So 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

So 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.