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Everyone seems to acknowledge this is a problem, but refuse to believe it actually affects anything when it comes time to "trust the science". Yes, science is

by ta8645 2y ago

Everyone seems to acknowledge this is a problem, but refuse to believe it actually affects anything when it comes time to "trust the science". Yes, science is corrupted, but all the results can be trusted, and the correct answer is always reached in the end. So, is it really a problem? Or not?

eig 2y ago
A key skill for any scientist is to differentiate quality work and science that can be easily faked. The Alzheimer's and Parkinson's fields are too easy to fake, and too difficult to replicate. The new ideas are only ~20 years old. Big pharma companies are understandably wary of published papers. When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of times. TL;DR: Some science should absolutely be trusted, some shouldn't. It's not surprising that you can't make blanket statements on a superfield ranging from germ theory to cold fusion.
- yunwal 2y ago
  > When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of times. When people say "trust the science" they're usually referring to fairly recent developments. Covid vaccines were in development and testing for just over 18 months before being mandated and were certainly not replicated on a large scale by disinterested 3rd parties before being mandated. The idea that we can have effective scientific policy without trust in scientific institutions is just... not accurate.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
    Exactly. Nobody needs to be told to "trust the science" on gravity and electricity, nobody asks to consult scientific consensus. The argument only arises for the more suspicious niches.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Yeah, we can trust that Ozempic works, because faking or fudging weight loss is close to impossible. Maybe this indicates the need for better metric.
- trustno2 2y ago
  mRNA is very new...
consteval 2y ago
It's a matter of how established the science actually is. Questioning novel science is one thing but questioning if the Earth is flat or Germ Theory is another thing all together. The problem with skeptics is that they sometimes hang around conspiracists. It's hard to not discount these people when the person next to them thinks black people are biologically inferior. Then when those skeptics don't distance themselves or don't explicitly condemn those bad actors, it brings to question if their positions are born of skepticism or some strange prejudice, and that they merely constructed the cover of skepticism to hide their strange prejudices. For example, during the Covid pandemic there was a lot of questioning around masks. In hindsight, the answer is obvious: it doesn't really matter if masks were or were not effective, because they're essentially free to wear. Even in the worst case, nobody is actually hurt. But there were many, maybe millions, of mask deniers who would simply refuse to wear them. They were doing this because of institutional distrust and political motivations, not because they truly believed the masks were dangerous. And this is the trouble: these people are skeptics, but they're skeptics with an end-goal of political destabilization, i.e. they're dangerous. When you mix it all together, which people often do to themselves, it's discredits the very thought process.
- mistermann 2y ago
  Your mind reading and soothsaying are perfectly rational though I suppose, it is only us conspiracy theorists who suffer from delusional cognition?
  - consteval 2y ago
    > it is only us conspiracy theorists who suffer from delusional cognition Of course not, but if you, say, think the Earth is flat you are delusional. That's just what it is, and I'm not gonna hand hold crazy people when I tell them they're crazy. The issue is when crazy people assimilate, or rather try to infiltrate, groups of educated skeptics. Now they all look crazy, and that's a problem.
    - mistermann 2y ago
      And what of the much larger harm your kind causes to the world? Nothing a nice story can't wash clean I suspect, but then that doesn't stop the harm.
mistermann 2y ago
Another example of the phenomenon where people can realize something when considering it from an abstract perspective but not at a realtime object level is psychological bias and imperfect rationality. If the topic of discussion is an article about bias, rare is the person who will deny the phenomenon, and many enthusiastically admit to suffering from the problem themselves. But if the topic of discussion is something else and one was to suggest the phenomenon may be in play: opposite reaction. During realtime cognition, that knowledge is inaccessible. I honestly think if some serious attention was paid to this and various other real world paradoxes around us, we could actually make some forward progress on these problems for a change.

by ta8645 2y ago

eig 2y ago

A key skill for any scientist is to differentiate quality work and science that can be easily faked. The Alzheimer's and Parkinson's fields are too easy to fake, and too difficult to replicate. The new ideas are only ~20 years old. Big pharma companies are understandably wary of published papers. When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of times. TL;DR: Some science should absolutely be trusted, some shouldn't. It's not surprising that you can't make blanket statements on a superfield ranging from germ theory to cold fusion.

yunwal 2y ago
> When people say "trust the science", they often refer to things like masks, and antibiotics, and vaccines. That science is hundreds of years old and have been replicated thousands of times. When people say "trust the science" they're usually referring to fairly recent developments. Covid vaccines were in development and testing for just over 18 months before being mandated and were certainly not replicated on a large scale by disinterested 3rd parties before being mandated. The idea that we can have effective scientific policy without trust in scientific institutions is just... not accurate.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 2y ago
  Exactly. Nobody needs to be told to "trust the science" on gravity and electricity, nobody asks to consult scientific consensus. The argument only arises for the more suspicious niches.
inglor_cz 2y ago
Yeah, we can trust that Ozempic works, because faking or fudging weight loss is close to impossible. Maybe this indicates the need for better metric.
trustno2 2y ago
mRNA is very new...

consteval 2y ago

It's a matter of how established the science actually is. Questioning novel science is one thing but questioning if the Earth is flat or Germ Theory is another thing all together. The problem with skeptics is that they sometimes hang around conspiracists. It's hard to not discount these people when the person next to them thinks black people are biologically inferior. Then when those skeptics don't distance themselves or don't explicitly condemn those bad actors, it brings to question if their positions are born of skepticism or some strange prejudice, and that they merely constructed the cover of skepticism to hide their strange prejudices. For example, during the Covid pandemic there was a lot of questioning around masks. In hindsight, the answer is obvious: it doesn't really matter if masks were or were not effective, because they're essentially free to wear. Even in the worst case, nobody is actually hurt. But there were many, maybe millions, of mask deniers who would simply refuse to wear them. They were doing this because of institutional distrust and political motivations, not because they truly believed the masks were dangerous. And this is the trouble: these people are skeptics, but they're skeptics with an end-goal of political destabilization, i.e. they're dangerous. When you mix it all together, which people often do to themselves, it's discredits the very thought process.

mistermann 2y ago
Your mind reading and soothsaying are perfectly rational though I suppose, it is only us conspiracy theorists who suffer from delusional cognition?
- consteval 2y ago
  > it is only us conspiracy theorists who suffer from delusional cognition Of course not, but if you, say, think the Earth is flat you are delusional. That's just what it is, and I'm not gonna hand hold crazy people when I tell them they're crazy. The issue is when crazy people assimilate, or rather try to infiltrate, groups of educated skeptics. Now they all look crazy, and that's a problem.
  - mistermann 2y ago
    And what of the much larger harm your kind causes to the world? Nothing a nice story can't wash clean I suspect, but then that doesn't stop the harm.

mistermann 2y ago

Another example of the phenomenon where people can realize something when considering it from an abstract perspective but not at a realtime object level is psychological bias and imperfect rationality. If the topic of discussion is an article about bias, rare is the person who will deny the phenomenon, and many enthusiastically admit to suffering from the problem themselves. But if the topic of discussion is something else and one was to suggest the phenomenon may be in play: opposite reaction. During realtime cognition, that knowledge is inaccessible. I honestly think if some serious attention was paid to this and various other real world paradoxes around us, we could actually make some forward progress on these problems for a change.