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Wow. Looking at that image I feel a weird superposition of awe and anger. Awe at the incredible work that it took to get that image and the fact that I'm arou

• deleted 5y ago
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• teakettle42 5y ago
  The emotions you’re expressing — awe and anger at disbelievers — are rooted more in religious sciencism than actual science. Science is critical and robust under criticism. Sciencism is not.
  • SECProto 5y ago
    > The emotions you’re expressing — awe and anger at disbelievers — are rooted more in religious sciencism than actual science. They didn't say a word about "disbelievers" (which implies faith). They spoke of the "rise of pseudo-science and the glorification of ignorance", which are two things very much separate from belief/faith.
    • teakettle42 5y ago
      > They didn't say a word about "disbelievers" (which implies faith). Sciencism is rooted in faith — faith in institutions and authority. Science is dispassionate and rooted in empiricism and logical reasoning. Enforced truth isn’t required — any claims can be tested and refuted. > They spoke of the "rise of pseudo-science and the glorification of ignorance", which are two things very much separate from belief/faith. Could have been written “the rise of heresy and the glorification of idolatry”. There’s no rise of pseudo-science; that’s been with us all along, and generally far more prevalent than it is today. The science continues to win regardless, because it can be proven without appeal to emotion or authority.
      • lisper 5y ago
        Are you by any chance a young-earth creationist?
        • teakettle42 5y ago
          No, I’m an agnostic software engineer in formal verification. Why?
          • lisper 5y ago
            Because you are employing the same rhetoric that YECs often do.
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            • teakettle42 5y ago
              Young earth creationists argue against religious thinking? That seems unlikely to me, but I’m totally unfamiliar with their rhetoric and will have to take your word for it.
              • lisper 5y ago
                > Young earth creationists argue against religious thinking? Yes. And the irony is lost on them.
          • XorNot 5y ago
            Which Gods are you agnostic about?
            • teakettle42 5y ago
              agnostic, n. a person who believes that nothing is known or can be known of the existence or nature of God or of anything beyond material phenomena All of them. None of them. What answer were you hoping for?
  • jacobolus 5y ago
    What you call “argument from authority” other people call “spending significant effort examining research or summaries of research, and using past experience to gauge its credibility.”
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• gfodor 5y ago
  It’s all too easy to confuse skepticism with science denialism. It’s important to be skeptical of scientific claims. This is essentially the core engine of scientific progress.
  • ajmurmann 5y ago
    > It’s important to be skeptical of scientific claims. This is essentially the core engine of scientific progress. This often gets abused. Laymen frequently will doubt scientific results and then make exactly this argument. That's a totally different breast than someone dedicating years of studies to understand the state of the art in a scientific field and THEN doubting results. Otherwise we can never move past agreeing even on fundamentals Edit: to add an example, in college I had a friend who didn't believe black holes were really a singularity and that something else might be going on. He wasn't able to explain beyond "feels wrong". When I called out that if he doesn't even have a coherent explanation why he maybe should shut up and trust experts everyone got angry because "scepticism is fundamental to scientific process". Sure, you doubt it. Fine! Hey a PhD in physics and proof your point!
    • ufmace 5y ago
      It does get abused, but IMO the abuse of perceived scientific authority is far more important. At the end of the day, who really cares if some random college friend doesn't believe in the scientific consensus on black holes? His opinion has zero impact on anything at all. On the other hand, when bad science gets elevated to near-religious status, we get horrific outcomes. I'm 1000x more afraid of the regime that can persuade some random college friend to mouth the mainstream opinion on black hole structure than I am that this guy wants to believe something that might not be true, especially in a field that will never have any impact on any of our daily lives.
      • atoav 5y ago
        The point is that critical thinking doesn't mean "question everything and assume everybody except yourself is incompetent or evil". It means that you understand you can replicate someone's results if you doubt them. You can look at the methods they used and find why they were adequate or inadequate. You can reason if the conclusions they drew from their findings are accurate. But all of this will not come out of "I have a strange feeling on that topic". Unless you are really an expert on the matter, many topics will produce strange feelings in people, because chances are they lack some fundamental understanding that would be needed to even understand the findings. I am not saying you need to either do all the work and check yourself OR blindly trust science and awallow everything that looks "sciency". What we need to do is to educate people on how to check studies and papers for themselves all while admiting which parts they don't know.
• jacquesm 5y ago
  Pseudo science will be here forever because it is much easier to get into than actual science and people will always look for explanations where science says 'we don't know'.
• Razengan 5y ago
  > anger at the rise of pseudo-science As a consolation, it will not spread beyond this minuscule speck in the cosmos.
  • cato_the_elder 5y ago
    I always disliked the "pale blue dot" narrative. We might be an atom in the universe, but we are also a universe of atoms.
• photochemsyn 5y ago
  Those who refuse to look through telescopes (because the evidence might upset their treasured notions of reality) have always been around. I wondered whether that particular story about Galileo's contemporaries was apocryphal, but it appears to have some fairly solid evidence: https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2016/2016-05-12-Galileo.html https://www.libraryofsocialscience.com/newsletter/posts/2016... However, note that 'science denial' has been an attack used by all manner of charlatans and fraudsters - as well as by people who are simply ignorant of facts - to defend their positions throughout our so-called 'age of reason'. This has often led to the spectacle of two different groups of perhaps well-intentioned (or not) people hurling the insult of 'science denialist' at each other while refusing to engage in actual science, i.e. examining observational data, conducting experiments, developing theories, rinse and repeat. Part of the problem is that science often reveals facts that powerful interests don't want to accept, for example, that smoking cigarettes greatly increases the risk of lung cancer, or that burning fossil fuels leads to warming of the planet and climatic destabilization, or that using antibiotics on factory farms increases the rate at which antibiotic resistance arises (due to the pressure of natural selection as per evolutionary theory). These outfits have made a practice of hiring deceptive and dishonest 'scientists' for PR purposes, because simply accepting the science would be expensive and/or embarrassing, and they're the ones who tend to scream 'science denialism!' the loudest. Hence it is not a very useful phrase, and it's always better to be explicit about what particular scientific concept you view as being subjected to attack on dubious grounds.
• MrPatan 5y ago
  We're being conned. Yes, Webb telescope is Science, and it's great, and it's lovely, and there should be more of it and it should get more respect and resources. But. Other people take the same word "Science" and use it for.... less clear-cut stuff. With less clear-cut benefits. And they use the same word because they want to get more respect and more resources and want to confuse you. This works because it's hard to know what's "Science". Most people use heuristics like "My side's Authority says so" or "It happens in a University" or "It uses Times News Roman". Unfortunately there is no easy solution. You'll have to think for yourself. If only there was some kind of method to tell the bullshit apart from the facts!
  • alexisread 5y ago
    These are all hypotheticals, but if you can trace articles back to their source, and you have a Web of trust, then things like Wikipedia can carry more authority/trust. So too can random Facebook articles, war reporting, tutorials, science with data to match, escrow etc You'd likely get a split-brain scenario in society, but we seem to already have a partisan narrative for most things, and this at least makes for a solid foundation.
  • sgt101 5y ago
    I dunno. Webb seems to me to be data gathering. Really good data gathering. Science is building hypothesis that predict the data, and confirming or falsifying them (I know that Popper was clear that it's the latter). The point is that Science is made of contingent knowledge. I believe these hypothesis, but if you show me evidence that supports better hypothesis or that contradicts my previous hypothesis then I'll change my mind - possibly (depends on the evidence). Anyway, science isn't I think about clear cut things - it's about developing and weighing a body of evidence.
    • pas 5y ago
      good science is good data. there's no way around it. it's the same thing. sure we devise clever (and expensive) experiments to falsify bad models, but that's because we don't have enough high quality data that you can look at and immediately tell which model is good and which is bad. but nowadays everything in science is even more data driven. (mostly because we have the infrastructure/technology to process all that data.) initially it was mostly high energy physics (run the big machine for a few years, gather data, check for 5 sigma) but when it comes to things like LIGO and the EHT (event horizon telescope) to even get the signal out of the noise they need to use a model, that of course builds on data (and its interpretation) from previous observations. many advances in the medical field are due to better microscopes, better techniques to gather data. sure, without interpretation it's just pretty images or just big "science machines" (in case of colliders and other data gathering experiments)
• Alex3917 5y ago
  If mainstream scientists were all denying that space exists despite these images, would it not surprise you that there would arise an anti-science movement? Because that’s basically how the current one came into existence.
  • lisper 5y ago
    Huh??? Mainstream scientists are "all denying that space exists"? That's news to me.