50-100 people would die worldwide. I think
| most people would call you foolish if given this IFR, had you
| been calling for continued mass restrictions.
|
| We are at an inflection point such that we have vaccines, we have
| mandates, we have restrictions, yet some clamour it isn't enough,
| while others clamour its too much. These all are based around the
| perceived deadliness, not the true deadliness of COVID.
|
| (1) - I don't recall the exact number
| strangeattractr wrote:
| 'Trust the science' is something generally said by people trying
| to get others to abide by their demands. In my experience there's
| usually nothing scientific behind what they're requesting. I see
| it said constantly where I live when people question the efficacy
| of some of the harshest COVID restrictions in the world including
| 9pm-5am curfews. For some it's as though the utterances of our
| politicians have become 'The Science' in which we must believe.
| rmah wrote:
| I think one issue is that many people seem to conflate believing
| the opposite with being skeptical of the positive. They are not
| the same thing.
|
| Being skeptical that a vaccine is safe enough for mass use is not
| the same as believing that a vaccine is not safe enough for mass
| use.
|
| Being skeptical that climate change is primarily caused by man is
| not the same as believing that climate change is not caused by
| man.
|
| Skepticism is fine. Belief in an opposite without evidence is not
| fine.
| ABS wrote:
| it's complicated because it's probably moot: we should learn,
| teach, spread and support "the scientific method" rather than
| anyone's "science"
| shkkmo wrote:
| We absolutely must teach science, it is frankly ridiculous to
| assert that we should only teach the scientific method and
| assume everything else will follow from that. It has taken
| millions of people hundreds of years to establish the corpus of
| scientific knowledge and understanding that knowledge is
| critical to advancing that knowledge or disproving it.
|
| We could do a better job of teaching the science alongside the
| history of the process of its discovery and validation and
| incorporate actually reading scientific papers rather than just
| textbooks. We can emphasize science as an ongoing process
| rather than simply a "just so" story, but we absolutely have to
| teach its results and not just the methodology.
| ABS wrote:
| I agree! I guess it's a good thing then that I did not write
| anywhere that we should only teach the scientific method :-)
|
| I made a statement about the argument (and title) of the
| article we are commenting, it doesn't automatically assert
| that everything else I'm not mentioning is not
| important/valid or should not be done at all.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| All this will accomplish is people that wear "I believe in
| science" shirts will instead wear "I believe in the scientific
| method" shirts but unless there's an actual behavioral change,
| all you've done is add a bit more ink to a piece of cotton. The
| message is good but if it isn't accompanied by an actual
| behavioral change, it's worthless.
| rmah wrote:
| When I was a child, we were taught the scientific method
| multiple times through middle-school and high-school. Is this
| really no longer the case? I really doubt it is.
| emerongi wrote:
| Well, at some level you do just need to trust someone's
| "science", otherwise you can only rely on your own empirical
| evidence.
| andybak wrote:
| I'm only a few paragraphs in but I'm already a bit confused by
| the way the author seems to use "falsifiable" and "falsified"
| interchangably when it is the former not the latter that is
| critical to Popper's definition.
|
| What matters is that you make a claim that has the potential to
| be tested. i.e. there exists an observation that could
| potentially contradict your claim.
|
| And if this observation arises, the result is that the hypothesis
| has an opportunity to refine itself and the process continues.
|
| Newtonian mechanics were falsifiable, they were falsified in
| particular domains (the very small and the very large) and now
| they have been refined as they are still applicable given certain
| contraints.
| stevefrench93 wrote:
| "Trust the Science" is the product of well funded social
| scientists who leveraged focus groups to determine the phrase
| effectively targeted people who already align themselves with the
| myriad of establishment pitch men - Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill
| Nye, Trevor Noah, et al. Same as (ironically) "My body, my
| choice."
|
| "Trust the Science" is merely a proxy for "Believe in and defend
| the Neoliberal agenda against scientific criticism".
|
| If you're still uncritical of it, you might want to start reading
| the science.
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7
|
| "At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable
| relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated
| and new COVID-19 cases..."
| thedorkknight wrote:
| What am I supposed to be critical of, beyond what the authors
| themselves are saying? Judging by your quote, are you critical
| of the notion that vaccines slow the spread of covid - great,
| but I haven't heard that as a main talking point.
|
| "Vaccines don't slow the spread, therefore..." what, exactly?
| What I've consistently heard since the vaccination campaigns
| started was that they reduce your chance of severe illness,
| hospitalization, and post-covid syndrome. Which is still
| absolutely true, in spite of the fact that (as the authors
| note) this effect has waned with the Delta wave. So, so what?
|
| I've been listening to the "this week in Virology" podcast,
| along with Dr. John Campbell on YouTube, since Feb 2020. The
| difference between what I hear from the actual professionals
| and what I'm told by people online who use phrases like
| "Neoliberal agenda" that the professionals say is striking to
| the point that I wonder if those people are even bothering to
| listen to science communicators before making straw-man
| fallacies.
| xkbarkar wrote:
| It becomes even more apparent when you live in a small
| society.
|
| Covid numbers presented in US for example are based on an
| endless set of definitions and interpretations. Dr a in state
| b may not use the same parameters as Dr c in state d to
| define a covid death or vaccine damage.
|
| In a minuscule society full of obese people with a high
| percentege of a frail elderly population, such as Iceland,
| feel the actual result no matter what nature.com or
| timesofisrael state.
|
| Our high vaccination rate drove down hospitalizations from 5%
| of the infected to about 2% ehich is where we are as of
| today.
|
| We have an extremely obese population in Iceland I might add.
| This is crucial for covid-19 development.
|
| Apologies for using an icelandic website, it is an article
| from today citing the state epidemiologist in Iceland
|
| https://www.visir.is/g/20212169078d/skipti-gridarlegu-
| mali-a...
|
| "Tilfelli a hverjum degi seu enn 20-60 og af theim leggist
| tvo prosent inn a spitala.".
|
| translation 20-60 cases per day. 2% of them are hospitalized.
|
| Our immunization rate is 88% of all age 12 and up.
|
| https://www.covid.is/tolulegar-upplysingar-boluefni.
| pedrosorio wrote:
| > Across the US counties too, the median new COVID-19 cases per
| 100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the
| categories of percent population fully vaccinated (Fig. 2)
|
| Am I looking at the wrong graph? There is a clear downward
| trend from 35-40% to the 70%+ categories.
|
| I am not sure why looking at the median county is better than
| just grouping all the counties in each category and looking at
| the cases per 100k, but looking at the latter (which the
| authors provide as a link [0]), and the latest available date
| (7 day period ending October 8th) the number of cases per 100k
| is 110 in the 70%+ group of counties, and it's 220+ for any
| group of counties with less than 55% vaccination rate.
|
| Having twice as many cases per capita (ignoring all the other
| factors on how densely populated the counties with higher
| vaccination rates are, etc.) for every county under 50%
| vaccination rate compared to the ones with 70%+ vaccination
| rate is "largely similar"?
|
| [0]
| https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZGE1NDBmZTctYWUyZi00N...
|
| EDIT: Also of relevance, is the fact that the country data is
| from September 3rd, when Israel was at the peak of cases with
| the delta variant. Israel is far from having vaccinated a large
| enough fraction of the population to achieve "herd immunity"
| (just 63% fully vaccinated, Portugal has 86% for example) [1].
| Another confounding factor is that Israel was one of the first
| countries to vaccinate a large number of people, which means
| the effectiveness of the vaccine is now declining compared to
| countries that vaccinated later. They have administered booster
| shots to vulnerable populations [2] and the rates of covid
| infections have (as expected) dropped precipitously.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-
| vaccina...
|
| [2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-virologist-says-delta-
| defe...
| lanevorockz wrote:
| Trust the Science is so silly that it shows the ignorance of
| those that speak it. Science by definition is an ever changing
| and refining process and the very process of studying is
| challenging settled science. Once, Einstein was called a lunatic,
| so was Hawking, so was ... Insert your favourite scientist here.
| carlgreene wrote:
| Science is a process and is skeptical by its nature.
|
| "Science" isn't some belief you hold.
| Supermancho wrote:
| I respectfully disagree. The process is steeped in the belief
| that it will give you answers you can accept. It doesn't
| always, but there is a belief that it will eventually lead to a
| truth regardless.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| What means "acceptance"? Scientific method if followed
| correctly should over a long period of time help you make
| better decisions. The answers you obtain could never be
| absolute, as a human you are always prone to failure of
| interpreting something wrongly. And the answer you find may
| not necessarily be correct, but just the best/most accurate
| at the time and completely wrong at the same time.
| [deleted]
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >I respectfully disagree. The process is steeped in the
| belief that it will give you answers you can accept. It
| doesn't always, but there is a belief that it will eventually
| lead to a truth regardless.
|
| That's a reasonable position. For myself, I'd modify that
| statement to read: The process is steeped in
| an understanding that the scientific method will give
| you results that inform us whether as to whether the
| theories and hypotheses that we use to describe the
| universe do so better than others. And there
| is a belief that such processes will eventually lead
| to a more precise description of the universe and its
| workings.
|
| I modified your statement, not because it's wrong, per se,
| but rather because of its imprecision. Experiment allows us
| to describe the universe with more precision, leading to
| greater understanding, not "truth," which implies an
| absolute. And science doesn't deal with absolutes, it deals
| with data, and the theories (in the scientific sense) that
| best fit that data.
| Supermancho wrote:
| I can't say I wholly agree, although I support the motive.
| Using the word "understanding" where I think "belief" is a
| more accurate term is wordplay to maintain a specific
| worldview. "results" and "better" seemingly avoid
| precision.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >I can't say I wholly agree, although I support the
| motive. Using the word "understanding" where I think
| "belief" is a more accurate term is wordplay to maintain
| a specific worldview. "results" and "better" seemingly
| avoid precision.
|
| Fair enough.
|
| I am uncertain as to which "specific worldview" you think
| I wish to maintain. If you'd expand on that, It would be
| appreciated.
| smegcicle wrote:
| Science produces models which can be used to view and predict
| the world in different ways. The idea that models can
| represent 'truth' in an absolute way is anti-science, and
| anti-reality.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| _L'science, c'est moi_ (Fauci)
|
| Fauci has done more damage to "science" than any 100 religious
| authorities ever did. The above quote is pretty much what he said
| when he claimed people criticizing him are criticizing science.
|
| One of the most important things for a scientist to say in public
| is "Just look at what I wrote; I'm not important."
| janandonly wrote:
| Of course it is...
|
| All fields of science have dogma's. It's the very reason why
| science progresses one funeral at the time....
|
| Also, no living soul has time to read all the papers that are
| pooped out by all the worlds scientists, so the shortcut is to
| fall back on "people in the known" AKA you can pick whom you want
| to believe. Of course a rational person will say he picked a
| source because trustworthiness, not because he or she _liked_
| that person...
| Tenoke wrote:
| There are plenty of 'shortcuts' in between reading all possible
| papers and picking at random who to trust. E.g. reading only
| Meta-Analyses of RCTs or reading some and picking your experts
| based on those who also agree with what youve confirmed or
| looking at past record etc.
| incrudible wrote:
| "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts"
|
| ~ Richard Feynman
| ourmandave wrote:
| As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way:
| 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.
|
| http://www.feynman.com/science/what-is-science/
| [deleted]
| mswtk wrote:
| Fundamentally, a lot of knowledge we possess as individuals is
| socially constructed, in the sense that we trust the process and
| the institutions that created it. Even if this knowledge can, in
| principle, be verified, it is usually impractical for an
| individual to do so.
|
| Putting science aside, how can I be confident that the basic
| facts presented in, say, a NYT article, are correct? I can trust
| the reputation of the NYT as an institution, and I can also trust
| that any inaccuracies in the article will be called out by other
| publications. But if I feel everyone's in on a conspiracy to push
| a particular viewpoint, then I need to anchor my knowledge in a
| different institutional framework - even if that might just be a
| random Facebook group of strangers, or my weird uncle, or a niche
| radio station.
|
| This, incidentally, is why the censorious push against
| "disinformation" is misguided in principle. It's sweeping the
| underlying problems under the rug in the hope that they disappear
| spontaneously. In an open society, truth can only be established
| as a result of public discourse, anything else is just the
| representation of the perspective and interests of some
| authority. Whatever its source, the seemingly growing distrust in
| public institutions will not disappear simply because we make
| social media companies remove its most obvious symptoms.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I think the problem you describe-- of being unsure of the
| origins and level of distortion of one's information on its
| journey between "reality" and "perception" is an old problem,
| which is rather quickly being solved by transparent technology.
|
| It used to be that you had to trust the institution, because
| they were the best suited and capable to verify and validate
| the data and the individuals. Trust problems were both not
| publicized widely, and also did not have any obvious solutions.
|
| Today, we are technically capable of validating and verifying
| the entire chain of custody or traversal for any given piece of
| information, and the only thing missing is the infrastructure
| to do so. On the other hand, if an institution demonstrates
| untrustworthiness, it is difficult to conceal.
|
| I think that, more and more, we will demand to see the entire
| chain of creation and origin for a piece of information, and
| either validate it ourselves, or delegate that validation to a
| party we personally trust. That validation can then itself be
| validated with reputation.
|
| Imagine, for a minute, if an article came with a list of all
| the writers, contributors, scientists, interviewees, editors,
| etc., who contributed to the article. And not only that,
| imagine you can see the entire social graph between you and
| those people. That is what the future looks like, IMO.
| bally0241 wrote:
| Science isn't based on trust. It's based on evidence. You may
| "trust" that someone's results are what they say they are, but
| they must be reproducible and independently verifiable. If they
| aren't then its bunk.
| goto11 wrote:
| That would mean you ultimately have to _personally_ reproduce
| the results under controlled conditions before you can trust
| anything. This is just not realistically possible for anybody,
| so in reality you have to trust somebody.
| bally0241 wrote:
| I did not say there was a need to personally verify the
| results of every experiment. Merely pointing out that the
| scientific process is not based on trust, but evidence. I
| would not believe a claim made by a single experimenter/group
| unless independent evidence corroborates it. Neither should
| you. Look up the Heidelberg-Moscow experiment, or
| pentaquarks.
| emerongi wrote:
| You are still putting trust into the fact that the
| groups/experimenters are actually independent. Unless you
| have personally verified every experiment, you are still
| putting trust into the fact that others have done the work
| as they claim. What you are doing is being _pragmatic_
| about your trust. You have a level of trust that is
| acceptable.
|
| The reality is that we all are trusting "science" to one
| degree or another. I absolutely agree that all experiments
| should be repeatable and independently verifiable, but in
| the real world science (in my opinion) very much depends on
| trust. We don't all have time to verify every experiment.
| bally0241 wrote:
| Separate experimenters making claims to the same results
| is in itself a form of evidence. Believing otherwise
| requires either the existence a common error or a
| conspiracy.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Believing otherwise requires either the existence a
| common error or a conspiracy.
|
| Both of which are common.
| goto11 wrote:
| Yeah but how do you then know the "independent scientists"
| actually reproduced the results and didn't just make it up?
| In the end it comes down to trust in the process and the
| community.
| bally0241 wrote:
| You don't. Case in point the drift in measured values of
| the fundamental charge of the electron over time starting
| with Millikan. However, given enough independent evidence
| you can conclude whether or not the results of a
| measurement are more likely than not.
| Ginden wrote:
| Even if your results are reproducible and independently
| verifiable, these results are open to interpretion.
|
| Will you publish "X is associated with Y", or "we observed weak
| correlation between X and Y in self-selected subgroups from
| already self-selected population"?
|
| Unfortunely, first approach dominates observational studies.
| dexwiz wrote:
| Have you ever seen an atom? Have you ever had access to a
| Scanning Electron Microscope or equivalently advanced machinery
| to observe one? If not, you have had to put at least some level
| of faith in that they do exist.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| that sounds more like religion to me, also people should have
| access to hacker spaces with electron microscopes the fact
| most don't is a failure
| bally0241 wrote:
| No, I have not "seen" an atom. However, I have done
| experiments in a lab which have produced results which are
| consistent with atomic theory. There is no need to have faith
| in the cartoon model of an atom. All that matters is that the
| theory can be used to make predictions which can then be
| verified by experiment. The underlying "objective" nature of
| reality is immaterial.
| Jensson wrote:
| I trust people who claim X, then let me come and test every
| bit of X myself to see that it is correct, and then I go and
| test a few bits of X and see that the tests work, and
| everyone I know who did the same on different parts also got
| results agreeing with X.
|
| It is perfectly rational to believe X in this scenario even
| if I didn't test all of it myself.
|
| I don't trust people who claim Y, get angry whenever I try to
| test any part of Y, the few things I test about Y aren't
| true, the people I know who tested other things about Y also
| saw that they weren't true.
|
| It is perfectly rational to assume that Y is just nonsense in
| this scenario even if I didn't test all of it myself.
| RattleyCooper wrote:
| Trusting science == faith. I'm pretty sure that's antithetical to
| real science.
| duxup wrote:
| Maybe it should be:
|
| "Trust the scientific method."
|
| You come up with an idea, TEST, see if it works, evaluate and so
| on. That tends to work out a great deal and has provided humanity
| with a lot of great things / protections we don't have to worry
| about / progress.
|
| It doesn't mean the outcomes are always optimal, but they're
| better than every other option if you keep at the process.
| [deleted]
| zaik wrote:
| That sounds nice but doesn't help me when deciding things like
| "should I get the COVID vaccine?" or "should I support action
| against climate change?". I do not have the time, knowledge and
| tools to answer such questions by doing experiments.
| Tenoke wrote:
| >You come up with an idea, TEST, see if it works, evaluate and
| so on.
|
| Sadly it's not so simple as most 'tests', papers etc. are crap
| even if they look reasonable on first glance.
| duxup wrote:
| And yet somehow progress is made.
|
| I don't think the gist of your statement makes much sense.
| Jensson wrote:
| Is progress really made in the social sciences? Any
| evidence for that? Lets say within the past 20 years.
| duxup wrote:
| I thought the topic was more ... science science (i'm not
| sure how to say that) and not in the social sciences.
| Tenoke wrote:
| I'd say the replication crisis on its own has brought a
| lot of progress at least if you count disproving the
| existence of many effects that were accepted 20 years
| ago. Similarly, some effects have replicated under more
| rigorous experiments (even if typically with low effect
| sizes) giving us more confidence they are real.
| Jensson wrote:
| Has the field actually acknowledged the replication
| crisis and made efforts to fix it for the future? If not
| the field didn't progress at all, it was just sceptic
| outsiders who learned something about the field not the
| people who "trust the science".
| Tenoke wrote:
| There are holdouts but yes, it's well acknowledged and
| there are many trying to battle it (e.g. with better
| designs, pre-registrations etc.) The replications are
| mostly conducted by other insiders in the first place,
| it's hardly just outsiders pointing it out.
| Jensson wrote:
| Ok, so if it turns out well we can maybe start trusting
| the social sciences that properly reformed in a few
| decades or so when they have rooted out most problems.
| But as of now I am still sceptical of those fields.
| Tenoke wrote:
| 'Trusting the Science' isn't a discussion on how to drive
| progress as a researcher but how to evaluate it as an
| outsider.
| duxup wrote:
| The outcome of trusting that the scientific method has
| worked and works is relevant.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| A part of the scientific method is trying to replicate
| studies... which is essentially an expression of
| _distrust_.
| CWuestefeld wrote:
| It seems to me that the biggest problem today isn't
| misunderstanding science, but _misapplying_ science. Folks seem
| to come up with formulations like "science says that X causes Y,
| and thus we must do Z". Regardless of what you might fill into
| those letters, the statement is a fallacy.
|
| Anyone who believes that policy can directly flow from science is
| mistaken.
|
| It's the job of science to make predictions: if these
| circumstances occur, we can expect the outcome to look like that.
| But this says nothing - _can_ say nothing - in judgment of how
| good or bad that outcome is.
|
| To create policy, we must weigh the costs and benefits of the
| various expected outcomes. That's not a scientific exercise, it
| flows only from our values as individuals and as a society.
|
| So if you're interesting in bringing about a particular policy,
| or forestalling a different one, the way to do this is by making
| your case for relative values of the outcomes that science
| predicts - not to hoodwink people into believing something other
| than what the science predicts.
|
| Examples of such misapplication:
|
| * Science shows that the climate is changing, caused by human
| action, such that in 50 years, some coastal cities will have
| ground level below high tide. Therefore we must do everything
| possible to limit CO2 emissions.
|
| * Science says that after (whatever) weeks gestation, a human
| baby could be viable outside the womb. Therefore we must forbid
| abortions after that term.
|
| In both these examples, a value judgment is being smuggled in
| that imposes unacknowledged values into the situation. Those
| values have nothing to do with science, and so the conclusion is
| a-scientific.
|
| (That's not to say that either of the conclusions is wrong given
| some values, including possibly the prevailing cultural values.
| But assuming that is so is certainly anti-scientific.)
| apatters wrote:
| We need to get away from the idea of "the Science" altogether
| because it's an incomplete abstraction and prone to corruption.
|
| What is valuable are specific principles like dedeuctive
| reasoning and the scientific method, upon which we've built our
| greatest achievements as a species.
|
| Trusting "the Science" without understanding what that really
| means is basically just another form of religion, complete with
| its own priesthood and people who demand that whatever the
| priests say must be taken on faith because it's moral and good.
|
| Philosophers have observed that this blind belief in "the
| Science" is actually worse than belief in religion. Because
| while religion roots its authority in the divine (which either
| doesn't exist or chooses not to get directly involved), the
| church of Science roots its authority in men. Men declare a
| truth and a morality based on what they claim to be scientific,
| then go on to commit atrocities they rationalize from it. The
| greatest mass murderers in history were atheists like Stalin
| and Mao. They were the little gods of their own secular
| personality cults and they committed genocide on a scale that
| had never before been seen.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| You mean all that p-hacked, mostly unreproducible pile of dreck
| that gets published these days? Yeah, trust isn't complicated it
| is the wrong thing to do. But mistrusting the science doesn't
| mean turning to the snake oil salesmen.
| zaik wrote:
| > But mistrusting the science doesn't mean turning to the snake
| oil salesmen.
|
| Unfortunately those who 'mistrust science' usually do. Snake
| oil salesmen will sound trustworthy to them, because they also
| 'mistrust the science' (which happens to disagree about the
| usefulness of the product/opinion they are offering).
| jollybean wrote:
| Policy, particularly things like Public Health Policy, is not the
| same thing as Science.
|
| Trusting the Science means something completely different in the
| domain of socializing information.
| JALTU wrote:
| I'm paraphrasing, but a scientist on a podcast said something
| like, "Science is not about so-called 'facts' as much as it is
| about reducing the uncertainty of a hypothesis enough that you
| have a working model."
|
| ^This takes work, complicated work. And then humans, being human,
| can muck up the interpretation. And so on...
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Skepticism is the driving engine behind science. It works well so
| long as people keep asking questions until they get satisfactory
| answers. Science is anti-fragile. The harder you attack it, the
| sturdier it becomes. So this is fine.
|
| The only time it really stops working is if people start treating
| it as doctrine, and demanding that you accept it on faith, and
| take any questions as evidence that you are an enemy of science.
| If anything destroys science, it is this line of reasoning.
|
| Skepticism does not require a degree or a license from the
| government. The only intellectually honest thing is to admit to
| yourself that you do not know until you are convinced otherwise.
| Whether other people say they are convinced is honestly quite
| irrelevant.
| orangepurple wrote:
| "The seeker after truth is not one who studies the writings of
| the ancients and, following his natural disposition, puts his
| trust in them," the first scientist wrote, "but rather the one
| who suspects his faith in them and questions what he gathers
| from them, the one who submits to argument and demonstration
| and not the sayings of human beings whose nature is fraught
| with all kinds of imperfection and deficiency. Thus the duty of
| the man who investigates the writings of scientists, if
| learning the truth is his goal, is to make himself an enemy of
| all that he reads, and, applying his mind to the core and
| margins of of its content, attack it from every side. he should
| also suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of
| it, so that he may avoid falling into either prejudice or
| leniency." -- Ibn al-Haytham
| cronix wrote:
| > The only time it really stops working is if people start
| treating it as doctrine, and demanding that you accept it on
| faith, and take any questions as evidence that you are an enemy
| of science. If anything destroys science, it is this line of
| reasoning.
|
| I wonder where we'd be today in science/physics if the Catholic
| Church ( _the_ authority of the day) was successful in stopping
| Galileo Galilei, in 1615, from "spreading
| misinformation/disinformation" that the Earth circled the sun,
| and pushing back against the prevailing "science" of the day.
|
| If he were alive in 2021 and pushing something that went
| against "current wisdom," of that magnitude, he would be banned
| from media, ridiculed, and cancelled.
|
| It was a lesson I had thought the West had learned. It appears
| not. Censor and treat science as a religion at your (our) own
| peril.
| plokiju wrote:
| > If he were alive in 2021 and pushing something that went
| against "current wisdom," of that magnitude, he would be
| banned from media, ridiculed, and cancelled.
|
| The problem is, for every Galileo who is thinking against the
| mainstream understanding and right, there are millions of
| others who are outside the mainstream and wrong.
|
| I don't see how any society could function if it didn't have
| a strict anti-bullshit filter, even if it may accidentally
| filter out geniuses who are ahead of their time.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| What's wrong with being wrong? If we are to be honest with
| ourselves, we must admit that we are wrong about things,
| each and every one of us. We may be right about some
| things, but even those are for the most part incomplete
| truths.
| plokiju wrote:
| It's ok to be wrong. But you should also expect that you
| may be ridiculed or ignored sometimes if your theories
| aren't conventional
|
| Basically, I don't think the BBC refusing to give time to
| flat earth era is cancel culture. Even if there's a non-
| zero chance they were right all along
| SV_BubbleTime wrote:
| Are the content teams at FAANG ridiculing and ignoring
| the people they consider to be wrong? Or are they going
| out of their way to censor perfectly legal and possibly
| correct things they just don't like using an ever
| changing and intentionally ambiguous terms of service to
| do so?
|
| > Basically, I don't think the BBC refusing to give time
| to flat earth era is cancel culture
|
| No one is making that argument. Talk about a Wuhan lab
| leak and see if it doesn't get a lot harder to speak from
| your position.
| mcguire wrote:
| Do you have specific knowledge of a Wuhan lab leak? Are
| your arguments regarding a lab leak reasonable? Will you
| cease making your argument if it is not supported?
| goatlover wrote:
| >> Even if there's a non-zero chance they were right all
| along
|
| What does a non-zero chance that the Earth is flat look
| like? That we live in a simulation fooling us into
| thinking the empirical evidence is spherical? The
| evidence is overwhelming. There's not really any chance
| for it being correct, short of some odd metaphysics being
| the case.
|
| Scientifically speaking, it's 100% wrong. Some beliefs
| are simply at odds with the vast empirical data, and can
| only be right if something else is producing false
| empirical results.
| pandaman wrote:
| It's not a problem at all. For example, people do mistakes
| in calculations all the time but since Math is not faith
| and/or consensus based nobody flies off the handle and runs
| a public ostracism campaign on them. You think Bloomberg
| spent 500M on his campaign so he spent more than if he had
| given 1M to every citizen of the US? You just look like a
| fool but there are not going to be 1000 Math professors
| signing letters to excommunicate you and your bank accounts
| are not going to be shut down and you still keep your job
| in New York Times.
|
| If you feel that your science won't stand without harassing
| heretics, perhaps it is the problem with the soundness of
| your science and not the folly of the heretics?
| mcguire wrote:
| What happens when there are 10 million citizens demanding
| their million dollars, who won't take "but that's not how
| math works" for an answer?
| pandaman wrote:
| They don't get their million dollars.
| mcguire wrote:
| And then we call out the National Guard to put an
| exclamation point at the end of that sentence.
| pandaman wrote:
| I am a bit late to your train of thought so it seems to
| have left the station without me. Are you saying we solve
| mathematical problems with the National Guard? Correct
| grammar with it? I honestly cannot understand what are
| you trying to say here.
| cronix wrote:
| > I don't see how any society could function if it didn't
| have a strict anti-bullshit filter
|
| I don't see how science can ultimately function if you
| aren't allowed to push back and legitimately question
| things. All things. How many times have we, years or
| hundreds or thousands of years later, come back and
| disproved something that was a "scientifically proven"
| thing in the past? How would you accomplish that if you
| aren't allowed to talk about it? Relatively few things in
| science are actually indisputable, and I question even
| that. Some things that we think are indisputable today we
| might laugh at a thousand years from now, just like we
| laugh at some of the primitive thoughts our ancestors had,
| but were cutting edge for the day. Science is the pursuit
| of truth through rigorous testing and pushback. Eventually,
| if proven enough times, we call it a law. You have to be
| open to being completely wrong to actually obtain that
| level. Free speech is paramount to science, as well as
| society.
|
| Society, as a whole, has worked fairly well without
| "bullshit filters." It's when you start putting them on
| that you start having issues, and often in areas that you
| didn't anticipate, because at that point you're acting on a
| belief and not a fact.
|
| I highly recommend reading Carl Sagan's The Demon-Haunted
| World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. Here's an interview
| to give a preview:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JpQFVXGzUI
| plokiju wrote:
| > Society, as a whole, has worked fairly well without
| "bullshit filters." It's when you start putting them on
| that you start having issues
|
| When has society ever not had bullshit filters?
| Intellectual debate goes both ways. The more your ideas
| go outside of the mainstream understanding of your peers,
| the more push back, ridiculing, and "cancelation" you
| will likely be subjected to by the scientific community
|
| Very few geniuses are appreciated until after their
| death. scientific consensus takes time
| cronix wrote:
| > When has society ever not had bullshit filters?
|
| I absolutely accept "I don't have to listen to you" as a
| bs filter. "That guy's nuts, I don't believe a thing he's
| saying." I don't accept "we won't allow others to listen
| to you question things" as a filter.
| mcguire wrote:
| What about "we don't think we will publish that"?
| cronix wrote:
| Sounds good on face. Do Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and
| other platforms that dominate the planet in
| information/thought exchange, consider themselves
| publishers?
| mcguire wrote:
| " _I don 't see how science can ultimately function if
| you aren't allowed to push back and legitimately question
| things._"
|
| Can you demonstrate an understanding of the things you
| are questioning? Do you have reasonable arguments to
| support your questions? And most importantly, are you
| doing your questioning in good faith?
| dolni wrote:
| > And most importantly, are you doing your questioning in
| good faith?
|
| Worrying about "good faith" is a pointless waste of time.
| You don't know, and can't know with certainty, whether a
| question is in good faith. Your assessment of good faith
| is based on feelings and those don't have a scientific
| basis. If you reject or criticize a question on the basis
| of an actor's "good faith", then that actually makes you
| the one who is unscientific.
|
| But the great thing about this is that this doesn't even
| matter. Bullshit questions will be easily refutable. And
| if they're not, it's because those doing the science
| haven't done a thorough enough job yet.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _[Tobacco smoking] has been a major health problem for
| many decades. For the entire 20th century it is estimated
| that around 100 million people died prematurely because
| of smoking, most of them in rich countries._ "
| (https://ourworldindata.org/smoking)
| rabuse wrote:
| The world is a constant battle of rights and wrongs.
| Getting something wrong, is a major part in arriving to
| something right. Now society wants to shun, filter, and
| cancel all the "wrongs", which removes skepticism of the
| popular "rights".
| plokiju wrote:
| What is the scientific process if not an attempt to
| filter and "cancel" wrong ideas, and propagate the right
| ones?
|
| Ideas will be attacked relentlessly by society until
| proven useful. That's how it all works
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Just to point that the prevailing science of the day was
| completely divided between Earth and Heliocentrism, and the
| Church supported research of both sides.
|
| The Galileo story is a very nice tale of what happens when
| you mix science and politics.
| [deleted]
| ecshafer wrote:
| We would be exactly where we are since Galileo didn't do that
| much to prove the heliocentric model.
|
| Galileo also wasn't jailed for the heliocentric model,
| Galileo was jailed for writing a book, where The Pope was the
| stand in character for an idiot, overtly. And while we are
| more liberal, at the time insulting the pope in published
| material, in Italy, was a rather poor choice.
| bduerst wrote:
| Yep. Galileo got himself into trouble not for his work on
| heliocentricity, but for publicly attacking an authority
| figure in the church.
|
| It's interesting to see how we today project our
| science/fundamentalism schism onto culture of the past,
| when in reality, there wasn't that much of a dichotomy
| before the Scopes trial in the 1930s.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Not being snarky, but it started with Aristarchus (his
| parallax work) and Ptolemy (the other one), so I'm pretty
| sure it would have continued in countries that weren't under
| Catholic oppression of science. Persia was pretty much the
| engine of science while Europe languished.
|
| To say this would not have progressed is to ignore the
| important work of non-European scientists.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Science actually progressed in Europe as well during the
| supposed dark ages. The whole notion that science just laid
| dormant between the fall of Rome and the renaissance is
| enlightenment-era propaganda that unfortunately has become
| part of the western cultural narrative.
|
| Ironically the notion of a Muslim golden age of free
| thought and science followed by a long dark age of no
| progress and oppression is also largely imagined.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Correct. Which is why I said "languished", in comparison
| to what immediately followed with the Age of Enlightment,
| and what came before it, in Greece and the early Roman
| empire.
|
| It also is a bit of a misnomer to blame it all on
| religion, it was mostly just an assload of war.
| mcguire wrote:
| Only if the "skeptic" is acting in good faith.
|
| Consider the skepticism regarding the health effects of smoking
| cigarettes.
| cletus wrote:
| I understand what you're saying but skepticism is also a tool
| for manipulation.
|
| We now have a significant number of people who are rejecting
| the Covid vaccine because they're "skeptical" or "waiting for
| the evidence" or, the worst, they've "done their own research".
|
| Hint: some random guy talking about this in his basement and
| putting the video up on YouTube is not "research".
|
| The fact of the matter is that we simply can't be skeptical
| about everything and research everything. It's physically
| impossible. It's why we delegate authority to people and
| institutions who do actual research and have credibility. It's
| why I listen to the CDC about diseases and CERN when it comes
| to physics.
|
| "Skepticism" these days is often a euphemism for confirmation
| bias.
| JoshuaDavid wrote:
| It's when those institutions lose credibility that things
| fall apart. If CERN came out with a press release tomorrow
| that said that actually the theory of relativity was wrong
| and the universe operates by newtonian mechanics, I would not
| only doubt that press release, but also everything else CERN
| put out recently. If a certain group started calling anyone
| who asked questions like "well how are GPS satellites so
| accurate" and "why does Mercury's orbit precess instead of
| being a perfect ellipse" was called a "science denier", well
| I would start doubting the credibility of that group.
| josefresco wrote:
| How should we counter coordinated unauthentic or disingenuous
| skepticism? I think everyone welcomes authentic concern, but
| what we're seeing with anti-vax/anti-mask/anti-science itself
| is something else completely.
| rabuse wrote:
| Who's welcoming authentic concern? The media, who labels
| parents as "domestic terrorists" for concerns over a mandate
| that may have detrimental social effects of their children
| down the line?
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| They reason they are thriving is this doctrinal view of
| science where anything that gets published is holy gospel.
|
| It opens up for these fringe movements is to present
| themselves as scientific, since they too have papers they can
| point to, and arguments that mirror the form of the
| scientific establishment.
|
| The way to beat them is to be very clear about the
| limitations of science, and stop trying to misrepresent it as
| having a larger degree of certainty than it has. Science is
| demonstrably wrong sometimes, especially early research like
| the stuff that was circulating in the beginning of the
| C19-pandemic, and to make matters worse, a large part of
| science is dedicated to identifying instances where science
| is wrong.
|
| That clashes with the official message is "trust the science"
| and makes devastating ammunition for undermining its
| credibility, especially nowadays when it is very easy to go
| back and check what claims were made in the past against
| which claims are made today.
| dolni wrote:
| I wish we would stop talking about science as a singular
| authority. Science is what you get if you follow the
| scientific method.
|
| The scientific method is practiced by imperfect people with
| biases and external motivators. That is why thorough peer
| review is required (and sadly lacking).
| jrm4 wrote:
| Correct.
|
| Look, I didn't get vaccinated because I was _told_ to by
| pharmaceutical companies. Those shady bastards are on TV
| all the time selling stuff that seems super sketchy.
|
| ALSO, I didn't get vaccinated because I was _told_ to by
| doctors; I 've had enough experiences with them getting
| things wrong in what they tell you to do.
|
| I got vaccinated because doctors and health professionals
| THEMSELVES got vaccinated without hesitation. Was lucky
| enough to see a good friend, a quasi-famous black doctor,
| get the jab on TV, which sealed it pretty quickly for me.
| pauldenton wrote:
| Why are there mass firings of nurses for refusing to get
| the shot?
| bprieto wrote:
| Because there is a debate about the degree of immunity
| that you get after being ill with COVID-19. And many
| healthcare workers that have been exposed to the virus
| have been ill, have high levels of antibodies and they
| don't think that the vaccine is necessary or beneficial
| for them.
|
| But right now you must be in one of the two fields: you
| are either an anti-vaxxer or you believe in science and
| will do everything your government says. There are no
| room for rational discussion about important issues
| anymore. You just choose your team and fight for it till
| death.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Why are there mass firings of nurses for refusing to
| get the shot?
|
| AFAICT, there aren't. Very small numbers have left
| (permanently or temporarily) jobs for that reason,
| whether fired, quit, or suspended. On the order of
| hundreds out of ~17 million health care workers covered
| by mandates.
|
| Lots of political opponents have pointed to mass firings
| as hypothetical future consequences of mandate policies,
| and then reacted as if these hypothetical future outcomes
| were present reality.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| > On the order of hundreds out of ~17 million health care
| workers covered by mandates.
|
| There are 17 million employees in the healthcare industry
| as a whole, but so far it's a handful of healthcare
| systems that have announced this firing policy, primarily
| (but not exclusively) in NY and California, and an even
| smaller subset has actually gone through with firing
| people. Of course, even 1% of 17 million healthcare
| workers is 170,000 people, and even if 95% are
| vaccinated, that's still 8,500 people to be fired. And
| 95% is optimistic.
|
| As to the claim that only hundreds have been fired, I'm
| not sure where you are getting your data. One healthcare
| provider in NY fired 1400 people[1]. 87% of New York's
| hospital workers are vaccinated and 64% of New York's
| general population are vaccinated.
|
| So if the providers in extremely blue areas are faced
| with firing 13% of their healthcare workers, I'm a little
| skeptical that only hundreds will be fired, or that this
| is even a workable plan. But who knows, I don't think
| anyone has the full count for the nation at the moment.
| If you didn't just make it up, then please do share your
| source. More facts and less speculation are needed when
| discussing this issue.
|
| [1] https://www.axios.com/new-york-northwell-health-
| vaccine-mand...
| mcguire wrote:
| "Vaccine Mandates Lead to Mass Firings and Mass Walkouts
| from State Troopers to Hospital Workers" (https://cmsedit
| .cbn.com/cbnnews/us/2021/september/vaccine-ma...)
|
| As of Sep. 28, CBN could find only 843. And, oh, look,
| they linked to
| https://www.fiercehealthcare.com/hospitals/how-many-
| employee...
|
| Kaiser Permanente and Northwell Health were the largest
| with 1-2% of their workforces, although Kaiser's are on
| "administrative leave".
| xadhominemx wrote:
| Because a lot of nurses are dumb and/or highly partisan
| or otherwise ideological
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| It's something like 1%?
|
| Also, some of these stats include nurses that are still
| registered but not currently working anywhere so it's
| unclear that their vaccination status is correctly
| recorded.
| nickthemagicman wrote:
| Labotomies won the Nobel prize.
|
| Descartes was excommunicated.
|
| Semmelweis was mocked.
|
| How you should approach anti-vax/anti-mask people is to
| consider that they may have a point.
|
| But your FAITH in the science of your narrative precludes
| you.
| 0xBA5ED wrote:
| >coordinated unauthentic or disingenuous skepticism
|
| There is certainly some of this happening as with every
| issue, but echo chambers can easily emerge and sustain
| themselves without the need for coordinated bad actors. I
| believe the larger issue is simply lack of education rather
| than bad guys doing bad things.
| pumaontheprowl wrote:
| You counter all skepticism the same way: by a designing an
| experiment to test the skeptic's hypothesis and presenting
| the results of the experiment to the skeptic. Name-calling,
| censorship, and persecution are not going to bring the
| skeptic to your side, but they will almost certainly
| discourage future skeptics from presenting their findings.
|
| If we allow politicians to turn science into a dogma instead
| of an investigative process, progress will come to a grinding
| halt.
| theaeolist wrote:
| If only. There's a nice flat-earth documentary on Netflix.
| Some scientifically-minded flat-earthers designed and
| carried out not one but two experiments to "prove" the
| earth is flat. Both of them came conclusively on the side
| that the earth is not flat, but is quasi-spherical with a
| radius and rotation rate consistent with the scientific
| consensus. Remember, these experiments were on their own
| terms. They repeated them several times and they declared
| them "inconclusive". This is not someone you can convince
| by any means.
| thrwawy12345 wrote:
| Who are they hurting by believing that the Earth is flat?
| WillDaSilva wrote:
| The harm people cause by holding believing false beliefs
| is rather complicated at times, yet extremely important
| and impactful nonetheless.
|
| For flat earthers in particular this video sheds some
| light on why their way of thinking is harmful:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
|
| To be extremely reductive, allowing false beliefs into
| one's web of beliefs corrupts it. This typically gives
| rise to a multitude of other false beliefs. Flat earthers
| almost never only believe one obviously false conspiracy
| theory. They become epistemically susceptible, and worse
| still, they tend to spread these awful ways of thinking
| with great zeal.
|
| In the more general case, I recommend you learn about the
| ethics of belief. The Standford Encyclopedia of
| Philosophy page on the topic is a good starting point:
| https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/
|
| Maybe someone can come along and answer your question in
| a more succinct yet equally (or ideally more) convincing
| way. This request that you commit several hours to
| educating yourself is the best I can do at this time.
| deepnotderp wrote:
| Well said. I propose therefore that we ban Boltzmann for
| his crime of false belief in statistical mechanics. /s
| thereisnospork wrote:
| How do you inform a voter on the implications of say, tax
| policy, and expect them to make a rational decision if
| they can't even comprehend that the earth is proven to
| not be flat? Ignorance and its tolerance hurts everyone
| in a democracy.
| thrwawy12345 wrote:
| What a curious argument against democracy.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| It's not that curious, it's pretty clearly self
| describing actually.
|
| And what's wrong with arguments against democracy? We are
| in a thread explicitly discussing questioning anything
| and everything and talking about the virtues of being
| averse to dogma. What if democracy is not as good as it
| gets? What if there's an alternative that is not
| authoritarianism?
| chana_masala wrote:
| There's no such thing as scientific consensus, strictly
| speaking
| josefresco wrote:
| > You counter all skepticism the same way: by a designing
| an experiment to test the skeptic's hypothesis and
| presenting the results of the experiment to the skeptic.
|
| I've tried this (by sharing data) with friends and family
| members - it doesn't work/matter. They simply dismiss the
| data as "fake news" and shift to a new argument. This is
| why I classify it as "disingenuous skepticism".
|
| Their actions (anecdotally) are driven by culture and
| politics, not data.
| gotoeleven wrote:
| I mean, very often "shared data" is fake news because we
| know that studies on politically charged topics are under
| intense pressure (via funding or public lynch mobs) to
| come out a particular way. In the past two years studies
| on crime rates by race, illegal immigration/amnesty, and
| many covid related topics have all been shaped by this.
|
| And remember, the way most people are finding out about
| this "shared data" is via the media that just got done
| spending 4 years accusing trump of being a russian agent.
| So, they're biased or they're liars. Hence the
| skepticism.
| [deleted]
| over_the_raibow wrote:
| Besides analytical skill, people also posses intuition
| which is a valid tool to interpret the world. A wife that
| is cheated on by her husband, intuitively knows that she
| s cheated on even though she has no proof. She might see
| the unusual behavior of her husband, the fact that he s
| secretive doesn't give her attention as he used to or
| comes home very late. She might even confront him about
| this only to be met with a lot of logical explanations
| and alibies(I had to work till late, I went on a
| teambuilding trip, etc). His reasons might be completely
| rational and logical but she knows something is wrong. He
| might even attempt to make it seems she s the hysterical
| and crazy one while he s the rational and calm guy. See
| where I m going? Your friends and family don t contest
| "the data",they couldn t do this even if they wanted. But
| they have serious reasons to believe something s off.
| Their intuition is telling that. They might not have the
| data, only a feeling. But that feeling is strong. They
| don t deny your good intentions,it s just that you made
| yourself the defender of a certain conclusion.They have
| an issue with the mainstream source of that data, with
| the government and the the industry behind, which
| academics ar legitimizing through skewed papers, paid
| research, etc. I suggest to take their skepticism more
| serious, since even I, from the other side of the world,
| can see they probably they are right. There is definitely
| something off and skepticism is reasonable these days.
| rabuse wrote:
| The data conflicts within different nations across the
| globe. Some barely had lockdowns, with minimal impact to
| their healthcare system, and others are at a high
| vaccination rate with record cases. There's nothing
| concrete in this.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > Their actions (anecdotally) are driven by culture and
| politics, not data.
|
| I'd argue 40% of societies response to this pandemic is
| culture and politics. 30% is media fear mongering. 20% is
| intellectual error and 10% is actually disease
| mitigation.
|
| Requiring fully vaccinated individuals to wear masks is
| culture & politics.
|
| Shutting down outdoor restaurants is culture and politics
|
| Casting moral shame on people who get covid is culture
| and politics
|
| Saying it is totally okay to go to a BLM rally while not
| being able to attend a football game is culture and
| politics.
|
| Closing the birthday card isle in the grocery store is
| culture and politics.
|
| The list goes on and on...
|
| In fact the very core of lockdowns is premised in culture
| and politics and not science. Science doesn't create
| policy. Human values do. For example places that place
| more emphasis on living life instead of protecting life
| were probably the first to drop restrictions.... a
| perfectly valid stance.
|
| Science doesn't tell us what to do. It is merely a
| process for testing hypothesis in an attempt to get to
| the "truth" of something. That's all it does. Science
| didn't tell us to lockdown, it doesn't tell us to require
| vaccinated individuals to wear a mask, it doesn't tell us
| to shut down our borders, or any of that. All those
| decisions were driven by culture and politics.
| [deleted]
| betwixthewires wrote:
| If your goal is to convince _them_ , and not come to a
| more clear understanding of the truth, this will be
| frustrating. Once you let go of convincing anyone of
| anything you are free to find the truth for yourself.
| liber8 wrote:
| This is not what pumaontheprowl said.
|
| You are right, simply presenting people with data doesn't
| work. If it did, you would never see a fat nurse, or a
| doctor who smokes, or... the list is endless.
|
| pumaontheprowl's suggestion is to design a (thought)
| experiment that involves the skeptic. There are various
| ways to do this, but history is literally built on this
| exact phenomena. Getting people to change their mind on
| an issue requires that you have a real conversation with
| them. You can't just shove data in their face and see
| "See, look dummy you're wrong I'm right!" There are all
| sorts of people that do this for a living: helping people
| leave cults/white supremacy groups/etc.
| whatshisface wrote:
| We have to train people to have critical thinking skills in
| school so that they can tell the difference between truth and
| lies when they see them out in the wild. Of course, the
| government will have to stop making stuff up, but that's a
| small price to pay for insulating society against other
| forces who are way better at making propaganda than our
| government / our "institutions."
| kansface wrote:
| Talking of unscientific beliefs, I have yet to see any
| evidence that teaching critical thinking is either possible
| or likely, or that schools would do anything other than use
| the time for propaganda - particularly in regard to
| anything of importance that is contentious.
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| It's a harsh truth as far as I know, that some people
| refuse to come to terms with. Some people just believe
| that anyone can be taught anything given the appropriate
| conditions.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| How does government benefit from teaching critical thinking
| in government schools? If there's no good answer to that,
| it won't happen.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| The assumption that all governments are at best always
| hostile is not something shared by everyone in the world.
|
| it seems to be a reliable indicator that the person
| expressing it is a US citizen or at least resident in the
| US.
|
| Isn't it debilitating to live in a place suffused with
| this opinion? Does it become self-fulfilling?
|
| And to answer the question: the government is composed of
| people like you; critical thinking helps the government
| see how to improve society just as it helps you to
| improve your own life and prevent you from falling for
| scams.
| whatshisface wrote:
| When you say "the government is composed of people like
| you," I imagine you are talking about the low to mid
| echelons of the civil service. That's right, but they
| don't set policy. Corporations work together with
| politicians and reliable upper-echelon civil servants to
| set US policy, and the media works together with them to
| prevent the use of democracy. It's impossible for a US
| citizen to believe anything else if they have but the
| most shallow awareness of even the foreign policy alone
| of the past 70 years.
|
| It's universal knowledge; you will hear it whether you
| are talking to a conservative christian or a communist,
| although the particular culturally appropriate way of
| phrasing it will change. You will even hear it from
| comfortable urban professionals, although couched in a
| way that makes it look like they're not excessively upset
| about it.
|
| I have heard a lot of opinions, some of them bonkers, but
| there is one I have never heard; I challenge you to find
| one single American who believes that Iraq was invaded
| due to popular demand.
| goatlover wrote:
| > I have heard a lot of opinions, some of them bonkers,
| but there is one I have never heard; I challenge you to
| find one single American who believes that Iraq was
| invaded due to popular demand.
|
| I seem to recall it being fairly popular among the public
| back when it was proposed and first carried out, because
| there was a pretty widespread belief that Saddam did
| still have WMDs, and that he was somehow linked to 9/11.
| Those were both wrong, and there were certainly people
| who were skeptical, but it did have somewhat popular
| support at the time.
| mcguire wrote:
| Some popular support?
|
| " _Days before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Maines told a
| London audience the band did not endorse the war and were
| "ashamed" of US President George W. Bush being from
| Texas. The remarks triggered boycotts in the US and
| backlash from fans._"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chicks)
| whatshisface wrote:
| That's overlooking the order of events - first the
| decision was made to invade Iraq, then the WMD claim was
| invented, then the public was convinced of the claim, and
| then Iraq was invaded. If you only consider the last two
| steps, then it would look like the second to last event
| was first. Sadly, public demand was a _consequence_ , not
| a cause.
| goatlover wrote:
| I don't know whether it was actually invented or was the
| result of poor intelligence and the Bush administration
| wanting it to be true. At any rate, the public largely
| bought into it at the time.
| goatlover wrote:
| > It's universal knowledge; you will hear it whether you
| are talking to a conservative christian or a communist,
|
| I wouldn't expect either to be part of the Overton
| window, and both to be rather unhappy with current
| society. As for upper civil servants, corporations and
| the media, one has to suppose their interests are all
| aligned, as opposed to being in disagreement over various
| matters. Sounds like something you'd hear conservative
| christian or communist say. Someone unhappy with the
| current form of government who supposes there is a grand
| conspiracy preventing their ideal conservative or
| communist society from being realized. Instead of a
| majority of people not wanting such a society.
|
| Both have a narrative of the world as being controlled by
| dark forces brainwashing people, instead of it being a
| complex, emergent structure from a messy history with
| nobody in control.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The factions within the, as you put it, Overton window,
| share some interests and oppose each other on some other
| goals. All of the uncertainty in policy lies in wondering
| whether corporations, politicians or upper level civil
| servants will get their way in each conflict, sometimes
| none of them getting their way due to gridlock. Nobody is
| in control, but some people are in more control than
| others. As you put it, groups outside the "Overton
| window" are all dissatisfied - but the really revealing
| thing is that they make up almost all of the US
| population.
| thephyber wrote:
| > Isn't it debilitating to live in a place suffused with
| this opinion? Does it become self-fulfilling?
|
| One of the 2 major political parties in the USA has
| pushed this opinion for as long as I've been alive. They
| deny federal government any opportunity to improve then
| point at government as an example of why it doesn't
| improve peoples' lives.
|
| I hope other still-functioning governments learn from the
| institutional failures of the USA in the 1970s and 1980s
| so as to avoid following the same path.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The people running our society have more to lose from
| getting replaced by some kind of taliban-equivalent than
| they have to lose from inoculating the population against
| propaganda at the expense of limiting their own power in
| some cases. This is a plan where they can keep their
| money and their authority, and they'd only have to
| sacrifice a small amount of the effectiveness of the big
| papers, which are not effective anymore anyway.
| lisael wrote:
| GP told about "a government". You rephrased to "The
| people running our society". If we accept the fact that
| this people is, simply put, the rich and the giant
| corporations... they have a lot to gain from some kind of
| fascist society. That's the heart of fascism: a strong
| government serving the rich. They do have to gain a lot
| from the masses ignorance, irrationality and short sight.
| Not that I'm saying they all adhere to fascism, people
| may have principles that contradict their most direct
| interest.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Multinational corporations don't like nationalism. I
| think the idea that big corporations benefit from fascism
| is an interesting one, but it doesn't square with
| capitalism's need to keep borders open to trade and
| capital flow. If you're proposing that someone is going
| to invent a non-nationalist version of fascism, that's
| again an interesting idea, but I'm having a hard time
| imagining it.
| nitrogen wrote:
| If it's successful it won't get a name, it won't be a
| "thing," it will just be the new normal.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| The problem with your reasoning here is that your two
| options are replacement by "a taliban-equivalent", or a
| slight limitation of their power. I think you've vastly
| overestimated the risk of a naive population to
| government while underestimating the benefit. In my view,
| the U.S. government's propaganda system is essential to
| its survival in its current form. It uses it to maintain
| the war industry, to justify its spending power, to
| preserve the stability of the currency, to ensure the
| election of tame officials -- there's a lot to lose.
| whatshisface wrote:
| The stability of the currency is mainly decided by
| countries outside the reach of the US's internal
| propaganda, because of the enormous debts and reserve
| currency status. I agree that a population which wouldn't
| go for Qanon would also make them quit invading countries
| in the middle east and south america, but depending on
| how this crazy business plays out, leaving Iran alone may
| be a small price for them to pay.
|
| I hate to invoke Godwin's law, but business people loved
| Hitler all around the world right up until his propaganda
| machine shut out their influence and he started invading
| the other half of their markets and supply chains. If the
| people running our country have learned anything from
| history they will quit encouraging irrationality and
| gullibility some time before the curtains close, so to
| speak.
| JasonFruit wrote:
| Maybe you are right. I'm not as confident as you that the
| U.S. government has learned from history, though; it
| spends a lot of time explaining that it has made
| historically-attested consequences of its actions
| impossible. But I'm not a fan in general, and that may
| color my perceptions.
| kiba wrote:
| I don't think critical thinking will do anyone any good if
| people abuse critical thinking to have opinions they want
| to have as opposed to changing their mind.
| jjcon wrote:
| > coordinated unauthentic or disingenuous skepticism
|
| We stop trying to ascribe malicious motives to their actions
| and try to have genuine conversation with them. If they
| aren't convinced after that then we have more work to do.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Right now at this moment my 60 year old SiL is holed up in
| her apartment with covid. She refused to get the vaccine.
| She believes that there are lizard people who live beneath
| the earth's crust, etc. She found a "doctor" to prescribe
| her ivermectin - the "doctor" does not allow vaccinated
| people into their clinic for whatever bizarre reason (sPIkE
| pRoTeenZ no doubt).
|
| We asked her to take a pic of her oximeter reading and send
| it to us - it read 91. We told her she should get to a
| hospital where they could give her some oxygen, but she
| refuses (doesn't want to be in "the system"). She is the
| poster child for disingenuous skepticism and it's
| impossible to have a "genuine conversation" with her
| because she's so infected with conspiracy theories
| (including the Q conspiracy).
| swader999 wrote:
| Hopefully someone can help get her script filled. If she
| doesn't notice improvement after a couple of doses, maybe
| she'll reconsider hospital. Time is of the essence with
| ivermectin, early application is more effective.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| If ivermectin has any effect against covid (I'm
| skeptical, but try to keep an open mind) it's likely past
| the point where it would have been possibly effective as
| she's over a week into it so the viral replication phase
| is likely mostly over and it's entered the inflammatory
| phase (meaning she probably needs steroids at this
| point).
| swader999 wrote:
| Hospital best choice if she's that far into it. No harm
| in getting her the ivm too though if possible.
| jjcon wrote:
| > She is the poster child for disingenuous skepticism
|
| She doesn't seem at all disingenuous to me, what actions
| make you doubt her genuinity? To me it sounds like she
| may have some mental health issues to work out and that
| is an entirely different beast than this conversation.
| thephyber wrote:
| Why do you believe that "mental health issues" (very non-
| specific) is an entirely different beast? My family
| experiences suggest that information silos (my personal
| diagnosis of one of the root causes of disbelief of
| reproducible scientific findings) can and do create
| mental health issues similar to the parent's SiL.
| iammisc wrote:
| There is good reason to not want to be in the system.
| During COVID, both my aunt and grandmother were abused
| during their hospitalizations (not for COVID). The
| experience left my aunt feeling she'd rather have died
| than endure what she had to, and after hearing her
| experiences, I think that would have been a perfectly
| rational decision to make had she known what was going to
| happen.
|
| Why are we so upset when people decide to refuse
| treatment?
| bduerst wrote:
| >Why are we so upset when people decide to refuse
| treatment?
|
| The anecdotal evidence you gave (hospital abuse) is an
| outlier, not a norm.
|
| A better question is, why _wouldn 't_ you be upset when a
| family member refuses life saving treatment, rationalized
| by disinformation?
| cde-v wrote:
| Hanlon's razor
| hallway_monitor wrote:
| Thank you. The phrase "disingenuous skepticism" is
| difficult to imagine. If someone believes masks don't work,
| or that a vaccine could have risks, they are skeptical;
| they haven't seen evidence that convinces them otherwise.
|
| It's interesting how much time and effort is spent trying
| to win people over to another way of thinking or opinion.
| bduerst wrote:
| I don't know how many of these conversations you've tried
| to have, because the confirmation bias is very real.
|
| We're not discussing skepticism of nematode behavior, but
| of the politicization of a pandemic, which makes it
| opinion. You can't reason with someone out of an opinion
| who didn't reason themselves into it to begin with.
|
| Rational bad actors abuse this notion that they have the
| right to play, to be heard, to have a discourse; when in
| reality they're repeating the same disinformation ad
| nausea to profit for themselves.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| I also think misconceptions about Occam's razor are to
| blame. It's a good heuristic for choosing which
| hypotheses to test first, but a lot of people seem to
| misuse it as a heuristic for which of two propositions is
| more likely to be true, which is unfounded and very often
| leads to incorrect conclusions. It's basically on par
| with "there's no smoke without fire".
|
| People tend to assume that if they cannot prove P and
| cannot prove !P, then !P must be assumed to be true. This
| is of course not correct at all, and most propositions
| can be rephrased so that Q=!P and !Q=P.
|
| If there is no evidence either way, then neither P nor !P
| is supported, and we should remain uncertain.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| >>The phrase "disingenuous skepticism" is difficult to
| imagine.
|
| I find it easy to imagine and indeed can pinpoint many
| observed instances. A lot of "I'm not saying anything,
| I'm just asking questions" ARE in fact saying something,
| quite strongly, with minds made up and no curiosity or
| eagerness to learn, but are being disingenuous. It's not
| skepticism: they are not awaiting or hoping for data or
| facts or claims, rational discourse or healthy
| discussion; their mind is not open to change; they have
| an objective, they are aiming to persuade and recruit, or
| sow doubt. To the point that when a user made an
| innocuous comment in this thread and ended it with "not a
| criticism, just an observation:)" we all assumed he was
| in fact disingenuous and was criticizing, because that's
| the current (unfortunate!) norm for that form of
| statement.
|
| A lot of cult-like institutions or groups understand,
| consciously or subconsciously, that their views are not
| agreed upon and appreciated. So they have devised
| disingenuous ways of promoting them. From naming
| ("Discovery Institute" is hard-core creationists,
| "National Vaccine Information Center" is hard-core anti-
| vaxx group etc), to appearances (websites are full of
| stock photos of people in white lab coats and charts, to
| appear science-y), to discourse (again, the frequent,
| "I'm not SAYING anything, I'm just ASKING"; "I'm not
| AGAINST vaccines, I just have QUESTIONS on the timing" -
| all pulled from distributed talking points),disingenuous
| skepticism has become the norm, I'm sad to say... and
| thus trivial to imagine.
|
| edit: All forms of discussion like this ultimately
| converge to definitions; so to be explicit and hopefully
| drive us to point of mutual understanding, to me,
| skepticism implies _seeking_ facts, data, truth; openness
| to change your mind; genuine looking for mutual objective
| truth and agreement. As such, there 's disingenuous
| skepticism _aplenty_ in this world of ours :- /
| ohwellhere wrote:
| This is exactly right, and what the original comment was
| describing I believe. Although I wonder if the subject is
| muddied as the adjective may be applied to the wrong
| noun.
|
| Their _skepticism_ is likely genuine and sincere, but
| their _engagement_ is not in good faith and is
| disingenuous.
|
| One problem, I think, is that it the communities are self
| selecting. Skeptics who engage in good faith on well
| understood topics become converts; all who remain over
| time in the community of skeptics are those who do not
| engage in good faith.
|
| It's a worthwhile question to ask why they don't engage
| in good faith, which I think has a more complicated
| answer than either straightforward ignorance or malice.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| The tongue in cheek term for this is "JAQing off". JAQ =
| Just Asking Questions. It is also known as "concern
| trolling". Any fool who spends the effort to successfully
| address the face value concern will find that the troll
| has immediately transitioned to having a new concern
| which happens to support/oppose the same exact things as
| the previous. It is a textbook example of motivated
| reasoning laundering itself in the clothing of
| skepticism.
|
| It is like fighting a squid. The moment you've caught it
| by one of the tentacles it slaps at you with the other 7
| while the first 1 slips away.
| mcguire wrote:
| How much evidence would it take you to come to believe
| that masks work or that the risks of vaccines do not
| outweigh the risks of the disease?
|
| And what do you do if the answer is "No amount of
| evidence"?
| mcguire wrote:
| Do you attribute malicious motives to the skeptics employed
| by tobacco companies?
| willcipriano wrote:
| > How should we counter coordinated unauthentic or
| disingenuous skepticism?
|
| Isn't this really asking "how do you have ideas that stand up
| to the Socratic method?"
| thephyber wrote:
| No. You are making categorical error by equating emotional
| messages with cognitive messages.
|
| Coordinated inauthentic ideas are not intended to withstand
| rigorous review. They are intended to tickle the limbic
| system and to get retweeted before the reader's cognitive
| mind has a chance to weigh in. The author will shed that
| idea or identity and move to another. For this reason, they
| are also called a "disinformation firehouse".
| sjwalter wrote:
| Do you mean people who question the vaccine at all are
| "something else completely"?
|
| Seems strange to be called "anti-vax" and, presumably, "anti-
| science" for questioning the logic in mass vaccinating with
| an experimental vaccine, built with experimental
| technologies, which since its deployment has been
| demonstrated through various data to be a spectacular failure
| in terms of safety and efficacy.
|
| What about just questioning the policies themselves?
|
| What about the fact that from where I'm sitting there's zero
| "science" supporting the use of cloth masks, yet they're
| attack vector numero uno when it comes to bifurcating the
| populace into angels and demons?
| thephyber wrote:
| > Seems strange to be called "anti-vax" and, presumably,
| "anti-science" for questioning...
|
| _Who_ is calling you these things? Are they government
| epidemiologists or just randos on the internet? If the
| latter, then why do you care what they call you? Opinions
| are like models: they are all imperfect and only some are
| useful.
|
| Questioning policies is fine, but you have to recognize
| that you aren't the only person espousing your position.
| There is a seemingly endless stream of opinions about how
| policies should be changed, so your voice is grouped
| together with other voices (some louder, some uninformed,
| some come with death threats, some come with violence).
|
| And it doesn't help your case when you discount the actual
| scientific evidence that masks (even some cloth masks) do a
| non-zero amount of intervention. Never mind the fact that
| cloth masks are available, cheap, safe, and visible. You
| may not agree with these qualities, but you aren't (I'm
| going out on a limb here) a government official charged
| with maintaining public health. Policy makers have to
| factor in things like effectiveness, cost, ubiquity, ease
| of implementation, effectiveness, and how it affects public
| order. If you aren't applying all of these in your
| calculus, then you are just complaining without suggesting
| a viable solution.
| thephyber wrote:
| > has been demonstrated through various data to be a
| spectacular failure in terms of safety and efficacy.
|
| Wat.
|
| There are 6 major vaccines which are approved for use in
| most countries. Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, J&J, AstraZeneca,
| Sinopharm, Sputnik. Most are extremely safe (obviously
| risks are non-zero, but those risks are orders of
| magnitudes better than the effects of the disease). Some
| are extremely effective (at reducing severe disease and/or
| reducing the spread of disease), at least for the first
| several months. Some are even very effective against a
| variant that didn't present until after development and
| testing were done. Only 2 are mRNA based, which I presume
| is what you mean by "experimental". These vaccines have
| been administered in billions of doses and side effects
| have been monitored for over a year. Your statements
| completely overstate the facts as observed.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| > demonstrated through various data to be a spectacular
| failure in terms of safety and efficacy
|
| No
| sjwalter wrote:
| It's best broken down by group, so here's just one
| example that I think is irrefutable about these being
| unsafe.
|
| If you've ever been pregnant or had a pregnant wife,
| you'd know that the list of medications which they can
| avail themselves of during pregnancy is tiny. This is
| because due to ethical concerns, testing pharmaceuticals
| on pregnant women is almost never done. So doctors tell
| pregnant women to never take most things while pregnant.
|
| The studies for the covid vaccines intentionally excluded
| pregnant women from their cohorts, for the same reason.
|
| Therefore, by the definition of unsafe that we've used
| for generations of medical advice, the vaccines are
| unsafe for pregnant women. No study on pregnancy? Not
| safe.
|
| And yet, pregnant women are recommended the vaccine every
| day.
|
| That's just one among many.
|
| As for failure, that's blindingly obvious at this point.
| If you disagree, please let me know how your view changes
| as you prepare for your fourth booster.
| thephyber wrote:
| You are conflating unsafe with unknown.
|
| You are ignoring the difference between a disease which
| is highly contagious (therefore difficult to avoid)
| versus pregnancy complications that are easy to avoid
| because they aren't contagious diseases.
|
| You are also projecting typical ethical concerns around
| medical research on pregnant women and the mounting body
| of evidence that COVID vaccines are safe for women who
| get pregnant after vaccination. It turns out it is easy
| to study this after billions of doses are administered.
| The CDC is currently studying the effects of these
| vaccines on pregnancy: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/20
| 19-ncov/vaccines/recommend...
|
| "That's just one among many"
|
| Perhaps some of the "many" might stand up to scrutiny...
| lamontcg wrote:
| https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/vaccines/recomm
| end...
| paganel wrote:
| > which since its deployment has been demonstrated through
| various data to be a spectacular failure in terms of safety
| and efficacy.
|
| What do you mean by "spectacular failure"? I live in
| Romania, one of the least vaccinated countries in the EU
| (together with Bulgaria) and we're now in the middle of a
| very, very bad Covid wave because of the low vaccination
| rates. The other EU countries don't go through the same
| thing as us. I don't call the vaccine a "spectacular
| failure" in terms of safety and efficacy, quite the
| contrary, it demonstrates that it has been doing its job
| pretty well.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| In the US, 44% of the population remains unvaccinated,
| including virtually all school-aged children... but
| because the same anti-vax people are also really bad at
| math, they think that infection rates are proof that
| they're right when factually the virus is much more
| widespread than this time last year due to their lack of
| care.
|
| Meanwhile, the most vocal vaccine skeptics are catching
| and dying from the virus with such frequency that there
| are multiple subreddits devoted to their stories.
| sjwalter wrote:
| And here to me, it seems very obvious that vaccinating
| children is utter madness. Children are not at risk of
| covid.
| thephyber wrote:
| It depends what you think the intent of vaccination is.
|
| The 3 vaccines authorized / approved in the USA all
| significantly reduce the probability of severe disease,
| the duration of contagiousness, and the magnitude of
| contagiousness.
|
| I would agree that severe disease is already exceedingly
| rare among that population, but the contagiousness issue
| is more of a trade off of multiple factors.
| lamontcg wrote:
| Risks of the vaccine in kids are lower than the risks of
| MIS-C or myocarditis from the actual virus.
|
| Children have a very low risk of COVID complications, but
| the risk of vaccine complications is even lower.
| MisterBastahrd wrote:
| And here to me, knower of basic biology and observer of
| children, know that children spread viruses.
|
| I sorta caught COVID from my kid and stuff. She sat in a
| class for 3 days with another infected child whose
| parents knew the child was infected but who also did not
| have an adequate plan in place to care for him during the
| day. It was a complete shitshow, and I permanently lost
| most of my sense of smell.
|
| But thanks for your information.
| [deleted]
| lamontcg wrote:
| > Seems strange to be called "anti-vax" and, presumably,
| "anti-science" for questioning the logic in mass
| vaccinating with an experimental vaccine, built with
| experimental technologies, which since its deployment has
| been demonstrated through various data to be a spectacular
| failure in terms of safety and efficacy.
|
| Well yeah, that is hilariously bad anti-science. There's
| nothing scientific to support any of that.
| ipspam wrote:
| Science is only one piece of the puzzle. Ultimately it's a
| political game, so science is only part of the equation.
| Masks are to signal that I care about you, and to make you
| feel safe. Bullshit of course, but it's way to hard to make
| people understand that they are overestimating the risk of
| death and hospitalization by factors of 10x and 20x. Much
| easier to not correct the record and pretend masks reduce
| the risk 10-20x.
|
| Back to basics: The government doesn't care about you. Any
| interventions are likely to sacrifice long term success for
| short term success.
| sjwalter wrote:
| Lying to people in some kind of psychological game to
| manipulate their feelings in the way you're describing is
| despicable and anyone participating willfully in such
| bullshit deserves zero respect.
|
| Many scientists and doctors out there are obviously
| either completely uninterested in the truth or just
| toadies for the elite, if what you're describing is
| correct.
|
| If so, they don't deserve our respect, our trust, or even
| our attention.
| angelzen wrote:
| It's more complicated than that. Most scientists do not
| set out to willfully participate in bullshit. They do
| honest work within the constraints of their profession.
|
| As an example, take covid antibody studies. It is
| interesting and useful to learn how covid vaccines elicit
| antibody production. OTOH, the immune system is not
| limited to antibodies. Extrapolating long-term immunity
| conclusions from an antibody study is unwarranted. Alas,
| the scientists performing antibody studies don't have the
| resources to perform long term studies. This creates an
| over-abundence of antibody studies, which are cheap and
| likely to produce measurable results. These studies are
| then used as incontrovertible evidence that 'science
| says' there is no such thing as natural immunity, and
| even if it were, vaccines are much better.
| thrwawy12345 wrote:
| > Most scientists do not set out to willfully participate
| in bullshit.
|
| Probably true. But "scientists who seek political power"
| is a different set. See, Fauci
| spookthesunset wrote:
| > If so, they don't deserve our respect, our trust, or
| even our attention.
|
| Totally agree. What's the number one rule of crisis
| management? Keep people calm. I cannot name a single
| "expert" who has attempted to calm people at all. In fact
| most have done the exact opposite. They have
| intentionally provoked fear.
|
| If these people wanted respect, trust and attention
| they'd go out of their way to _clearly_ articulate the
| risks of covid for each population group. Instead they
| act as if covid is a death sentence for anybody. They
| would actively stamp out misinformation like "4% kill
| rate" and "25% of people get long covid". They'd clearly
| frame "hospitals full" with the context of how busy an
| ICU is during normal times. They'd spend large chunks of
| their time calming parents who are fearful for their
| children.
|
| More important, they'd offer hope and work to instill
| courage and bravery in people. They'd tell people what
| they can do to minimize symptoms. They'd remind people
| virtually everybody recovers and many don't even know
| they had it. They'd give people ways to meaningfully
| contribute "to the cause" within their communities.
|
| Instead they've done nothing but crank up the fear factor
| and freaked the absolute shit out of people. They'd
| literally knocked screws loose from people I used to
| regard as level headed, rational people. And they keep at
| it. Never offering positive messaging. Never offering
| hope. Never communicating good news. Never calming people
| down.
|
| Of course if they did any of what I described, I'd
| imagine most people wouldn't have accepted any of these
| mitigation measures at all. Because I believe a rational
| individual looking at the data would see almost none of
| what we've done over the past year and a half makes a
| single ounce of sense at all. The cynic in me says that
| is exactly why they don't do what I describe... cranking
| up the fear is the only way to sell lockdowns, masks,
| vaccine mandates, border closures, and whatever other
| human rights crushing crap these people want to shove
| down our mouths.
|
| These "experts" are some of the most vile individuals I
| can think of. They don't deserve an ounce of respect,
| trust or attention.
| kansface wrote:
| It's actually more like a factor of 100x for Democrats -
| maybe 50x for Republicans.
| [deleted]
| psychlops wrote:
| > anti-vax/anti-mask/anti-science
|
| I'd like to define what these terms mean. Right now, I think
| the mainstream technique is anyone who questions
| vax/mask/science gets the anti- prefix.
| angelzen wrote:
| Or the -phobe suffix. This isn't isolated.
| thrwawy12345 wrote:
| In common parlance it usually means "is disgusted by"
| rather than the traditional "is afraid of".
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Labeling people as part of some group of undesirables
| seems to be a very popular way of not having to meet
| legitimate criticism these days. I wish we would be
| better at calling it out.
| mcguire wrote:
| What, exactly, is "legitimate criticism"?
| spookthesunset wrote:
| Being anti-mask isn't "unauthentic or disingenuous
| skepticism". I've yet to hear a compelling argument why a
| fully vaccinated individual has any business wearing a mask.
| I've also yet to see any real data that shows that most masks
| worn do anything beyond being a placebo.
|
| All these studies conducted around masks are being done in
| the heat of the moment in a highly politically charged
| environment. Releasing a study that says masks don't work
| will get the authors labeled as "anti-science" and probably
| destroy their careers. All the studies performed prior to
| this mess were inconclusive, at best.
|
| Just because you disagree with somebody doesn't make that
| person anti-science and doesn't make them dangerous,
| "disingenuous" or "unauthentic". People have plenty of good
| reasons to call BS on almost all of our mitigations.
| rabuse wrote:
| There is no compelling argument. They constantly keep
| shifting the goal posts whenever asked genuine questions.
| The definition of "vaccine" is even being redefined by a
| couple of these radical groups.
| lordnacho wrote:
| The problem is it all comes down to authority in the end.
|
| There, I said it.
|
| But it does.
|
| In the end all evidence in the public sphere is second hand. If
| you don't already trust the scientists, there's an alternative
| universe of quacks who will give you what you're after.
| nitrogen wrote:
| Anything independently reproducible doesn't come down to
| authority. Reproducibility is fundamental to science.
| lordnacho wrote:
| And nobody can realistically reproduce anything outside
| their own little niche.
|
| "I injected the boys with fluid from cowpox victims, and
| they didn't get smallpox later."
|
| "I don't believe you"
|
| Turtles all the way down. At best we can say the quacks
| hold everyone else's evidence to a higher standard than
| their own.
| apetresc wrote:
| He's talking about "the public sphere." Among the general
| non-specialist public (probably 95%+ of the population),
| virtually nobody can even do things like prove the
| Pythagorean theorem. The idea that science is substantially
| different from religion for most people because they
| "could", in principle, reproduce the studies is laughable.
| verall wrote:
| What about bad-faith skepticism, like cigarettes-cause-cancer
| skeptics and global warming skeptics?
|
| From what I can see, good faith skepticism makes science
| sturdier, but in bad faith it seduces the less knowledgable and
| burns the time of the more knowledgeable.
|
| On the flipside, most flat earthers don't seem to be arguing in
| bad faith.
| sjwalter wrote:
| Your statement that all, for e.g., global warming skeptics
| are bad-faith shows you don't have a scientific mindset
| yourself.
|
| I live near glacier national park. In the 1990s, some climate
| model predicted the eponymous glacier would be gone by 2020.
| Signs around the parks' entrances were erected boldly stating
| this claim. In January of 2020, the signs were removed
| because the glaciers hadn't even shrunk.
|
| If there were real scientific interest in climate change,
| there'd be some interest and funding in ascertaining why that
| prediction was proven incorrect. But there is no such study,
| no funding for it, no interest whatsoever.
|
| The climate change alarmists have zero opposition in all
| major institutions. Anyone who says their models are
| bullshit, or who says maybe the Sun is having a larger impact
| on the climate than are GHGs, is ridiculed without their
| arguments even entertained. You belie this with your
| statement that any such skepticism is "bad faith".
|
| When it comes to climate change in particular, a field that
| seeks to study an incredibly complex collection of phenomena,
| whose leading experts have raised blood-chilling alarmist
| calls for action for decades and many of whose forecasts have
| proven totally bunk, who study a system far more complex than
| even the economy (are economics skeptics bad-faith too?)...
| Well, if you think YOU have a lock on what's true, and
| everyone with varying opinions is an obvious quack or a
| shill, then I think it's you who doesn't understand science.
| verall wrote:
| > You belie this with your statement that any such
| skepticism is "bad faith".
|
| I really didn't, and I feel that you did not attempt to
| engage with a charitable interpretation of my argument.
|
| I used climate change denial as an example, because there
| clearly are people that make those arguments in bad faith,
| for monetary compensation. The same was true during
| cigarette legislation. I made no _all_ statement at any
| point.
|
| > Well, if you think YOU have a lock on what's true, and
| everyone with varying opinions is an obvious quack or a
| shill, then I think it's you who doesn't understand
| science.
|
| Dude are you arguing with me or a million other people?
| eutropia wrote:
| I searched the internet trying to find a reference to the
| study regarding the glaciers at GNP and found exclusively
| news stories and blogspam repeating the "removal of the
| signs" meme from foxnews, right-wing think tanks,
| fundamentalist christian organizations, and oil & gas
| funded "science" web sites.
|
| I'd love to have a look at the original publication that
| the USGS used when it decided to create those signs, but
| its buried so deep under partisan schadenfreude that I
| can't find it to even analyze it.
|
| With respect to Greenhouse Gases: what's hard to understand
| about conservation of matter?
|
| GHGs cause some warming; you can do lab experiments on flux
| and gas mixtures in identical glass containers to prove
| this.
|
| The Biosphere (that is, the surface of the earth and all
| its organisms) has some essentially fixed amount of carbon
| distributed between critters, plants, soil, air, and
| dissolved in water. It's a closed system. When something
| dies and decomposes, it releases its carbon into the soil
| and atmosphere where it is endlessly recycled. Only in rare
| (and extremely slow) circumstances does the carbon get
| removed from the biosphere and put deep into the earth as
| coal, oil, or natural gas.
|
| When you dig up carbon that is currently out of that cycle
| and put into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels you are
| adding additional carbon to the system. It has to go
| somewhere. Some of it will temporarily become plants (until
| they die, rot and release the carbon again), some of it
| will dissolve into the ocean and raise the acidity, and
| some of it will stay in the atmosphere and cause some
| warming.
|
| This part of "climate change" is very simple to understand.
| The earth previously did just fine with a higher fixed
| amount of carbon in the biosphere, but it was a lot warmer,
| wetter, and humans weren't around.
| iammisc wrote:
| > I'd love to have a look at the original publication
| that the USGS used when it decided to create those signs,
| but its buried so deep under partisan schadenfreude that
| I can't find it to even analyze it.
|
| Don't you and the guy you responded to want the same
| thing: answers from the scientific community? You can
| criticize the right wing news sources all you want... the
| existence of the signs saying the glaciers were going to
| disappear is pretty indisputable. Clearly, someone at
| some point had enough belief in that prophesy that they
| made a sign.
| lordgrenville wrote:
| I found it pretty easy to find non-flamebait information
| on this story, here it is on CNN[0]. Here[1] is some
| background; here[2] is the original 2003 study (which
| predicted the glaciers would disappear in 2030; the date
| was apparently pushed up based on field observations
| showing glaciers melting faster than the model predicted.
|
| [0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-
| national-park...
|
| [1] https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/09/fact-
| check-no-the...
|
| [2] https://doi.org/10.1641/0006-3568(2003)053[0131:MCIGC
| I]2.0.C...
| burntsushi wrote:
| I think the comment you're responding to is taking issue
| with predictions about the specific effects of climate on
| a particular time table. I think your comment is talking
| about the general concept of greenhouse gases produced by
| humans causing warming. There is a large chasm between
| these two things.
|
| This is also why it's important to clarify what we mean
| by "global warming skeptic." Are we talking about someone
| that denies that human behavior creates greenhouse gases
| that warms the climate? Or are we talking about someone
| who views predictions about the specific effects of that
| warming on our environment on a particular time scale
| with great skepticism? These are two very different
| positions to take.
| sjwalter wrote:
| You and GP both have spherical cow ideas about how GHGs
| impact the climate.
|
| Yes, we can create an ideal lab "climate" and demonstrate
| some GHGs cause warming.
|
| The global climate is much, much more complicated. What
| is the impact of GHG-caused warming on cloud formation?
| What is the impact of same on jetstreams? Chaos Theory
| was started as a result of the complexity of weather
| prediction, which is simply short-term climate
| forecasting. The two variables I mentioned are just two,
| and they are dizzingly complex to model. It is not as
| simple as "GHG++ == HEAT++".
|
| Further, taking a step back: If we could agree on exactly
| how GHGs impact the global climate, then can we get a
| number on how much humans impact the climate at all? The
| way climate change alarmists seem to think, the climate
| would be absolutely static were it not for our industrial
| revolution. So what is it? If humans got GHGs to zero,
| how much less would the climate change? Are we
| responsible for 1% of overall change? 50%? 100%?
|
| Pretending these are simple or obvious questions is
| absurd. I've read hundreds of papers on climate change.
| These topics never seem to come up. Rarely do climate
| scientists mention the sun, which seems to be treated
| like a static heat bulb in the sky that gives off an
| steady, constant flow of energy, which couldn't be
| further from the truth!
|
| Even the name of the topic, Climate Change, describing it
| as some kind of problem in itself--if the climate were
| static it'd be a HUGE alarm! The climate has _always_
| changed.
|
| Then a step back even further: The climate has changed
| throughout civilization and it appears that large-scale
| civilizations grow in population during periods of
| warming, and shrink (sometimes drastically), during
| periods of cooling. So how much warming is acceptable? It
| seems the goal is to get to zero change (lol) or to
| cooling. Why is that the necessarily best way?
|
| The entire field is super-complex, and because of the
| political environment, even asking questions such as the
| above make it impossible to actually do science--only one
| view is acceptable.
| burntsushi wrote:
| > You and GP both have spherical cow ideas about how GHGs
| impact the climate.
|
| I didn't tell you what I believe. I was trying to
| communicate how y'all might be talking past one another.
|
| If anything, teasing apart these positions (and the
| positions inbetween) is exactly the opposite of a
| spherical cow. Which seems to be exactly what you're
| saying. So it seems like you've completely misinterpreted
| my comment.
| eutropia wrote:
| Appealing to complexity doesn't make basics like
| conservation of matter go away.
|
| The Climate is extremely complex, and will not be
| entirely understood in our lifetimes; but I'm not
| interested in litigating my way to a perfect climate
| model. I'll leave that to climatologists or whatever.
|
| I'll state my policy position (the end result of whatever
| one's understanding of the problem is anyway) and leave
| it at that:
|
| My position is that mankind ought to follow what I was
| taught in scouts: "leave no trace".
|
| Return GHGs to preindustrial levels, control all other
| pollutants in a similarly strict sense. Work towards
| solving the problems we have with deforestation and
| destruction of habitats, etc. All while maintaining
| freedom of reproduction for everyone, and continuing to
| improve quality of life for humans everywhere. Not
| exactly an easy feat.
|
| That world (the preindustrial world) changed according to
| its own whims and patterns, but it was beautiful and
| humans thrived in it.
|
| Knowing that a much warmer planet would look different
| and likely be less hospitable makes me want to avoid that
| outcome; however I've made my peace with the high
| likelihood that I wont see "garden earth". We're working
| with a system we don't understand against a timetable we
| can't see while people make money every time they slow us
| down.
| burntsushi wrote:
| > My position is that mankind ought to follow what I was
| taught in scouts: "leave no trace".
|
| This position isn't really coherent on its own, because
| with enough time, it doesn't matter what we do: there
| won't be a trace of us left. So really, you need to say
| what you mean by "trace" and on what time scale. Your
| time scale can't be zero, because then we couldn't build
| anything. But it can't be arbitrarily long either,
| because then it ceases to be any kind of restraint at
| all.
| eutropia wrote:
| I thought I laid out what I meant by that in the
| following paragraphs -- it was intended as a finger
| pointed at the moon, not a prescriptive maxim to be taken
| literally. A goal to work towards instead of "everyone do
| whatever is profitable for them in the near term"...
|
| In the very long term it would be awesome if our
| industrial systems emitted only manageable waste heat and
| the produced good, with all waste streams recycled or
| otherwise kept from contaminating the environment; but
| this is pure sci-fi utopian optimism on my part.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _I 've read hundreds of papers on climate change. These
| topics never seem to come up. Rarely do climate
| scientists mention the sun, which seems to be treated
| like a static heat bulb in the sky that gives off an
| steady, constant flow of energy, which couldn't be
| further from the truth!_"
|
| These statements are contradictory.
|
| "Modelling the impact of solar variability on climate" (h
| ttps://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S136
| 46...)
|
| "Climate change and solar variability: What's new under
| the sun?" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/
| abs/pii/S00128...)
|
| "Significant impact of forcing uncertainty in a large
| ensemble of climate model simulations"
| (https://www.pnas.org/content/118/23/e2016549118.short)
|
| "Has solar variability caused climate change that
| affected human culture?" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/s
| cience/article/abs/pii/S02731...)
|
| "Do Models Underestimate the Solar Contribution to Recent
| Climate Change?" (https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journ
| als/clim/16/24/1520-0...)
|
| Hell, Roy Spencer has made much of his career off blaming
| what climate change he admits exists on solar
| variability.
| generalizations wrote:
| > I searched the internet trying to find a reference to
| the study regarding the glaciers at GNP and found
| exclusively news stories and blogspam repeating the
| "removal of the signs" meme from foxnews, right-wing
| think tanks, fundamentalist christian organizations, and
| oil & gas funded "science" web sites.
|
| Seriously? How hard did you look?
| https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-
| park-202...
|
| Also, if you want a science source, Google scholar is
| your friend. This doesn't look like the original source,
| since it's from 2003, but it makes similar predictions. h
| ttps://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/53/2/131/25497
| 6?...
| verall wrote:
| According to your CNN source, the GP is wrong and the
| glaciers have shrunk.
| generalizations wrote:
| > The signs at Glacier National Park warning that its
| signature glaciers would be gone by 2020 are being
| changed. [CNN link]
|
| > In the 1990s, some climate model predicted the
| eponymous glacier would be gone by 2020. Signs around the
| parks' entrances were erected boldly stating this claim.
| In January of 2020, the signs were removed because the
| glaciers hadn't even shrunk. [GP]
|
| No, the source backed up the GP, because the prediction
| was that the glacier would be gone. Whether or not it
| shrank is secondary.
| mcguire wrote:
| Like Grinnell Glacier
| (https://www.usgs.gov/centers/norock/science/grinnell-
| glacier...)?
|
| " _Between 1966 and 2005, Agassiz Glacier lost a third of
| its surface area. ... Between 1966 and 2005, Ahern Glacier
| lost 13 percent of its surface area._ " (https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/List_of_glaciers_in_Glacier_Na....))
|
| Blackfoot and Jackson Glaciers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wi
| ki/Blackfoot_Glacier#/media/File:...)?
|
| Chaney Glacier
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaney_Glacier)?
|
| Dixon Glacier (45%)? Whitecrow Glacier (47%)?
|
| Anyway, here's the USGS on Glacier National Park: https://w
| eb.archive.org/web/20120511154502/http://www.nrmsc....
|
| You may be interested in knowing that work on climate
| models has progressed significantly since the 1990s. Also
| that Glacier National Park does not have an eponymous
| glacier.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| How do you determine someone is arguing in bad faith? I'm not
| asking how do you determine that a bad faith actor exists
| somewhere but on the individual level, which is where we all
| exist, how do you know? Is everyone who disagrees with your
| individual personal view of science a bad faith skeptic? If
| not, how do you sort them out? Is based on how much effort
| was required to convince you of a particular POV? That should
| be something greater than zero, otherwise you're acting on
| faith not science. Should everyone require the exact same
| amount of evidence? And what about the situations where you
| believed something to be true but later found out you were
| wrong? Were you acting in bad faith all that time or were the
| people who were ultimate correct acting in bad faith until
| you agreed with them, at which point they were arguing in
| good faith?
|
| Bad faith actors exist but the bad faith label appears to be
| an overused and a lazy way of shutting down debate. Not
| everyone who was skeptical about the link between smoking and
| cancer worked for the tobacco companies or were addicted to
| smoking. How often are medicines we're told are safe taken
| off the market because it turns out they're not? Are people
| who were skeptical of that safety bad faith actors until they
| were proven correct?
|
| Why are there "scientific" subjects for which skepticism
| automatically bad faith? What is the criteria for being able
| to question the mainstream dogma and still be considered
| arguing in good faith? The people who proposed the
| possibility of a lab leak were not long ago considered to be
| arguing in bad faith. How did those arguments one day
| suddenly stop being bad faith arguments?
| quotemstr wrote:
| > How do you determine someone is arguing in bad faith?
|
| You can tell when someone is arguing in bad faith by the
| fact that he disagrees with The Science. Duh.
|
| (I'm being sarcastic here, but that's what a frightening
| fraction of the population _actually thinks_.)
| dennis_jeeves wrote:
| The huge fraction is indeed frightening.
| sjwalter wrote:
| > How did those arguments one day suddenly stop being bad
| faith arguments?
|
| I know you're asking this to demonstrate, but I'll answer
| anyways, because it's obvious: The elite who have very
| effectively captured the press, big tech, and the
| scientific institutions used their leverage to ensure that
| all such skepticism was "bad faith", even though it very
| clearly was not.
| verall wrote:
| Skepticism is not automatically bad faith, and I really try
| to make that point clear when I say that most flat earthers
| are not arguing in bad faith, although their worldview
| seems to sustain a massive conflict with reality.
|
| I would even say that the vast majority of people who argue
| that climate change is not real do not argue in bad faith,
| they really believe it. But in both of my examples there
| _are_ bad faith shills, and they poison the discourse.
|
| Bad faith is when your external motives supersede your
| opinion on the topic. Good faith is engaging directly with
| the topic.
|
| Another example:
|
| If someone is arguing that abortion should be illegal
| because it is dangerous for the woman, and they believe
| this because a friend of theirs was injured in an abortion,
| or because they heard it on Fox news, they are making an
| argument in good faith. For whatever reason, they really
| believe in the risk to the health of the woman.
|
| If someone is making the same argument, after understanding
| the statistics on abortion and childbirth, because they
| care about the life of the unborn child, they are making an
| argument in bad faith. Their feelings about the effects of
| abortion are motivating an argument about the safety of
| abortion.
|
| I never said it was easy to distinguish - but clearly bad-
| faith skepticism exists. If you leave it be it will poison
| discourse. Engaging with and understanding the worldviews
| of people you are discussing with is expensive and it is
| painful if the person on the other side has no intention of
| engaging with your or even their own arguments.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| To me, it seems like there's a failure to differentiate bad-
| faith skepticism.
|
| There's malicious "I know what I'm saying is a lie / broken
| argument, but I'm willing to make it because my righteousness
| / beliefs justify winning." (Fixable with... nothing?)
|
| But there's also ignorant "I don't understand the foundations
| of this information, and so arrive at an erroneous
| conclusion." (Fixable with education)
|
| One of the failures of scientific proponents (especially pop
| scientific proponents) has been to treat the second group as
| synonymous with the first.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| This is a great point, and one that I wish was more widely
| understood. In my anecdotal experience at least the latter
| group by far outnumbers the former, and treating the "good
| faith but poorly informed" group as you would the bad faith
| group is nearly always counterproductive.
| brightball wrote:
| This is the best, concise write up I have seen on this topic.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The only time it really stops working is if people start
| treating it as doctrine, and demanding that you accept it on
| faith, and take any questions as evidence that you are an enemy
| of science. If anything destroys science, it is this line of
| reasoning.
|
| There is another point when "skepticism" as a principle fails,
| and that is when it is being _weaponized_ by political and /or
| financial interests. Climate change is the most obvious example
| with oil companies funding all sorts of quackery, derailments
| and misinformation (such as BP did by inventing the "individual
| carbon footprint" in the 70s, see
| https://mashable.com/feature/carbon-footprint-pr-campaign-
| sh...), but also the tobacco and alcohol industry - and in the
| last two years, COVID deniers who branded themselves
| "skepticists" only to renounce the most basic bits of societal
| solidarity such as wearing masks and getting a recommended
| vaccination.
|
| Skepticism should always, _always_ come with at least some
| provable (!) claims - for example, with COVID vaccines, the
| issues regarding AstraZeneca and blood clots. These claims can
| then be investigated and validated or disproven. The problem is
| that modern and /or "alternative" media simply takes skepticist
| claims and reports them as gospel either because they don't
| have journalists with a science background any more or (as is
| the case with OAN/Newsmax/Fox/Murdoch/Axel Springer) they
| follow their own/their owners' agenda.
|
| The root cause at the bottom of weaponized skepticism is the
| truly horrible state of teaching and the attitude towards
| science in schools in most Western countries. "Creationism"
| should not be seen on any curriculum worth its name, the fact
| that students get ruthlessly bullied as nerds/know-it-
| alls/autists/<insert whatever label you were bullied with here>
| without consequences and that such behavior is culturally
| accepted (e.g. in "teenage movies" and sitcoms, where "nerds"
| are routinely portrayed in absurd cliches), the total lack of
| media education (aka what bias is, how it works, and what the
| pitfalls of modern mass media like clickbait, deceptive ads
| masked as journalism etc. are)... our societies are rotten from
| the core.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| It is difficult for most people to defend against weaponized
| anti-science. The reason is that no one can become an expert
| scientist in one day or even one year. First you learn
| elementary-school science, which by necessity involves some
| simplifications, and some things are left unexplained. Then
| you learn high-school science, which explains some of the
| gaps of the previous level, and improves some of its
| simplifications; yet it comes with its own simplifications
| and gaps. Then you learn undergraduate science... and after
| many years you hopefully become capable of understanding and
| evaluating the most complex scientific claims.
|
| Weaponized anti-science attacks people with statements that
| sound credible at their level, and require higher level to
| understand the deception. This does not happen accidentally;
| it is constructed so on purpose. So the person with
| elementary-school knowledge reads the statement that seems to
| make sense from the elementary-school perspective (it does
| not contradict anything taught at elementary school), but a
| high-school students could see why it is completely wrong. So
| the person can only conclude: "as far as I can understand, it
| is correct... and there is this one guy saying that it is
| wrong, but his arguments I can't understand". Similarly, you
| target people with high-school knowledge with statements
| involving undergraduate-level deception, etc.
|
| This is for me the most frustrating part of debating smart
| people who believe pseudoscience -- as far as they know (in
| my bubble that typically means undergraduate level of math,
| plus high-school level of everything else), the science often
| checks out. Someone who graduated in given area will be
| completely frustrated by hearing the "proof", because it
| contradicts many known and well-tested things... but to
| convince the person who is ignorant about it all (but is
| completely willing to trust his own Dunning-Kruger syndrome
| and Nassim Taleb's twitter over thousands of peer-reviewed
| papers), you need to hunt for the subtle error in the
| mathematical proof.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > The reason is that no one can become an expert scientist
| in one day or even one year.
|
| Indeed. However, basic media literacy training could help
| people to differentiate between quacks (Alex Jones, un-
| attributed opinions in social media share pics not grounded
| in any scientific facts), actual experts but not in a
| relevant field to a debate (e.g. a PhD in art history or
| psychology in a debate about the infectiousness of
| coronavirus), and actual experts (e.g. Christian Drosten,
| one of the discoverers of the first SARS Coronavirus).
|
| A bit of common sense in media entities such as newspapers
| in TV stations - such as not giving quacks and non-relevant
| experts airtime and having scientific expertise on-call -
| would do the rest to further civilized debate.
| cogman10 wrote:
| This is all well said, but I'd put a caveat here, science, by
| it's empirical nature, is fuzzy.
|
| What that means is that for nearly any generally accepted
| position, you can find studies that invalidate that position.
|
| This all comes into the need for looking into meta analysis
| over single studies.
|
| The perfect example of this is climate change. There are,
| literally, thousands of studies supporting the notion that
| human made climate change is real. However, there are 100s of
| studies that call it into question.
|
| That is where you can get 2 individuals saying "I'm following
| the science" that talk past each other because each is clinging
| onto the set of studies that confirm their beliefs.
|
| Skepticism is fine, however, if you aren't challenging your own
| position you aren't being a skeptic, you are simply using it as
| a cover for what you want to believe. The example here is flat
| earthers that would all describe themselves as "skeptics".
| ethbr0 wrote:
| > _Science is anti-fragile. The harder you attack it, the
| sturdier it becomes._
|
| This is true for the subset of _" scientific professionals,
| devoting significant amounts of time to their field"_. That's
| not all of the public. That's not even all of most scientific
| disciplines.
|
| The scientific _method_ is perfect.
|
| The scientific method _as practiced by fallible and irrational
| humans_ is subject to starts and stops, groupthink and cargo
| culting, and politics ad nauseam.
|
| The even more common case of _" laypeople, with limited
| technical background knowledge, devoting limited amounts of
| time to understanding issues, who want to appear informed and
| intelligent about issues"_ is significantly more fraught with
| danger. And the source of most ineffective outcomes.
| marivilla wrote:
| >The scientific method is perfect.
|
| >The scientific method as practiced by fallible and
| irrational humans
|
| This is giving me flashbacks to Catholic school :)
|
| 'Christ is perfect, his earthly church is not. Because the
| church consists of fallible human clergy and laity it is
| vulnerable to corruption, ambition, lust, and politics, oh
| the politics'
|
| It's interesting to know that secular students get the same
| arguments just in defense of scientism instead of
| Christianity. All apologists sound alike.
|
| Not a criticism, just interesting
| beebmam wrote:
| Metaphors/analogies aren't an argument, and if you find
| them persuasive that's your problem
| rajin444 wrote:
| This isn't really a metaphor or an analogy. Modern
| scientific leaders and religious leaders both act as
| liaisons between the public and knowledge. Scientists
| tend to produce a lot more useful knowledge, but the
| issues faced by both are the same. It's obvious they both
| end up developing similar patterns for resolving
| communication issues.
|
| The parent noticed this similarity because both are in
| the same business.
| marivilla wrote:
| I said 'Not a criticism, just interesting' in the hopes
| of emphasizing that I was making an observation, not an
| argument.
|
| Sorry I failed to communicate that more clearly!
|
| That said, there is something to be said for
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_analogy
| ohwellhere wrote:
| I view your observation as interesting and worth making,
| and I also believe there's an implicit argument there
| against that line of thinking.
|
| The word "perfect" is problematic to me. It's ascribed to
| God to contrast with man, as most of us would agree that
| nothing we do is perfect. Using it implies the same
| religious status of being above man's foibles.
|
| I like the word "useful" here, or "anti-fragile" in the
| original comment.
|
| Further, I like defining context. Useful in what class of
| problems? For I don't think the scientific method is
| regarded as particularly useful in all domains.
| Consciousness and the subjective are valid realms of
| human experience worth dedicated inquiry, for which the
| scientific method seems woefully lacking.
| gengelbro wrote:
| If you think of them as roughly interchangeable apparatuses
| then it starts to make a whole lot of sense in my opinion.
| goatlover wrote:
| One is empirically based and the other is faith based, so
| no, they aren't he same. The faith is based on beliefs in
| something metaphysical like a supernatural realm, and on
| value judgements (morality).
| arrosenberg wrote:
| The main difference being that scientists (are encouraged
| to) update their model of the world as they gain new
| information.
| RattleyCooper wrote:
| I'm not religious, but isn't that what priests are for?
| Like to update the church's model of what's right/wrong
| based on new information... just from god
| bprieto wrote:
| No, priest are for keeping the doctrine and serving as
| bridges between the faithful and their god(s).
| Theologians are the ones who update (or uphold) the
| church system of belief.
| RattleyCooper wrote:
| Right, I guess the overall point being that religion has
| a mechanism for change as well.
| jhbadger wrote:
| Only in the same sense that clothing has a mechanism for
| change because fashion exists. Theologians have no way of
| contacting their gods(s) or even knowing whether they
| exist. Their opinions are not based on evidence.
| wussboy wrote:
| Sure they are, but in an evolutionary sense not in a
| scientific sense. Countless theologians have said
| countless things and most have gone in to the dustbin of
| history. But the things that resonated or were useful
| have remained.
|
| Religion is the result of evolutionary processes and like
| all evolutionary processes it changes slowly and is not
| perfect. D.S. Wilson's Darwin's Cathedral is the go-to
| book for this argument and contains a beautiful section
| that goes like this:
|
| We look at a bird's wing and marvel that it is so
| wonderfully adapted for flying. But we do not scorn birds
| for not being able to fly faster than the speed of sound.
| Their wings never required that to be successful in their
| evolutionary niches. Why do we look at religion which is
| also a marvel of adaptation for helping humans live
| together and get mad at it that it has not brought about
| world peace? World peace or perfection were never
| required for them to be successful in their evolutionary
| niches.
| Kranar wrote:
| Your use of the word encouraged is doing a lot of heavy
| lifting. In the abstract, sure, scientists are
| "encouraged" by some platonic ideal. In reality,
| scientists are not encouraged by other scientists to
| update their model based on new information and there is
| a great deal of resistance in many scientific fields to
| gain such information or even what constitutes new
| information.
| arrosenberg wrote:
| That's pretty much why I added it! I've known a lot of
| scientists who fall in love with their research a bit too
| much, and some of our most important scientists have been
| pious Christian monks and Muslim scholars.
|
| My point is that the central dogma of science is to be
| skeptical of existing thought and to update the model.
| The central dogma of most religions is to preserve
| tradition and be skeptical of challenges to existing
| thought.
| mcguire wrote:
| One of the most important things Einstein did was to
| _not_ immediately update his model based on the new
| quantum mechanics and to attack it as strongly as he
| could.
|
| An inherent conservatism avoids a lot of weird, faddish
| behavior.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, bewaring human institutions is a universal lesson
| that more institutions should teach. That you got that
| lesson there only means that you got at least one good
| teacher.
|
| That said, religion is based on the idea of worshiping a
| core idea, that shouldn't be contested, while science is
| based on the idea of contesting your core ideas, and never
| accepting pure belief. They are similar on the way that
| opposite things always have some similarity.
|
| (Anyway, "the scientific method is perfect" is a very bad
| misquote of the OP. Believing your method is perfect is
| anti-scientific, you should be always on the hunt for a
| better method.)
| marivilla wrote:
| >"the scientific method is perfect" is a very bad
| misquote of the OP
|
| :o
|
| It's not a misquote, the comment I replied to really said
| that!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's not your misquote.
|
| But the original is "the scientific method is anti-
| fragile, The harder you attack it, the sturdier it
| becomes." The comment you replied to threw a lot of
| nuance away when it was replaced by "perfect", and you
| threw the context that kept it reasonable away when you
| decided to compare with a similar phrase from anpother
| context. So, you both together made a misquote.
| IIAOPSW wrote:
| All organizations are superficially similar in the sense
| that they are all organizations.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Is Christ perfect though? Didn't he fuck up a fig tree just
| for not having figs at that very moment? Mark 11, starting
| at verse 12:
|
| https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2011-12&v
| e...
| undershirt wrote:
| Everything in the Bible points to something else. The fig
| tree mainly points to Revelation, wherein all people not
| bearing "fruit" in the "season" of the apocalypse, when
| He is "hungry" only for the righteous, will be judged to
| "wither away".
|
| We build stuff out of trees, so I think he straight-up
| killed that tree to build a parable out of doing it. It
| was in his sovereignty to uproot what isn't Good. In the
| very next paragraph, he does the same by throwing the
| merchants out of the temple.
|
| His response to his apostles after they mention the dead
| tree is interesting. It seems like he ignores them to
| explain that if they pray about anything, it will happen
| if they believe it. I think this has something to do with
| 1) the role of faith in avoiding the tree's fate so that
| they may be bear the fruit no matter how impossible it
| seems since it was "not the season for bearing fruit", or
| 2) a picture of the reality of the Kingdom after the
| harvest, where the Good will have reign to move
| mountains.
|
| Proofs blossom like trees from epistemic axioms. It's
| confounding to believe "Christ is perfect", but it does
| bear fruit, however confounding it is. Theology isn't
| popularly known, but it's there if you're curious.
| [deleted]
| rytcio wrote:
| Generally the fig tree in the Bible represents Israel.
| Jesus cursing the fig tree falls in line with Israel's
| long history of apostasy.
|
| What it probably was is a representation of one of Jesus'
| goals for his time here. The Israelites were being their
| usual disobedient selves as they always have been.
| Instead, the job of spreading the gospel has been
| relegated to the gentiles, since the Israelites were not
| producing fruit...ie spreading the gospel, following the
| law, etc.
|
| At the present time, AD, we are in the age of the
| church...where the gentiles are the ones working. Israel
| won't be back to being the focus until sometime in the
| future. Thus that situation could be an allegory for what
| was going to happen.
| goatlover wrote:
| That would be the Christian interpretation. I'm guessing
| the Jewish one is a little different. What Jesus actually
| believed on the matter (or whether it was relevant to
| him) is unknown. Paul thought this way. Whether Peter and
| James thought the same way back in Jerusalem is also
| unknown. It is known that the second century Jewish
| Christians called the Ebionities did not view Paul
| favorably. But the proto-orthodox believed Paul was
| legitimate, and they won out, in part because converting
| gentiles meant a lot more followers.
| rytcio wrote:
| Right. Paul was the one who wrote about how gentiles were
| grafted into the family with the Jews. The Jews don't
| believe that Jesus is the messiah, and I don't even think
| they consider Him a prophet either. So they probably
| don't have an opinion on it, not to mention they don't
| follow the New Testament
| marivilla wrote:
| I'm not Catholic, but I think a better question to get
| from that analogy would be
|
| >Is the scientific method perfect though? Isn't it the
| result of the _same_ fallible human minds that make it 's
| implementation inherently flawed as well?
|
| Maybe the scientific method is not perfect, but itself is
| still open to improvement in fundamental ways. This is
| more interesting to me than debates about ancient Judaean
| fig tree parables.
|
| But in case you're curious!
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursing_the_fig_tree
| antognini wrote:
| I remember going to a talk once by the Bishop of Columbus
| about the Gospels. Someone asked him what he thought the
| hardest passage of the Bible to interpret was and he
| responded with this one.
| spoonjim wrote:
| No surprise... I can't think of a more profoundly un-
| chill reaction to a fig tree not being in season. Wonder
| why anyone trying to make Jesus look good would even
| write it down.
| antognini wrote:
| This is related to the "Principle of Embarrassment" in
| hermeneutics. The idea is that "embarrassing" or
| inconvenient stories are more likely to have been true
| because there is no reason for someone to have made them
| up since they seem to conflict with the broader
| narrative, or at least complicate it.
|
| Another example is the discovery of the empty tomb by
| Mary Magdalene and possibly some other women. At the time
| women were considered to be more untrustworthy, so the
| argument was that if the story was fabricated, surely the
| author would have decided to make the empty tomb
| discovered by a group of men since it would have been
| viewed by contemporary readers that this (already
| implausible) story was coming from a more trustworthy
| source.
|
| Of course, the most prominent example is the crucifixion
| itself, since crucifixion was reserved for traitors and
| the lowest criminals. If you're trying to argue that this
| man was the Son of God, why write a story in which at the
| climax he is executed as a despised criminal?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criterion_of_embarrassment
| salemh wrote:
| Commentary by the church - the Eastern Orthodox Church,
| which canonized the bible - is the only coherent ideology
| which hasn't innovated in dogmas and reconciles all the
| 'hard' scriptures Old and New.
|
| Individual interpretations outside of a conciliar
| approach to Christianity (which started in the Book of
| Acts with the Counsel of Jerusalem, and continued into
| the Ecumenical Councils) has never resulted in anything
| but sectarianism and confusion.
|
| At least from a perspective of consistency, readers may
| be interested in the perspective of conciliar, dogmatic
| foundations which cannot be changed in the Eastern
| Orthodox Church.
|
| As regards for Mark 11: https://catenabible.com/mk/11
| This website provides a range of commentaries which one
| can choose the earliest Church Fathers. However, blessed
| Theophylact is the most accessible commentary, largely
| based on St John Chrysostom, which is a harder read due
| to depth and language.
|
| Cyril of Jerusalem AD 386 Remember at the time of the sin
| of Adam and Eve they clothed themselves--with what? Fig
| leaves. That was their first act after the fall. So now
| Jesus is making the same figure of the fig tree the very
| last of his wondrous signs. Just as he was headed toward
| the cross, he cursed the fig tree--not every fig tree,
| but that one alone for its symbolic significance--saying:
| "May no one ever eat fruit of you again." In this way the
| curse laid upon Adam and Eve was being reversed. For they
| had clothed themselves with fig leaves.
|
| St John Chrysostom:
| https://catenabible.com/com/5735de63ec4bd7c9723b9c17
|
| Eastern Orthodox history of the canonization of
| scripture:
| http://orthodoxinfo.com/inquirers/ntcanon_emergence.aspx
| drbojingle wrote:
| If the scientific method is so perfect why does it fail when
| used by imperfect operators
| thephyber wrote:
| Does it? You are making an assertion without any facts.
|
| The method itself is simple. It is agnostic to bad faith
| implementations, to bad measurements, to completely
| fallacious conclusions, etc. It is intended to be
| iterative; individual errors wash out in time with enough
| new experiments.
|
| What non-scientists learn from secondary or tertiary
| sources is irrelevant -- those misunderstandings do not
| mean the Method "failed".
| cogman10 wrote:
| Meh, the scientific method is akin to "agile" in software
| development.
|
| It's good principles but really is less a method and more
| guiding principles.
|
| That is the good and the bad of the scientific method.
| Implementing any one of the steps poorly and you've got
| crap studies which technically followed the scientific
| method but are ultimately "unscientific".
|
| You get into the same sorts of arguments as a result.
| "Agile is pefect, but scrum sucks" "The scientific method
| is perfect, but nutrition survey studies suck".
|
| The part that the scientific method lacks is determining
| what a good implementation looks like.
| thephyber wrote:
| > The part that the scientific method lacks is
| determining what a good implementation looks like.
|
| That seems like a feature, not a bug, to me. Descriptions
| of good implementations are likely subjective and vary
| based on what is being tested. It may even change over
| time as human knowledge improves.
| q-big wrote:
| > If the scientific method is so perfect why does it fail
| when used by imperfect operators
|
| The scientific method is not perfect, but the best method
| that we currently have.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| The scientific method cannot be separated from the humans
| that practice it. It doesn't have some separate existence as
| a platonic ideal.
|
| Ideas like these must be judged based on their actual real
| world performance, and not on the lofty promises of the
| ideologues that promote the ideas.
|
| Luckily science doesn't require perfectly rational
| practitioners. It still works even if practiced human beings.
| devilduck wrote:
| Calling it perfect is absurd and makes me skeptical of your
| understanding :)
| LocalH wrote:
| >The scientific method is perfect.
|
| Nonsense. _Nothing_ is perfect, especially nothing ever
| created by a human. The scientific method is the best we have
| developed, in my opinion, but it 's not perfect. The
| scientific method itself was developed by "fallible and
| irrational humans". Even with the best of intentions and the
| utmost in effort, all humans are susceptible to fallibility
| and irrationality. You are, I am, _everyone_ is.
| rcoveson wrote:
| The word/concept "perfect" was "developed" by "fallible and
| irrational humans" as well, so we do have the authority to
| apply it.
|
| The 3/4/5 right triangle is perfect. The perfect fifth in
| music is (tautologically) perfect. "p or not p" is perfect.
| Perhaps none of these things can be reproduced in the
| physical world in a perfect manner, but the concepts really
| are perfect. Anything in idea-space can in fact be perfect,
| and the scientific method lives in idea-space.
|
| In the realm of perfection, there isn't really any
| difference between "developing" something and "discovering"
| it. Did we "develop" the scientific method or "discover"
| it? I think that's a meaningless distinction. It's the loop
| that describes how inductive reasoning is applied by
| limited observers to a structured universe. People were
| doing it before it was "developed".
| angelzen wrote:
| This is confusing models with reality. It is the
| application of any specific model to reality that is not
| perfect.
| rcoveson wrote:
| Yes, one might say:
|
| > Perhaps none of these things can be reproduced in the
| physical world in a perfect manner, but the concepts
| really are perfect.
| notahacker wrote:
| Yep, and you can add in a worse case still which is "people
| with enough background knowledge to _sound_ like they know
| something, who have a particular motivation for wanting a
| particular scientific theory to be incorrect, who will never,
| ever admit to error " taking up the mantle of scepticism
| about current scientific theory.
|
| In the "marketplace of ideas" practising the scientific
| method isn't antifragile in the face of such reckless
| certainty, it's downright fragile, because it's requires
| being the only side of the argument which will admit that its
| hypotheses aren't proven and some of its previous theories
| were wrong. Worse still, when the motivated sceptic has their
| "stopped clock" moment, practising the scientific method
| requires conceding they are right. The more science you
| practice, the more the opponent gets to point to the stuff
| you've conceded wasn't quite as expected.
|
| Science might become sturdier in terms of _better theory_ in
| response to attacks (where said attacks are accompanied by
| experimentation) but it 's more vulnerable to losing trust
| iammisc wrote:
| The scientific method is a human invention. It is not
| 'perfect'. This is ridiculous religious dogmatism.
| Aperocky wrote:
| > If anything destroys science
|
| Nothing destroy science, people can always opt to not believing
| in science, sometimes to their own peril.
|
| > accept it on faith
|
| I accept GNU/Linux on faith, having not analyzed its (public)
| code or build, because I trust that other people have done
| their best. And science is honestly an even easier decision.
| angelzen wrote:
| https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a
|
| > More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to
| reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half
| have failed to reproduce their own experiments. Those are
| some of the telling figures that emerged from Nature's survey
| of 1,576 researchers who took a brief online questionnaire on
| reproducibility in research.
|
| If 70% the GNU/Linux installations failed to boot, are you
| sure you'd take it on faith?
| mcguire wrote:
| " _"It 's healthy that people are aware of the issues and
| open to a range of straightforward ways to improve them,"
| says Munafo. And given that these ideas are being widely
| discussed, even in mainstream media, tackling the
| initiative now may be crucial. "If we don't act on this,
| then the moment will pass, and people will get tired of
| being told that they need to do something."_"
| Aperocky wrote:
| If you installed ALL packages from npm, yum or pip, I
| wouldn't be surprised if 70% contains significant bugs or
| won't even start. Afterall, I published like 5 of them out
| of about 2 weeks worth of work and never looked at them
| again.
|
| But it's not that 70% that matters, it's the stable branch
| OS that you're running. It's the science that has been
| there for decades, that is the backbone of that faith.
| simorley wrote:
| > The only time it really stops working is if people start
| treating it as doctrine, and demanding that you accept it on
| faith, and take any questions as evidence that you are an enemy
| of science. If anything destroys science, it is this line of
| reasoning.
|
| Agreed with everything you wrote. We should be especially
| vigilant when politics/media gets involved in science. Science
| is just as corruptable, especially in the short term, as any
| other field.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man
|
| The more obvious example being the purging of "jewish science"
| from germany during ww2.
| loudmax wrote:
| Skepticism is indeed healthy, but beware of selective
| skepticism. Humans have a tendency trust people that they like
| or who make them feel good about themselves, and distrust
| people they don't like or who challenge assumptions they'd
| rather hold onto. So yes you should be skeptical, but you do
| need to keep yourself grounded.
|
| How are you to convince a flat-Earther that the world is round?
| You can show photos of Earth taken from the moon, but clearly
| you have to trust NASA. You can show global flight traffic
| patterns that only make sense if the Earth is a sphere, but
| then you have to trust the FAA or wherever you're getting the
| airline data. You can dig up whatever evidence you want but at
| some point you'll need them to relinquish their skepticism and
| accept that these institutions are not part of a vast
| conspiracy to hide the shape of the Earth. Now apply that to
| vaccines, climate change, election results, economic theory and
| everything else that matters.
|
| Institutions are imperfect. They have their own agendas and
| sometimes they happen to be wrong, and sometimes they flat out
| lie. If you only trust people that you like, you're liable to
| fall prey to charismatic charlatans. If you demand absolute
| certainty, you'll never get past a bedrock reality of cogito
| ergo sum. You have to make some sort of reasonable balance
| between trust and skepticism and accept that sometimes you'll
| be wrong.
| [deleted]
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| You're correct that institutions are imperfect, just like
| individuals...
|
| But there is another factor here: trustworthiness or
| credibility.
|
| If an institution or an individual is caught more than once
| being dishonest, putting their agenda above the truth, etc.,
| should they be trusted again, or should anything they say or
| do be treated as a curiosity and thought experiment at best,
| until it is agreed with by someone credible and trustworthy?
| duxup wrote:
| Skepticism requires discipline to actually look at the outcomes
| of exploring that skepticism and reevaluating.
|
| Sadly I see a lot of skepticism expressed that I think is just
| driving to a result people already believe.
| iechoz6H wrote:
| As Wittgenstein notes in On Certainty 'A doubt without an end
| is not even a doubt.' Bad faith scepticism is of this order, no
| amount of evidence will convince such sceptics. Science doesn't
| become 'harder' in the face of the this kind of scepticism, it
| becomes irrelevant.
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Why must skeptics be convinced? It is perfectly okay to live
| in doubt, ask Pyrrho.
| Viliam1234 wrote:
| Problem is that science is sometimes expensive. Math usually is
| not, but physics sometimes requires building huge machines, and
| psychology requires giving questionnaires to thousands of
| people. You can check the logic of the study, but unless you
| have lots of money, you need to trust the data.
|
| If we no longer can trust the data, and don't have money to
| gather our own data... well, yes, then the only option is to
| admit that we don't know.
| sjwalter wrote:
| One thing Heather Heying talks about with some frequency is
| the bias in science towards "Big Science", that is, expensive
| science with complicated studies and huge funding
| requirements and expensive machinery. These are the things
| our scientific institutions prioritize and highlight.
|
| Science can be much cheaper, but nobody's interested in cheap
| science if it doesn't advance their careers.
|
| It's similar to how NASA was obsessed with putting people
| into space for a long time. That's basically adding a
| gigantic expense to the exploration of space. When they
| decided to stop all that shit and use robots and probes and
| leave the human out of it, the science of exploring space
| became much cheaper (relatively) and we got far more out of
| it.
| [deleted]
| brandonmenc wrote:
| Science can't answer questions like:
|
| "Is it OK to curb freedoms and force medical procedures in order
| to save a million people?"
|
| "Trust the science" people either think we all agree on those
| questions or they believe that their positions are the correct
| ones.
|
| Also, "trust the science" used to mean things like "electroshock
| your abnormally behaving child." It's hard to fault people for a
| lack of trust.
| hnaccount141 wrote:
| This is critical. Public policy cannot and should not be based
| purely on science. Science can give us hints as to how me might
| be able to optimize for certain things, but it can't tell us
| what things to optimize for. That's a question of values.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| Unfortunately, the enforced values are being dictated by
| technocrats who subscribe to scientism and utilitarianism and
| value "safety" above everything else.
| helen___keller wrote:
| From a meta point of view, it's a bit wild to be living in a
| point of history where people actively debate where our trusted
| source of truth should exist.
|
| For most of human history you didn't get many options. Before the
| printing press, King and God were the roots of trust and truth,
| because churches and states were the only ones with the power to
| disseminate information reliably on a regional, national, or
| global scale.
|
| The printing press added newspapers as potential roots of trust.
| Then radio stations. Then TV stations. Still, with limited papers
| and channels, and large barriers to entry, institutions arose and
| the status quo was not too much changed.
|
| Now we have an eruption of information as anybody can create a
| massive following for any idea with sufficient effort. The
| implications of this have yet to be realized.
|
| One thing is for sure: You can't really trust the science.
| Definitely not the media. And certainly not whoever you follow on
| Youtube, the links you see on HN/Reddit, or the posts shared on
| Facebook. It's hard to say you can know anything for sure these
| days.
| cde-v wrote:
| Because simple supply and demand rules apply. If there is a
| demand for corrupted scientific studies there will be a supply.
| sega_sai wrote:
| I am a scientist myself (obviously in one narrow field) and my
| approach to trusting the science is that unless I can myself
| evaluate the evidence, data, analyses, I'll trust the scientific
| consensus. I will not necessarily trust single papers, as people
| may make mistakes, be dishonest etc. Obviously the scientific
| consensus may also turn out to be wrong (it happened before), but
| realistically it's unlikely that I'll have unique knowledge to
| find this out myself not being expert, so 'trusting' the
| consensus is my approach.
|
| Also in rare cases where I can actually read and understand the
| paper outside of my field that may or may not increase or
| decrease the belief in its correctness. Realistically outside my
| field of expertise I'll be only able to see things like dodgy
| statistical methods, small number statistics, crappy plots which
| are clues of untrustworthy results, but not proofs.
| bwanab wrote:
| I wish I could upvote this enough times to get it to the top.
| This is the rational approach to any system of belief in which
| you yourself can't reliably confirm or disprove the
| conclusions.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Step 1: Be a scientist.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Any health related science is fraught because it is usually
| unethical to run the actual causal experiments. E.g. put people
| in closed rooms with various types of masks, release covid virus
| in the air, measure death rate, etc.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| "Trust the Science" is pretty much just a dog whistle to call for
| censorship through "fact checkers", which deliver checked facts
| such as "Covid-19 did not leak from a laboratory" in early 2020.
|
| That even people with Ph.D.s fall for this just shows that we, as
| humans, really like a simpler world, a world with known facts and
| truths, where you don't have to check things because someone else
| already did it for you. However, this is not the world we live
| in. The world we live in is complex, messy, almost entirely made
| out of shades and very little black and white. Most things are
| not known and won't be known. People telling and selling you
| things as fact are invariably acting on agendas. Scientific
| consensus is not a fixed thing, and concerning many questions it
| is not a thing at all. The closest thing you can do is "trusting
| the scientific method", but that is very, very different from
| what "Trust the Science" means.
| depaya wrote:
| A credible fact check would not state "Covid-19 did not leak
| from a laboratory" - it would state "There is no evidence that
| shows Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory." Back in early 2020
| the "evidence" to which people were pointing was the fact that
| there was a lab researching coronavirus in Wuhan, and...
| general conspiracy nonsense.
|
| If over time actual evidence emerges that there was a potential
| lab leak, that doesn't in any way vindicate people making
| baseless claims early in the pandemic.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| There are several issues with this argument. It's making a
| statement about hypothetical Credible Fact Checks instead of
| the fact checks that actually exists or that _can_ exist (the
| "no true scotsman" fallacy). As far as contents go, in early
| 2020 the Fact Checked story was that there's a wetmarket
| selling bats and pangolins, which the Chinese eat, which is
| where it came from. Similarly, the evidence for a lab leak
| was that the ground zero is close to the lab, the lab handles
| SARS coronaviruses and it performs GoF research on them in a
| facility with a Bio-Safety Level (BSL) that's not quite right
| for that work. This theory was generally conflated with the
| "the virus was engineered at a secret Chinese bioweapons lab"
| theory. Fact Checks asserted this was false and people
| talking about it got banned. Later it became clear that the
| wetmarket didn't handle either bats not pangolins and The
| Chinese don't usually eat bats around there.
| dionidium wrote:
| > _" There is no evidence that shows Covid-19 leaked from a
| laboratory."_
|
| But this, too, is complicated, because despite what people
| say on Twitter, as humans we actually can reason from first
| principles, assign probabilities, and discount or promote
| less or more likely explanations -- especially when hard
| evidence isn't forthcoming.
|
| When there's "no evidence" for something, that doesn't mean
| all explanations are equally likely.
| rob_c wrote:
| Again the problem was the convolution of "lab leak"
| incorrectly meaning "lab made and leaked" exclusively which
| is different to poor quality control of wild specimens held
| on site...
| MichaelDickens wrote:
| > Back in early 2020 the "evidence" to which people were
| pointing was the fact that there was a lab researching
| coronavirus in Wuhan
|
| This absolutely qualifies as evidence. If there were no such
| lab, that would pretty much conclusively rule out the lab
| leak hypothesis, right? If observation X is evidence against
| a hypothesis, then observation not-X must be evidence in
| favor. We could debate about how _strong_ this evidence is,
| but it 's definitely evidence.
| hairofadog wrote:
| With respect, I don't think that's true. Consider:
|
| If MichaelDickens did not exist, it would rule out his
| having robbed the bank. However, MichaelDickens exists, and
| therefore it is evidence, however weak, that he robbed the
| bank.
| pessimizer wrote:
| If MichaelDickens, the bank robber, were as rare and as
| close to the bank robbery as the a lab researching
| coronavirus in Wuhan was to the earliest part of the
| outbreak, you'd be goofy if you didn't talk to him first.
| drdeadringer wrote:
| What science should we not be trusting?
|
| All of it? Some things and not others? Which things? Which
| others? Do I take your word for it? Do I not take your word for
| it? Do you see how I've watched 'Reading Rainbow' in
| questioning you like this?
| [deleted]
| pessimizer wrote:
| > we, as humans, really like a simpler world
|
| It isn't that we "like" a simpler world, it's that we _need_ a
| simpler world. We have to feed ourselves and keep a roof over
| our heads, therefore we don 't have time to become independent
| experts on every subject. Even worse, because of Dunning-
| Kreuger, we often find ourselves with the strongest opinions on
| the things we don't realize we understand the least about.
|
| And because of the particular set of values we've decided to
| define as the core of our society and as the motivators of all
| useful progress, we demand that everyone become a predator.
| Every source of information is actively trying to deceive you
| in order to make more money. This is what we can't survive. We
| did not evolve to constantly deal within an environment filled
| with trickery, with people engineering their communications
| with you to exploit your ignorance and desire to trust.
|
| "Trust the Science" is just another way to say "trust us."
| "Trust us" worked (at least in the US) on white guys, if not
| anyone else (and it didn't matter whether anyone else bought
| into it.) It's not working on them any more, because white guys
| have gradually lost position while going in and out of cycles
| of trust in authority. And because the institutions are filled
| with predators working purely looking out for themselves, with
| no overarching ideals. At least the protection of white men (or
| judeo-christian western states' rights civilization, or
| whatever euphemism is current) is a value, and offers stability
| compared to the solipsistic _nothing_ offered by pure
| liberalism.
|
| White guys have come to the conclusion that institutions aren't
| working for them anymore, even though it's really only their
| working class that has lost material ground; their managers and
| and millionaire gentry are upset because they've lost the
| _respect_ they were used to. This is where everyone else
| already was - others never believed that institutions were
| working for them.
|
| The only people left to "trust the science" are the
| professionals who create it, and who have mates, children and
| parents who create it. "Trusting the science" is the best
| indicator that you're upper-middle class that there is. It's
| the conservative position of comfortable people who only trust
| institutions because they populate them. Either 1) their trust
| lives in a strange Gell-Mann amnesia bubble where they know
| that their own workplaces are corrupt, and they know their own
| employment is to come up with and execute strategies to deceive
| people, but somehow think that other institutions are
| different, or 2) they've decided that since they're good
| people, the things that they are doing must be good.
|
| They keep airing a particular commercial about covid
| vaccination where they keep cutting between random doctors who
| repeat "trust us" over and over again like a hypnotic mantra. I
| don't know anyone who trusts doctors. Right now, the people in
| charge are the people who do; they trust doctors like white
| townies from sundown towns and segregated cities love cops.
| They identify with them. They don't trust because of their
| independent research into the validity of the scientific
| consensus, they trust because of their cultural and class
| affinity. They trust because they want to be doctors, or marry
| doctors, or could imagine their kids growing up to be doctors.
|
| People who see that as out of reach, don't.
|
| Sorry for rambling on. It's just that the alternative to
| "trusting the science" is no good either. It's tribalism all
| the way down, and for you too, because you're eventually going
| to have to trust someone.
| mcguire wrote:
| " _It is not quite sufficient, in answering this question, to
| point to a near-consensus on the part of the scientific
| community, thus in effect arguing that science is what the vast
| majority of scientists say it is. If this is largely how the
| argument does indeed function in the cases of debates about the
| safety of vaccines or the causes of global warming, we should
| nonetheless be aware of its flaws._ "
|
| "If an elderly, respected scientist tells you something is
| possible, he is very likely right. If he tells you something is
| impossible, he is likely wrong." --- An old SF fandom saying.
|
| If a ginormous herd of scientists tell you something, possible or
| impossible, they may not be right but that is the way you want to
| place your bets.
|
| [Edit]
|
| " _But there are broad guidelines that could help. We might
| insist, for example, that those wishing to challenge the
| scientific consensus do their homework, demonstrating a competent
| (but not necessarily expert) understanding of the theories and
| empirical data they wish to displace. We might require that they
| have reasonable arguments concerning the theory or data's flaws
| that do not presuppose, as some anti-vaccine arguments do, the
| existence of a large-scale conspiracy to distort the truth. And
| we would be well within our rights to demand that they argue in
| good faith and not -- as historians of science Naomi Oreskes and
| Erik Conway have shown for many climate change denialists -- as
| professional water-muddiers, following a playbook first written
| by cigarette companies attempting to obfuscate a known connection
| between smoking and cancer._ "
|
| Ooh, I like that.
| amelius wrote:
| Half of nutrition science is completely bogus. Just look at
| what's in the supermarkets today.
|
| From there, it's difficult to have any trust in science at all. I
| can't blame people.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I don't trust science, I trust facts, testing, measurements and
| data which is what the scientific methods relies on to make
| assertions.
| cute_boi wrote:
| sadly its not easy to digest every fact, testings, measurements
| and data. And many experiments takes either too much time,
| money or resource and at the end it might just be easy to
| accept other theories?
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| You don't need to dig into philosophy and start talking about
| Karl Popper in order to explain the problem with "trusting the
| science".
|
| Science is and will always be our best shot at being correct
| about the universe, but it's performed by imperfect humans.
| There's very little we can know for certain, so we have to pick
| our poison - either trust strangers who claim to have done their
| research, or trust our own fallible instincts.
|
| I don't think there's a single correct answer to that question,
| but don't pretend like you're not choosing a poison. These "I
| believe in science" mantras are no more scientific than any other
| attitude.
| Retric wrote:
| I don't understand why you think your instincts would be just
| as valid an option? I mean if you're accepting people can be
| wrong then assuming you're more correct than large numbers of
| other people trying to find the truth seems obviously flawed.
|
| Sure science is flawed, but we don't have a better option to
| fall back to. Consider people strongly objected to seatbelts
| and we still need to promote their use. Trusting your instincts
| means wallowing in exactly that kind of ignorance.
|
| Edited: before comments.
| hammock wrote:
| It's an interesting question. If those "large numbers of
| other people" were also following their own intuitions, you
| would have a strong point. However, if that large number of
| others was simply exhibiting groupthink, it significantly
| weakens your counterargument.
| Jensson wrote:
| We need both people who trust experts above their instincts
| and instincts above the experts. And since we need both you
| need to consider both behaviours just as valid.
|
| The problem with experts is that often they became experts by
| just trusting other experts, and going back the chain a bit
| all of that was just based on a single persons opinion a
| century ago.
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| I don't think your comment addresses what I actually said. I
| wrote that I don't think there's a single correct answer to
| the question of "trust the experts or my own instinct" that
| applies to all situations. Your example about seatbelts is
| simply an example of a scenario in which you would likely
| want to defer to expert opinion.
|
| edit: Also, the case of seatbelts vs no-seatbelts is a fairly
| easy example, because the evidence is readily available
| through life experience. I think most people know someone who
| was injured or killed by not wearing one (I knew a few). So
| you don't even _need_ to refer to an expert opinion to make
| that call.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I can't help but think the myopic way of arguing a position based
| on lobbing citations at each-other has contributed to this.
| _Just_ because a study supports your position does not mean "The
| Science" is on your side, it literally just means a study was
| performed that reached the conclusion(s) you already wanted to
| support. The citation is trotted out without any of the meta that
| goes into actually analyzing the validity and significance of the
| studies themselves.
| testfoobar wrote:
| In general to the lay person "Trust The Science" translates into
| trust the experts and authorities. Authorities do not always have
| your best interest at heart.
|
| "Trust the Science" coming out of the mouths of politicians is
| especially questionable. Politicians are not known to make
| scientifically sound decisions.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| > However, as Michael Gordin, professor of the history of science
| at Princeton University, notes early on in his lively and
| thought-provoking survey of multiple dodgy and perhaps-not-as-
| dodgy-as-you-thought scientific areas, falsification invariably
| fails almost before it starts. How do you know that you've
| actually falsified a theory? Is getting a weird, unexpected
| result enough?
|
| I blogged about this thing a few months ago. We misunderstand
| Popper. Hell, Popper probably misunderstood his own ideas.
| Falsifiability works precisely _because_ it 's imprecise. It's
| not a bug, it's a feature.
|
| For more depth, obligatory link:
| https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-...
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-13 23:02 UTC)