7 ms·

"I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust y

by api 12y ago

"I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?" I'm really happy to see that someone else sees this. I've been harping on this for a long time -- that the reason people believe things like anti-vaxx propaganda is not because they are idiots but because scientific authorities, the media, and the medical establishment have not earned their trust. People subscribe to kooky conspiracy theories and fringe/quack medical ideas because those advancing those points of view appear more credible than our society's institutions. Much of that appearance of credibility is by default -- it's more that our institutions have ruined their own credibility by being overconfident or in some cases actually deceptive. I personally think it extends way beyond medicine. When the president tells us we're invading Iraq because it has "weapons of mass destruction," and that turns out to be almost entirely hot air, should people be considered stupid for suddenly trusting Alex Jones more than they trust the POTUS? Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. In addition when you have someone trust and then stab them in the back, the emotional reaction from that is far worse than if you never had any trust to begin with. Betrayal inspires some of the deepest negative emotions. Edit: Another phenomenon that I think is at work, especially with people like Alex Jones and wacky conspiracy theories, is a kind of "fuck you factor" that they have. Believing such things and perpetuating them is an act of (often subconscious) protest -- akin to things like calling yourself a "Satanist" in protest against fundamentalist religion. You might call these kinds of things "protest beliefs." I have a friend who leans toward the view that we didn't land on the moon. He's a very intelligent person. I personally believe -- and I've told him this -- that this "belief" is more of a big fuck you to the backward-and-sideways direction NASA and America in general has taken post-Apollo. "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you." He didn't really deny that, just kind of shrugged.

TTPrograms 12y ago
The blame is misplaced here, though. There's no real avenue for science to interact with the public currently (except for /r/AskScience, which is a terrific development). A vast majority of the misleading described is perpetuated by news headlines ending in question marks and "doctors" with mail order degrees trying to sell books. If there's any blame to be placed on scientific institutions it's not that they are bad at communicating to the public, but rather that they need to start communicating to the public. This is really a question of incentives - what do scientists have to gain from communicating reasonable conclusions about their results? And how can they compete with exaggeration by media outlets?
- api 12y ago
  What about cases where prestigious scientific institutions have deeply held and advanced utterly wrong ideas for decades? Nutritional science is particularly bad in this regard. The recommendations that were advanced from (roughly) the 70s through the 90s lead to obesity and heart disease. One thing in particular comes to mind: margarine. I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever communicated? Vastly and systematically exaggerating your knowledge and certainty of something in order to present a "unified message to the public" is dangerously close to just lying. I also think science is much more vulnerable to corruption by moneyed interests than many people will admit. Research payola is very real. While I'm personally pretty convinced the CO2 problem is real, I do not blame people from being skeptical when government-backed science and jet setting rich do-gooders tell them they must accept higher energy costs and possibly a reduced standard of living in order to combat a threat they cannot directly perceive. It's particularly easy to understand in cases like China and India where fossil fuel energy is lifting billions out of abject poverty. I could afford to pay 3-4X for energy. A Chinese peasant or an American member of the working poor can barely afford to pay 1.01X for energy.
  - Retric 12y ago
    The view on Fat moved a lot less than you might think. People used to eat a lot of fat which we still think is a bad idea. More recently we found that eating too little fat was also a bad idea. As to dietary guidelines, if you pick a target for a 2,000 calorie diet and someone on a 5,000 calorie a day diet tries to hit that same target there is a clear miscommunication going on. And yes, you can eat a relatively healthy 5,000 calorie a day diet if you’re tall and active enough. Or, you can rapidly become morbidly obese on 3k/day if you’re short and inactive. PS: I would suggest to most people that they talk with a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN). Diet is far from a one size fit's all thing.
    - WillPostForFood 12y ago
      Your post is full of the science that people no longer trust. There is plenty of evidence that fat doesn't cause weight gain or heart attacks, and that exercise doesn't lead to weight loss because it makes you hungry. I don't know the correct answer, but I know there is a lot of uncertainty now, and there seemed to be no uncertainty in the food pyramid days.
wutbrodo 12y ago
> Believing such things and perpetuating them is an act of (often subconscious) protest -- akin to things like calling yourself a "Satanist" in protest against fundamentalist religion. You might call these kinds of things "protest beliefs." This is fascinating to me. I've read ample studies about how people do this, and I can't understand it as anything but the worst form of petulant childishness. Changing which FACTS you believe in because of personal reasons? I suppose this excludes people who don't actually believe them but just say they do, but then I guess those people aren't just stupid, they're just kind of dicks...
- api 12y ago
  It's a form of protest -- meaning a challenge or accusation levied against the powerful by the less powerful. Such things are inherently dickish and often a bit petulant. Our evolutionary forebears liked to fling their own feces to express these kinds of emotions. We do it symbolically. Go listen to some punk rock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8fLOJswWtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8fLOJswWtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAaQtDUNZHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAaQtDUNZHk "Punk" style and sentiment isn't popular around here -- this is largely an upper class forum full of top-ten university graduates. When the system is good to you, it's hard to understand why others hate it so much that they're willing to engage in this kind of petulant rage-driven feces-flinging behavior. Having been raised in a barn in the flyover country on food stamps, I personally really get it. I do not think Apollo was a hoax, but I do think advancing that crackpot theory is a good way to say fuck you to NASA for losing the will to actually go anywhere and to the US government for deciding that Vietnam was more important than humanity's future. The "fuck you beliefs" effect is IMHO a bit broader than I implied. One of the reasons people are not vaccinating their children is that the president lied to us about Iraq. That's because if you are middle to lower class, the "authorities" start to look like an unreachable monolithic bloc from your perspective... like how a light source loses detail and vanishes into a point at infinity. This effect is magnified if you are both socially and physically distant from your authorities -- which is why a number of these beliefs are much more popular outside of coastal alpha world cities. Edit: I thought of another way to explain it, returning to the moon hoax theory... If you are living in an underwater house in the flyover country somewhere and are working a dead-end job to service that and your mountain of student debt, "we" did not go to the moon. They went to the moon -- the same they who hold your writs of indenture and tell you what you must inject into your children. That "accomplishment" is one of the things they lord over you, so denying it is a way of denying their authority over you. Not vaccinating your kids is another. You don't have the power to escape your socioeconomic situation, but you do have the power to do those things. Protest, like water under pressure, will find whatever holes in a structure it can. This process is only semi-conscious, and is driven by emotion. The process whereby an elite comes to believe itself above law and decency and to lord its "meritocratic" status over people is also only semi-conscious and driven by emotion. We all share 99.9~% the same genetic material, and none of us are perfectly rational beings. The popularity of these "antagonistically irrational" beliefs is a major leading indicator of social trust collapse. This will be followed by the collapse of our society, since mutual trust is the basis of civilization. I think the rolling out of things like the surveillance state are due in part to our elite's understanding of this coupled with the fact that they lack the spine to take the high road and actually repair their lost trust by owning up to past mistakes and offering to remedy current wrongs. This in turn will only accelerate our social collapse as people, contrary to popular belief, are not utterly oblivious and see these moves for what they are.
jstalin 12y ago
I think your second point is important. Many people simply don't trust those in authority because, so often, those in authority lie. This applies to both the public and private sector. We are constantly lied to by authority figures, so it becomes difficult to trust those who are telling you things "for your own good."
lotharbot 12y ago
Here's a thought I wrote on HN five years ago [some typos fixed]: "Imagine an engineer who normally comes to work in jeans and a t-shirt. One day the boss says "I want you to present your product tomorrow. Here's the address." So the engineer cobbles together a demo, dresses up in his khakis and a polo shirt, and shows up to present... at a nationally-televised, black-tie event. That's analogous to the situation in which climate scientists now find themselves. For the most part, climate scientists are doing normal science, and thinking in terms of presenting their work to other scientists. But their work has become the centerpiece for huge global initiatives with large economic, environmental, and political impacts. This means their results, methods, and even personalities are being subject to an unusual degree of criticism (some valid, some not.)" This creates a credibility gap. The science they're doing is perfectly acceptable in the "getting less wrong all the time" sense, but not really acceptable in the "we have a completely proven solution" sense. We've all heard "science ... it works, bitches". Yeah, science works and planes fly -- but individual scientists will tell you it's more like http://www.twisteddoodles.com/image/86414780702 http://www.twisteddoodles.com/image/86414780702 or https://electroncafe.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/scientific-process-rage/ https://electroncafe.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/scientific-pro... . Loads and loads of uncertainty, repeating experiments, interpreting results, criticism from other scientists, and then eventually you get something that improves on pre-existing ideas by a small amount. So the emphasis on the "planes fly" kind of science ends up increasing the credibility gap for the sort of ordinary science done by most scientists, because most science doesn't have flashy "now we have airplanes" type results. Then there's the problem of science being presented by polarizing figures rather than scientists, and often being tied to specific policy recommendations that aren't actually all that closely tied to the science. Politicians are both overconfident in the science, and overconfident in their favored solutions. So people end up buying anti-vaxx BS, even though that's an area where the science works in the "airplanes fly" sense. The data is overwhelmingly in favor of vaccinating for things like measles. But if people can't tell the difference between that kind of science and Al Gore saying "we need cap and trade" or some guy on TV selling nutritional supplements who uses the word "science" 12 times per minute in his infomercial, they'll have a hard time trusting even the best science.
raverbashing 12y ago
I too am glad this is being realised by some people As an example with vaccines. Mercury containing substances have been phased out (thiomersal). Doctors and news outlets keep pumping information about the bad side of Mercury, etc, etc (which are true for the most part, but maybe exaggerated) But thiomersal is still used in a lot of vaccines. So people get all the negative messages about Mercury but they're supposed to think "it's OK to be used in vaccines"?!?
- api 12y ago
  Very good point about mercury. What are people supposed to think? "Mercury is so bad I'm barely allowed to purchase or handle it, but then I'm supposed to then inject it into my baby?" Yes there's a lot of nuance here, and a lot of cost/benefit analysis around the risk of a tiny amount of mercury (in excretable compound form) vs. the risk of nasty diseases. But it becomes harder to communicate that nuance and be believed when you've just been telling people to eat margarine (artery plaque) for 50 years.
  - Dylan16807 12y ago
    Well we could stop acting like pure mercury is all that dangerous to begin with...
    - api 12y ago
      I played with it as a kid and I'm perfectly fine. Just look at my comment history.
    - vixen99 12y ago
      Yes, I am sure that those who say mercury is a highly toxic element don't know what they are talking about. Or perhaps they do.
- scott_s 12y ago
  Please read this: http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/UCM096228 http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability... Ethylmercury and methylmercury are not the same thing.
scott_s 12y ago
I think you are greatly underestimating the impact of two things: one, the explanation based on science is often subtle and also often requires a significant amount of intuition for probabilities and statistics; and yet, two, there are people out there who loudly yell easy answers that prey on our biases. My point: I find it difficult to talk about "earned trust" when not also acknowledging that the truth is often confusing yet boring, and there are people who actively espouse a simple, exciting, yet false alternative.
calinet6 12y ago
The problem here is not with science itself, but the expectation of what science is, and what it tells us, and how. People are not educated on science, period. The popular perception is that science tells us facts about the world. This is false. What science is, at its core, is a complete and utter acceptance of an extremely high level of doubt and uncertainty. It is living with the unknown, and working with it anyway to try to get closer to the truth. Framed this way, science always "changing its mind" about what's right should be revered and celebrated by everyone in the world! We're looking at the advancement of civilization with our own two eyes! Not always grand and not always perfect, but that's how science works, in its own extremely productive way. But we don't teach this. We do not teach, deeply, this version of science. No people except a chosen few will reach this level of understanding. The 99% of society which are not scientists will look at it as untrustworthy, because it always looks like it's wrong, all the time. That is what needs to be changed. Not science itself, not what we recommend based on science—which is just the best thing that we know at the time—but the public perception of science itself. Science education must be deep, ingrained, and profound; not simply functional. It would solve a great many problems of society if the average person were able to look at a situation with a respect for both what we know and what we do not, and understand the procedure for moving closer to truth, and respect it. It is unlikely to ever happen, but that is the systemic problem, and that is where we should direct our attention.
- SilasX 12y ago
  Adams wasn't criticizing science's updating of beliefs on new evidence. He was criticizing the practice of shouting "Hey! We're ultra-certain about this! Very important! You've got to do this!" when the truth was more like, "We kind of have some preliminary evidence this might be bad for you, stay tuned." (And I don't buy the claim that it's just the media overblowing this; why weren't the national academies of science criticizing the food pyramid, at least in the sense of "okay it's not actually that important to eat 11 servings of bread a day".) The point, then, is: don't be surprised when people are skeptical in those cases where you really are deservedly confident (e.g. vaccines). If your evidence isn't very good and prone to being updated, that's fine! Just don't pretend to be confident it it.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I agree, but I wouldn't put that much of blame on scientist themselves - what I think did most of the damage is science reporting, which is yet another case of audacious journalist lies. Most people do not learn "what science says" from research papers, they read about it in lifestyle magazines, on news sites, and now on Facebook. It is there where "coffee possibly linked to cancer (p < 0.1) (study on 100 people)" gets turned into "Your Morning Coffee Will Give You Cancer" (and cue in articles with opposite conclusions next week). I don't get why people have such tolerance for being lied to. People should be fired from their jobs for spewing such nonsense and misrepresenting facts. Of course news sites and marketers have zero incentive to say the truth, but I hoped that at least the recipients would care. Apparently, most of them don't. As a side note: > "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you." Well, I recently learned that US Congress basically got fed up with all those "visionary projects" and preemptively shut down the space race. From [0]: "Wernher von Braun also proposed a manned Mars mission using NERVA and a spinning donut-shaped spacecraft to simulate gravity. Many of the NASA plans for Mars in the 1960s and early 1970s used the NERVA rocket specifically, see list of manned Mars mission plans in the 20th century. The Mars mission became NERVA's downfall. Members of Congress in both political parties judged that a manned mission to Mars would be a tacit commitment for the United States to decades more of the expensive Space Race. Manned Mars missions were enabled by nuclear rockets; therefore, if NERVA could be discontinued the Space Race might wind down and the budget would be saved." [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA
jacquesm 12y ago
> I personally think it extends way beyond medicine. When the president tells us we're invading Iraq because it has "weapons of mass destruction," and that turns out to be almost entirely hot air, should people be considered stupid for suddenly trusting Alex Jones more than they trust the POTUS? The scientists were actually pretty clear about that particular bit of data. http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix.shtml http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix.shtm... I think the politicians squarely deserve the blame for that one.
mcphage 12y ago
> because scientific authorities, the media, and the medical establishment have not earned their trust Given the developments and accomplishments of science and medicine in the last few hundred years... if that doesn't earn peoples' trust, what will? When it provides cancer cures and hoverboards, will that satisfy people, or will they still want more? Sorry NASA hasn't done anything as cool as the moon landing, but if your friend thinks pretending it didn't happen will get us flying cars or space elevators any sooner, I don't have much sympathy for his position.
webnrrd2k 12y ago
I've noticed a different motive for many of the more kooky science-deniers. I think that kind of denialism is rooted in their own insecurities about their intelligence. In essence, if they can rig up some quick way to prove the experts wrong, then they are smarter than all the experts. Another way of putting it is this: Rather than put in the hard work of understanding a difficult or nuanced argument, they come up with an easy solution that shows, in their mind, how smart they are.

by api 12y ago

TTPrograms 12y ago

The blame is misplaced here, though. There's no real avenue for science to interact with the public currently (except for /r/AskScience, which is a terrific development). A vast majority of the misleading described is perpetuated by news headlines ending in question marks and "doctors" with mail order degrees trying to sell books. If there's any blame to be placed on scientific institutions it's not that they are bad at communicating to the public, but rather that they need to start communicating to the public. This is really a question of incentives - what do scientists have to gain from communicating reasonable conclusions about their results? And how can they compete with exaggeration by media outlets?

api 12y ago
What about cases where prestigious scientific institutions have deeply held and advanced utterly wrong ideas for decades? Nutritional science is particularly bad in this regard. The recommendations that were advanced from (roughly) the 70s through the 90s lead to obesity and heart disease. One thing in particular comes to mind: margarine. I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever communicated? Vastly and systematically exaggerating your knowledge and certainty of something in order to present a "unified message to the public" is dangerously close to just lying. I also think science is much more vulnerable to corruption by moneyed interests than many people will admit. Research payola is very real. While I'm personally pretty convinced the CO2 problem is real, I do not blame people from being skeptical when government-backed science and jet setting rich do-gooders tell them they must accept higher energy costs and possibly a reduced standard of living in order to combat a threat they cannot directly perceive. It's particularly easy to understand in cases like China and India where fossil fuel energy is lifting billions out of abject poverty. I could afford to pay 3-4X for energy. A Chinese peasant or an American member of the working poor can barely afford to pay 1.01X for energy.
- Retric 12y ago
  The view on Fat moved a lot less than you might think. People used to eat a lot of fat which we still think is a bad idea. More recently we found that eating too little fat was also a bad idea. As to dietary guidelines, if you pick a target for a 2,000 calorie diet and someone on a 5,000 calorie a day diet tries to hit that same target there is a clear miscommunication going on. And yes, you can eat a relatively healthy 5,000 calorie a day diet if you’re tall and active enough. Or, you can rapidly become morbidly obese on 3k/day if you’re short and inactive. PS: I would suggest to most people that they talk with a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN). Diet is far from a one size fit's all thing.
  - WillPostForFood 12y ago
    Your post is full of the science that people no longer trust. There is plenty of evidence that fat doesn't cause weight gain or heart attacks, and that exercise doesn't lead to weight loss because it makes you hungry. I don't know the correct answer, but I know there is a lot of uncertainty now, and there seemed to be no uncertainty in the food pyramid days.

wutbrodo 12y ago

> Believing such things and perpetuating them is an act of (often subconscious) protest -- akin to things like calling yourself a "Satanist" in protest against fundamentalist religion. You might call these kinds of things "protest beliefs." This is fascinating to me. I've read ample studies about how people do this, and I can't understand it as anything but the worst form of petulant childishness. Changing which FACTS you believe in because of personal reasons? I suppose this excludes people who don't actually believe them but just say they do, but then I guess those people aren't just stupid, they're just kind of dicks...

api 12y ago
It's a form of protest -- meaning a challenge or accusation levied against the powerful by the less powerful. Such things are inherently dickish and often a bit petulant. Our evolutionary forebears liked to fling their own feces to express these kinds of emotions. We do it symbolically. Go listen to some punk rock. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8fLOJswWtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8fLOJswWtk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAaQtDUNZHk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAaQtDUNZHk "Punk" style and sentiment isn't popular around here -- this is largely an upper class forum full of top-ten university graduates. When the system is good to you, it's hard to understand why others hate it so much that they're willing to engage in this kind of petulant rage-driven feces-flinging behavior. Having been raised in a barn in the flyover country on food stamps, I personally really get it. I do not think Apollo was a hoax, but I do think advancing that crackpot theory is a good way to say fuck you to NASA for losing the will to actually go anywhere and to the US government for deciding that Vietnam was more important than humanity's future. The "fuck you beliefs" effect is IMHO a bit broader than I implied. One of the reasons people are not vaccinating their children is that the president lied to us about Iraq. That's because if you are middle to lower class, the "authorities" start to look like an unreachable monolithic bloc from your perspective... like how a light source loses detail and vanishes into a point at infinity. This effect is magnified if you are both socially and physically distant from your authorities -- which is why a number of these beliefs are much more popular outside of coastal alpha world cities. Edit: I thought of another way to explain it, returning to the moon hoax theory... If you are living in an underwater house in the flyover country somewhere and are working a dead-end job to service that and your mountain of student debt, "we" did not go to the moon. They went to the moon -- the same they who hold your writs of indenture and tell you what you must inject into your children. That "accomplishment" is one of the things they lord over you, so denying it is a way of denying their authority over you. Not vaccinating your kids is another. You don't have the power to escape your socioeconomic situation, but you do have the power to do those things. Protest, like water under pressure, will find whatever holes in a structure it can. This process is only semi-conscious, and is driven by emotion. The process whereby an elite comes to believe itself above law and decency and to lord its "meritocratic" status over people is also only semi-conscious and driven by emotion. We all share 99.9~% the same genetic material, and none of us are perfectly rational beings. The popularity of these "antagonistically irrational" beliefs is a major leading indicator of social trust collapse. This will be followed by the collapse of our society, since mutual trust is the basis of civilization. I think the rolling out of things like the surveillance state are due in part to our elite's understanding of this coupled with the fact that they lack the spine to take the high road and actually repair their lost trust by owning up to past mistakes and offering to remedy current wrongs. This in turn will only accelerate our social collapse as people, contrary to popular belief, are not utterly oblivious and see these moves for what they are.

jstalin 12y ago

I think your second point is important. Many people simply don't trust those in authority because, so often, those in authority lie. This applies to both the public and private sector. We are constantly lied to by authority figures, so it becomes difficult to trust those who are telling you things "for your own good."

lotharbot 12y ago

Here's a thought I wrote on HN five years ago [some typos fixed]: "Imagine an engineer who normally comes to work in jeans and a t-shirt. One day the boss says "I want you to present your product tomorrow. Here's the address." So the engineer cobbles together a demo, dresses up in his khakis and a polo shirt, and shows up to present... at a nationally-televised, black-tie event. That's analogous to the situation in which climate scientists now find themselves. For the most part, climate scientists are doing normal science, and thinking in terms of presenting their work to other scientists. But their work has become the centerpiece for huge global initiatives with large economic, environmental, and political impacts. This means their results, methods, and even personalities are being subject to an unusual degree of criticism (some valid, some not.)" This creates a credibility gap. The science they're doing is perfectly acceptable in the "getting less wrong all the time" sense, but not really acceptable in the "we have a completely proven solution" sense. We've all heard "science ... it works, bitches". Yeah, science works and planes fly -- but individual scientists will tell you it's more like http://www.twisteddoodles.com/image/86414780702 http://www.twisteddoodles.com/image/86414780702 or https://electroncafe.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/scientific-process-rage/ https://electroncafe.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/scientific-pro... . Loads and loads of uncertainty, repeating experiments, interpreting results, criticism from other scientists, and then eventually you get something that improves on pre-existing ideas by a small amount. So the emphasis on the "planes fly" kind of science ends up increasing the credibility gap for the sort of ordinary science done by most scientists, because most science doesn't have flashy "now we have airplanes" type results. Then there's the problem of science being presented by polarizing figures rather than scientists, and often being tied to specific policy recommendations that aren't actually all that closely tied to the science. Politicians are both overconfident in the science, and overconfident in their favored solutions. So people end up buying anti-vaxx BS, even though that's an area where the science works in the "airplanes fly" sense. The data is overwhelmingly in favor of vaccinating for things like measles. But if people can't tell the difference between that kind of science and Al Gore saying "we need cap and trade" or some guy on TV selling nutritional supplements who uses the word "science" 12 times per minute in his infomercial, they'll have a hard time trusting even the best science.

raverbashing 12y ago

I too am glad this is being realised by some people As an example with vaccines. Mercury containing substances have been phased out (thiomersal). Doctors and news outlets keep pumping information about the bad side of Mercury, etc, etc (which are true for the most part, but maybe exaggerated) But thiomersal is still used in a lot of vaccines. So people get all the negative messages about Mercury but they're supposed to think "it's OK to be used in vaccines"?!?

api 12y ago
Very good point about mercury. What are people supposed to think? "Mercury is so bad I'm barely allowed to purchase or handle it, but then I'm supposed to then inject it into my baby?" Yes there's a lot of nuance here, and a lot of cost/benefit analysis around the risk of a tiny amount of mercury (in excretable compound form) vs. the risk of nasty diseases. But it becomes harder to communicate that nuance and be believed when you've just been telling people to eat margarine (artery plaque) for 50 years.
- Dylan16807 12y ago
  Well we could stop acting like pure mercury is all that dangerous to begin with...
  - api 12y ago
    I played with it as a kid and I'm perfectly fine. Just look at my comment history.
  - vixen99 12y ago
    Yes, I am sure that those who say mercury is a highly toxic element don't know what they are talking about. Or perhaps they do.
scott_s 12y ago
Please read this: http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability/VaccineSafety/UCM096228 http://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/SafetyAvailability... Ethylmercury and methylmercury are not the same thing.

scott_s 12y ago

I think you are greatly underestimating the impact of two things: one, the explanation based on science is often subtle and also often requires a significant amount of intuition for probabilities and statistics; and yet, two, there are people out there who loudly yell easy answers that prey on our biases. My point: I find it difficult to talk about "earned trust" when not also acknowledging that the truth is often confusing yet boring, and there are people who actively espouse a simple, exciting, yet false alternative.

calinet6 12y ago

The problem here is not with science itself, but the expectation of what science is, and what it tells us, and how. People are not educated on science, period. The popular perception is that science tells us facts about the world. This is false. What science is, at its core, is a complete and utter acceptance of an extremely high level of doubt and uncertainty. It is living with the unknown, and working with it anyway to try to get closer to the truth. Framed this way, science always "changing its mind" about what's right should be revered and celebrated by everyone in the world! We're looking at the advancement of civilization with our own two eyes! Not always grand and not always perfect, but that's how science works, in its own extremely productive way. But we don't teach this. We do not teach, deeply, this version of science. No people except a chosen few will reach this level of understanding. The 99% of society which are not scientists will look at it as untrustworthy, because it always looks like it's wrong, all the time. That is what needs to be changed. Not science itself, not what we recommend based on science—which is just the best thing that we know at the time—but the public perception of science itself. Science education must be deep, ingrained, and profound; not simply functional. It would solve a great many problems of society if the average person were able to look at a situation with a respect for both what we know and what we do not, and understand the procedure for moving closer to truth, and respect it. It is unlikely to ever happen, but that is the systemic problem, and that is where we should direct our attention.

SilasX 12y ago
Adams wasn't criticizing science's updating of beliefs on new evidence. He was criticizing the practice of shouting "Hey! We're ultra-certain about this! Very important! You've got to do this!" when the truth was more like, "We kind of have some preliminary evidence this might be bad for you, stay tuned." (And I don't buy the claim that it's just the media overblowing this; why weren't the national academies of science criticizing the food pyramid, at least in the sense of "okay it's not actually that important to eat 11 servings of bread a day".) The point, then, is: don't be surprised when people are skeptical in those cases where you really are deservedly confident (e.g. vaccines). If your evidence isn't very good and prone to being updated, that's fine! Just don't pretend to be confident it it.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

I agree, but I wouldn't put that much of blame on scientist themselves - what I think did most of the damage is science reporting, which is yet another case of audacious journalist lies. Most people do not learn "what science says" from research papers, they read about it in lifestyle magazines, on news sites, and now on Facebook. It is there where "coffee possibly linked to cancer (p < 0.1) (study on 100 people)" gets turned into "Your Morning Coffee Will Give You Cancer" (and cue in articles with opposite conclusions next week). I don't get why people have such tolerance for being lied to. People should be fired from their jobs for spewing such nonsense and misrepresenting facts. Of course news sites and marketers have zero incentive to say the truth, but I hoped that at least the recipients would care. Apparently, most of them don't. As a side note: > "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you." Well, I recently learned that US Congress basically got fed up with all those "visionary projects" and preemptively shut down the space race. From [0]: "Wernher von Braun also proposed a manned Mars mission using NERVA and a spinning donut-shaped spacecraft to simulate gravity. Many of the NASA plans for Mars in the 1960s and early 1970s used the NERVA rocket specifically, see list of manned Mars mission plans in the 20th century. The Mars mission became NERVA's downfall. Members of Congress in both political parties judged that a manned mission to Mars would be a tacit commitment for the United States to decades more of the expensive Space Race. Manned Mars missions were enabled by nuclear rockets; therefore, if NERVA could be discontinued the Space Race might wind down and the budget would be saved." [0] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NERVA

jacquesm 12y ago

> I personally think it extends way beyond medicine. When the president tells us we're invading Iraq because it has "weapons of mass destruction," and that turns out to be almost entirely hot air, should people be considered stupid for suddenly trusting Alex Jones more than they trust the POTUS? The scientists were actually pretty clear about that particular bit of data. http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix.shtml http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/03/18_blix.shtm... I think the politicians squarely deserve the blame for that one.

mcphage 12y ago

> because scientific authorities, the media, and the medical establishment have not earned their trust Given the developments and accomplishments of science and medicine in the last few hundred years... if that doesn't earn peoples' trust, what will? When it provides cancer cures and hoverboards, will that satisfy people, or will they still want more? Sorry NASA hasn't done anything as cool as the moon landing, but if your friend thinks pretending it didn't happen will get us flying cars or space elevators any sooner, I don't have much sympathy for his position.

webnrrd2k 12y ago

I've noticed a different motive for many of the more kooky science-deniers. I think that kind of denialism is rooted in their own insecurities about their intelligence. In essence, if they can rig up some quick way to prove the experts wrong, then they are smarter than all the experts. Another way of putting it is this: Rather than put in the hard work of understanding a difficult or nuanced argument, they come up with an easy solution that shows, in their mind, how smart they are.