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Why “Trusting the Science” Is Complicated

177 points by robtherobber 5y ago

amelius 5y ago
Half of nutrition science is completely bogus. Just look at what's in the supermarkets today. From there, it's difficult to have any trust in science at all. I can't blame people.
ABS 5y ago
it's complicated because it's probably moot: we should learn, teach, spread and support "the scientific method" rather than anyone's "science"
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  All this will accomplish is people that wear "I believe in science" shirts will instead wear "I believe in the scientific method" shirts but unless there's an actual behavioral change, all you've done is add a bit more ink to a piece of cotton. The message is good but if it isn't accompanied by an actual behavioral change, it's worthless.
- rmah 5y ago
  When I was a child, we were taught the scientific method multiple times through middle-school and high-school. Is this really no longer the case? I really doubt it is.
- emerongi 5y ago
  Well, at some level you do just need to trust someone's "science", otherwise you can only rely on your own empirical evidence.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  We absolutely must teach science, it is frankly ridiculous to assert that we should only teach the scientific method and assume everything else will follow from that. It has taken millions of people hundreds of years to establish the corpus of scientific knowledge and understanding that knowledge is critical to advancing that knowledge or disproving it. We could do a better job of teaching the science alongside the history of the process of its discovery and validation and incorporate actually reading scientific papers rather than just textbooks. We can emphasize science as an ongoing process rather than simply a "just so" story, but we absolutely have to teach its results and not just the methodology.
  - ABS 5y ago
    I agree! I guess it's a good thing then that I did not write anywhere that we should only teach the scientific method :-) I made a statement about the argument (and title) of the article we are commenting, it doesn't automatically assert that everything else I'm not mentioning is not important/valid or should not be done at all.
    - shkkmo 5y ago
      The argument that article is making is a general argument about the philosophy of science and the types of demarcations between science and pseudoscience or fringe science. As such, it seems wholey reasonable to infer that you were making a general statement about how science education (particularly with the phrase: anyone's "science".) Since that was not your intent, what exactly were you trying to say? Which specific "sciences" are you advocating should not be taught and should be replaced by only teaching the scientific method?
incrudible 5y ago
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" ~ Richard Feynman
- deleted 5y ago
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- ourmandave 5y ago
  As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, “Science teaches such and such,” he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, “Science has shown such and such,” you might ask, “How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?” It should not be “science has shown” but “this experiment, this effect, has shown.” And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. http://www.feynman.com/science/what-is-science/ http://www.feynman.com/science/what-is-science/
testfoobar 5y ago
In general to the lay person "Trust The Science" translates into trust the experts and authorities. Authorities do not always have your best interest at heart. "Trust the Science" coming out of the mouths of politicians is especially questionable. Politicians are not known to make scientifically sound decisions.
cde-v 5y ago
Because simple supply and demand rules apply. If there is a demand for corrupted scientific studies there will be a supply.
brandonmenc 5y ago
Science can't answer questions like: "Is it OK to curb freedoms and force medical procedures in order to save a million people?" "Trust the science" people either think we all agree on those questions or they believe that their positions are the correct ones. Also, "trust the science" used to mean things like "electroshock your abnormally behaving child." It's hard to fault people for a lack of trust.
- hnaccount141 5y ago
  This is critical. Public policy cannot and should not be based purely on science. Science can give us hints as to how me might be able to optimize for certain things, but it can't tell us what things to optimize for. That's a question of values.
  - brandonmenc 5y ago
    Unfortunately, the enforced values are being dictated by technocrats who subscribe to scientism and utilitarianism and value "safety" above everything else.
rhema 5y ago
It would be easier to "trust the science" for the plebs out there if they felt that institutions valued their needs. Insulin could cost $15 per vial, but they can cost $300. The financial institutions (see 2008 crash) caused no problems for leaders of institutions. When I hear someone say "trust the science", I hear, "institutions have worked out for me so far". As much as we wish it were based on rational belief, it is almost certainly personal experience. George Carlin was right: "they" want you to be smart enough to keep the system moving, but too dumb to see how inequitable the system is. EDIT: Addressing the "that's just capitalism, not science" point. You can't really separate the funding from institutions from the products / science. Governments limit the possible research that can be done, media brings in attention and recognition, universities placate their owners (corporate, government, academic, investors). None of the institutions are really motivated by what the base needs or wants apart from avoiding actual anarchy and chaos. It's not a conspiracy. It is power getting more power and power corrupting, quite naturally and with people making rational choices in their own self interest.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  Okay, look, science has some ups and downs but unless you expand its definition to include all components of modern society, it's not charging people $300 for insulin. That's a result of the various problems of the US medical system. We can check this claim by comparing the price of insulin in different countries, where science (being the same everywhere in the universe) is the same but business works differently.
  - mikeyouse 5y ago
    Right - "Trust the science" means that if your doctor prescribes you insulin for high blood sugar, it's likely to work and to help you live longer and healthier. There are political decisions that cause it to be ruinously expensive in the US. The messy bit is where science necessarily interacts with politics.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Doctor's prescriptions aren't really scientific although they are a lot more science-adjacent than price setting.
carlgreene 5y ago
Science is a process and is skeptical by its nature. “Science” isn’t some belief you hold.
- Supermancho 5y ago
  I respectfully disagree. The process is steeped in the belief that it will give you answers you can accept. It doesn't always, but there is a belief that it will eventually lead to a truth regardless.
  - mewpmewp2 5y ago
    What means "acceptance"? Scientific method if followed correctly should over a long period of time help you make better decisions. The answers you obtain could never be absolute, as a human you are always prone to failure of interpreting something wrongly. And the answer you find may not necessarily be correct, but just the best/most accurate at the time and completely wrong at the same time.
  - smegcicle 5y ago
    Science produces models which can be used to view and predict the world in different ways. The idea that models can represent 'truth' in an absolute way is anti-science, and anti-reality.
  - nobody9999 5y ago
    >I respectfully disagree. The process is steeped in the belief that it will give you answers you can accept. It doesn't always, but there is a belief that it will eventually lead to a truth regardless. That's a reasonable position. For myself, I'd modify that statement to read: The process is steeped in an understanding that the scientific method will give you results that inform us whether as to whether the theories and hypotheses that we use to describe the universe do so better than others. And there is a belief that such processes will eventually lead to a more precise description of the universe and its workings. I modified your statement, not because it's wrong, per se, but rather because of its imprecision. Experiment allows us to describe the universe with more precision, leading to greater understanding, not "truth," which implies an absolute. And science doesn't deal with absolutes, it deals with data, and the theories (in the scientific sense) that best fit that data.
janandonly 5y ago
Of course it is... All fields of science have dogma's. It's the very reason why science progresses one funeral at the time.... Also, no living soul has time to read all the papers that are pooped out by all the worlds scientists, so the shortcut is to fall back on "people in the known" AKA you can pick whom you want to believe. Of course a rational person will say he picked a source because trustworthiness, not because he or she liked that person...
- Tenoke 5y ago
  There are plenty of 'shortcuts' in between reading all possible papers and picking at random who to trust. E.g. reading only Meta-Analyses of RCTs or reading some and picking your experts based on those who also agree with what youve confirmed or looking at past record etc.
bally0241 5y ago
Science isn't based on trust. It's based on evidence. You may "trust" that someone's results are what they say they are, but they must be reproducible and independently verifiable. If they aren't then its bunk.
- Ginden 5y ago
  Even if your results are reproducible and independently verifiable, these results are open to interpretion. Will you publish "X is associated with Y", or "we observed weak correlation between X and Y in self-selected subgroups from already self-selected population"? Unfortunely, first approach dominates observational studies.
- dexwiz 5y ago
  Have you ever seen an atom? Have you ever had access to a Scanning Electron Microscope or equivalently advanced machinery to observe one? If not, you have had to put at least some level of faith in that they do exist.
  - sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
    that sounds more like religion to me, also people should have access to hacker spaces with electron microscopes the fact most don't is a failure
  - bally0241 5y ago
    No, I have not "seen" an atom. However, I have done experiments in a lab which have produced results which are consistent with atomic theory. There is no need to have faith in the cartoon model of an atom. All that matters is that the theory can be used to make predictions which can then be verified by experiment. The underlying "objective" nature of reality is immaterial.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    I trust people who claim X, then let me come and test every bit of X myself to see that it is correct, and then I go and test a few bits of X and see that the tests work, and everyone I know who did the same on different parts also got results agreeing with X. It is perfectly rational to believe X in this scenario even if I didn't test all of it myself. I don't trust people who claim Y, get angry whenever I try to test any part of Y, the few things I test about Y aren't true, the people I know who tested other things about Y also saw that they weren't true. It is perfectly rational to assume that Y is just nonsense in this scenario even if I didn't test all of it myself.
duxup 5y ago
Maybe it should be: "Trust the scientific method." You come up with an idea, TEST, see if it works, evaluate and so on. That tends to work out a great deal and has provided humanity with a lot of great things / protections we don't have to worry about / progress. It doesn't mean the outcomes are always optimal, but they're better than every other option if you keep at the process.
- deleted 5y ago
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- Tenoke 5y ago
  >You come up with an idea, TEST, see if it works, evaluate and so on. Sadly it's not so simple as most 'tests', papers etc. are crap even if they look reasonable on first glance.
  - duxup 5y ago
    And yet somehow progress is made. I don't think the gist of your statement makes much sense.
    - Tenoke 5y ago
      'Trusting the Science' isn't a discussion on how to drive progress as a researcher but how to evaluate it as an outsider.
      - duxup 5y ago
        The outcome of trusting that the scientific method has worked and works is relevant.
        Viliam1234 5y ago
        A part of the scientific method is trying to replicate studies... which is essentially an expression of distrust.
    - 5y ago
marginalia_nu 5y ago
Skepticism is the driving engine behind science. It works well so long as people keep asking questions until they get satisfactory answers. Science is anti-fragile. The harder you attack it, the sturdier it becomes. So this is fine. The only time it really stops working is if people start treating it as doctrine, and demanding that you accept it on faith, and take any questions as evidence that you are an enemy of science. If anything destroys science, it is this line of reasoning. Skepticism does not require a degree or a license from the government. The only intellectually honest thing is to admit to yourself that you do not know until you are convinced otherwise. Whether other people say they are convinced is honestly quite irrelevant.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  Problem is that science is sometimes expensive. Math usually is not, but physics sometimes requires building huge machines, and psychology requires giving questionnaires to thousands of people. You can check the logic of the study, but unless you have lots of money, you need to trust the data. If we no longer can trust the data, and don't have money to gather our own data... well, yes, then the only option is to admit that we don't know.
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    One thing Heather Heying talks about with some frequency is the bias in science towards "Big Science", that is, expensive science with complicated studies and huge funding requirements and expensive machinery. These are the things our scientific institutions prioritize and highlight. Science can be much cheaper, but nobody's interested in cheap science if it doesn't advance their careers. It's similar to how NASA was obsessed with putting people into space for a long time. That's basically adding a gigantic expense to the exploration of space. When they decided to stop all that shit and use robots and probes and leave the human out of it, the science of exploring space became much cheaper (relatively) and we got far more out of it.
- verall 5y ago
  What about bad-faith skepticism, like cigarettes-cause-cancer skeptics and global warming skeptics? From what I can see, good faith skepticism makes science sturdier, but in bad faith it seduces the less knowledgable and burns the time of the more knowledgeable. On the flipside, most flat earthers don't seem to be arguing in bad faith.
bastardoperator 5y ago
I don't trust science, I trust facts, testing, measurements and data which is what the scientific methods relies on to make assertions.
- cute_boi 5y ago
  sadly its not easy to digest every fact, testings, measurements and data. And many experiments takes either too much time, money or resource and at the end it might just be easy to accept other theories?
tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
You don't need to dig into philosophy and start talking about Karl Popper in order to explain the problem with "trusting the science". Science is and will always be our best shot at being correct about the universe, but it's performed by imperfect humans. There's very little we can know for certain, so we have to pick our poison - either trust strangers who claim to have done their research, or trust our own fallible instincts. I don't think there's a single correct answer to that question, but don't pretend like you're not choosing a poison. These "I believe in science" mantras are no more scientific than any other attitude.
- Retric 5y ago
  I don’t understand why you think your instincts would be just as valid an option? I mean if you’re accepting people can be wrong then assuming you’re more correct than large numbers of other people trying to find the truth seems obviously flawed. Sure science is flawed, but we don’t have a better option to fall back to. Consider people strongly objected to seatbelts and we still need to promote their use. Trusting your instincts means wallowing in exactly that kind of ignorance. Edited: before comments.
  - hammock 5y ago
    It's an interesting question. If those "large numbers of other people" were also following their own intuitions, you would have a strong point. However, if that large number of others was simply exhibiting groupthink, it significantly weakens your counterargument.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    We need both people who trust experts above their instincts and instincts above the experts. And since we need both you need to consider both behaviours just as valid. The problem with experts is that often they became experts by just trusting other experts, and going back the chain a bit all of that was just based on a single persons opinion a century ago.
    - Retric 5y ago
BitwiseFool 5y ago
I can't help but think the myopic way of arguing a position based on lobbing citations at each-other has contributed to this. Just because a study supports your position does not mean "The Science" is on your side, it literally just means a study was performed that reached the conclusion(s) you already wanted to support. The citation is trotted out without any of the meta that goes into actually analyzing the validity and significance of the studies themselves.
DanielBMarkham 5y ago
> However, as Michael Gordin, professor of the history of science at Princeton University, notes early on in his lively and thought-provoking survey of multiple dodgy and perhaps-not-as-dodgy-as-you-thought scientific areas, falsification invariably fails almost before it starts. How do you know that you’ve actually falsified a theory? Is getting a weird, unexpected result enough? I blogged about this thing a few months ago. We misunderstand Popper. Hell, Popper probably misunderstood his own ideas. Falsifiability works precisely because it's imprecise. It's not a bug, it's a feature. For more depth, obligatory link: https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-numberline-model-of-communication/ https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-...
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black6 5y ago
"...when President Trump proposed drinking bleach as a cure for COVID-19..." Never. Happened. Disingenuous comments like this are why institutional trust is at an all-time low.
- parrellel 5y ago
  When president trump suggested people inject some undefined disinfectant or shine UV lights up into their guts, then. That's more accurate, less of a ring to it of course.
  - sjwalter 5y ago
    This is absolutely false. Trump spoke about experimental covid therapeutics that involve shining UV lights inside patients' bodies, and these therapeutics are still purportedly under development and showing promising results to this very day. "The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Therapy, were based on five days of 20-minute treatments with ultraviolet A (UVA) light using a catheter inserted into the patients' tracheas." https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-seen-in-covid-19-patients-treated-with-uva-light/ https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-se... You have been proven totally wrong. Now, does your media-driven hatred of Trump trump your ability to admit you were wrong, and you've updated your beliefs, and you're ready to move on more educated than you were before you read this comment? If not, you lack the basics to make you able to engage with scientific thought.
    - parrellel 5y ago
      I just went back and watched the clip on YouTube again, so, no. No.
      - sjwalter 5y ago
        Link?
        5y ago
strangeattractr 5y ago
‘Trust the science’ is something generally said by people trying to get others to abide by their demands. In my experience there’s usually nothing scientific behind what they’re requesting. I see it said constantly where I live when people question the efficacy of some of the harshest COVID restrictions in the world including 9pm-5am curfews. For some it’s as though the utterances of our politicians have become ‘The Science’ in which we must believe.
lanevorockz 5y ago
Trust the Science is so silly that it shows the ignorance of those that speak it. Science by definition is an ever changing and refining process and the very process of studying is challenging settled science. Once, Einstein was called a lunatic, so was Hawking, so was ... Insert your favourite scientist here.
stonemetal12 5y ago
You mean all that p-hacked, mostly unreproducible pile of dreck that gets published these days? Yeah, trust isn't complicated it is the wrong thing to do. But mistrusting the science doesn't mean turning to the snake oil salesmen.
- zaik 5y ago
  > But mistrusting the science doesn't mean turning to the snake oil salesmen. Unfortunately those who 'mistrust science' usually do. Snake oil salesmen will sound trustworthy to them, because they also 'mistrust the science' (which happens to disagree about the usefulness of the product/opinion they are offering).
JALTU 5y ago
I'm paraphrasing, but a scientist on a podcast said something like, "Science is not about so-called 'facts' as much as it is about reducing the uncertainty of a hypothesis enough that you have a working model." ^This takes work, complicated work. And then humans, being human, can muck up the interpretation. And so on...
formerly_proven 5y ago
"Trust the Science" is pretty much just a dog whistle to call for censorship through "fact checkers", which deliver checked facts such as "Covid-19 did not leak from a laboratory" in early 2020. That even people with Ph.D.s fall for this just shows that we, as humans, really like a simpler world, a world with known facts and truths, where you don't have to check things because someone else already did it for you. However, this is not the world we live in. The world we live in is complex, messy, almost entirely made out of shades and very little black and white. Most things are not known and won't be known. People telling and selling you things as fact are invariably acting on agendas. Scientific consensus is not a fixed thing, and concerning many questions it is not a thing at all. The closest thing you can do is "trusting the scientific method", but that is very, very different from what "Trust the Science" means.
- drdeadringer 5y ago
  What science should we not be trusting? All of it? Some things and not others? Which things? Which others? Do I take your word for it? Do I not take your word for it? Do you see how I've watched 'Reading Rainbow' in questioning you like this?
  - deleted 5y ago
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- depaya 5y ago
  A credible fact check would not state "Covid-19 did not leak from a laboratory" - it would state "There is no evidence that shows Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory." Back in early 2020 the "evidence" to which people were pointing was the fact that there was a lab researching coronavirus in Wuhan, and... general conspiracy nonsense. If over time actual evidence emerges that there was a potential lab leak, that doesn't in any way vindicate people making baseless claims early in the pandemic.
  - dionidium 5y ago
    > "There is no evidence that shows Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory." But this, too, is complicated, because despite what people say on Twitter, as humans we actually can reason from first principles, assign probabilities, and discount or promote less or more likely explanations -- especially when hard evidence isn't forthcoming. When there's "no evidence" for something, that doesn't mean all explanations are equally likely.
cletus 5y ago
Here's the problem: 1. Science is a process. If you've ever seen the typical graph explaining the scientific method it's important to note that it's a loop. Science is iterative; 2. I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of falsifiability here as making predictions that can be proven wrong. The essence of scientific theory is to make testable predictions, that is the theory can be used to make predictions that can be experimentally tested. Scientific theories are never proven right per se, at least not without making assumptions. They simply become accepted given enough of a track record of testable predictions and continued failure to find a counterexample; 3. By (2), creationism clearly isn't science. It makes no testable predictions. Efforts to conflate creationism as science continue the long losing trend of religion pitting itself against science (eg Capernicus, Galileo) and it's not science; 4. There are an awful lot of people who don't understand or have no interest in understanding that science is a process and are merely looking for confirmation of what they already believe. These people tend to reject anything that contradicts their world view; 5. In the US in particular, there is a long history of anti-intellectualism that's deeply tied to religion; and 6. Ironically, the people who reject accepted science are typically the most easily manipulated by religious dogma, jingoism or the like; and 7. There are people who are quite willing to manipulate others for financial gain and/or power. It's why every living president, all but ~3 Senators, all but a handful of Congresspeople, all governors and the likes of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are all vaccinated but continue to fan the flames of anti-vaxxers for their own gain.
- iammisc 5y ago
  > Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are all vaccinated but continue to fan the flames of anti-vaxxers for their own gain. Sean Hannity has continuously supported vaccines (has unequivocally stated he thinks they're the best way to deal with the pandemic); he's just against mandates, and believes you should speak with your own doctor about them. If that's being an anti-vaxxer, then most people are.
  - cletus 5y ago
    It's a milder position than Tucker Carlson but Hannity also pushed hydrochloroquine.
serverholic 5y ago
Speaking of trusting science, I have a bone to pick with the "soft" sciences like psychology, and sociology. These sciences are much more open to interpretation than, say, physics. Yet people will link research papers in these fields and push them as 100% fact without thinking critically about these papers. Let's say that your paper claims "X reduces negative behaviors in children such as aggression". In my experience on Reddit and Hacker News, people will link papers like this and claim you are anti-science for questioning anything. Yet there are some important questions that should be answered like: "How do you even measure aggression?" "Did X also reduce assertiveness (which is linked to aggression)?" "Is aggression always a negative behavior? Who decided this was an appropriate classification?" "Holistically, is this a better outcome overall or were there drawbacks to doing X?" It's to the point where I have serious doubts about the validity of papers in soft science fields. Unless of course your paper measures something directly like serotonin levels.
xaduha 5y ago
United (sic) States of America is full of people who think that they know better. If no matter what question or problem comes up you have an answer ready, then your problem isn't with science, you have a problem with logic.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  Can you list countries in which this type of person doesn't exist?
  - pumaontheprowl 5y ago
    North Korea.
  - xaduha 5y ago
    It's a quantity turning into quality type of situation.
stevefrench93 5y ago
"Trust the Science" is the product of well funded social scientists who leveraged focus groups to determine the phrase effectively targeted people who already align themselves with the myriad of establishment pitch men - Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Trevor Noah, et al. Same as (ironically) "My body, my choice." "Trust the Science" is merely a proxy for "Believe in and defend the Neoliberal agenda against scientific criticism". If you're still uncritical of it, you might want to start reading the science. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7 "At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases..."
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  > Across the US counties too, the median new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the categories of percent population fully vaccinated (Fig. 2) Am I looking at the wrong graph? There is a clear downward trend from 35-40% to the 70%+ categories. I am not sure why looking at the median county is better than just grouping all the counties in each category and looking at the cases per 100k, but looking at the latter (which the authors provide as a link [0]), and the latest available date (7 day period ending October 8th) the number of cases per 100k is 110 in the 70%+ group of counties, and it's 220+ for any group of counties with less than 55% vaccination rate. Having twice as many cases per capita (ignoring all the other factors on how densely populated the counties with higher vaccination rates are, etc.) for every county under 50% vaccination rate compared to the ones with 70%+ vaccination rate is "largely similar"? [0] https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZGE1NDBmZTctYWUyZi00NTBjLWE2NDYtODM0NjE1NjE3NzVjIiwidCI6ImU2NzkwZmI5LTM0NzQtNDViMC1hOWUyLWM3NTQ5MzEyYTAxZSJ9 https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZGE1NDBmZTctYWUyZi00N... EDIT: Also of relevance, is the fact that the country data is from September 3rd, when Israel was at the peak of cases with the delta variant. Israel is far from having vaccinated a large enough fraction of the population to achieve "herd immunity" (just 63% fully vaccinated, Portugal has 86% for example) [1]. Another confounding factor is that Israel was one of the first countries to vaccinate a large number of people, which means the effectiveness of the vaccine is now declining compared to countries that vaccinated later. They have administered booster shots to vulnerable populations [2] and the rates of covid infections have (as expected) dropped precipitously. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina... [2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-virologist-says-delta-defeated-predicts-6-months-of-covid-quiet-for-israel/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-virologist-says-delta-defe...
mswtk 5y ago
Fundamentally, a lot of knowledge we possess as individuals is socially constructed, in the sense that we trust the process and the institutions that created it. Even if this knowledge can, in principle, be verified, it is usually impractical for an individual to do so. Putting science aside, how can I be confident that the basic facts presented in, say, a NYT article, are correct? I can trust the reputation of the NYT as an institution, and I can also trust that any inaccuracies in the article will be called out by other publications. But if I feel everyone's in on a conspiracy to push a particular viewpoint, then I need to anchor my knowledge in a different institutional framework - even if that might just be a random Facebook group of strangers, or my weird uncle, or a niche radio station. This, incidentally, is why the censorious push against "disinformation" is misguided in principle. It's sweeping the underlying problems under the rug in the hope that they disappear spontaneously. In an open society, truth can only be established as a result of public discourse, anything else is just the representation of the perspective and interests of some authority. Whatever its source, the seemingly growing distrust in public institutions will not disappear simply because we make social media companies remove its most obvious symptoms.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  I think the problem you describe-- of being unsure of the origins and level of distortion of one's information on its journey between "reality" and "perception" is an old problem, which is rather quickly being solved by transparent technology. It used to be that you had to trust the institution, because they were the best suited and capable to verify and validate the data and the individuals. Trust problems were both not publicized widely, and also did not have any obvious solutions. Today, we are technically capable of validating and verifying the entire chain of custody or traversal for any given piece of information, and the only thing missing is the infrastructure to do so. On the other hand, if an institution demonstrates untrustworthiness, it is difficult to conceal. I think that, more and more, we will demand to see the entire chain of creation and origin for a piece of information, and either validate it ourselves, or delegate that validation to a party we personally trust. That validation can then itself be validated with reputation. Imagine, for a minute, if an article came with a list of all the writers, contributors, scientists, interviewees, editors, etc., who contributed to the article. And not only that, imagine you can see the entire social graph between you and those people. That is what the future looks like, IMO.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Any health related science is fraught because it is usually unethical to run the actual causal experiments. E.g. put people in closed rooms with various types of masks, release covid virus in the air, measure death rate, etc.
tenpoundhammer 5y ago
I haven't seen this comment yet, so here we go. I live in a rural community of about 15,000 people, attend church, and sports for my kids and generally spend a lot of time with people in the community. These are people who don't trust the science. They aren't stupid, they aren't uneducated, and they mostly aren't believing radical misinformation. There are two really important things to consider though. 1. They don't have experience with Science or Statistics. Outside of a high school classroom 20 or more years ago. [It's easy to get through college without any meaningful science education] 2. They have been screwed by the medical system, government, and economy. Their decision making and behavior is primarily driven off of their intuition and second hand information from people they trust. The vast majority of unvaccinated people that I know don't believe in microchips or that the vaccine will kill them. They just think they don't need it cause they aren't at risk or because they have already developed natural immunity. Some of them are right and some of them wrong. They are just people and doing the best they can.
- pedrosorio 5y ago
  > they aren't uneducated > They don't have experience with Science or Statistics (...) It's easy to get through college without any meaningful science education Maybe understanding science/statistics needs to be higher on the list of criteria used to determine if someone is "educated".
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Only if we want to exclude 99.5% of people. Plenty of successful scientists are also bad at statistics.
- deleted 5y ago
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andybak 5y ago
I'm only a few paragraphs in but I'm already a bit confused by the way the author seems to use "falsifiable" and "falsified" interchangably when it is the former not the latter that is critical to Popper's definition. What matters is that you make a claim that has the potential to be tested. i.e. there exists an observation that could potentially contradict your claim. And if this observation arises, the result is that the hypothesis has an opportunity to refine itself and the process continues. Newtonian mechanics were falsifiable, they were falsified in particular domains (the very small and the very large) and now they have been refined as they are still applicable given certain contraints.
RattleyCooper 5y ago
Trusting science == faith. I'm pretty sure that's antithetical to real science.
jollybean 5y ago
Policy, particularly things like Public Health Policy, is not the same thing as Science. Trusting the Science means something completely different in the domain of socializing information.
sega_sai 5y ago
I am a scientist myself (obviously in one narrow field) and my approach to trusting the science is that unless I can myself evaluate the evidence, data, analyses, I'll trust the scientific consensus. I will not necessarily trust single papers, as people may make mistakes, be dishonest etc. Obviously the scientific consensus may also turn out to be wrong (it happened before), but realistically it's unlikely that I'll have unique knowledge to find this out myself not being expert, so 'trusting' the consensus is my approach. Also in rare cases where I can actually read and understand the paper outside of my field that may or may not increase or decrease the belief in its correctness. Realistically outside my field of expertise I'll be only able to see things like dodgy statistical methods, small number statistics, crappy plots which are clues of untrustworthy results, but not proofs.
- unanswered 5y ago
  This doesn't really answer anything, though, because you don't have direct access to "The Consensus". How do you determine what the consensus is? Media reports? Whichever points come up most often on forums? Whatever points are most often reported in journal articles? The point reported in the journal article you most recently saw?
- bwanab 5y ago
  I wish I could upvote this enough times to get it to the top. This is the rational approach to any system of belief in which you yourself can’t reliably confirm or disprove the conclusions.
  - pessimizer 5y ago
    Step 1: Be a scientist.
ravenstine 5y ago
Trusting science is antithetical to science.
jccalhoun 5y ago
It is a complicated subject. I teach college and I try to include some media literacy. We tell them to be skeptical but then they say "you can't trust the media" but then they believe every stupid conspiracy that confirms their biases and then in papers they cite "google" because they can't be bothered to take the time to figure out where something actually comes from. (This literally happened in one of my classes yesterday.)
efitz 5y ago
When people tell me to “trust the science” they are usually trying to convince me to a political point of view. Real scientists don’t say that during discussions about science. “Trust the science” is a dismissive statement intended to terminate discussion/dissent and denigrate the dissenter as a simpleton.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A... https://www.google.com/search?q=thought+terminating+cliche https://www.google.com/search?q=thought+terminating+cliche
- president 5y ago
  In colloquial conversation where most lay people have no scientific background it basically means "trust me, I heard it on TV".
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rob_c 5y ago
Yep this started with last mistakes in the evolution of sciences and moved onto attack something about modern studies and covid... I'm fairly sure the goalposts moved here somewhat...
rmah 5y ago
I think one issue is that many people seem to conflate believing the opposite with being skeptical of the positive. They are not the same thing. Being skeptical that a vaccine is safe enough for mass use is not the same as believing that a vaccine is not safe enough for mass use. Being skeptical that climate change is primarily caused by man is not the same as believing that climate change is not caused by man. Skepticism is fine. Belief in an opposite without evidence is not fine.
mcguire 5y ago
"It is not quite sufficient, in answering this question, to point to a near-consensus on the part of the scientific community, thus in effect arguing that science is what the vast majority of scientists say it is. If this is largely how the argument does indeed function in the cases of debates about the safety of vaccines or the causes of global warming, we should nonetheless be aware of its flaws." "If an elderly, respected scientist tells you something is possible, he is very likely right. If he tells you something is impossible, he is likely wrong." --- An old SF fandom saying. If a ginormous herd of scientists tell you something, possible or impossible, they may not be right but that is the way you want to place your bets. [Edit] "But there are broad guidelines that could help. We might insist, for example, that those wishing to challenge the scientific consensus do their homework, demonstrating a competent (but not necessarily expert) understanding of the theories and empirical data they wish to displace. We might require that they have reasonable arguments concerning the theory or data’s flaws that do not presuppose, as some anti-vaccine arguments do, the existence of a large-scale conspiracy to distort the truth. And we would be well within our rights to demand that they argue in good faith and not — as historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have shown for many climate change denialists — as professional water-muddiers, following a playbook first written by cigarette companies attempting to obfuscate a known connection between smoking and cancer." Ooh, I like that.
CWuestefeld 5y ago
It seems to me that the biggest problem today isn't misunderstanding science, but misapplying science. Folks seem to come up with formulations like "science says that X causes Y, and thus we must do Z". Regardless of what you might fill into those letters, the statement is a fallacy. Anyone who believes that policy can directly flow from science is mistaken. It's the job of science to make predictions: if these circumstances occur, we can expect the outcome to look like that. But this says nothing - can say nothing - in judgment of how good or bad that outcome is. To create policy, we must weigh the costs and benefits of the various expected outcomes. That's not a scientific exercise, it flows only from our values as individuals and as a society. So if you're interesting in bringing about a particular policy, or forestalling a different one, the way to do this is by making your case for relative values of the outcomes that science predicts - not to hoodwink people into believing something other than what the science predicts. Examples of such misapplication: * Science shows that the climate is changing, caused by human action, such that in 50 years, some coastal cities will have ground level below high tide. Therefore we must do everything possible to limit CO2 emissions. * Science says that after (whatever) weeks gestation, a human baby could be viable outside the womb. Therefore we must forbid abortions after that term. In both these examples, a value judgment is being smuggled in that imposes unacknowledged values into the situation. Those values have nothing to do with science, and so the conclusion is a-scientific. (That's not to say that either of the conclusions is wrong given some values, including possibly the prevailing cultural values. But assuming that is so is certainly anti-scientific.)
- apatters 5y ago
  We need to get away from the idea of "the Science" altogether because it's an incomplete abstraction and prone to corruption. What is valuable are specific principles like dedeuctive reasoning and the scientific method, upon which we've built our greatest achievements as a species. Trusting "the Science" without understanding what that really means is basically just another form of religion, complete with its own priesthood and people who demand that whatever the priests say must be taken on faith because it's moral and good. Philosophers have observed that this blind belief in "the Science" is actually worse than belief in religion. Because while religion roots its authority in the divine (which either doesn't exist or chooses not to get directly involved), the church of Science roots its authority in men. Men declare a truth and a morality based on what they claim to be scientific, then go on to commit atrocities they rationalize from it. The greatest mass murderers in history were atheists like Stalin and Mao. They were the little gods of their own secular personality cults and they committed genocide on a scale that had never before been seen.
AlbertCory 5y ago
L’science, c’est moi (Fauci) Fauci has done more damage to "science" than any 100 religious authorities ever did. The above quote is pretty much what he said when he claimed people criticizing him are criticizing science. One of the most important things for a scientist to say in public is "Just look at what I wrote; I'm not important."
helen___keller 5y ago
From a meta point of view, it's a bit wild to be living in a point of history where people actively debate where our trusted source of truth should exist. For most of human history you didn't get many options. Before the printing press, King and God were the roots of trust and truth, because churches and states were the only ones with the power to disseminate information reliably on a regional, national, or global scale. The printing press added newspapers as potential roots of trust. Then radio stations. Then TV stations. Still, with limited papers and channels, and large barriers to entry, institutions arose and the status quo was not too much changed. Now we have an eruption of information as anybody can create a massive following for any idea with sufficient effort. The implications of this have yet to be realized. One thing is for sure: You can't really trust the science. Definitely not the media. And certainly not whoever you follow on Youtube, the links you see on HN/Reddit, or the posts shared on Facebook. It's hard to say you can know anything for sure these days.
650 5y ago
For me the 'science' and covid related issue comes down to the major point of risk perception. In the early days, there were videos of people collapsing on the streets in Wuhan, and the disease was thought to be extremely deadly with a CFR of 10%+(1). As the months went by we realized its not really dangerous at all to kids, with death and hospitalization rates extremely tilted towards the elderly and obese. The main insight I have is that say we found out COVID or one of its variants had a 30%+ death/hospitalization rate as the months went on. I firmly believe more people would get vaccinated due to the obvious severity of it. This current ~1% IFR is at a point such that some think its not deadly enough to warrant the hypocritical restrictions and mandates, and some believe that it is. Lets say on the other hand that as the months went by, we discovered COVID had a 0.000001% IFR. 1 out of a hundred million people that caught it died. [assume long COVID does not exist]. We could see that ~50-100 people would die worldwide. I think most people would call you foolish if given this IFR, had you been calling for continued mass restrictions. We are at an inflection point such that we have vaccines, we have mandates, we have restrictions, yet some clamour it isn't enough, while others clamour its too much. These all are based around the perceived deadliness, not the true deadliness of COVID. (1) - I don't recall the exact number
egberts1 5y ago
“Trusting the science” AS A FACTUAL BASIS requires a trustable process that is clearly documentable, repeatable, recreatable, reprovable, and verifiable. Anything else not factual may be called “science”, “healthy skepticism“, or “common knowledge”; and that is easily misguidable by the few in the know. Looking at you, PolSci, Econ101, and pyschobabble.

177 points by robtherobber 5y ago

Half of nutrition science is completely bogus. Just look at what's in the supermarkets today. From there, it's difficult to have any trust in science at all. I can't blame people.

ABS 5y ago

it's complicated because it's probably moot: we should learn, teach, spread and support "the scientific method" rather than anyone's "science"

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
All this will accomplish is people that wear "I believe in science" shirts will instead wear "I believe in the scientific method" shirts but unless there's an actual behavioral change, all you've done is add a bit more ink to a piece of cotton. The message is good but if it isn't accompanied by an actual behavioral change, it's worthless.
rmah 5y ago
When I was a child, we were taught the scientific method multiple times through middle-school and high-school. Is this really no longer the case? I really doubt it is.
emerongi 5y ago
Well, at some level you do just need to trust someone's "science", otherwise you can only rely on your own empirical evidence.
shkkmo 5y ago
We absolutely must teach science, it is frankly ridiculous to assert that we should only teach the scientific method and assume everything else will follow from that. It has taken millions of people hundreds of years to establish the corpus of scientific knowledge and understanding that knowledge is critical to advancing that knowledge or disproving it. We could do a better job of teaching the science alongside the history of the process of its discovery and validation and incorporate actually reading scientific papers rather than just textbooks. We can emphasize science as an ongoing process rather than simply a "just so" story, but we absolutely have to teach its results and not just the methodology.
- ABS 5y ago
  I agree! I guess it's a good thing then that I did not write anywhere that we should only teach the scientific method :-) I made a statement about the argument (and title) of the article we are commenting, it doesn't automatically assert that everything else I'm not mentioning is not important/valid or should not be done at all.
  - shkkmo 5y ago
    The argument that article is making is a general argument about the philosophy of science and the types of demarcations between science and pseudoscience or fringe science. As such, it seems wholey reasonable to infer that you were making a general statement about how science education (particularly with the phrase: anyone's "science".) Since that was not your intent, what exactly were you trying to say? Which specific "sciences" are you advocating should not be taught and should be replaced by only teaching the scientific method?

incrudible 5y ago

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts" ~ Richard Feynman

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ourmandave 5y ago
As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, “Science teaches such and such,” he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, “Science has shown such and such,” you might ask, “How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?” It should not be “science has shown” but “this experiment, this effect, has shown.” And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments–but be patient and listen to all the evidence–to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. http://www.feynman.com/science/what-is-science/ http://www.feynman.com/science/what-is-science/

testfoobar 5y ago

In general to the lay person "Trust The Science" translates into trust the experts and authorities. Authorities do not always have your best interest at heart. "Trust the Science" coming out of the mouths of politicians is especially questionable. Politicians are not known to make scientifically sound decisions.

cde-v 5y ago

Because simple supply and demand rules apply. If there is a demand for corrupted scientific studies there will be a supply.

brandonmenc 5y ago

Science can't answer questions like: "Is it OK to curb freedoms and force medical procedures in order to save a million people?" "Trust the science" people either think we all agree on those questions or they believe that their positions are the correct ones. Also, "trust the science" used to mean things like "electroshock your abnormally behaving child." It's hard to fault people for a lack of trust.

hnaccount141 5y ago
This is critical. Public policy cannot and should not be based purely on science. Science can give us hints as to how me might be able to optimize for certain things, but it can't tell us what things to optimize for. That's a question of values.
- brandonmenc 5y ago
  Unfortunately, the enforced values are being dictated by technocrats who subscribe to scientism and utilitarianism and value "safety" above everything else.

rhema 5y ago

It would be easier to "trust the science" for the plebs out there if they felt that institutions valued their needs. Insulin could cost $15 per vial, but they can cost $300. The financial institutions (see 2008 crash) caused no problems for leaders of institutions. When I hear someone say "trust the science", I hear, "institutions have worked out for me so far". As much as we wish it were based on rational belief, it is almost certainly personal experience. George Carlin was right: "they" want you to be smart enough to keep the system moving, but too dumb to see how inequitable the system is. EDIT: Addressing the "that's just capitalism, not science" point. You can't really separate the funding from institutions from the products / science. Governments limit the possible research that can be done, media brings in attention and recognition, universities placate their owners (corporate, government, academic, investors). None of the institutions are really motivated by what the base needs or wants apart from avoiding actual anarchy and chaos. It's not a conspiracy. It is power getting more power and power corrupting, quite naturally and with people making rational choices in their own self interest.

whatshisface 5y ago
Okay, look, science has some ups and downs but unless you expand its definition to include all components of modern society, it's not charging people $300 for insulin. That's a result of the various problems of the US medical system. We can check this claim by comparing the price of insulin in different countries, where science (being the same everywhere in the universe) is the same but business works differently.
- mikeyouse 5y ago
  Right - "Trust the science" means that if your doctor prescribes you insulin for high blood sugar, it's likely to work and to help you live longer and healthier. There are political decisions that cause it to be ruinously expensive in the US. The messy bit is where science necessarily interacts with politics.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Doctor's prescriptions aren't really scientific although they are a lot more science-adjacent than price setting.

carlgreene 5y ago

Science is a process and is skeptical by its nature. “Science” isn’t some belief you hold.

Supermancho 5y ago
I respectfully disagree. The process is steeped in the belief that it will give you answers you can accept. It doesn't always, but there is a belief that it will eventually lead to a truth regardless.
- mewpmewp2 5y ago
  What means "acceptance"? Scientific method if followed correctly should over a long period of time help you make better decisions. The answers you obtain could never be absolute, as a human you are always prone to failure of interpreting something wrongly. And the answer you find may not necessarily be correct, but just the best/most accurate at the time and completely wrong at the same time.
- smegcicle 5y ago
  Science produces models which can be used to view and predict the world in different ways. The idea that models can represent 'truth' in an absolute way is anti-science, and anti-reality.
- nobody9999 5y ago
  >I respectfully disagree. The process is steeped in the belief that it will give you answers you can accept. It doesn't always, but there is a belief that it will eventually lead to a truth regardless. That's a reasonable position. For myself, I'd modify that statement to read: The process is steeped in an understanding that the scientific method will give you results that inform us whether as to whether the theories and hypotheses that we use to describe the universe do so better than others. And there is a belief that such processes will eventually lead to a more precise description of the universe and its workings. I modified your statement, not because it's wrong, per se, but rather because of its imprecision. Experiment allows us to describe the universe with more precision, leading to greater understanding, not "truth," which implies an absolute. And science doesn't deal with absolutes, it deals with data, and the theories (in the scientific sense) that best fit that data.

janandonly 5y ago

Of course it is... All fields of science have dogma's. It's the very reason why science progresses one funeral at the time.... Also, no living soul has time to read all the papers that are pooped out by all the worlds scientists, so the shortcut is to fall back on "people in the known" AKA you can pick whom you want to believe. Of course a rational person will say he picked a source because trustworthiness, not because he or she liked that person...

Tenoke 5y ago
There are plenty of 'shortcuts' in between reading all possible papers and picking at random who to trust. E.g. reading only Meta-Analyses of RCTs or reading some and picking your experts based on those who also agree with what youve confirmed or looking at past record etc.

bally0241 5y ago

Science isn't based on trust. It's based on evidence. You may "trust" that someone's results are what they say they are, but they must be reproducible and independently verifiable. If they aren't then its bunk.

Ginden 5y ago
Even if your results are reproducible and independently verifiable, these results are open to interpretion. Will you publish "X is associated with Y", or "we observed weak correlation between X and Y in self-selected subgroups from already self-selected population"? Unfortunely, first approach dominates observational studies.
dexwiz 5y ago
Have you ever seen an atom? Have you ever had access to a Scanning Electron Microscope or equivalently advanced machinery to observe one? If not, you have had to put at least some level of faith in that they do exist.
- sorry_outta_gas 5y ago
  that sounds more like religion to me, also people should have access to hacker spaces with electron microscopes the fact most don't is a failure
- bally0241 5y ago
  No, I have not "seen" an atom. However, I have done experiments in a lab which have produced results which are consistent with atomic theory. There is no need to have faith in the cartoon model of an atom. All that matters is that the theory can be used to make predictions which can then be verified by experiment. The underlying "objective" nature of reality is immaterial.
- Jensson 5y ago
  I trust people who claim X, then let me come and test every bit of X myself to see that it is correct, and then I go and test a few bits of X and see that the tests work, and everyone I know who did the same on different parts also got results agreeing with X. It is perfectly rational to believe X in this scenario even if I didn't test all of it myself. I don't trust people who claim Y, get angry whenever I try to test any part of Y, the few things I test about Y aren't true, the people I know who tested other things about Y also saw that they weren't true. It is perfectly rational to assume that Y is just nonsense in this scenario even if I didn't test all of it myself.

duxup 5y ago

Maybe it should be: "Trust the scientific method." You come up with an idea, TEST, see if it works, evaluate and so on. That tends to work out a great deal and has provided humanity with a lot of great things / protections we don't have to worry about / progress. It doesn't mean the outcomes are always optimal, but they're better than every other option if you keep at the process.

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Tenoke 5y ago
>You come up with an idea, TEST, see if it works, evaluate and so on. Sadly it's not so simple as most 'tests', papers etc. are crap even if they look reasonable on first glance.
- duxup 5y ago
  And yet somehow progress is made. I don't think the gist of your statement makes much sense.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    'Trusting the Science' isn't a discussion on how to drive progress as a researcher but how to evaluate it as an outsider.
    - duxup 5y ago
      The outcome of trusting that the scientific method has worked and works is relevant.
      - Viliam1234 5y ago
        A part of the scientific method is trying to replicate studies... which is essentially an expression of distrust.
  - 5y ago

marginalia_nu 5y ago

Skepticism is the driving engine behind science. It works well so long as people keep asking questions until they get satisfactory answers. Science is anti-fragile. The harder you attack it, the sturdier it becomes. So this is fine. The only time it really stops working is if people start treating it as doctrine, and demanding that you accept it on faith, and take any questions as evidence that you are an enemy of science. If anything destroys science, it is this line of reasoning. Skepticism does not require a degree or a license from the government. The only intellectually honest thing is to admit to yourself that you do not know until you are convinced otherwise. Whether other people say they are convinced is honestly quite irrelevant.

Viliam1234 5y ago
Problem is that science is sometimes expensive. Math usually is not, but physics sometimes requires building huge machines, and psychology requires giving questionnaires to thousands of people. You can check the logic of the study, but unless you have lots of money, you need to trust the data. If we no longer can trust the data, and don't have money to gather our own data... well, yes, then the only option is to admit that we don't know.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  One thing Heather Heying talks about with some frequency is the bias in science towards "Big Science", that is, expensive science with complicated studies and huge funding requirements and expensive machinery. These are the things our scientific institutions prioritize and highlight. Science can be much cheaper, but nobody's interested in cheap science if it doesn't advance their careers. It's similar to how NASA was obsessed with putting people into space for a long time. That's basically adding a gigantic expense to the exploration of space. When they decided to stop all that shit and use robots and probes and leave the human out of it, the science of exploring space became much cheaper (relatively) and we got far more out of it.
verall 5y ago
What about bad-faith skepticism, like cigarettes-cause-cancer skeptics and global warming skeptics? From what I can see, good faith skepticism makes science sturdier, but in bad faith it seduces the less knowledgable and burns the time of the more knowledgeable. On the flipside, most flat earthers don't seem to be arguing in bad faith.

bastardoperator 5y ago

I don't trust science, I trust facts, testing, measurements and data which is what the scientific methods relies on to make assertions.

cute_boi 5y ago
sadly its not easy to digest every fact, testings, measurements and data. And many experiments takes either too much time, money or resource and at the end it might just be easy to accept other theories?

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago

You don't need to dig into philosophy and start talking about Karl Popper in order to explain the problem with "trusting the science". Science is and will always be our best shot at being correct about the universe, but it's performed by imperfect humans. There's very little we can know for certain, so we have to pick our poison - either trust strangers who claim to have done their research, or trust our own fallible instincts. I don't think there's a single correct answer to that question, but don't pretend like you're not choosing a poison. These "I believe in science" mantras are no more scientific than any other attitude.

Retric 5y ago
I don’t understand why you think your instincts would be just as valid an option? I mean if you’re accepting people can be wrong then assuming you’re more correct than large numbers of other people trying to find the truth seems obviously flawed. Sure science is flawed, but we don’t have a better option to fall back to. Consider people strongly objected to seatbelts and we still need to promote their use. Trusting your instincts means wallowing in exactly that kind of ignorance. Edited: before comments.
- hammock 5y ago
  It's an interesting question. If those "large numbers of other people" were also following their own intuitions, you would have a strong point. However, if that large number of others was simply exhibiting groupthink, it significantly weakens your counterargument.
- Jensson 5y ago
  We need both people who trust experts above their instincts and instincts above the experts. And since we need both you need to consider both behaviours just as valid. The problem with experts is that often they became experts by just trusting other experts, and going back the chain a bit all of that was just based on a single persons opinion a century ago.
  - Retric 5y ago

BitwiseFool 5y ago

I can't help but think the myopic way of arguing a position based on lobbing citations at each-other has contributed to this. Just because a study supports your position does not mean "The Science" is on your side, it literally just means a study was performed that reached the conclusion(s) you already wanted to support. The citation is trotted out without any of the meta that goes into actually analyzing the validity and significance of the studies themselves.

DanielBMarkham 5y ago

> However, as Michael Gordin, professor of the history of science at Princeton University, notes early on in his lively and thought-provoking survey of multiple dodgy and perhaps-not-as-dodgy-as-you-thought scientific areas, falsification invariably fails almost before it starts. How do you know that you’ve actually falsified a theory? Is getting a weird, unexpected result enough? I blogged about this thing a few months ago. We misunderstand Popper. Hell, Popper probably misunderstood his own ideas. Falsifiability works precisely because it's imprecise. It's not a bug, it's a feature. For more depth, obligatory link: https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-numberline-model-of-communication/ https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-...

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black6 5y ago

"...when President Trump proposed drinking bleach as a cure for COVID-19..." Never. Happened. Disingenuous comments like this are why institutional trust is at an all-time low.

parrellel 5y ago
When president trump suggested people inject some undefined disinfectant or shine UV lights up into their guts, then. That's more accurate, less of a ring to it of course.
- sjwalter 5y ago
  This is absolutely false. Trump spoke about experimental covid therapeutics that involve shining UV lights inside patients' bodies, and these therapeutics are still purportedly under development and showing promising results to this very day. "The findings, published in the peer-reviewed journal Advances in Therapy, were based on five days of 20-minute treatments with ultraviolet A (UVA) light using a catheter inserted into the patients' tracheas." https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-seen-in-covid-19-patients-treated-with-uva-light/ https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/reduced-viral-loads-se... You have been proven totally wrong. Now, does your media-driven hatred of Trump trump your ability to admit you were wrong, and you've updated your beliefs, and you're ready to move on more educated than you were before you read this comment? If not, you lack the basics to make you able to engage with scientific thought.
  - parrellel 5y ago
    I just went back and watched the clip on YouTube again, so, no. No.
    - sjwalter 5y ago
      Link?
      - 5y ago

strangeattractr 5y ago

‘Trust the science’ is something generally said by people trying to get others to abide by their demands. In my experience there’s usually nothing scientific behind what they’re requesting. I see it said constantly where I live when people question the efficacy of some of the harshest COVID restrictions in the world including 9pm-5am curfews. For some it’s as though the utterances of our politicians have become ‘The Science’ in which we must believe.

lanevorockz 5y ago

Trust the Science is so silly that it shows the ignorance of those that speak it. Science by definition is an ever changing and refining process and the very process of studying is challenging settled science. Once, Einstein was called a lunatic, so was Hawking, so was ... Insert your favourite scientist here.

stonemetal12 5y ago

You mean all that p-hacked, mostly unreproducible pile of dreck that gets published these days? Yeah, trust isn't complicated it is the wrong thing to do. But mistrusting the science doesn't mean turning to the snake oil salesmen.

zaik 5y ago
> But mistrusting the science doesn't mean turning to the snake oil salesmen. Unfortunately those who 'mistrust science' usually do. Snake oil salesmen will sound trustworthy to them, because they also 'mistrust the science' (which happens to disagree about the usefulness of the product/opinion they are offering).

JALTU 5y ago

I'm paraphrasing, but a scientist on a podcast said something like, "Science is not about so-called 'facts' as much as it is about reducing the uncertainty of a hypothesis enough that you have a working model." ^This takes work, complicated work. And then humans, being human, can muck up the interpretation. And so on...

formerly_proven 5y ago

"Trust the Science" is pretty much just a dog whistle to call for censorship through "fact checkers", which deliver checked facts such as "Covid-19 did not leak from a laboratory" in early 2020. That even people with Ph.D.s fall for this just shows that we, as humans, really like a simpler world, a world with known facts and truths, where you don't have to check things because someone else already did it for you. However, this is not the world we live in. The world we live in is complex, messy, almost entirely made out of shades and very little black and white. Most things are not known and won't be known. People telling and selling you things as fact are invariably acting on agendas. Scientific consensus is not a fixed thing, and concerning many questions it is not a thing at all. The closest thing you can do is "trusting the scientific method", but that is very, very different from what "Trust the Science" means.

drdeadringer 5y ago
What science should we not be trusting? All of it? Some things and not others? Which things? Which others? Do I take your word for it? Do I not take your word for it? Do you see how I've watched 'Reading Rainbow' in questioning you like this?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
depaya 5y ago
A credible fact check would not state "Covid-19 did not leak from a laboratory" - it would state "There is no evidence that shows Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory." Back in early 2020 the "evidence" to which people were pointing was the fact that there was a lab researching coronavirus in Wuhan, and... general conspiracy nonsense. If over time actual evidence emerges that there was a potential lab leak, that doesn't in any way vindicate people making baseless claims early in the pandemic.
- dionidium 5y ago
  > "There is no evidence that shows Covid-19 leaked from a laboratory." But this, too, is complicated, because despite what people say on Twitter, as humans we actually can reason from first principles, assign probabilities, and discount or promote less or more likely explanations -- especially when hard evidence isn't forthcoming. When there's "no evidence" for something, that doesn't mean all explanations are equally likely.

cletus 5y ago

Here's the problem: 1. Science is a process. If you've ever seen the typical graph explaining the scientific method it's important to note that it's a loop. Science is iterative; 2. I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of falsifiability here as making predictions that can be proven wrong. The essence of scientific theory is to make testable predictions, that is the theory can be used to make predictions that can be experimentally tested. Scientific theories are never proven right per se, at least not without making assumptions. They simply become accepted given enough of a track record of testable predictions and continued failure to find a counterexample; 3. By (2), creationism clearly isn't science. It makes no testable predictions. Efforts to conflate creationism as science continue the long losing trend of religion pitting itself against science (eg Capernicus, Galileo) and it's not science; 4. There are an awful lot of people who don't understand or have no interest in understanding that science is a process and are merely looking for confirmation of what they already believe. These people tend to reject anything that contradicts their world view; 5. In the US in particular, there is a long history of anti-intellectualism that's deeply tied to religion; and 6. Ironically, the people who reject accepted science are typically the most easily manipulated by religious dogma, jingoism or the like; and 7. There are people who are quite willing to manipulate others for financial gain and/or power. It's why every living president, all but ~3 Senators, all but a handful of Congresspeople, all governors and the likes of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are all vaccinated but continue to fan the flames of anti-vaxxers for their own gain.

iammisc 5y ago
> Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are all vaccinated but continue to fan the flames of anti-vaxxers for their own gain. Sean Hannity has continuously supported vaccines (has unequivocally stated he thinks they're the best way to deal with the pandemic); he's just against mandates, and believes you should speak with your own doctor about them. If that's being an anti-vaxxer, then most people are.
- cletus 5y ago
  It's a milder position than Tucker Carlson but Hannity also pushed hydrochloroquine.

serverholic 5y ago

Speaking of trusting science, I have a bone to pick with the "soft" sciences like psychology, and sociology. These sciences are much more open to interpretation than, say, physics. Yet people will link research papers in these fields and push them as 100% fact without thinking critically about these papers. Let's say that your paper claims "X reduces negative behaviors in children such as aggression". In my experience on Reddit and Hacker News, people will link papers like this and claim you are anti-science for questioning anything. Yet there are some important questions that should be answered like: "How do you even measure aggression?" "Did X also reduce assertiveness (which is linked to aggression)?" "Is aggression always a negative behavior? Who decided this was an appropriate classification?" "Holistically, is this a better outcome overall or were there drawbacks to doing X?" It's to the point where I have serious doubts about the validity of papers in soft science fields. Unless of course your paper measures something directly like serotonin levels.

xaduha 5y ago

United (sic) States of America is full of people who think that they know better. If no matter what question or problem comes up you have an answer ready, then your problem isn't with science, you have a problem with logic.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
Can you list countries in which this type of person doesn't exist?
- pumaontheprowl 5y ago
  North Korea.
- xaduha 5y ago
  It's a quantity turning into quality type of situation.

stevefrench93 5y ago

"Trust the Science" is the product of well funded social scientists who leveraged focus groups to determine the phrase effectively targeted people who already align themselves with the myriad of establishment pitch men - Neil Degrasse Tyson, Bill Nye, Trevor Noah, et al. Same as (ironically) "My body, my choice." "Trust the Science" is merely a proxy for "Believe in and defend the Neoliberal agenda against scientific criticism". If you're still uncritical of it, you might want to start reading the science. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7 "At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases..."

pedrosorio 5y ago
> Across the US counties too, the median new COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people in the last 7 days is largely similar across the categories of percent population fully vaccinated (Fig. 2) Am I looking at the wrong graph? There is a clear downward trend from 35-40% to the 70%+ categories. I am not sure why looking at the median county is better than just grouping all the counties in each category and looking at the cases per 100k, but looking at the latter (which the authors provide as a link [0]), and the latest available date (7 day period ending October 8th) the number of cases per 100k is 110 in the 70%+ group of counties, and it's 220+ for any group of counties with less than 55% vaccination rate. Having twice as many cases per capita (ignoring all the other factors on how densely populated the counties with higher vaccination rates are, etc.) for every county under 50% vaccination rate compared to the ones with 70%+ vaccination rate is "largely similar"? [0] https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZGE1NDBmZTctYWUyZi00NTBjLWE2NDYtODM0NjE1NjE3NzVjIiwidCI6ImU2NzkwZmI5LTM0NzQtNDViMC1hOWUyLWM3NTQ5MzEyYTAxZSJ9 https://app.powerbi.com/view?r=eyJrIjoiZGE1NDBmZTctYWUyZi00N... EDIT: Also of relevance, is the fact that the country data is from September 3rd, when Israel was at the peak of cases with the delta variant. Israel is far from having vaccinated a large enough fraction of the population to achieve "herd immunity" (just 63% fully vaccinated, Portugal has 86% for example) [1]. Another confounding factor is that Israel was one of the first countries to vaccinate a large number of people, which means the effectiveness of the vaccine is now declining compared to countries that vaccinated later. They have administered booster shots to vulnerable populations [2] and the rates of covid infections have (as expected) dropped precipitously. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccinations-tracker.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina... [2] https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-virologist-says-delta-defeated-predicts-6-months-of-covid-quiet-for-israel/ https://www.timesofisrael.com/top-virologist-says-delta-defe...

mswtk 5y ago

Fundamentally, a lot of knowledge we possess as individuals is socially constructed, in the sense that we trust the process and the institutions that created it. Even if this knowledge can, in principle, be verified, it is usually impractical for an individual to do so. Putting science aside, how can I be confident that the basic facts presented in, say, a NYT article, are correct? I can trust the reputation of the NYT as an institution, and I can also trust that any inaccuracies in the article will be called out by other publications. But if I feel everyone's in on a conspiracy to push a particular viewpoint, then I need to anchor my knowledge in a different institutional framework - even if that might just be a random Facebook group of strangers, or my weird uncle, or a niche radio station. This, incidentally, is why the censorious push against "disinformation" is misguided in principle. It's sweeping the underlying problems under the rug in the hope that they disappear spontaneously. In an open society, truth can only be established as a result of public discourse, anything else is just the representation of the perspective and interests of some authority. Whatever its source, the seemingly growing distrust in public institutions will not disappear simply because we make social media companies remove its most obvious symptoms.

forgotmypw17 5y ago
I think the problem you describe-- of being unsure of the origins and level of distortion of one's information on its journey between "reality" and "perception" is an old problem, which is rather quickly being solved by transparent technology. It used to be that you had to trust the institution, because they were the best suited and capable to verify and validate the data and the individuals. Trust problems were both not publicized widely, and also did not have any obvious solutions. Today, we are technically capable of validating and verifying the entire chain of custody or traversal for any given piece of information, and the only thing missing is the infrastructure to do so. On the other hand, if an institution demonstrates untrustworthiness, it is difficult to conceal. I think that, more and more, we will demand to see the entire chain of creation and origin for a piece of information, and either validate it ourselves, or delegate that validation to a party we personally trust. That validation can then itself be validated with reputation. Imagine, for a minute, if an article came with a list of all the writers, contributors, scientists, interviewees, editors, etc., who contributed to the article. And not only that, imagine you can see the entire social graph between you and those people. That is what the future looks like, IMO.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Any health related science is fraught because it is usually unethical to run the actual causal experiments. E.g. put people in closed rooms with various types of masks, release covid virus in the air, measure death rate, etc.

tenpoundhammer 5y ago

I haven't seen this comment yet, so here we go. I live in a rural community of about 15,000 people, attend church, and sports for my kids and generally spend a lot of time with people in the community. These are people who don't trust the science. They aren't stupid, they aren't uneducated, and they mostly aren't believing radical misinformation. There are two really important things to consider though. 1. They don't have experience with Science or Statistics. Outside of a high school classroom 20 or more years ago. [It's easy to get through college without any meaningful science education] 2. They have been screwed by the medical system, government, and economy. Their decision making and behavior is primarily driven off of their intuition and second hand information from people they trust. The vast majority of unvaccinated people that I know don't believe in microchips or that the vaccine will kill them. They just think they don't need it cause they aren't at risk or because they have already developed natural immunity. Some of them are right and some of them wrong. They are just people and doing the best they can.

pedrosorio 5y ago
> they aren't uneducated > They don't have experience with Science or Statistics (...) It's easy to get through college without any meaningful science education Maybe understanding science/statistics needs to be higher on the list of criteria used to determine if someone is "educated".
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Only if we want to exclude 99.5% of people. Plenty of successful scientists are also bad at statistics.
deleted 5y ago
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andybak 5y ago

I'm only a few paragraphs in but I'm already a bit confused by the way the author seems to use "falsifiable" and "falsified" interchangably when it is the former not the latter that is critical to Popper's definition. What matters is that you make a claim that has the potential to be tested. i.e. there exists an observation that could potentially contradict your claim. And if this observation arises, the result is that the hypothesis has an opportunity to refine itself and the process continues. Newtonian mechanics were falsifiable, they were falsified in particular domains (the very small and the very large) and now they have been refined as they are still applicable given certain contraints.

RattleyCooper 5y ago

Trusting science == faith. I'm pretty sure that's antithetical to real science.

jollybean 5y ago

Policy, particularly things like Public Health Policy, is not the same thing as Science. Trusting the Science means something completely different in the domain of socializing information.

sega_sai 5y ago

I am a scientist myself (obviously in one narrow field) and my approach to trusting the science is that unless I can myself evaluate the evidence, data, analyses, I'll trust the scientific consensus. I will not necessarily trust single papers, as people may make mistakes, be dishonest etc. Obviously the scientific consensus may also turn out to be wrong (it happened before), but realistically it's unlikely that I'll have unique knowledge to find this out myself not being expert, so 'trusting' the consensus is my approach. Also in rare cases where I can actually read and understand the paper outside of my field that may or may not increase or decrease the belief in its correctness. Realistically outside my field of expertise I'll be only able to see things like dodgy statistical methods, small number statistics, crappy plots which are clues of untrustworthy results, but not proofs.

unanswered 5y ago
This doesn't really answer anything, though, because you don't have direct access to "The Consensus". How do you determine what the consensus is? Media reports? Whichever points come up most often on forums? Whatever points are most often reported in journal articles? The point reported in the journal article you most recently saw?
bwanab 5y ago
I wish I could upvote this enough times to get it to the top. This is the rational approach to any system of belief in which you yourself can’t reliably confirm or disprove the conclusions.
- pessimizer 5y ago
  Step 1: Be a scientist.

ravenstine 5y ago

Trusting science is antithetical to science.

jccalhoun 5y ago

It is a complicated subject. I teach college and I try to include some media literacy. We tell them to be skeptical but then they say "you can't trust the media" but then they believe every stupid conspiracy that confirms their biases and then in papers they cite "google" because they can't be bothered to take the time to figure out where something actually comes from. (This literally happened in one of my classes yesterday.)

efitz 5y ago

When people tell me to “trust the science” they are usually trying to convince me to a political point of view. Real scientists don’t say that during discussions about science. “Trust the science” is a dismissive statement intended to terminate discussion/dissent and denigrate the dissenter as a simpleton.

forgotmypw17 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought-terminating_clich%C3%A... https://www.google.com/search?q=thought+terminating+cliche https://www.google.com/search?q=thought+terminating+cliche
president 5y ago
In colloquial conversation where most lay people have no scientific background it basically means "trust me, I heard it on TV".

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rob_c 5y ago

Yep this started with last mistakes in the evolution of sciences and moved onto attack something about modern studies and covid... I'm fairly sure the goalposts moved here somewhat...

rmah 5y ago

I think one issue is that many people seem to conflate believing the opposite with being skeptical of the positive. They are not the same thing. Being skeptical that a vaccine is safe enough for mass use is not the same as believing that a vaccine is not safe enough for mass use. Being skeptical that climate change is primarily caused by man is not the same as believing that climate change is not caused by man. Skepticism is fine. Belief in an opposite without evidence is not fine.

mcguire 5y ago

"It is not quite sufficient, in answering this question, to point to a near-consensus on the part of the scientific community, thus in effect arguing that science is what the vast majority of scientists say it is. If this is largely how the argument does indeed function in the cases of debates about the safety of vaccines or the causes of global warming, we should nonetheless be aware of its flaws." "If an elderly, respected scientist tells you something is possible, he is very likely right. If he tells you something is impossible, he is likely wrong." --- An old SF fandom saying. If a ginormous herd of scientists tell you something, possible or impossible, they may not be right but that is the way you want to place your bets. [Edit] "But there are broad guidelines that could help. We might insist, for example, that those wishing to challenge the scientific consensus do their homework, demonstrating a competent (but not necessarily expert) understanding of the theories and empirical data they wish to displace. We might require that they have reasonable arguments concerning the theory or data’s flaws that do not presuppose, as some anti-vaccine arguments do, the existence of a large-scale conspiracy to distort the truth. And we would be well within our rights to demand that they argue in good faith and not — as historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway have shown for many climate change denialists — as professional water-muddiers, following a playbook first written by cigarette companies attempting to obfuscate a known connection between smoking and cancer." Ooh, I like that.

CWuestefeld 5y ago

It seems to me that the biggest problem today isn't misunderstanding science, but misapplying science. Folks seem to come up with formulations like "science says that X causes Y, and thus we must do Z". Regardless of what you might fill into those letters, the statement is a fallacy. Anyone who believes that policy can directly flow from science is mistaken. It's the job of science to make predictions: if these circumstances occur, we can expect the outcome to look like that. But this says nothing - can say nothing - in judgment of how good or bad that outcome is. To create policy, we must weigh the costs and benefits of the various expected outcomes. That's not a scientific exercise, it flows only from our values as individuals and as a society. So if you're interesting in bringing about a particular policy, or forestalling a different one, the way to do this is by making your case for relative values of the outcomes that science predicts - not to hoodwink people into believing something other than what the science predicts. Examples of such misapplication: * Science shows that the climate is changing, caused by human action, such that in 50 years, some coastal cities will have ground level below high tide. Therefore we must do everything possible to limit CO2 emissions. * Science says that after (whatever) weeks gestation, a human baby could be viable outside the womb. Therefore we must forbid abortions after that term. In both these examples, a value judgment is being smuggled in that imposes unacknowledged values into the situation. Those values have nothing to do with science, and so the conclusion is a-scientific. (That's not to say that either of the conclusions is wrong given some values, including possibly the prevailing cultural values. But assuming that is so is certainly anti-scientific.)

apatters 5y ago
We need to get away from the idea of "the Science" altogether because it's an incomplete abstraction and prone to corruption. What is valuable are specific principles like dedeuctive reasoning and the scientific method, upon which we've built our greatest achievements as a species. Trusting "the Science" without understanding what that really means is basically just another form of religion, complete with its own priesthood and people who demand that whatever the priests say must be taken on faith because it's moral and good. Philosophers have observed that this blind belief in "the Science" is actually worse than belief in religion. Because while religion roots its authority in the divine (which either doesn't exist or chooses not to get directly involved), the church of Science roots its authority in men. Men declare a truth and a morality based on what they claim to be scientific, then go on to commit atrocities they rationalize from it. The greatest mass murderers in history were atheists like Stalin and Mao. They were the little gods of their own secular personality cults and they committed genocide on a scale that had never before been seen.

AlbertCory 5y ago

L’science, c’est moi (Fauci) Fauci has done more damage to "science" than any 100 religious authorities ever did. The above quote is pretty much what he said when he claimed people criticizing him are criticizing science. One of the most important things for a scientist to say in public is "Just look at what I wrote; I'm not important."

helen___keller 5y ago

From a meta point of view, it's a bit wild to be living in a point of history where people actively debate where our trusted source of truth should exist. For most of human history you didn't get many options. Before the printing press, King and God were the roots of trust and truth, because churches and states were the only ones with the power to disseminate information reliably on a regional, national, or global scale. The printing press added newspapers as potential roots of trust. Then radio stations. Then TV stations. Still, with limited papers and channels, and large barriers to entry, institutions arose and the status quo was not too much changed. Now we have an eruption of information as anybody can create a massive following for any idea with sufficient effort. The implications of this have yet to be realized. One thing is for sure: You can't really trust the science. Definitely not the media. And certainly not whoever you follow on Youtube, the links you see on HN/Reddit, or the posts shared on Facebook. It's hard to say you can know anything for sure these days.

650 5y ago

For me the 'science' and covid related issue comes down to the major point of risk perception. In the early days, there were videos of people collapsing on the streets in Wuhan, and the disease was thought to be extremely deadly with a CFR of 10%+(1). As the months went by we realized its not really dangerous at all to kids, with death and hospitalization rates extremely tilted towards the elderly and obese. The main insight I have is that say we found out COVID or one of its variants had a 30%+ death/hospitalization rate as the months went on. I firmly believe more people would get vaccinated due to the obvious severity of it. This current ~1% IFR is at a point such that some think its not deadly enough to warrant the hypocritical restrictions and mandates, and some believe that it is. Lets say on the other hand that as the months went by, we discovered COVID had a 0.000001% IFR. 1 out of a hundred million people that caught it died. [assume long COVID does not exist]. We could see that ~50-100 people would die worldwide. I think most people would call you foolish if given this IFR, had you been calling for continued mass restrictions. We are at an inflection point such that we have vaccines, we have mandates, we have restrictions, yet some clamour it isn't enough, while others clamour its too much. These all are based around the perceived deadliness, not the true deadliness of COVID. (1) - I don't recall the exact number

egberts1 5y ago

“Trusting the science” AS A FACTUAL BASIS requires a trustable process that is clearly documentable, repeatable, recreatable, reprovable, and verifiable. Anything else not factual may be called “science”, “healthy skepticism“, or “common knowledge”; and that is easily misguidable by the few in the know. Looking at you, PolSci, Econ101, and pyschobabble.