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This is a hard problem. At some level, all people have to rely on experts to interpret scientific results for them. In science, the standard of truth is exper
by elihu 5y ago
This is a hard problem. At some level, all people have to rely on experts to interpret scientific results for them. In science, the standard of truth is experimental repeatability, and most results that are interesting enough to get published require quite a lot of effort to actually run the experiments. And at some level you either have to run the experiment for yourself or trust somebody's word that they got the result they got and didn't make any mistakes.
So, since replicating results is hard we rely on reputation and authority instead. Is this paper peer reviewed and accepted to a respected journal or conference? Are respectable journalists writing about it? Are government officials saying things that match what the paper seems to be saying? And so on.
There are shortcuts. If an article is claiming that scientists have created a perpetual motion machine, they haven't. If an article was plainly written by someone who doesn't understand the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour, it can safely be ignored. And so on. Science literacy is helpful at spotting obviously wrong articles, but I think there's a danger that it can lull one into overconfidence in one's own abilities to spot falsehoods. Sometimes the things we're told are just plain wrong, and some of those things aren't obviously nonsense. Some of them come from seemingly reputable sources and could plausibly be true, and the only way to know for sure is to see if other reputable scientists are getting the same results.
- AmericanChopper 5y agoIt’s a problem that’s been solved for hundreds of years, and depending on the way you look at it, it’s not even a problem at all. For starters, it depends on what you’re supposed to be trusting science to do. If you’re trusting science to provide you with a collection of knowledge that is definitely true, then you’ve misplaced your trust. Because that’s not what science is. Science is simply a methodology for refining knowledge, on its best day, science will provide you with the best understanding that we have currently achieved on a particular topic, and no more than that. Are you trusting science to be a pure discipline, motivated only by the search of the truth? Because it’s not that either. Science and academia just as infested with politics, and ideology, and perverse incentives, and corruption as any other human institution. Are you trusting the knowledge provided by science to be particularly sophisticated? Because depending on the field it might not be that either. If you require science to be capable of making repeatable predictions, then there’s entire scientific fields that are not capable of that. Psychology for instance has failed to reliably predict anything other than some rather broad trends, by some standards the entire field would be considered pseudoscience. In any case, the solution we came up with for dealing with this issue was democracy. I think the real question that’s being asked here is “why are technocratic policies often not popular?”, there’s lots of reasons you could postulate for any particular policy, but in all cases democracy is doing its job properly by acting as a safeguard against unpopular technocratic policies.
- erdewit 5y ago> Are you trusting science to be a pure discipline, motivated only by the search of the truth? A distinction can be made between science on the one hand and scientists on the other.
- AmericanChopper 5y agoYes, but the science in this context usually refers to the work done by its practitioners.
- datavirtue 5y agoArchaeology. The use of scientific methods to determine facts. Facts are then used for large swathes of conjecture.
- maccolgan 5y agoPsychology IS indeed pseudoscience, one of the most well known fields of pseudoscience, what made you think otherwise?
- elihu 5y agoI agree with most of that; in fact, I've said similar things myself. I guess I just want anyone to be able to distinguish science that came from actual experiments run by honest scientists from pseudoscience that came from people just making stuff up and faking results. I mean, that shouldn't be a very high bar, but it's actually pretty hard to meet when you think about it. Respected scientists can get away with faking results for years sometimes. As for technocrats: I find it hard to trust anyone who thinks their policy positions are simply the result of direct application of pure logic. That's not how it works. Logic and science can help you arrive at a policy position once you decide what your goals and priorities are, but different people have different goals and priorities, and those aren't determined by logic. Maybe there are some good technocrats out there, but to me it seems like their goals and priorities tend to somehow always gravitate towards the goals and priorities of lobbyists, think tanks, and wealthy people generally. Maximize shareholder value and don't rock the boat.