8 ms·
The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science
- Alex3917 13y agoIf HN has taught me anything, it's that it's trivially easy to trick people into taking the wrong side of any argument, at which point they'll continue to defend their position indefinitely even if they had no strong prior beliefs on the subject. It's kind of sad that we live in a society where posting factually accurate comments/information is the most effective form of trolling.
- bjhoops1 13y agoIt's also sad that people typically spend a small fraction of effort determining what it is they believe, then expend vastly greater effort arguing and promoting those hastily-formed (or most often, inherited) beliefs.
- tokenizer 13y agoNicely put. I personally find this frustrating to deal with. I've also learned that the most open of individuals are usually in the least amount of need for a good thought-provoking debate.
- lukifer 13y agoI believe that one shouldn't try to debate an idea until you can understand why a reasonable person might come to the opposing conclusion. Solves the empathy problem and "what if I'm wrong" problem in one stroke. Many people are incorrect, but few are actually crazy (and it is mostly pointless to debate those who are).
- justindz 13y agoThis has been my basic frustration with what I call "YouTube logic," which seems to take this form: 1) Determine what you would prefer to be true. 2) Spend your time absorbing and referencing supporting evidence, at the expense of verifying its credibility. 3) When presented with contradicting evidence, spend your time dismissing or discrediting it, at the expense of verifying its credibility. 4) Re-affirm your belief successfully through willful or accidental intellectual dishonesty. Perhaps there's a formal name for this. YouTube logic works for me, though, because that makes it sound appropriately juvenile.
- tokenizer 13y agoI like Information Saturation. The idea that for some people, instead of using the internet as an intelligent, character building resource, the internet uses them with it's strong polarizing and insular force of saturating them with distractions and half-truths. The individual may think they have choices of what to think, but ultimately the specific forum and/or resource may already be tailored to their biases. We even have our most popular English search engine, google, tailoring your biases at the discovery phase of research. I can't remember the specific presentation, but I seem to recall an example of the search "Egypt", which displayed revolution in one user window, and vacation opportunities in the other. If you think this is interesting, try http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo1qzjC_5xI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bo1qzjC_5xI
- dlokshin 13y agoIf Hacker News has taught me anything, it's that people try to masquerade a lot of conclusions behind a wall of "Science" when in fact the process is neither scientific nor conclusive.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- lukifer 13y agoNot to mention how easy it is to forget the historical track record of science being overturned by better science: http://arbesman.net/the-half-life-of-facts/ http://arbesman.net/the-half-life-of-facts/
- mathattack 13y agoI was thinking the same thing, though I didn't have a citation.
- mynameishere 13y agoThe fact that the examples of disbelief given in such articles are always lefty pop-topics (climate change, Obama's birth certificate, death panels) is the real hint into why people don't examine things with pure rationality. I could lead off a similar article with "Why don't people realize that human races, to some degree, have different average intelligence stemming from genetics?" That would never be published in MotherJones, and honestly, if they had their way, I would go to prison just from saying that. So why don't people "believe" in climate change? Because they realize it's a political, not a scientific, topic. It has winners and losers to the order of trillions of dollars. Science can't compete. Sorry.
- lindauer 13y agoDo you really think the vaccine-autism thing is a "lefty pop-topic"? As far as I can tell the sets of people who deny climate change science and those who deny vaccine-autism science are nearly disjoint.
- samatman 13y agoYou will find legions on homeschoolers in the intersection, if you go looking.
- ZeroGravitas 13y agoSince you're someone who seems to belive in multiple human races could you give me a list of those races?
- sublimit 13y agoHuman races are not a matter of belief. Look at the people around you, look at different cultures and their trends across centuries. You're one of those people who could take a lesson from this article.
- anon1385 13y agoIn a discussion about public ignorance of science you are telling somebody the best way to get an answer to something is anecdotal evidence from looking at the people around them? On a topic where we know people have great difficulty objectively comparing things? I honestly can't tell if you are joking or not.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- bjhoops1 13y ago> non-groupthink outliers of one century who overturn the previously accepted scientific consensus of the century before These outliers are just that - outliers. They are rare and it is not productive to lionize them, especially in the context of science deniers who may fancy themselves as "skeptics". Also, scientific consensus is not groupthink, and the scientific establishment is by its very nature self-correcting. Which is why when a major breakthrough comes along that discredits old models, it is typically quickly accepted. That major scientific breakthroughs are repressed and covered up by the scientific establishment is a myth told by quacks.
- Torgo 13y agoThis could have just as easily been applied to disputes inside science itself.
- eeky 13y agoThe main reason is that people don't understand science, but they will still appeal to it as if it were the law of the universe. It's an appeal to authority: Much like people used to say "X is true because God said it", it is now "X is true because Science proved it". Science is a continual work in progress towards an objective understanding of the universe. But it's so easy to see a news story saying: "A new study shows that global warming will melt the ice caps before 2012! More at 11". People have been lied to before and don't trust these studies, because they may have faulty conclusions. We need to look at the data and make our own conclusions, because we may all have different perspectives on what caused a result. Relevant reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Lie_with_Statistics
- splawn 13y agoI disagree that it is simply an appeal to authority. I think this is more accurate: "X is likely true not just because the current scientific consensus says it is, but because we as humanity literally can not know better".
- BlackDeath3 13y agoThis is why I feel so uncertain about almost everything. How can one go through life confident about anything if they must not only research everything for themselves, but also overcome their own biases? What makes somebody qualified to evaluate or research anyway? I feel like after over two decades of living, I don't know a damn thing, and I don't mean that in a "I'm so young and naive" sense either.
- Diederich 13y agoI have twice as many decades of living as you do, and my certainty has only continued to decline, for all the reasons you mentioned.
- rosser 13y agoI think William James summarized TFA's thesis most succinctly when he said, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices."
- zwieback 13y agoLike probably most HN readers I think of myself as reasonably well educated in science and engineering. However, when it comes to interpreting the vast majority of scientific discoveries I have to rely on my sense of scientific authority, not on firsthand knowledge. Now put yourself in the average person's shoes: how can you trust anyone when there's so much contradictory information and, frankly, so much bad science around us? Also, people love to argue so they will often take extreme positions just for the heck of it.
- coldtea 13y agoWhy we don't believe in science? Besides the illegitimate reasons, also because science is not some magic oracle but a process. A process that can be (and HAS been) falsified for profit, fame, ideology or current fads. A process which one can selectively take parts from, to push further agendas. A process which lots of times, even in it's purest and well-intended form, arrives at bullshit conclusions (like lobotomy, the cures for homosexuality, thalidomide, etc). And it gets worse: a lot of things that are political and ideological in nature are also considered sciences (History, Sociology, Economics, etc). Things which are not even close to "black/white" as hard sciences are. One should not "believe" in science. One should EXAMINE and VERIFY science, with the scientific method (which in itself is mostly: systematic experimentation). Merely "believing" or "trusting" science is no better than mediaval people trusting the priests of yore.
- Amadou 13y agoWhile I agree with much of what you wrote, I have to point out that it is impossible to "examine and verify" anywhere near enough of the science that is relevant to our daily lives. That's both a physical impossibility due to resource constraints and a mental impossibility due to lack of domain knowledge required to correctly interpret the data. We have to choose which "shortcuts" to accept. One way or another we end up trusting in something greater than ourselves -- the nebulous scientific community, political analysts, priests, neighbors, etc -- to inform us. Unless you disbelieve basically everything in life you put your faith in somebody or something. Not necessarily 100% belief but some level of certainty is necessary and that doesn't make it less a faith-based decision, for example even priests have a tendency to doubt the existence of God.
- lukifer 13y agoI really wish we had a different term for "prevailing consensus of the current practioners of science". The word science itself should refer specifically to the scientific method, not to its conclusions.
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoSo here's the secret you should learn by your 20s, but some people never do: human beings are wonderful at rationalizing. Most of the time they do not know they are doing this. There is a bedrock falsehood that somehow wrapping the word "science" around something prevents it from this problem. It does not. Science history has taught us that for the most part, the social part of science works just like the social part of any other industry: there are cool people, there are weirdos, there's folks who have amazing ideas, there are fads, there are things the group feels strongly about, and so on. In other words, scientists, like all of us, operate in clans and herds. (Their herds just have much better names!) Pay attention: I am not trying to trash the entire field of science. Far from it. Science is the light we have in the darkness. It's mankind's only hope. But what I'm trying to show is that reading articles like "the science of why we don't believe in science" is bullshit. In it, the writer will just put his own misconceptions, or popular opinion, in the place of what is right and show the various ways people do not agree with him and how they are broken. The subtext is clear: we, the cognoscenti, know the truth. It's those poor other rubes that aren't getting it. I've long said I do not know what the climate is going to do. Looking at some of the models' performance and the lack of any other planet-sized biological systems to study, I have my doubts that others do either, but that's just my own bias. What I can say is that the discussion around climate science is full of horse shit so deep that you'd need an excavator working 24/7 for a year to dig your way out. It has become politicized, and scientists have crossed the line between telling us what is and telling us what we should do. This politicization of science is not good for politics or for science, because Average Joe Sixpack is going to start lumping in all information he receives under the rubric "science" as being suspect. He doesn't have the time nor inclination to sort out the different types of proofs we have for Newtonian physics versus evolutionary psychology. To him, it's all just "science". And when one of these sciences promotes something that later on turns out to be highly-opinionated BS, it hurts the entire field. It's bad enough when journalists do this with poor science stories, but when scientists themselves start playing the game of "who's right and who's wrong" in the world, it destroys the very thing they're supposed to be promoting. Very bad. So when I read articles about how one political party has differently-organized brains than the other one, or about various forms of cognitive bias influencing politics, or how denialism and being a crank has a scientific basis, I wince. This is not helpful. Please stop. You are not the scientific, reasonable-minded judge of rationality you think you are. None of us are. If you absolutely must say something, make the general point and move on. Otherwise you are creating the very problem that you say you are just trying to point out.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- js2 13y agoFunny how articles get traction on HN: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22don't+believe+science%22&start=0 https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=%22don...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- csense 13y ago> Somewhat oversimplifying, you can think of hierarchical individualists as akin to conservative Republicans, and egalitarian communitarians as liberal Democrats. What about hierarchical communitarians or egalitarian individualists? What about people who are near the middle of one or both scales? Why even bother having two supposedly independent traits if you're really just asking people about their political party? The author may be distorting the study's methodology or results, in order to support the narrative he wants to tell. (Or the researchers, but from the information presented here, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt.)
- MaysonL 13y agoWell, at one time, not so long ago, there were such animals as moderate Republicans and conservative Democrats (although an argument could be made that the current Democrat party is somewhat more conservative than Nixon was).