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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

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 15y ago
To tie in something bluekeybox mentioned, while this is strictly true, people are often exposed to underdeveloped scientific arguments. High energy physics at CERN is the same as Climatology is the same as people who interpreted those reverse-causality ESP results as something other than a statistical anomaly. Of course, some skepticism can be used to separate these three classes even for the layperson. The wiser layperson looks for articles on journal websites that they don't want to buy, looks for credentials from known universities, looks for something that sounds sciencey instead of new agey. These policies definitely can improve your capacity to learn from digested scientific material. But if you interpret this power as roughly knowing how to interpret and trust scientists, which is probably a fair description of the actors in a lot of lay science argumentation (or politics in general), then you can quickly get out of your depth without others or even yourself noticing. --- I think the article does a good job conveying the idea of scientific doubt. I also love the idea of stressing science history in an effort to both demonstrate the uncertainty of scientific knowledge and the sheer volume of work that's gone behind a lot of it. The real message, I believe, should be one of reverence toward the problem. When scientific knowledge is passed on to an increasingly lay audience, it should be known that this is the best guess a room full of really smart, dedicated people could get at. This guess may be good or bad, but unless you're willing to tackle the question they were asking at a similar level of rigor (like your "could you get a paper accepted" criterion) then you are pretty unlikely to understand and appreciate the less good options.

tel 15y ago

To tie in something bluekeybox mentioned, while this is strictly true, people are often exposed to underdeveloped scientific arguments. High energy physics at CERN is the same as Climatology is the same as people who interpreted those reverse-causality ESP results as something other than a statistical anomaly. Of course, some skepticism can be used to separate these three classes even for the layperson. The wiser layperson looks for articles on journal websites that they don't want to buy, looks for credentials from known universities, looks for something that sounds sciencey instead of new agey. These policies definitely can improve your capacity to learn from digested scientific material. But if you interpret this power as roughly knowing how to interpret and trust scientists, which is probably a fair description of the actors in a lot of lay science argumentation (or politics in general), then you can quickly get out of your depth without others or even yourself noticing. --- I think the article does a good job conveying the idea of scientific doubt. I also love the idea of stressing science history in an effort to both demonstrate the uncertainty of scientific knowledge and the sheer volume of work that's gone behind a lot of it. The real message, I believe, should be one of reverence toward the problem. When scientific knowledge is passed on to an increasingly lay audience, it should be known that this is the best guess a room full of really smart, dedicated people could get at. This guess may be good or bad, but unless you're willing to tackle the question they were asking at a similar level of rigor (like your "could you get a paper accepted" criterion) then you are pretty unlikely to understand and appreciate the less good options.