7 ms·

Trust Me, I'm a Scientist

23 points by revorad 16y ago

wccrawford 16y ago
"Why do people say that they trust scientists in general but part company with them on specific issues?" Because, for once, they aren't being mindless sheeple? Presented with something that can be proven or disproven, they actually want that to happen, unlike other subjects which don't have any hard lines that can be drawn, and they simply follow. The essence of the scientific method is to trust nothing that hasn't been proven, with evidence, and peer reviewed. Then scientists go to the public and expect people to take their word for it. They really can't see why that doesn't work? People are going to trust their experiences and pre-conceptions before the word of a stranger, no matter how many letters are after his name. If that stranger happens to line up with their existing knowledge, they believe him without question ONLY because their existing knowledge says the same thing. They don't believe the scientist, they believe in themselves. That's how most people work, anyhow. There's a few who go beyond that and challenge even things they have always believed to be true.
- JoachimSchipper 16y ago
  It seems rather optimistic to think that climate change can be (dis-)proven without going beyond the knowledge of the average person. And even where an average person could learn enough to check the data (e.g. in the whole autism-vaccines mess), people rarely do so.
  - bugsy 16y ago
    Many have become skeptics after personally checking the data and protocol. Often this is not provided in enough detail to replicate the study. All such studies should be discarded. Those that provide their data and exact protocol can be reviewed. Journal articles are not an assertion of truth. They are an alleged reporting of results, which should be provided in enough detail to get the same results. This is necessary because historically only a minority of peer reviewed journal published results have reported things that ended up being true.
- karamazov 16y ago
  It's great to be suspicious of results in a field in which you're an expert, but physicists and biochemists hardly ask their doctor for peer-reviewed proof that his advice is correct. At any rate, people who are so inclined can look up actual research done; but most people won't have the expertise to understand it anyway, which is completely normal outside of your own field. To constantly question everything, or to go with one's preconceived notions irrespective of how much evidence there is against them, is both dangerous and stupid - professional scientists might be wrong about some things, but if the vast majority of them agree on something that you're not qualified to discuss, you can and should assume that they're probably right. A good litmus test for this is asking what evidence you would need to be convinced that you're wrong; if you don't know or if the answer is there is no evidence, you don't know what you're talking about.
  - realitygrill 16y ago
    Maybe they should ask their doctor, given the recent spate of articles on ineffectiveness of medical treatment: http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/294/2/218.abstract http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/294/2/218.abstract http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/the-ideology-of-health-care/ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/the-ideology-of-hea... (If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness, I would appreciate it - have had much trouble locating it.) But of course, doctors are not scientists.
    - Alex3917 16y ago
      "If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness, I would appreciate it - have had much trouble locating it." I haven't seen that study, but if you look up any given common medical condition, for many of them there are studies about what percentage of those diagnosed are being treated in accordance with best practices. And for most conditions it's usually not more than a third. Doctors usually just prescribe whatever is advertised the most regardless of whether or not it's even remotely effective or safe, e.g. http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/15/2055 http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/15/2055
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- tel 16y ago
  Mathematicians want you to distrust everything. Scientists want you to believe whatever the data says. If you know someone is a highly accurate person and they say something, then you should trust what they said to be correct. If someone is widely regarded as being highly accurate, it's likely that they are. If someone is scientifically decorated, it's likely they are widely regarded as being highly accurate. In other words while there are a lot of links in the chain you can attack, if you want to succeed at being accurate yourself, you should consider the words of scientists as pretty strong evidence. Now there are much stronger, more direct links that you can follow to achieve strong belief in something. You can study its actual behaviors and how they fit into well-regarded patterns of reality (which you can derive yourself from observing it, if you like) and then extrapolate these to a tentative conclusion about the world. You can also then go and publish your conclusion and begin to collect scientific accolade. --- In short, science in no way suggests that you shouldn't trust something until you can take it all the way apart. Nobody does that (except mathematicians, sort of). It has been shown however that you can trace scientific accolade back to being highly accurate back to actually following and discovering all of those steps. It's also been shown that nearly the only way to become highly accurate yourself is to pare down to them. This is closer to the actual promise of rational study.
tomjen3 16y ago
Maybe but you are also interested in grant money, in getting published and (as a human being) have your own biases and pet theories.
- cagey 16y ago
  ++! "Scientists" are people, having all the same flaws, biases, and impure motivations found in the greater population. I certainly don't unquestioningly trust as 100% truth anything following "Scientists say...". Certainly not about how the climate is going to be in 10 years (awful!) unless we let the government (or the UN) control and tax what goes in and out of every bodily orifice, and every movement we make outside our home. Science by itself; ok, I'm willing to listen and pay attention with an open mind. "Science" in league with _government_ (the only agency which can legally point a gun at my head and demand my compliance to ANYTHING)? I have EXTREME skepticism in this situation. Because such alliances can easily lead to totalitarianism in the name of science. Power-hungry bureaucrats and do-gooders see "scientists" as the key to getting the population at large to give up freedoms (to have a "safer" future). And few "scientists" will walk away from millions of dollars in grant money dangled in front of their noses. And if they want to get the next grant (what else are they going to do?), don't you suppose there's just a little bias injected into the activities sponsored by the current grant? It strains credulity to think that such biases don't exist. Most commenters on HN seem to think that such biases only arise in situations where "science" is funded by private business, but I see the potential for trouble as being much higher when "science" and governments join forces. You can almost always ignore or dodge something a corporation does, but dodging the government is basically impossible. The entirely miserable track record of "scientists" who've predicted "the world will end unless we all ..." over the past century reinforces my comfort in holding a skeptical position. Basically, the (US) government today is in the business of controlling the behavior of citizens. The more ways they can control citizen behavior, the more bureaucracies there will be, and the bigger the existing bureaucracies will get. The ultimate expression of this will be "single payer" (a.k.a. 100% government controlled) health care. This will be the justification for total in-detail control of individual/personal behavior. Think I'm paranoid? Let's just see what happens...
aristidb 16y ago
Science is based on reasoning (EDIT: and evidence), not trust. Asking people to trust scientists is an anti-science statement, IMHO. (Of course, vaccines are pretty obviously a great thing, and there is no reason to believe they cause autism.)
- simpleTruth 16y ago
  Science is based on evidence NOT reasoning. Thinking about problems don't provide new information. It's the same basic fallacy as assuming a really really powerful AI could deduce QM from a few minutes of webcam footage.
  - aristidb 16y ago
    I didn't intend to claim that evidence was not necessary. It is not sufficient however to have evidence and not reason about it.
  - tel 16y ago
    That's sort of a technical non-sequitur, no? I would imagine that a sufficiently advanced AI could deduce QM from a few seconds of real time, given that it could ask questions of any resolution. Or, equivalently, a large amount of webcam footage. In either case, the emphasis is on conclusions being bought in the currency of experience.
    - simpleTruth 16y ago
      I brought it up because people actually believe it. As you noticed both resolution and time are important limitations. You don't get to arbitrarily examine things at any resolution or for any length of time. Stick a AI up to a webcam at 648x480 @ 30 cycles per second pointed at a brick wall and it's not going to be able to say comment on politics in the middle east. Or in a more down to earth example, if we stop building ever higher energy particle accelerators there are things we simply don't get to know.
- gjm11 16y ago
  > Asking people to trust scientists is an anti-science statement I understand but disagree. If a member of the public trusts scientists on some particular issue, what they're doing is not science (because science is based on reasoning and evidence and controlled experiments and mathematics and so on) but that doesn't mean it's anti-science. There's nothing wrong with someone who isn't a scientist making a decision by means other than Doing Science -- after all, if they could do that then they would be a scientist. Trusting what scientists tell you is (for most people, most of the time) rational behaviour even if it isn't doing science. The only reason why scientists don't always do it is that they have an even better option, namely actually doing science. People who aren't scientists usually don't. (Note 1. Actually, most of the time scientists also trust what other scientists say, and quite right too. Note 2. Of course Doing Science isn't really an activity strictly limited to Real Scientists; anyone can, in principle, do it. But in practice, for most areas of active research, doing it competently requires the right sort of brain, the right sort of training, and sometimes the right equipment, and the great majority of the people who have those are scientists.)
syllogism 16y ago
Most people think the scientific consensus is right, say, 90% of the time. This is reasonable. They then go ahead and pick 10% of issues to disagree with the scientific consensus on. This is NOT reasonable. People fall into the same trap in many other situations. If you give someone a guessing game where a red card is shown 80% of the time, and a black card is shown 20% of the time, they'll usually start guessing red 80% and black 20%. They'll still do this even if they're given money for correct guesses. They'll even do this if they're told the game is totally random, and that red occurs more often! You of course maximise your correct predictions by always guessing the majority class, unless you're more accurate than the prior distribution. So if you can't guess the next card >80% accurately, you should always pick red. Likewise, if you can't know _when_ the scientists are wrong with >90% accuracy, you should just shut up and trust the scientists _always_. But, of course, this is not what people do.
- CapitalistCartr 16y ago
  The real World is not a card game. When there is a lot at stake questioning the scientists, wanting more, is the best course of action. Trust is fine for most things, but as the stakes get higher, the trust should, and does, drop.
  - syllogism 16y ago
    As the stakes get higher it's ever more important to pursue the rational course of action. It also gets more difficult. Beating the baseline of always trusting the scientists is basically impossible for the lay-person to do. All they're going to do is look more closely at whatever claims perk up their ears based on their current biases, and then look just closely enough to spot some "flaw" which would get swatted aside in minutes by a serious researcher. If you couldn't write a paper that had a good chance of being accepted by a journal (modulo bias) then you have no business doubting the conclusion. If you go about doing that, then your beliefs will on average be less accurate. And that's a bad thing, as the stakes are quite high.
    - tel 16y ago
chernevik 16y ago
"Science may not be the only way of organizing and understanding our experience, but for accuracy it fares better than religion, politics and art. That’s the lesson." Really? "it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs." Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ari/nico/nico003.htm http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ari/nico/nico003.htm).
bluekeybox 16y ago
There is something very important that is missing from this post and from most of the discussions of this issue. Who are these scientists? What exactly do they say? How do we know that what we hear that "scientists say" is not actually what the media wants us to hear? Most people never talk to scientists directly. Everything they hear is through the media. Most people are not stupid and understand that what the media says is not always to be trusted (not necessarily because the media is corrupt or because it intentionally tries to mislead, but simply because the way the media works is that it focuses on the most popular and controversial topics to receive the most views). TL;DR: The perceived distrust of scientists by the public could well be a distrust of media reporting of most issues in general, not necessarily a lack of belief in the scientific method.
- rauljara 16y ago
  While I have seen plenty of news reports that mangle scientific findings, in all the internet debates I've witnessed on vaccines and global warming, I've never seen someone attack the scientific conclusions on the basis that they're being misreported by media. The attacks I've run across have generally been ad hominem (accusing the scientists of being motivated by something other pursuit of truth), with some direct questioning of evidence / methodology. You present an interesting idea, but I believe the reason this issue is missing from the debate is that there just aren't very many people who feel that way. Or if there are, they are remarkably unvocal about it.
  - bluekeybox 16y ago
    > I've never seen someone attack the scientific conclusions on the basis that they're being misreported by media Well I've seen examples of bad, exaggerated, sometimes completely misleading media reporting of scientific findings nearly everywhere. Now I have a scientific background and I can tell that those reports should be taken with a grain of salt, but how can people without such background filter out the signal from the noise? I bet that many people assume that a reporter publishing something in "The Daily Galaxy" is actually the scientist. How would they ever trust him or her?
bugsy 16y ago
Obviously there is no correlation between false results and a profit connection between the research and the researcher. Or is there. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-papers-are-probably-wrong.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-p...
Tichy 16y ago
I don't think scientists should be trusted. There is a lot of shoddy "science" being produced on a daily basis.
drstrangevibes 16y ago
using the scientific method to prove the value of the scientific method, is like trying to bite your own teeth
gityou 16y ago
"Vaccines cause autism." "Vaccines do not cause autism." This is a contradiction. I think the public has good right to be skeptical of scientists' statements here.
- jokermatt999 16y ago
  You're lumping all scientists in together, when there are clearly two different groups here. Furthermore, later evidence has shown how terrible the evidence was for "Vaccines cause autism". The study that started this controversy was ridiculous. It used a ridiculously low sample size, the scientist conducting it (Andrew Wakefield) had severe conflicts of interest that basically lead to fraud, and to top it all off, the journal that original posted the paper retracted it.
mduerksen 16y ago
"Why do people say that they trust scientists in general but part company with them on specific issues?" I don't think that's necessarily the case. The cited study only suggests that people trust scientists more than leaders of business or government. That might not be a very high level of trust. I would rather suppose that people do not trust anybody very much unless they know them personally. To really convince a person of the contrary, he must grasp or experience it for himself. The problem with scientific publications is that a lot of prior knowledge, preparation and work is required to really understand the reasoning behind the findings. Only that way, one can confidently reject or approve the scientific statement. Alas, most people are untrained and too disconnected from the subject.

23 points by revorad 16y ago

"Why do people say that they trust scientists in general but part company with them on specific issues?" Because, for once, they aren't being mindless sheeple? Presented with something that can be proven or disproven, they actually want that to happen, unlike other subjects which don't have any hard lines that can be drawn, and they simply follow. The essence of the scientific method is to trust nothing that hasn't been proven, with evidence, and peer reviewed. Then scientists go to the public and expect people to take their word for it. They really can't see why that doesn't work? People are going to trust their experiences and pre-conceptions before the word of a stranger, no matter how many letters are after his name. If that stranger happens to line up with their existing knowledge, they believe him without question ONLY because their existing knowledge says the same thing. They don't believe the scientist, they believe in themselves. That's how most people work, anyhow. There's a few who go beyond that and challenge even things they have always believed to be true.

JoachimSchipper 16y ago
It seems rather optimistic to think that climate change can be (dis-)proven without going beyond the knowledge of the average person. And even where an average person could learn enough to check the data (e.g. in the whole autism-vaccines mess), people rarely do so.
- bugsy 16y ago
  Many have become skeptics after personally checking the data and protocol. Often this is not provided in enough detail to replicate the study. All such studies should be discarded. Those that provide their data and exact protocol can be reviewed. Journal articles are not an assertion of truth. They are an alleged reporting of results, which should be provided in enough detail to get the same results. This is necessary because historically only a minority of peer reviewed journal published results have reported things that ended up being true.
karamazov 16y ago
It's great to be suspicious of results in a field in which you're an expert, but physicists and biochemists hardly ask their doctor for peer-reviewed proof that his advice is correct. At any rate, people who are so inclined can look up actual research done; but most people won't have the expertise to understand it anyway, which is completely normal outside of your own field. To constantly question everything, or to go with one's preconceived notions irrespective of how much evidence there is against them, is both dangerous and stupid - professional scientists might be wrong about some things, but if the vast majority of them agree on something that you're not qualified to discuss, you can and should assume that they're probably right. A good litmus test for this is asking what evidence you would need to be convinced that you're wrong; if you don't know or if the answer is there is no evidence, you don't know what you're talking about.
- realitygrill 16y ago
  Maybe they should ask their doctor, given the recent spate of articles on ineffectiveness of medical treatment: http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/294/2/218.abstract http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/294/2/218.abstract http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/the-ideology-of-health-care/ http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/the-ideology-of-hea... (If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness, I would appreciate it - have had much trouble locating it.) But of course, doctors are not scientists.
  - Alex3917 16y ago
    "If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness, I would appreciate it - have had much trouble locating it." I haven't seen that study, but if you look up any given common medical condition, for many of them there are studies about what percentage of those diagnosed are being treated in accordance with best practices. And for most conditions it's usually not more than a third. Doctors usually just prescribe whatever is advertised the most regardless of whether or not it's even remotely effective or safe, e.g. http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/15/2055 http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/15/2055
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
tel 16y ago
Mathematicians want you to distrust everything. Scientists want you to believe whatever the data says. If you know someone is a highly accurate person and they say something, then you should trust what they said to be correct. If someone is widely regarded as being highly accurate, it's likely that they are. If someone is scientifically decorated, it's likely they are widely regarded as being highly accurate. In other words while there are a lot of links in the chain you can attack, if you want to succeed at being accurate yourself, you should consider the words of scientists as pretty strong evidence. Now there are much stronger, more direct links that you can follow to achieve strong belief in something. You can study its actual behaviors and how they fit into well-regarded patterns of reality (which you can derive yourself from observing it, if you like) and then extrapolate these to a tentative conclusion about the world. You can also then go and publish your conclusion and begin to collect scientific accolade. --- In short, science in no way suggests that you shouldn't trust something until you can take it all the way apart. Nobody does that (except mathematicians, sort of). It has been shown however that you can trace scientific accolade back to being highly accurate back to actually following and discovering all of those steps. It's also been shown that nearly the only way to become highly accurate yourself is to pare down to them. This is closer to the actual promise of rational study.

tomjen3 16y ago

Maybe but you are also interested in grant money, in getting published and (as a human being) have your own biases and pet theories.

cagey 16y ago
++! "Scientists" are people, having all the same flaws, biases, and impure motivations found in the greater population. I certainly don't unquestioningly trust as 100% truth anything following "Scientists say...". Certainly not about how the climate is going to be in 10 years (awful!) unless we let the government (or the UN) control and tax what goes in and out of every bodily orifice, and every movement we make outside our home. Science by itself; ok, I'm willing to listen and pay attention with an open mind. "Science" in league with _government_ (the only agency which can legally point a gun at my head and demand my compliance to ANYTHING)? I have EXTREME skepticism in this situation. Because such alliances can easily lead to totalitarianism in the name of science. Power-hungry bureaucrats and do-gooders see "scientists" as the key to getting the population at large to give up freedoms (to have a "safer" future). And few "scientists" will walk away from millions of dollars in grant money dangled in front of their noses. And if they want to get the next grant (what else are they going to do?), don't you suppose there's just a little bias injected into the activities sponsored by the current grant? It strains credulity to think that such biases don't exist. Most commenters on HN seem to think that such biases only arise in situations where "science" is funded by private business, but I see the potential for trouble as being much higher when "science" and governments join forces. You can almost always ignore or dodge something a corporation does, but dodging the government is basically impossible. The entirely miserable track record of "scientists" who've predicted "the world will end unless we all ..." over the past century reinforces my comfort in holding a skeptical position. Basically, the (US) government today is in the business of controlling the behavior of citizens. The more ways they can control citizen behavior, the more bureaucracies there will be, and the bigger the existing bureaucracies will get. The ultimate expression of this will be "single payer" (a.k.a. 100% government controlled) health care. This will be the justification for total in-detail control of individual/personal behavior. Think I'm paranoid? Let's just see what happens...

aristidb 16y ago

Science is based on reasoning (EDIT: and evidence), not trust. Asking people to trust scientists is an anti-science statement, IMHO. (Of course, vaccines are pretty obviously a great thing, and there is no reason to believe they cause autism.)

simpleTruth 16y ago
Science is based on evidence NOT reasoning. Thinking about problems don't provide new information. It's the same basic fallacy as assuming a really really powerful AI could deduce QM from a few minutes of webcam footage.
- aristidb 16y ago
  I didn't intend to claim that evidence was not necessary. It is not sufficient however to have evidence and not reason about it.
- tel 16y ago
  That's sort of a technical non-sequitur, no? I would imagine that a sufficiently advanced AI could deduce QM from a few seconds of real time, given that it could ask questions of any resolution. Or, equivalently, a large amount of webcam footage. In either case, the emphasis is on conclusions being bought in the currency of experience.
  - simpleTruth 16y ago
    I brought it up because people actually believe it. As you noticed both resolution and time are important limitations. You don't get to arbitrarily examine things at any resolution or for any length of time. Stick a AI up to a webcam at 648x480 @ 30 cycles per second pointed at a brick wall and it's not going to be able to say comment on politics in the middle east. Or in a more down to earth example, if we stop building ever higher energy particle accelerators there are things we simply don't get to know.
gjm11 16y ago
> Asking people to trust scientists is an anti-science statement I understand but disagree. If a member of the public trusts scientists on some particular issue, what they're doing is not science (because science is based on reasoning and evidence and controlled experiments and mathematics and so on) but that doesn't mean it's anti-science. There's nothing wrong with someone who isn't a scientist making a decision by means other than Doing Science -- after all, if they could do that then they would be a scientist. Trusting what scientists tell you is (for most people, most of the time) rational behaviour even if it isn't doing science. The only reason why scientists don't always do it is that they have an even better option, namely actually doing science. People who aren't scientists usually don't. (Note 1. Actually, most of the time scientists also trust what other scientists say, and quite right too. Note 2. Of course Doing Science isn't really an activity strictly limited to Real Scientists; anyone can, in principle, do it. But in practice, for most areas of active research, doing it competently requires the right sort of brain, the right sort of training, and sometimes the right equipment, and the great majority of the people who have those are scientists.)

syllogism 16y ago

Most people think the scientific consensus is right, say, 90% of the time. This is reasonable. They then go ahead and pick 10% of issues to disagree with the scientific consensus on. This is NOT reasonable. People fall into the same trap in many other situations. If you give someone a guessing game where a red card is shown 80% of the time, and a black card is shown 20% of the time, they'll usually start guessing red 80% and black 20%. They'll still do this even if they're given money for correct guesses. They'll even do this if they're told the game is totally random, and that red occurs more often! You of course maximise your correct predictions by always guessing the majority class, unless you're more accurate than the prior distribution. So if you can't guess the next card >80% accurately, you should always pick red. Likewise, if you can't know _when_ the scientists are wrong with >90% accuracy, you should just shut up and trust the scientists _always_. But, of course, this is not what people do.

CapitalistCartr 16y ago
The real World is not a card game. When there is a lot at stake questioning the scientists, wanting more, is the best course of action. Trust is fine for most things, but as the stakes get higher, the trust should, and does, drop.
- syllogism 16y ago
  As the stakes get higher it's ever more important to pursue the rational course of action. It also gets more difficult. Beating the baseline of always trusting the scientists is basically impossible for the lay-person to do. All they're going to do is look more closely at whatever claims perk up their ears based on their current biases, and then look just closely enough to spot some "flaw" which would get swatted aside in minutes by a serious researcher. If you couldn't write a paper that had a good chance of being accepted by a journal (modulo bias) then you have no business doubting the conclusion. If you go about doing that, then your beliefs will on average be less accurate. And that's a bad thing, as the stakes are quite high.
  - tel 16y ago

chernevik 16y ago

"Science may not be the only way of organizing and understanding our experience, but for accuracy it fares better than religion, politics and art. That’s the lesson." Really? "it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs." Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ari/nico/nico003.htm http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ari/nico/nico003.htm).

bluekeybox 16y ago

There is something very important that is missing from this post and from most of the discussions of this issue. Who are these scientists? What exactly do they say? How do we know that what we hear that "scientists say" is not actually what the media wants us to hear? Most people never talk to scientists directly. Everything they hear is through the media. Most people are not stupid and understand that what the media says is not always to be trusted (not necessarily because the media is corrupt or because it intentionally tries to mislead, but simply because the way the media works is that it focuses on the most popular and controversial topics to receive the most views). TL;DR: The perceived distrust of scientists by the public could well be a distrust of media reporting of most issues in general, not necessarily a lack of belief in the scientific method.

rauljara 16y ago
While I have seen plenty of news reports that mangle scientific findings, in all the internet debates I've witnessed on vaccines and global warming, I've never seen someone attack the scientific conclusions on the basis that they're being misreported by media. The attacks I've run across have generally been ad hominem (accusing the scientists of being motivated by something other pursuit of truth), with some direct questioning of evidence / methodology. You present an interesting idea, but I believe the reason this issue is missing from the debate is that there just aren't very many people who feel that way. Or if there are, they are remarkably unvocal about it.
- bluekeybox 16y ago
  > I've never seen someone attack the scientific conclusions on the basis that they're being misreported by media Well I've seen examples of bad, exaggerated, sometimes completely misleading media reporting of scientific findings nearly everywhere. Now I have a scientific background and I can tell that those reports should be taken with a grain of salt, but how can people without such background filter out the signal from the noise? I bet that many people assume that a reporter publishing something in "The Daily Galaxy" is actually the scientist. How would they ever trust him or her?

bugsy 16y ago

Obviously there is no correlation between false results and a profit connection between the research and the researcher. Or is there. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-papers-are-probably-wrong.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-p...

Tichy 16y ago

I don't think scientists should be trusted. There is a lot of shoddy "science" being produced on a daily basis.

drstrangevibes 16y ago

using the scientific method to prove the value of the scientific method, is like trying to bite your own teeth

gityou 16y ago

"Vaccines cause autism." "Vaccines do not cause autism." This is a contradiction. I think the public has good right to be skeptical of scientists' statements here.

jokermatt999 16y ago
You're lumping all scientists in together, when there are clearly two different groups here. Furthermore, later evidence has shown how terrible the evidence was for "Vaccines cause autism". The study that started this controversy was ridiculous. It used a ridiculously low sample size, the scientist conducting it (Andrew Wakefield) had severe conflicts of interest that basically lead to fraud, and to top it all off, the journal that original posted the paper retracted it.

mduerksen 16y ago

"Why do people say that they trust scientists in general but part company with them on specific issues?" I don't think that's necessarily the case. The cited study only suggests that people trust scientists more than leaders of business or government. That might not be a very high level of trust. I would rather suppose that people do not trust anybody very much unless they know them personally. To really convince a person of the contrary, he must grasp or experience it for himself. The problem with scientific publications is that a lot of prior knowledge, preparation and work is required to really understand the reasoning behind the findings. Only that way, one can confidently reject or approve the scientific statement. Alas, most people are untrained and too disconnected from the subject.