4 ms·

The cult of science

39 points by jxub 8y ago

mr_toad 8y ago
This whole debate (and the TV shows) seem peculiarly American. > Yes, the conflation between atheism and science is very frustrating, and harmful to science's image. In particular, this attitude seems to be prevalantly American. Being an atheist carries less of a stigma outside the US, and the correlation between scientific understanding and a tendency to irreligious beliefs is taken for granted.
steve_madere 8y ago
I suspect this whole thread is made up by some Russian propaganda campaign. The positions in it are really quite ridiculous. It's just people trying to create a wedge between rational thinking and the American public. Admittedly there's already a huge gap there so the wedge doesn't have to be very sharp.
- joenot443 8y ago
  Just because people disagree with you doesn't make them Russian propaganda. I'd love to hear what specifically makes you think /u/M0dusPwnens, a redditor of 6 years with thousands of largely non-political comments, is part of a propaganda campaign. Spreading false accusations like that just undermines the validity of the very real issue of astroturfing and propaganda on sites like reddit.
  - lifeformed 8y ago
    If there actually was a propagandist in any of this, it would be steve_madere.
  - steve_madere 8y ago
    I was talking about the Reddit thread.
- dang 8y ago
  > I suspect this whole thread is made up by some Russian propaganda campaign. This breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing without evidence. That's one of the internet poisons we're trying to do without here. If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.
Cogito 8y ago
It seems like so much of these discussions come from attempts to position 'belief in science' as faith exercise. These attempts appear to be taught in various communities as defence against the rational, and as a tool when evangelising. If someone questions your beliefs, saying you have no reason to believe them, a common thing to fall back to is that you believe them on faith. There are lots of ways to argue against that from a rational point of view, such as by showing they could just as easily believe on faith an opposing view, but the believer doesn't even need to entertain those arguments if they simply say 'but your beliefs are based on faith as well'. Similarly, if you can convince someone that they believe 'science' on faith, it becomes easier to stretch that to have them believe other things on faith. It's not always obvious when someone is believing some thing about the world, claiming they believe it because 'science', if they believe it on faith or not. This is why I think the 'faith based science' arguments have been so successful. For me the counterargument to 'belief in science is on faith, too' is fairly simple, and comes in two parts. - No idea of 'science' is held sacred, and will be replaced as soon as we have reason to replace it. Science changes its ideas to fit the world. Faith ignores the world when those ideas are contradicted. - No authority of 'science' is held sacred, assumed to be infallible or incomprehensible. Whenever science makes a claim it is possible to verify that claim and the assumptions the claim builds upon. Any faith based claim eventually reduces to 'because this thing/person claimed it' - often a specific person or book.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  I think the "cult of science" argument still holds up even if you take it out of the context of someone countering in a faith-related argument. I've seen plenty of the rituals and iconography mentioned in the article play out in pop culture ( with reddit being especially bad for "fuck yeah science" type nonsense). Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson being the atheist televangelists strikes a chord. It's not that faith in science is wrong (it's the best tool we have available right now), but that the way many people treat science is exactly the same way they would have treated religion if they were fervently religious. They didn't pick up the skepticism and rationalism that's meant to come with a scientific mindset, it's just "science TV man says X so X is true". We even get cargo cult science on HN (not a big surprise given this place is just a more formal reddit) where people demand a citation to a journal to back up arguments, but if one is provided the argument is dead in the water because the requester has no idea how to read the jargon of the field 9/10 times.

39 points by jxub 8y ago

This whole debate (and the TV shows) seem peculiarly American. > Yes, the conflation between atheism and science is very frustrating, and harmful to science's image. In particular, this attitude seems to be prevalantly American. Being an atheist carries less of a stigma outside the US, and the correlation between scientific understanding and a tendency to irreligious beliefs is taken for granted.

steve_madere 8y ago

I suspect this whole thread is made up by some Russian propaganda campaign. The positions in it are really quite ridiculous. It's just people trying to create a wedge between rational thinking and the American public. Admittedly there's already a huge gap there so the wedge doesn't have to be very sharp.

joenot443 8y ago
Just because people disagree with you doesn't make them Russian propaganda. I'd love to hear what specifically makes you think /u/M0dusPwnens, a redditor of 6 years with thousands of largely non-political comments, is part of a propaganda campaign. Spreading false accusations like that just undermines the validity of the very real issue of astroturfing and propaganda on sites like reddit.
- lifeformed 8y ago
  If there actually was a propagandist in any of this, it would be steve_madere.
- steve_madere 8y ago
  I was talking about the Reddit thread.
dang 8y ago
> I suspect this whole thread is made up by some Russian propaganda campaign. This breaks the site guidelines, which ask you not to insinuate astroturfing without evidence. That's one of the internet poisons we're trying to do without here. If you'd read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules when posting to HN, we'd appreciate it.

Cogito 8y ago

It seems like so much of these discussions come from attempts to position 'belief in science' as faith exercise. These attempts appear to be taught in various communities as defence against the rational, and as a tool when evangelising. If someone questions your beliefs, saying you have no reason to believe them, a common thing to fall back to is that you believe them on faith. There are lots of ways to argue against that from a rational point of view, such as by showing they could just as easily believe on faith an opposing view, but the believer doesn't even need to entertain those arguments if they simply say 'but your beliefs are based on faith as well'. Similarly, if you can convince someone that they believe 'science' on faith, it becomes easier to stretch that to have them believe other things on faith. It's not always obvious when someone is believing some thing about the world, claiming they believe it because 'science', if they believe it on faith or not. This is why I think the 'faith based science' arguments have been so successful. For me the counterargument to 'belief in science is on faith, too' is fairly simple, and comes in two parts. - No idea of 'science' is held sacred, and will be replaced as soon as we have reason to replace it. Science changes its ideas to fit the world. Faith ignores the world when those ideas are contradicted. - No authority of 'science' is held sacred, assumed to be infallible or incomprehensible. Whenever science makes a claim it is possible to verify that claim and the assumptions the claim builds upon. Any faith based claim eventually reduces to 'because this thing/person claimed it' - often a specific person or book.

beaconstudios 8y ago
I think the "cult of science" argument still holds up even if you take it out of the context of someone countering in a faith-related argument. I've seen plenty of the rituals and iconography mentioned in the article play out in pop culture ( with reddit being especially bad for "fuck yeah science" type nonsense). Bill Nye and Neil DeGrasse Tyson being the atheist televangelists strikes a chord. It's not that faith in science is wrong (it's the best tool we have available right now), but that the way many people treat science is exactly the same way they would have treated religion if they were fervently religious. They didn't pick up the skepticism and rationalism that's meant to come with a scientific mindset, it's just "science TV man says X so X is true". We even get cargo cult science on HN (not a big surprise given this place is just a more formal reddit) where people demand a citation to a journal to back up arguments, but if one is provided the argument is dead in the water because the requester has no idea how to read the jargon of the field 9/10 times.