6 ms·

> “Believe in science” is just a new religion for the intellectual class. Amen. Credentialed scientists are now the high priests of yesterday. The layperson i

> “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).
      - fastaguy88 5y ago
        Since I have not seen any evidence that directly supports the lab escape theory, I do not feel deceived. It’s a pretty big jump from not disclosing some proposed experiments that may or may not have been done to lying about likely origins of the virus.
- User23 5y ago
  The real issue is that other members of your group have seriously damaged its credibility. If you fail to remedy that then the frustrations you describe are sure to increase. Sure it’s ego-preserving to instead blame the rubes and look down on them, but it’s also counterproductive. The “uneducated“ masses may not understand the scientist’s field, but they easily comprehend condescension and contempt and it amounts to efficient anti-persuasion. Also plenty of non-scientists have considerable subject matter expertise in bullshitting. They may not understand the science, but they know when a scientist is communicating with the intent to persuade rather than inform. Then of course there’s the possibility that an inability to explain something to lay people indicates a deficiency in the scientist’s understanding. Feynman certainly thought so and he was probably the most publicly trusted scientist of his generation. His QED[1] is a shining example of explaining a very difficult subject to the lay audience. Edit: Einstein is another example of a publicly trusted scientist who made every effort to clearly and completely explain his work to lay people. In his Relativity[2] he mostly succeeds, and where he falls short he acknowledges it and still communicates the concepts of general relativity pretty well. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5552.QED https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5552.QED [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15852.Relativity https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15852.Relativity
  - nautilius 5y ago
    I think you're overestimating your importance, and for me that notion is indeed the crux of the matter, that ultimately also leads to QAnon, etc: It's a misconception that scientists gather in their ivory towers and spend weeks and months scheming, how they can rub it in to the plebes that they are smarter. Most are not interested in that, and, I'd say, all have something better to do. There are many, much easier, and much better ways to get into a position where you can live out your inferiority complexes. You think that's the motivation of someone going through grad school, doing a PhD, a couple of PostDocs, then tenure track, etc. I admire Feynman and Einstein as the next guy, but they lived in an academic environment that is vastly different from what we have today.
- throwaway210222 5y ago
  > they know when a scientist is communicating with the intent to persuade rather than inform. Persuasion is part of a good scientist's responsibilities to his/her community. What is not is: "Here is our explanation, add it to the list of other explanations you got from your hairdresser, neighbour, priest, chief, etc. and choose which ever one makes your feel better."
- naasking 5y ago
  > 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 I think "feel entitled" is the wrong way to think of this. People's skepticism of scientific experts or scientific facts is a failure of both journalism and science: 1. Science journalism is almost universally terrible, so people already get sold half truths and sometimes even outright falsehoods from allegedly reputable sources. Messaging needs dramatic improvement. 2. The replication crisis has shown that up to 50% of published results in medicine can't be replicated (and up to 66% in social sciences), and there are virtually no incentives to replicate or publish negative results, and too many incentives to data mine/p-hack and publish sensationalized results. There are now some efforts towards correcting this, but it's only just beginning. Depending on the field and the topic, someone questioning expert advice actually has a coin flip's chance of being right and the expert wrong. > Now, the solution is of course not blind trust. It's probably making sure that more laypeople have a clue about science I don't think that will fix anything. Having a clue about how science should work and then seeing it's failures only validates science skepticism. For example, Fauci said early in the pandemic that people had no reason to wear masks, and in fact, that mask wearing could be worse than not wearing them. He later publicly admitted that he lied to allegedly avoid PPE shortages. So a public health official whose duty was to convey accurate scientific information admitted he lied to the public, thus breaking public trust. Exactly what additional knowledge about science do you think will correct this violation of public trust? You see science is not the problem here, but journalist' and scientist' public conduct is the problem.
sandworm101 5y ago
No. Believe in science is very different than believe in scientists. I believe in science. That does not mean I inherently trust any scientist. Science is different than the people who practice it. The fundamental core of science is repeatability and prediction. Belief in anything else, belief in things that are not repeatable and offer no external predictions, THAT is religion. When faced with a new phenomena I will to my last breath believe that there is a scientific explanation. That doesn't make me a fanatic. It makes me rational.
- donquichotte 5y ago
  > core of science is repeatability It is indeed. But with experiments and theories getting ever more complex and difficult to verify [1], we are edging towards just having to believe what we are told. Verifying Newton's theory of gravity was relatively simple, just throw stuff from your balcony and verify that s = 1/2 g * t^2! So we are deep inside the second Middle Ages, where the priesthood tells us what to believe and how to behave, without us having any chance of verifying their claims. I greatly wonder if and how humanity will get out of this one, and what a second Age of Enlightenment would look like. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
  - nautilius 5y ago
    The 'priesthood' mostly isn't interested in telling you what to believe and how to behave. The vast majority of the 'priesthood' would much rather just return to their lab and do exciting research. You're writing this on a device developed using physical insight into quantum mechanics. I am sure you can, without understanding the theories (neither do I), verify, that your device does, indeed, work. Surely, you are able to verify that your GPS works, without understanding the intricacies of neither general relativity nor literal rocket science to make this happen.
    - BoxOfRain 5y ago
      >The 'priesthood' mostly isn't interested in telling you what to believe and how to behave. The vast majority of the 'priesthood' would much rather just return to their lab and do exciting research. Politicians on the other hand are more than happy to use science and the social credibility of science to coerce and manipulate though. It wasn't too long ago in terms of human generations that "the science" was that we should chemically castrate those who didn't fit traditional society's norms (like Alan Turing), or that the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels were worth the ecological catastrophe for future generations. I think a discussion on scientific ethics needs to be had by the general public as well as better scientific education all around. It's not good enough to blindly trust "the science" when there's an ethical dimension in play which there almost always is.
nautilius 5y ago
Exactly! Fuck those people who studied a topic for 40 years -- why would they know one iota more about it than I do, or the facebook group of my crazy uncle -- they all have access to Google, after all! I, for one, refuse to defer to the authority of so-called experts, 'so-called' merely because of decades of experience in the field. Pah. For questions about cancer treatment, I typically just ask someone else in the Walmart aisle standing in front of Sauerkraut; for investment advice I ask the feral cat outside, when my car makes funny noises, I just throw a dart at a printout of an amazon page after I searched for 'car funny noises'. Edit: Also, fuck pilots. Why do they think they can do anything better than I can? They hide behind their locked doors and just Google stuff, I just know it!
- beckman466 5y ago
  1.) What do you think has made people scientifically incompetent (not trusting experts)? 2.) What do you think the impact of our current economic system has been on science? About the way science has been commoditized and feedback loops of the collective learning of humanity have been enclosed/black-boxed and made artificially scarce (innovations in the forms of patents, and other commoditized knowledge)? [1] > Exactly! Fuck those people who studied a topic for 40 years -- why would they know one iota more about it than I do, or the facebook group of my crazy uncle -- they all have access to Google, after all! I'm glad to see you state that access to Google and the 'commercial' web (can't think of better word) is not a good benchmark for access to humanity's shared inheritance. I see that claim too often. [1] https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-purge-elon-musk-just-another-hypocritical-tech-billionaire/ https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-pur...
  - nautilius 5y ago
    Science is the process of gaining, evaluating, and revising knowledge and understanding, Science is not a body of knowledge. It's an algorithm, not data. So clearly, having access to the largest book ever written does not say anything about scientific literacy. Here's the thing: people love to trust experts and, also, love to not think for themselves. And they do trust experts, i.e. when it comes to having their cars repaired, getting medical treatment outside of COVID, etc. It's not like millions of people came up with using malaria medication and horse dewormer on their own after conducting studies in their basement. They are following other people, while, ironically, praising themselves for being independent and most certainly not sheep (it's horse dewormer, after all).

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).
    - fastaguy88 5y ago
      Since I have not seen any evidence that directly supports the lab escape theory, I do not feel deceived. It’s a pretty big jump from not disclosing some proposed experiments that may or may not have been done to lying about likely origins of the virus.
User23 5y ago
The real issue is that other members of your group have seriously damaged its credibility. If you fail to remedy that then the frustrations you describe are sure to increase. Sure it’s ego-preserving to instead blame the rubes and look down on them, but it’s also counterproductive. The “uneducated“ masses may not understand the scientist’s field, but they easily comprehend condescension and contempt and it amounts to efficient anti-persuasion. Also plenty of non-scientists have considerable subject matter expertise in bullshitting. They may not understand the science, but they know when a scientist is communicating with the intent to persuade rather than inform. Then of course there’s the possibility that an inability to explain something to lay people indicates a deficiency in the scientist’s understanding. Feynman certainly thought so and he was probably the most publicly trusted scientist of his generation. His QED[1] is a shining example of explaining a very difficult subject to the lay audience. Edit: Einstein is another example of a publicly trusted scientist who made every effort to clearly and completely explain his work to lay people. In his Relativity[2] he mostly succeeds, and where he falls short he acknowledges it and still communicates the concepts of general relativity pretty well. [1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5552.QED https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5552.QED [2] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15852.Relativity https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15852.Relativity
- nautilius 5y ago
  I think you're overestimating your importance, and for me that notion is indeed the crux of the matter, that ultimately also leads to QAnon, etc: It's a misconception that scientists gather in their ivory towers and spend weeks and months scheming, how they can rub it in to the plebes that they are smarter. Most are not interested in that, and, I'd say, all have something better to do. There are many, much easier, and much better ways to get into a position where you can live out your inferiority complexes. You think that's the motivation of someone going through grad school, doing a PhD, a couple of PostDocs, then tenure track, etc. I admire Feynman and Einstein as the next guy, but they lived in an academic environment that is vastly different from what we have today.
throwaway210222 5y ago
> they know when a scientist is communicating with the intent to persuade rather than inform. Persuasion is part of a good scientist's responsibilities to his/her community. What is not is: "Here is our explanation, add it to the list of other explanations you got from your hairdresser, neighbour, priest, chief, etc. and choose which ever one makes your feel better."
naasking 5y ago
> 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 I think "feel entitled" is the wrong way to think of this. People's skepticism of scientific experts or scientific facts is a failure of both journalism and science: 1. Science journalism is almost universally terrible, so people already get sold half truths and sometimes even outright falsehoods from allegedly reputable sources. Messaging needs dramatic improvement. 2. The replication crisis has shown that up to 50% of published results in medicine can't be replicated (and up to 66% in social sciences), and there are virtually no incentives to replicate or publish negative results, and too many incentives to data mine/p-hack and publish sensationalized results. There are now some efforts towards correcting this, but it's only just beginning. Depending on the field and the topic, someone questioning expert advice actually has a coin flip's chance of being right and the expert wrong. > Now, the solution is of course not blind trust. It's probably making sure that more laypeople have a clue about science I don't think that will fix anything. Having a clue about how science should work and then seeing it's failures only validates science skepticism. For example, Fauci said early in the pandemic that people had no reason to wear masks, and in fact, that mask wearing could be worse than not wearing them. He later publicly admitted that he lied to allegedly avoid PPE shortages. So a public health official whose duty was to convey accurate scientific information admitted he lied to the public, thus breaking public trust. Exactly what additional knowledge about science do you think will correct this violation of public trust? You see science is not the problem here, but journalist' and scientist' public conduct is the problem.

sandworm101 5y ago

No. Believe in science is very different than believe in scientists. I believe in science. That does not mean I inherently trust any scientist. Science is different than the people who practice it. The fundamental core of science is repeatability and prediction. Belief in anything else, belief in things that are not repeatable and offer no external predictions, THAT is religion. When faced with a new phenomena I will to my last breath believe that there is a scientific explanation. That doesn't make me a fanatic. It makes me rational.

donquichotte 5y ago
> core of science is repeatability It is indeed. But with experiments and theories getting ever more complex and difficult to verify [1], we are edging towards just having to believe what we are told. Verifying Newton's theory of gravity was relatively simple, just throw stuff from your balcony and verify that s = 1/2 g * t^2! So we are deep inside the second Middle Ages, where the priesthood tells us what to believe and how to behave, without us having any chance of verifying their claims. I greatly wonder if and how humanity will get out of this one, and what a second Age of Enlightenment would look like. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- nautilius 5y ago
  The 'priesthood' mostly isn't interested in telling you what to believe and how to behave. The vast majority of the 'priesthood' would much rather just return to their lab and do exciting research. You're writing this on a device developed using physical insight into quantum mechanics. I am sure you can, without understanding the theories (neither do I), verify, that your device does, indeed, work. Surely, you are able to verify that your GPS works, without understanding the intricacies of neither general relativity nor literal rocket science to make this happen.
  - BoxOfRain 5y ago
    >The 'priesthood' mostly isn't interested in telling you what to believe and how to behave. The vast majority of the 'priesthood' would much rather just return to their lab and do exciting research. Politicians on the other hand are more than happy to use science and the social credibility of science to coerce and manipulate though. It wasn't too long ago in terms of human generations that "the science" was that we should chemically castrate those who didn't fit traditional society's norms (like Alan Turing), or that the economic benefits of burning fossil fuels were worth the ecological catastrophe for future generations. I think a discussion on scientific ethics needs to be had by the general public as well as better scientific education all around. It's not good enough to blindly trust "the science" when there's an ethical dimension in play which there almost always is.

nautilius 5y ago

Exactly! Fuck those people who studied a topic for 40 years -- why would they know one iota more about it than I do, or the facebook group of my crazy uncle -- they all have access to Google, after all! I, for one, refuse to defer to the authority of so-called experts, 'so-called' merely because of decades of experience in the field. Pah. For questions about cancer treatment, I typically just ask someone else in the Walmart aisle standing in front of Sauerkraut; for investment advice I ask the feral cat outside, when my car makes funny noises, I just throw a dart at a printout of an amazon page after I searched for 'car funny noises'. Edit: Also, fuck pilots. Why do they think they can do anything better than I can? They hide behind their locked doors and just Google stuff, I just know it!

beckman466 5y ago
1.) What do you think has made people scientifically incompetent (not trusting experts)? 2.) What do you think the impact of our current economic system has been on science? About the way science has been commoditized and feedback loops of the collective learning of humanity have been enclosed/black-boxed and made artificially scarce (innovations in the forms of patents, and other commoditized knowledge)? [1] > Exactly! Fuck those people who studied a topic for 40 years -- why would they know one iota more about it than I do, or the facebook group of my crazy uncle -- they all have access to Google, after all! I'm glad to see you state that access to Google and the 'commercial' web (can't think of better word) is not a good benchmark for access to humanity's shared inheritance. I see that claim too often. [1] https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-purge-elon-musk-just-another-hypocritical-tech-billionaire/ https://www.ipwatchdog.com/2019/02/19/dont-fooled-patent-pur...
- nautilius 5y ago
  Science is the process of gaining, evaluating, and revising knowledge and understanding, Science is not a body of knowledge. It's an algorithm, not data. So clearly, having access to the largest book ever written does not say anything about scientific literacy. Here's the thing: people love to trust experts and, also, love to not think for themselves. And they do trust experts, i.e. when it comes to having their cars repaired, getting medical treatment outside of COVID, etc. It's not like millions of people came up with using malaria medication and horse dewormer on their own after conducting studies in their basement. They are following other people, while, ironically, praising themselves for being independent and most certainly not sheep (it's horse dewormer, after all).