3 ms·

Reading some of the comments on this thread, would like to ask if anyone knows the right term to research something that has long bothered me. There are of cour

Reading some of the comments on this thread, would like to ask if anyone knows the right term to research something that has long bothered me. There are of course people who disagree on science, data and facts. What I'm curious about is people who claim or are science and data-driven but believe that only certain scientific fields are engaged in organized collusion or mass delusion. For instance, a biologist I met who thought archeologists are covering up young Earth, an astronomer who thinks the NIST/ASCE 9/11 Study was complete fabulation (although they admitted they'd never read it), and engineers I know who insist climatologists are all just in it for the money. While I understand why the general populace may hold such views, I'm curious as to if there have been studies concerning how a population of those who believe in scientific method can so strongly believe their peers in selective (usually other) fields are so differently motivated.

coldpie 7y ago
Sounds like you basically got there yourself in your last paragraph, but I think a term that might lead you down some fruitful reading is "motivated reasoning." It's often about maintaining some other desirable property (e.g. being accepted by their community; keeping a particular friend group; holding a belief system), and rationality takes a backseat to maintaining that property.
milesvp 7y ago
This one can be quite complicated, but I wonder how much of it is actually related to the quote that goes something like “science progresses one death at a time”. Which is talking about a bigger problem in science, which is that tenured scientists have either too much invested in their careers or too much vested in their models to allow the spread of upstart scientists’ ideas. There’s often a generational aspect (though don’t confuse this with age, since someone new to a field at 70 would be a younger generation) where newer scientists pick up on some thing that older scientists ignored and they start spreading it’s importance, then 20 years later, once the last of the old guard leave the field, it’s no longer downplayed and science can ‘advance’ (there is some risk that said thing wasn’t actually important, but for hard sciences data tends to trump all else). So then the question to your question becomes more, are these contrarians representative of some new wave? As a trained economist, I’ve been trained to be skeptical of entrenched establishments, usually people will fail to believe that which threatens their paychecks. So the other question is, are there big incentives to encourage the established field to continue believing what it believes? I will say there are a lot of crackpots out there, and novices tend to be wrong a lot, so the way science is currently done isn’t such a bad thing. But it would be wise to at least listen occasionally to cross discipline contrarians. They will often bring up arguments that are strong from their primary field, without being weighed down with baggage from the other field. You get an occasional Eli Whitney, or if you’re really lucky a John Nash. One last thought. Hard sciences are hard for a reason, reality keeps them in check. And experiments allow for falsifiable hypotheses. There are a lot of sciences that rely primarily on observation, with little to no experimentation. This makes falsifiability tricky. This also means you’re going to see more general dissent associated with these fields (and if you don’t see it within the field that might be a red flag).
Izkata 7y ago
Sounds like the opposite of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.

coldpie 7y ago

Sounds like you basically got there yourself in your last paragraph, but I think a term that might lead you down some fruitful reading is "motivated reasoning." It's often about maintaining some other desirable property (e.g. being accepted by their community; keeping a particular friend group; holding a belief system), and rationality takes a backseat to maintaining that property.

milesvp 7y ago

This one can be quite complicated, but I wonder how much of it is actually related to the quote that goes something like “science progresses one death at a time”. Which is talking about a bigger problem in science, which is that tenured scientists have either too much invested in their careers or too much vested in their models to allow the spread of upstart scientists’ ideas. There’s often a generational aspect (though don’t confuse this with age, since someone new to a field at 70 would be a younger generation) where newer scientists pick up on some thing that older scientists ignored and they start spreading it’s importance, then 20 years later, once the last of the old guard leave the field, it’s no longer downplayed and science can ‘advance’ (there is some risk that said thing wasn’t actually important, but for hard sciences data tends to trump all else). So then the question to your question becomes more, are these contrarians representative of some new wave? As a trained economist, I’ve been trained to be skeptical of entrenched establishments, usually people will fail to believe that which threatens their paychecks. So the other question is, are there big incentives to encourage the established field to continue believing what it believes? I will say there are a lot of crackpots out there, and novices tend to be wrong a lot, so the way science is currently done isn’t such a bad thing. But it would be wise to at least listen occasionally to cross discipline contrarians. They will often bring up arguments that are strong from their primary field, without being weighed down with baggage from the other field. You get an occasional Eli Whitney, or if you’re really lucky a John Nash. One last thought. Hard sciences are hard for a reason, reality keeps them in check. And experiments allow for falsifiable hypotheses. There are a lot of sciences that rely primarily on observation, with little to no experimentation. This makes falsifiability tricky. This also means you’re going to see more general dissent associated with these fields (and if you don’t see it within the field that might be a red flag).

Izkata 7y ago

Sounds like the opposite of the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect.