5 ms·

Yes. “Science says” is a statement of belief in a knowledge mafia. “Scientists asked this question and here’s what they discovered and here is what they think

Yes. “Science says” is a statement of belief in a knowledge mafia. “Scientists asked this question and here’s what they discovered and here is what they think” is how science news should be reported. More like entertainment tonight and less like a Sunday school sermon.

Alupis 4y ago
It should go even further, because even your modified statement "Scientists asked this question and here’s what they discovered and here is what they think" still implies "Scientist" is one singular thing or is a singular group of people. The word "Scientist" has become a word without meaning. It's applied to anything we think we want to convince others of or use as argument of authority. When people say "Scientists", they often mean statisticians or other number/data crunching careers. Instead, that statement could be rewritten as: "The Eggs-For-Health Institute, Department of Eggs-Every-Day asked this question and here’s what they discovered and here is what they think". This rewritten statement now informs the reader of all the basics - who, what, where, when and why. It's unsurprising the Eggs-For-Health Institute (for a made up scenario) says eating eggs is a good thing. Unfortunately it gets murkier when it's highly regarded institutions publishing ideas, such as the FDA, CDC, etc. These folks aren't any more certain of things as the rest of the community either. We saw variations of this during the pandemic - the CDC would release some preliminary aggregated data and suddenly headlines ran with "Scientists from the CDC say do X to stop Y" etc... which led to a lot of perceived flip-flopping along the way (because all of this was new territory at the time, ie. the scientific process was playing out in real time.
- deafpolygon 4y ago
  And then you have Coldplay co-opting the term "Scientist" for a song, further muddying the waters.
  - LBJsPNS 4y ago
    Fucking magnets, how do they work?
patrick451 4y ago
> Laymen might think that's a bad thing. But it's not... it's exactly how science is supposed to work. The problem is, people need to be told an absolute, but science can't do that for the most part. Scientists have my full support to stumble around in the dark and figure things out. But it's not the laymen who desperately need certainty. It's the scientists themselves when they deign to make policy demands based these half-baked theories de jour.
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  But better than politicians who make policy demands that flagrantly ignore solid evidence because they're being paid to. Truth is a probability and not a binary, but politics is still a casino pretending to be a church.
  - patrick451 4y ago
    No, it is never the scientists job to talk about policy. At all. Ever. Once they do that, they have no credibility, and become no different from the politician.
8bitsrule 4y ago
I wish it were possible to upvote this statement by double-underlining every word. (It's as though human nature abhors a dogma vacuum.) "When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it." - Feynman

Alupis 4y ago

It should go even further, because even your modified statement "Scientists asked this question and here’s what they discovered and here is what they think" still implies "Scientist" is one singular thing or is a singular group of people. The word "Scientist" has become a word without meaning. It's applied to anything we think we want to convince others of or use as argument of authority. When people say "Scientists", they often mean statisticians or other number/data crunching careers. Instead, that statement could be rewritten as: "The Eggs-For-Health Institute, Department of Eggs-Every-Day asked this question and here’s what they discovered and here is what they think". This rewritten statement now informs the reader of all the basics - who, what, where, when and why. It's unsurprising the Eggs-For-Health Institute (for a made up scenario) says eating eggs is a good thing. Unfortunately it gets murkier when it's highly regarded institutions publishing ideas, such as the FDA, CDC, etc. These folks aren't any more certain of things as the rest of the community either. We saw variations of this during the pandemic - the CDC would release some preliminary aggregated data and suddenly headlines ran with "Scientists from the CDC say do X to stop Y" etc... which led to a lot of perceived flip-flopping along the way (because all of this was new territory at the time, ie. the scientific process was playing out in real time.

deafpolygon 4y ago
And then you have Coldplay co-opting the term "Scientist" for a song, further muddying the waters.
- LBJsPNS 4y ago
  Fucking magnets, how do they work?

patrick451 4y ago

> Laymen might think that's a bad thing. But it's not... it's exactly how science is supposed to work. The problem is, people need to be told an absolute, but science can't do that for the most part. Scientists have my full support to stumble around in the dark and figure things out. But it's not the laymen who desperately need certainty. It's the scientists themselves when they deign to make policy demands based these half-baked theories de jour.

TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
But better than politicians who make policy demands that flagrantly ignore solid evidence because they're being paid to. Truth is a probability and not a binary, but politics is still a casino pretending to be a church.
- patrick451 4y ago
  No, it is never the scientists job to talk about policy. At all. Ever. Once they do that, they have no credibility, and become no different from the politician.

8bitsrule 4y ago

I wish it were possible to upvote this statement by double-underlining every word. (It's as though human nature abhors a dogma vacuum.) "When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it." - Feynman