8 ms·

Americans' trust in scientists, positive views of science continue to decline

42 points by adrian_mrd 3y ago

hddbd 3y ago
Shannon solved this problem at the dawn of telco age when everyone was broadcasting and noise exceeded signal, by giving us error correcting codes, and clear limits above which the system turned useless etc. We need something similar today or the thousands of orchestras playing different tunes will never sync or get coherent. HN front page is a great example of pure randomness. You can't produce focus and trust using such systems. Just endless distraction and confusion.
- fractallyte 3y ago
  I'm not sure how that would translate into the real world. For example, climate scientists are mostly united about anthropogenic climate change. But there is a huge dissenting crowd of pseudo-scientists - "noise". They sound convincing because they use big words and fancy graphs, and people believe them. And they're very good at arguing, because they're driven by religious levels of irrationality and fear. Somehow, it's become much easier to sound like a scientist. There are pseudo-universities, and pseudo-qualifications. A doctorate doesn't seem to carry much weight any more. These people weave politics into the scientific numbers, and twist issues away from the hard-core science. And let's not even mention the conspiracy theorists... How does one deal with that kind of insanity?
  - 082349872349872 3y ago
    If you go far enough back on https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu you'll start to find people who were writing theses on religious topics (what would now be doctors of divinity?). Our universities actually developed from what we would now consider pseudo-universities, so the mechanism for getting science (from what we would now consider pseudo-science) has worked in the past. Eg: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=143082 https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=143082 "Illustre Axioma, Ivstvs Avtem Fide Sva Vivet"
    - polotics 3y ago
      For an example of one very interesting and relevant recent work in the field of religious topics that you decry, may I recommend Jason Josephson-Storm's excellent "the myth of disenchantment"? It starts with Marie Currie's frequent visit to Medium Séances, continues onto the amazing statistics about belief in the American public, and gets better from there.
      - 082349872349872 3y ago
        On those topics I prefer Barber & Barber, "When They Severed Earth from Sky". If Josephson-Storm's thesis be true, at least given the existence proof that humanity has at least once decided that (a) the problem with studying inconsistent things is that it is too easy to make contradictory claims*, and therefore (b) we would be better off to study consistent things, allowing claims to be built upon claims, and hence at least ephemeral progress, we should expect the same process to remain possible after any future dark ages, whether it were to be carried out once more by humans, or —given our current level of destructive technology— perhaps even by remote descendants of the cockroaches. * were I to write a DD, my topic would be: "The Rapture occurred on schedule, in 1000 AD", and so few (they who would have been There to witness the 2nd coming in 1007) were taken and so many were Left Behind, that we the remanent have no historical record.
throwaway128128 3y ago
Coincidentally, Americans' trust in woo and pseudoscience continues to climb.
- dang 3y ago
  Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
Maybe I'm just missing it, but does the writeup show the actual survey questions? Personally, my trust in survey results summaries is pretty low.
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  Actual survey questions are shown in the figure legends.
082349872349872 3y ago
4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38269343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38269343
PrimeMcFly 3y ago
[flagged]
- somedude895 3y ago
  No surprise that Republicans distrust so-called science (and rightfully so, imo) > a 2014 study found that "[b]y 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1." [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_... Many of those "progressive" academics put politics above truth and support curbing free speech if it's "harmful", acadamics who stray from the orthodoxy are silenced and lose their jobs. The fact that sociology, anthropology (especially things like Critical Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory) are considered to be scientific [1] and that studies that go counter to any common sense are spread by the media as fact add to that. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair Any reasonable person can see that many academics in the humanities have the goal of bringing about social change and not actually finding the truth and that muddies the waters, so it's not surprising that people start doubting science as a whole, including STEM.
  - SenAnder 3y ago
    > Many of those "progressive" academics put politics above truth. Such a claim needs a citation. So here it is: 157 university [institutional review boards] provided reviews of 9 hypothetical proposals that were identical in their treatment of human Ss but differed in sociopolitical sensitivity and in level of ethical concerns (e.g., presence or absence of deception, debriefing). [..] Nonsensitive proposals that did not involve ethical problems were approved 95% of the time vs only 40–50% of the time for comparable sensitive ones. Content analysis of the narratives that accompanied decisions revealed that the primary reason for rejection of sensitive proposals was the potential political impact of the proposed findings (e.g., discrediting of affirmative action policies). [0] As for the Wikipedia article on political views of American academics, it's amusing to see it include a section on loyalty oaths during McCarthyism [1], but nothing on the fact that diversity statements are, today, required for one-fifth of academic jobs in the US [2]. Edit: I should clarify how damning a result the 50% vs 95% approval rate really is. At first glance it seems like there would be half as many published studies with politically unfavorable results than there should be. But it's far worse, because the people on the review boards are a sample of the researchers. If half the time they will deny a valid study for political reasons, how likely are they to propose such a study? In other words, they're like goalkeepers. They let the opponent's ball score half the time. But there is nearly nobody on the opposing team. They have a 50% fail rate at defending their goal, they don't have a relative 50% chance at scoring an own goal. [0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics#McCarthyism_and_loyalty_oaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_ac... [2] https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-statements-required-for-one-fifth-of-academic-jobs/ https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...
bayesianbot 3y ago
After covid my trust in future of humanity has plummeted. It feels like every time I see people they're talking about "science" where they've actually thrown the science part out and are having a lot of feelings how things are. Apparently everything is impossible to know, even all the things that are extremely well studied and really simple, and you can replace all the modern science by reading some tweets, listening to bro science podcasts and feeling them out, and always ending up the result you were looking for anyways. It's hard to understand how people's understanding of complex subjects can be on so ridiculous level but still be thinking they know everything they need to know. Maybe my view is biased but it's always the same story everywhere I go, though I've stopped going out as I find it so frustrating and depressing. I even meet people who have been "studying science" for years but don't really know how scientific method works and obviously don't even know what scientific paper looks like.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- google234123 3y ago
  So extended lockdowns were the right chocie?
  - rqtwteye 3y ago
    Maybe they were the right choice with the info available at the time?
    - kcplate 3y ago
      Ok, I accept that. The problem was the doubling down by authorities of that choice as knowledge about the virus and its transmission increased. So at a certain point most people realized it was BS but authorities (both governmental and medical) were reluctant to admit that it was counter intuitive. Erodes trust.
  - bayesianbot 3y ago
    My opinion on extended lockdowns or anything else Covid-related really doesn't have much to do with my opinion that when forming strong opinions on complex subjects, especially ones that differ from consensus of experts, you should have good understanding of the basics of the subject as well as what are the experts basing their opinions on and why. Especially in science where the whole basis of the whole thing is evaluating how well your model performs predicting real world, throwing that all out and feeling things out really isn't as great method as many people seem to think.
tjpnz 3y ago
[flagged]
Garvi 3y ago
[flagged]
- tjpnz 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - Garvi 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 3y ago
      Users are flagging your posts—rightly, because you've been breaking HN's guidelines egregiously. This has nothing to do with the current topic because you've done it just as badly in other threads, such as here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38203707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38203707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38202957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38202957 We ban accounts that post this abusively, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
      - Garvi 3y ago
        You forgot the one just recently, where I called a person insane for stating the US is in a good position to win a nuclear exchange with Russia. I do not come to this site to have an open and fair debate with idiots. It is your job to have enough common sense and general education to tell whether something is worth debating over. For example I feel a topic that is heavily under-debated is abortion. Maybe we should have a fair and balanced debate whether it's right to force women to carry out our children and on how easy we want to make it for people to kill babies? (this whole paragraph is an attempt at irony, I feel the need to point this out) I understand you enforcing US exceptionalism to the extreme and removing any critique on it. But on the other side you're encouraging a debate on vaccine effectiveness as if it's apparently ambiguous. The consequences of what you are doing, especially on a site that is supposed to be full of point dexters, are making this so immoral, it sometimes simply takes extra words to express it.
Ambolia 3y ago
Science is a tool. I'm sure most people would have a positive view of science if it was performed by people or institutions they trust, for goals that they hold.
- karmakurtisaani 3y ago
  So performed by Fox news for increasing some billionaires' wealth? Seems like that's where the public's trust and interests lie these days, whether they know it or not.
marklubi 3y ago
"Science is real, study says." At some point, people stop blindly believing in the constant click-bait headlines.
dudeinjapan 3y ago
This should be qualified that trust is lost in academic paper-mills and “expert” policy advisor scientists—in other words, any scientist who attends cocktail parties—not in the fruits of science itself.
js8 3y ago
I watched Angela Collier, an astrophysicist, on YT the other day. I'll paraphrase an off-hand remark she made: This is a really cool technology, but then you think how big companies are going to ruin it for profit, as they do with everything. It's hard to get excited about technology these days. I think this is the root of problem. If you want to make technology cool again, you need to cut out the gold rush that's ruining everything. Almost tautologically, the motivation for a society to do things must be something else than "make more money".
- huijzer 3y ago
  I‘ll probably get downvoted for this, but big companies do not ruin everything for profit. Google Calendar, for example, is a simple tool which is very well implemented on various systems and it just works. And if you want more privacy, then you can go to Proton Calendar. Also a typical argument is made that more should be done against anti-competitive behaviour. The problem is that there is no better alternative. If you regulate competition too much then people will not spend their time and/or money on moonshot ideas anymore. Why take a massive amount of risk if you aren’t allowed to reap the rewards? This is what happened in the Soviet Union and nowadays partially in China. Innovation stalls and all you can do is copy. Russia, for example, tried to make chips by copying the American designs, but without understanding the fundamentals. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work. So complete regulation for anti-competitive behaviour doesn’t work. Then governments should probably just regulate a little bit? This is precisely what the US is doing. Yes, sometimes corporations push it too far and consumers are negatively affected. However, the alternative is less innovation which will also negatively affect customers. For the counterargument that technology doesn’t make things better. (Even this is nowadays a common argument.) Compare living today with living in the 1980s. Transportation, education, medical aid, and entertainment are in general much better. Yes, there are some negative sides, but I wouldn’t want to be born 40 years earlier. Having to write letters to your family when they are overseas. No YouTube. Internet measured in kB/s. Sending patches via email on repositories without CI/CD. No thanks.
  - upsidesinclude 3y ago
    While the latter part of your statement is reasonable, it is also only opinion. Many people would prefer a less technically advanced society. This forum, for instance, is about as simple as it gets and that is to it's credit. The initial point misses a fairly significant consideration though. A huge number of advancements are publicly funded. That public funding turns into private profit. People largely unaware of that fact, recently were made aware with the massive vaccine development spending that led to record shattering profits for pharma companies. To cite just one prominent example in the last few years. Edit: shout out to text only
questinthrow 3y ago
Science was never meant to be a political tool where you can bludgeon those who dont agree with you as being unscientific. The more you use it as a weapon the more people will start resenting it for being used on them. Still as people moved from religion to ideologies like communism and nazism as their new God, now they abandoned those and moved to science as the single spring of truth and morality. For most laypeople science is now a religion that must be "trusted" instead of a tool fundamentally based on falsification.It is not a tool for establishing principles of morality and conduct. If you think you can trust the "science" then you are fundamentally unscientific, science is based on finding counterexamples not on trusting.
- pyuser583 3y ago
  They’ve moved past science even. There’s a really good YouTube video of Richard Dawkins talking about what became of the atheist movement of the 2000s. Basically, they abandoned science in favor of “social justice.”
0xChain 3y ago
Sadly, due to some scientists no longer including ethics in their research, by fudging data to keep their funding, siding with corporate interests, and showing their elitism by treating their word for gospel as if they're infallible.
tibbydudeza 3y ago
They want you dumb and entertained by circuses.
- i8comments 3y ago
  What else are comments?
Garvi 3y ago
Covid is a very big part of the answer to this question. Unfortunately on HN covid is a heavily moderated topic and only one opinion is allowed. So I'd like to tell you from my point of view, but my posts were removed for being pro science. On HN. So since this is turning into reddit.. where have all the techies gone?
underseacables 3y ago
Science allowed itself to be politicized. On the one hand, we are told to trust the science, but on the other hand, we are told to believe things that are absolutely contradictory to science, and common sense. It's no wonder people have lost faith.
- timeon 3y ago
  If you want to talk about politics... In two-party system anything that does not align with chosen party is wrong. And one must defend the party at all cost, otherwise other would win. Scientists, like everyone are not without errors. But there is active anti-science push in some media. There are several reasons for that. For example topic of climate change is in contrast with profits of some companies. Another example are vaccines. Exploiting believes and fears that can not be proven is easy way to obtain support.
- Kye 3y ago
  When was it ever not politicized?
  - underseacables 3y ago
    When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable. When vaccines were accepted as a good thing by the vast majority of the public. Those are the two most hotly contested scientific issues in recent memory
    - Kye 3y ago
      >> "When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable." I had people like Galileo and Darwin in mind. So no, politics in science is not new. And no, there has never been universal agreement on...that. We'll call it a "statement" to not run afoul of the guidelines. You would have to restrict your view to a fantastically thin and non-contiguous slice of geography, history, and ideology to consider it true, and it would be absurd to take someone who does that seriously. You are politicizing science. Mind your glass house.
countWSS 3y ago
disturbing decline for faith in science? heretical thoughts on the rise?

42 points by adrian_mrd 3y ago

Shannon solved this problem at the dawn of telco age when everyone was broadcasting and noise exceeded signal, by giving us error correcting codes, and clear limits above which the system turned useless etc. We need something similar today or the thousands of orchestras playing different tunes will never sync or get coherent. HN front page is a great example of pure randomness. You can't produce focus and trust using such systems. Just endless distraction and confusion.

fractallyte 3y ago
I'm not sure how that would translate into the real world. For example, climate scientists are mostly united about anthropogenic climate change. But there is a huge dissenting crowd of pseudo-scientists - "noise". They sound convincing because they use big words and fancy graphs, and people believe them. And they're very good at arguing, because they're driven by religious levels of irrationality and fear. Somehow, it's become much easier to sound like a scientist. There are pseudo-universities, and pseudo-qualifications. A doctorate doesn't seem to carry much weight any more. These people weave politics into the scientific numbers, and twist issues away from the hard-core science. And let's not even mention the conspiracy theorists... How does one deal with that kind of insanity?
- 082349872349872 3y ago
  If you go far enough back on https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu you'll start to find people who were writing theses on religious topics (what would now be doctors of divinity?). Our universities actually developed from what we would now consider pseudo-universities, so the mechanism for getting science (from what we would now consider pseudo-science) has worked in the past. Eg: https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=143082 https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=143082 "Illustre Axioma, Ivstvs Avtem Fide Sva Vivet"
  - polotics 3y ago
    For an example of one very interesting and relevant recent work in the field of religious topics that you decry, may I recommend Jason Josephson-Storm's excellent "the myth of disenchantment"? It starts with Marie Currie's frequent visit to Medium Séances, continues onto the amazing statistics about belief in the American public, and gets better from there.
    - 082349872349872 3y ago
      On those topics I prefer Barber & Barber, "When They Severed Earth from Sky". If Josephson-Storm's thesis be true, at least given the existence proof that humanity has at least once decided that (a) the problem with studying inconsistent things is that it is too easy to make contradictory claims*, and therefore (b) we would be better off to study consistent things, allowing claims to be built upon claims, and hence at least ephemeral progress, we should expect the same process to remain possible after any future dark ages, whether it were to be carried out once more by humans, or —given our current level of destructive technology— perhaps even by remote descendants of the cockroaches. * were I to write a DD, my topic would be: "The Rapture occurred on schedule, in 1000 AD", and so few (they who would have been There to witness the 2nd coming in 1007) were taken and so many were Left Behind, that we the remanent have no historical record.

throwaway128128 3y ago

Coincidentally, Americans' trust in woo and pseudoscience continues to climb.

dang 3y ago
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

CoastalCoder 3y ago

Maybe I'm just missing it, but does the writeup show the actual survey questions? Personally, my trust in survey results summaries is pretty low.

082349872349872 3y ago
Actual survey questions are shown in the figure legends.

082349872349872 3y ago

4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38269343 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38269343

PrimeMcFly 3y ago

[flagged]

somedude895 3y ago
No surprise that Republicans distrust so-called science (and rightfully so, imo) > a 2014 study found that "[b]y 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had climbed to more than 11:1." [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_... Many of those "progressive" academics put politics above truth and support curbing free speech if it's "harmful", acadamics who stray from the orthodoxy are silenced and lose their jobs. The fact that sociology, anthropology (especially things like Critical Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory) are considered to be scientific [1] and that studies that go counter to any common sense are spread by the media as fact add to that. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grievance_studies_affair Any reasonable person can see that many academics in the humanities have the goal of bringing about social change and not actually finding the truth and that muddies the waters, so it's not surprising that people start doubting science as a whole, including STEM.
- SenAnder 3y ago
  > Many of those "progressive" academics put politics above truth. Such a claim needs a citation. So here it is: 157 university [institutional review boards] provided reviews of 9 hypothetical proposals that were identical in their treatment of human Ss but differed in sociopolitical sensitivity and in level of ethical concerns (e.g., presence or absence of deception, debriefing). [..] Nonsensitive proposals that did not involve ethical problems were approved 95% of the time vs only 40–50% of the time for comparable sensitive ones. Content analysis of the narratives that accompanied decisions revealed that the primary reason for rejection of sensitive proposals was the potential political impact of the proposed findings (e.g., discrediting of affirmative action policies). [0] As for the Wikipedia article on political views of American academics, it's amusing to see it include a section on loyalty oaths during McCarthyism [1], but nothing on the fact that diversity statements are, today, required for one-fifth of academic jobs in the US [2]. Edit: I should clarify how damning a result the 50% vs 95% approval rate really is. At first glance it seems like there would be half as many published studies with politically unfavorable results than there should be. But it's far worse, because the people on the review boards are a sample of the researchers. If half the time they will deny a valid study for political reasons, how likely are they to propose such a study? In other words, they're like goalkeepers. They let the opponent's ball score half the time. But there is nearly nobody on the opposing team. They have a 50% fail rate at defending their goal, they don't have a relative 50% chance at scoring an own goal. [0] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1986-12806-001 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_academics#McCarthyism_and_loyalty_oaths https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_views_of_American_ac... [2] https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-statements-required-for-one-fifth-of-academic-jobs/ https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2021/11/11/study-diversity-...

bayesianbot 3y ago

After covid my trust in future of humanity has plummeted. It feels like every time I see people they're talking about "science" where they've actually thrown the science part out and are having a lot of feelings how things are. Apparently everything is impossible to know, even all the things that are extremely well studied and really simple, and you can replace all the modern science by reading some tweets, listening to bro science podcasts and feeling them out, and always ending up the result you were looking for anyways. It's hard to understand how people's understanding of complex subjects can be on so ridiculous level but still be thinking they know everything they need to know. Maybe my view is biased but it's always the same story everywhere I go, though I've stopped going out as I find it so frustrating and depressing. I even meet people who have been "studying science" for years but don't really know how scientific method works and obviously don't even know what scientific paper looks like.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
google234123 3y ago
So extended lockdowns were the right chocie?
- rqtwteye 3y ago
  Maybe they were the right choice with the info available at the time?
  - kcplate 3y ago
    Ok, I accept that. The problem was the doubling down by authorities of that choice as knowledge about the virus and its transmission increased. So at a certain point most people realized it was BS but authorities (both governmental and medical) were reluctant to admit that it was counter intuitive. Erodes trust.
- bayesianbot 3y ago
  My opinion on extended lockdowns or anything else Covid-related really doesn't have much to do with my opinion that when forming strong opinions on complex subjects, especially ones that differ from consensus of experts, you should have good understanding of the basics of the subject as well as what are the experts basing their opinions on and why. Especially in science where the whole basis of the whole thing is evaluating how well your model performs predicting real world, throwing that all out and feeling things out really isn't as great method as many people seem to think.

tjpnz 3y ago

[flagged]

Garvi 3y ago

[flagged]

tjpnz 3y ago
[flagged]
- Garvi 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 3y ago
    Users are flagging your posts—rightly, because you've been breaking HN's guidelines egregiously. This has nothing to do with the current topic because you've done it just as badly in other threads, such as here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38203707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38203707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38202957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38202957 We ban accounts that post this abusively, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
    - Garvi 3y ago
      You forgot the one just recently, where I called a person insane for stating the US is in a good position to win a nuclear exchange with Russia. I do not come to this site to have an open and fair debate with idiots. It is your job to have enough common sense and general education to tell whether something is worth debating over. For example I feel a topic that is heavily under-debated is abortion. Maybe we should have a fair and balanced debate whether it's right to force women to carry out our children and on how easy we want to make it for people to kill babies? (this whole paragraph is an attempt at irony, I feel the need to point this out) I understand you enforcing US exceptionalism to the extreme and removing any critique on it. But on the other side you're encouraging a debate on vaccine effectiveness as if it's apparently ambiguous. The consequences of what you are doing, especially on a site that is supposed to be full of point dexters, are making this so immoral, it sometimes simply takes extra words to express it.

Ambolia 3y ago

Science is a tool. I'm sure most people would have a positive view of science if it was performed by people or institutions they trust, for goals that they hold.

karmakurtisaani 3y ago
So performed by Fox news for increasing some billionaires' wealth? Seems like that's where the public's trust and interests lie these days, whether they know it or not.

marklubi 3y ago

"Science is real, study says." At some point, people stop blindly believing in the constant click-bait headlines.

dudeinjapan 3y ago

This should be qualified that trust is lost in academic paper-mills and “expert” policy advisor scientists—in other words, any scientist who attends cocktail parties—not in the fruits of science itself.

js8 3y ago

I watched Angela Collier, an astrophysicist, on YT the other day. I'll paraphrase an off-hand remark she made: This is a really cool technology, but then you think how big companies are going to ruin it for profit, as they do with everything. It's hard to get excited about technology these days. I think this is the root of problem. If you want to make technology cool again, you need to cut out the gold rush that's ruining everything. Almost tautologically, the motivation for a society to do things must be something else than "make more money".

huijzer 3y ago
I‘ll probably get downvoted for this, but big companies do not ruin everything for profit. Google Calendar, for example, is a simple tool which is very well implemented on various systems and it just works. And if you want more privacy, then you can go to Proton Calendar. Also a typical argument is made that more should be done against anti-competitive behaviour. The problem is that there is no better alternative. If you regulate competition too much then people will not spend their time and/or money on moonshot ideas anymore. Why take a massive amount of risk if you aren’t allowed to reap the rewards? This is what happened in the Soviet Union and nowadays partially in China. Innovation stalls and all you can do is copy. Russia, for example, tried to make chips by copying the American designs, but without understanding the fundamentals. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work. So complete regulation for anti-competitive behaviour doesn’t work. Then governments should probably just regulate a little bit? This is precisely what the US is doing. Yes, sometimes corporations push it too far and consumers are negatively affected. However, the alternative is less innovation which will also negatively affect customers. For the counterargument that technology doesn’t make things better. (Even this is nowadays a common argument.) Compare living today with living in the 1980s. Transportation, education, medical aid, and entertainment are in general much better. Yes, there are some negative sides, but I wouldn’t want to be born 40 years earlier. Having to write letters to your family when they are overseas. No YouTube. Internet measured in kB/s. Sending patches via email on repositories without CI/CD. No thanks.
- upsidesinclude 3y ago
  While the latter part of your statement is reasonable, it is also only opinion. Many people would prefer a less technically advanced society. This forum, for instance, is about as simple as it gets and that is to it's credit. The initial point misses a fairly significant consideration though. A huge number of advancements are publicly funded. That public funding turns into private profit. People largely unaware of that fact, recently were made aware with the massive vaccine development spending that led to record shattering profits for pharma companies. To cite just one prominent example in the last few years. Edit: shout out to text only

questinthrow 3y ago

Science was never meant to be a political tool where you can bludgeon those who dont agree with you as being unscientific. The more you use it as a weapon the more people will start resenting it for being used on them. Still as people moved from religion to ideologies like communism and nazism as their new God, now they abandoned those and moved to science as the single spring of truth and morality. For most laypeople science is now a religion that must be "trusted" instead of a tool fundamentally based on falsification.It is not a tool for establishing principles of morality and conduct. If you think you can trust the "science" then you are fundamentally unscientific, science is based on finding counterexamples not on trusting.

pyuser583 3y ago
They’ve moved past science even. There’s a really good YouTube video of Richard Dawkins talking about what became of the atheist movement of the 2000s. Basically, they abandoned science in favor of “social justice.”

0xChain 3y ago

Sadly, due to some scientists no longer including ethics in their research, by fudging data to keep their funding, siding with corporate interests, and showing their elitism by treating their word for gospel as if they're infallible.

tibbydudeza 3y ago

They want you dumb and entertained by circuses.

i8comments 3y ago
What else are comments?

Garvi 3y ago

Covid is a very big part of the answer to this question. Unfortunately on HN covid is a heavily moderated topic and only one opinion is allowed. So I'd like to tell you from my point of view, but my posts were removed for being pro science. On HN. So since this is turning into reddit.. where have all the techies gone?

underseacables 3y ago

Science allowed itself to be politicized. On the one hand, we are told to trust the science, but on the other hand, we are told to believe things that are absolutely contradictory to science, and common sense. It's no wonder people have lost faith.

timeon 3y ago
If you want to talk about politics... In two-party system anything that does not align with chosen party is wrong. And one must defend the party at all cost, otherwise other would win. Scientists, like everyone are not without errors. But there is active anti-science push in some media. There are several reasons for that. For example topic of climate change is in contrast with profits of some companies. Another example are vaccines. Exploiting believes and fears that can not be proven is easy way to obtain support.
Kye 3y ago
When was it ever not politicized?
- underseacables 3y ago
  When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable. When vaccines were accepted as a good thing by the vast majority of the public. Those are the two most hotly contested scientific issues in recent memory
  - Kye 3y ago
    >> "When everyone agreed that there was only two biological sexes, and the two were immutable." I had people like Galileo and Darwin in mind. So no, politics in science is not new. And no, there has never been universal agreement on...that. We'll call it a "statement" to not run afoul of the guidelines. You would have to restrict your view to a fantastically thin and non-contiguous slice of geography, history, and ideology to consider it true, and it would be absurd to take someone who does that seriously. You are politicizing science. Mind your glass house.

countWSS 3y ago

disturbing decline for faith in science? heretical thoughts on the rise?