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The fundamental principle of science is doubt, not trust. “Believe in science” is just a new religion for the intellectual class. Obviously, knee-jerk doubt i

• aww_dang 5y ago
  Scientismic appeals commonly appear in relation to political agendas. In popular discourse "trusting science" can be better understood as an appeal for conformity of thought. Scientists naturally disagree about a great many things. When people are asked to "trust The Science", the speaker is asking for unquestioning faith in the experts they feel are truthful. Scientism is just another way denigrate dissent as dangerous heresy. The core of the issue revolves around the lack of trust in government and media institutions. It is a poor substitute for reflecting upon how the trust deficit came about and attempting to address those issues. The process would undoubtedly involve addressing past misdeeds, accepting responsibility and attempting to make amends. Understandably, this is not palatable. In lieu of this we are offered more divisive finger pointing and comically inept generalizations of the heathen unbelievers as "flat-earthers". The end result is a doubling down on the trust deficit, digging us deeper with further divisiveness. At a certain point this approach and the institutions advancing it must be recognized as bankrupt.
• goto11 5y ago
  > “Believe in science” is just a new religion for the intellectual class. What does that even mean? If I believe the earth is round, then science is my religion? If I believe it is flat, then I am an atheist?
  • Kenji 5y ago
    If you haven't confirmed it yourself (it's quite simple, there are various experiments you can do) then yes it is belief. You simply believe that the evidence is persuasive. That is good enough for most things, but for things of great importance, you wanna dig down deeper, do your own research. If you just trust whatever the current scientific authorities say, then yes, this behavior is indistinguishable from religion. Completely indistinguishable.
  • h2odragon 5y ago
    Belief in something (true or not) without concern for evidence is religion. If your faith can be changed by evidence that contradicts it, then you might begin to practice science by seeking more evidence.
    • goto11 5y ago
      So if the restaurant claims the tomatoes are locally sourced and I don't personally verify... that is religion? I know the concept of religion is hard to define unambiguously, but come on.
  • rcthompson 5y ago
    "Believe in science" doesn't mean believing in any specific scientific fact. It means believing whatever "science" tells you. The problem is that most people aren't equipped to tell the difference between science and pseudoscience, so if they "believe science" then they also end up believing pseudoscience.
  • BoxOfRain 5y ago
    I think what the GP is getting at is that science is a process, not a priesthood. Being part of the social institution of science doesn't automatically make one's opinions more valid, what makes their opinions more valid than the layperson is the correct application of the scientific method. Believing someone "because they're a scientist therefore they are right" like most of the general public is still a faith-based approach, believing someone because their paper managed to convince most of their peers they were onto something and produced reproducable results is a scientific approach. The GP is essentially claiming that many people are believing the right things for the wrong reason if I've interpreted the point correctly. The problem is in this brave new post-pandemic world we've elevated scientists to the social position of prophets without the general public really being aware of how the scientific method is supposed to work or the limitations of things like statistical modelling. Science is a mere process that society has foisted the role of a priesthood onto, and I really think that this is asking for trouble because for the most part people have trouble differentiating science from pseudoscience. This rising tide has lifted all boats, including the quacks and charlatans of the world.
    • goto11 5y ago
      It seems a lot of everyday things is a religion then. What if I hire a plumber to fix my sink and he says he need to replace a pipe to make it work. I know nothing about plumbing, so of course I trust the plumber even though I know any human make mistakes. Does that mean I have "elevated plumbers to a priesthood"? It seems like almost any human interaction involves a level of trust - but if everything is "religion" then the word is meaningless.
      • BoxOfRain 5y ago
        Hardly, nobody's saying that you can use plumbing to completely ignore ethical philosophy as though moral principles can just drop out of logic if we derive them in a clever enough way, but lots of people seem to make this claim (intentionally or not) about science. There's even a word for this: Scientism. I wouldn't ask a plumber OR a scientist about making moral decisions as though they had some special advantage.
  • DrStormyDaniels 5y ago
    Forget the curvature of the earth. The controversy is how a belief in science, which is necessary, translates into a non-trivial understanding of human life, which is voluntary - this is where things get "religious", in the sense of tendentious ideological reductive thinking.
  • haunter 5y ago
    Scientisim https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
• doplz 5y ago
  >There needs to be balance Its is not possible on top of the social media/news media landscape. Whatever gets the most attention "wins". Its not that people have "caught upto it". Its that its the only game worth playing in town and there are no other games that can get you influence as quickly.
  • drewcoo 5y ago
    Not possible? I'm not even sure it's desirable. "Balance" is not "truth."
• katzgrau 5y ago
  > “Believe in science” is just a new religion for the intellectual class. Amen. Credentialed scientists are now the high priests of yesterday. The layperson is expected to defer to their authority and all cases, and ignore that they too, are human.
  • Yoric 5y ago
    Well, as a scientist, I tend to defer to the fact that scientists in other domains know their respective domains much better than I do. Witnessing knee-jerk reactions (recent and not-so-recent) by laypeople who have no clue what they are talking about but feel entitled to criticize specialists who have dedicated their lives to studying a phenomenon, just because they manage to catch one or two words of vocabulary, is... frustrating. Whenever (some fringe of) media decide to hold (some piece of) science as controversial, said specialists find themselves the object of an intellectual DDoS whereby they are put in a loop of permanent justification and rejustification to people who simply do not understand the arguments, nor typically care. Now, the solution is of course not blind trust. It's probably making sure that more laypeople have a clue about science.
    • tomp 5y ago
      > scientists in other domains know their respective domains much better than I do But knowledge can also be misused. Those are exactly the people most capable to deceive you (if they want) (e.g. Peter Daszak)
      • fastaguy88 5y ago
        How has Peter Daszak deceived us?
        • tomp 5y ago
          He strongly pushed the "natural origin" theory and branded "lab escape" theory as a conspiracy theory, despite knowing (and without revealing) that the lab was involved exactly in that kind of virus research (in order to conceal his involvement).
• listless 5y ago
  “believe in science” always makes me think of Nacho Libre
• temptemptemp111 5y ago
  Correct. The author of this article and millions of others prove to us in their titles that they have no clue what science is... They often even personify it! Blind leading the blind.
• enkid 5y ago
  You should trust the epistemological methods developed by science, not the scientist who use them. That means you understand why scientists believe in their discoveries instead of taking their word on it. But you still can trust someone's credentials are better than your own and that they are giving you a better judgement than your own.
  • dathinab 5y ago
    But that isn't what the article is about. Most (many) people have no (basic but proper) understanding of the scientific method and statistics. When I hear "trusting since" it's most times not "trust the scientific method but be wary about interpretations of results yielded by it" but instead "fully non-questioning trust a specific interpretation of some scientific results" worse often a biased speculative interpretation based on some other speculations based on the scientific results. As such "trusting science" because "it's science" is in many peoples vocabulary something I can't say is good. Especially if politicians use the terms.
    • enkid 5y ago
      Agreed, the term "trust science" is not what we need, at least as commonly used. It should be understand the scientific method, which helps put claims into perspective in terms of confidence in claims.
  • User23 5y ago
    I don’t really even trust the method used by scientists. What I trust is the method used by engineers. When I get on an airplane I’m not trusting science, I’m trusting over a century of rigorous engineering that took planes from being death traps to being almost absurdly safe.
    • ravar 5y ago
      Not trusting the methods used by scientists is pretty natural if you get to see(experience) how the sausage is made.
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• ravenstine 5y ago
  I wholeheartedly agree, but I also think it's an inevitability of removing religion. It's not that I think people should be religious but that humans have the following proclivities: - Mystical thinking - Defensiveness against ideas that threaten the ego at the individual scale - Slowness or lag against canonizing new information - Poor introspection A current day example of many of those attributes are many of the intellectual liberals of my generation whom are ironically quite conservative in the true sense of the word, just not in the way that most visualize conservatism. Challenge any ideas that they consider to be common sense, especially if they are ordained by authority figures, and they speak as if you have committed blasphemy against the holy church. It doesn't even matter if you agree with them on 99% of points; there's something wrong with you for disagreeing with The Science. Experts themselves fall prey to these flaws. As someone who is freaking obsessed with nutrition and digestive science, it's baffling how many authority figures ignore information that either doesn't support the establishment or doesn't support a theory that their ego is riding upon. I can't help but conclude that the current axioms around human health are legging at least 20 years behind where they should be. This is why I use science as a compass, and why it's not something I simply just believe in. Science isn't even designed to be a system of belief. Belief can only come from within, and society gets closer to the truth faster when there's a confluence of true individual belief, not because everyone believes in a system. The mistake we've made IMO is the mindset that, by simply dumping knowledge on people, they will make better decisions and be smarter. In other words, the greatest tragedy of our time is in telling people they are smarter than they actually are without requiring any sort or rigor before they can reach that level of "smartness", if you will. How else would "believe in the science" work if we didn't remove religion and didn't essentially tell people they are smart enough to understand enough science that they can believe in it? We threw science at the masses, from intelligent to mentally-challenged, and they turned into a cargo cult. In fact, I often find intellectuals to be worse in this regard because the rationalization of cognitive dissonance requires intelligence. Many intellectuals will do anything to defend The Science os the one true way to examine anything, often turning philosophy into some sort of historic curiosity that shouldn't really be taken seriously once you've passed your humanities prerequisites in college. At least Forrest Gump would have the openness to consider the meaning that "Life is a box of chocolates". Some intellectuals would scoff and spend time coming up with reasons to conclude that life is entirely predictable, often not even to consider an idea themselves but to use the other party as a neuron-treadmill. > Obviously, knee-jerk doubt is no better than knee-jerk trust, but there needs to be a balance, If the knee-jerk leads to everyone running off a cliff, I fail to see how knee-jerks are "obviously" preferable to essentially doing nothing. There are problems that resolve faster without intervention, or are at least not made worse when people don't do what they think is obvious. It's obvious to many that if you get stabbed that the first step is to pull the knife out, but immediately pulling the knife out can make an already bad situation 100x worse. Certainly, there must be trust, or else you don't have a society. Trust doesn't come from condescension or having information withheld. That can work for a period of time, but isn't sustainable, just as most despotic dictatorships don't last long in the 21st century (American invasions notwithstanding) in the face of another regime or a revolution. With a globalized world that efficiently propagates information, you can't proselytize The Science without a significant number of people disagreeing for any number of reasons. The only way for The Science to get its way is to suppress the scientific process and to cut individuals off from information channels for their own good. I'm pessimistic. The Science is too profitable from all angles. Ironically, it's becoming the next step in religiosity. We went from many gods with specific roles to believing in one more amorphous and omnipresent God to an even more abstract system that doesn't specifically describe any universal truth. When the people know too much, religiosity has to become murkier in order to survive. Science turned out to be a superior host for religiosity because, the more research you read, the more you realize you don't know; black holes and white holes of knowledge can be manufactured at will. Skepticism has become a tainted idea, in my eyes, and too often becomes "The Skepticism", but it is the only way forward that I think there may be, at least for individuals. They have to understand that skepticism doesn't mean knee-jerk disbelieving in everything but that gnosis is arrived at from both questioning and faith, or not having a position in an idea until a position is justified. We have to choose to teach this as a virtue to our children. But will we do so?