I agree with most of that; in fact, I've said similar things myself. I guess I just want anyone to be able to distinguish science that came from actual experiments run by honest scientists from pseudoscience that came from people just making stuff up and faking results. I mean, that shouldn't be a very high bar, but it's actually pretty hard to meet when you think about it. Respected scientists can get away with faking results for years sometimes.
As for technocrats: I find it hard to trust anyone who thinks their policy positions are simply the result of direct application of pure logic. That's not how it works. Logic and science can help you arrive at a policy position once you decide what your goals and priorities are, but different people have different goals and priorities, and those aren't determined by logic. Maybe there are some good technocrats out there, but to me it seems like their goals and priorities tend to somehow always gravitate towards the goals and priorities of lobbyists, think tanks, and wealthy people generally. Maximize shareholder value and don't rock the boat.
I think intelligent people refusing to acknowledged that science is not a field void of people with imperfect ethics, bias, financial gain incentive or a need to justify their position has immunized me from blindly trusting science. Many years ago a research professor at a highly regarded university basically described to me how funding worked at their university. Essentially the most important criteria was if their research had some promise of results aligning with who was giving the university funding. The second was how well you could navigate the politics of the university and the research funds director. This person expressed deep dissatisfaction that they had promising research in the cancer field that they could not get the lab director to fund because of the first two points.
Personally, I do not really care what Kalium-the-person says or does.
But as long as you are donning the hat of Kalium-the-spokeperson-of-Science, you are displaying ignorance and comptept for human nature. You seem to confuse the fact that Science is able to get the material facts more or less right, with the assertation that people should automatically trust/obey what scientists say.
They did just that, during the 20th century... and then (some of) the scientist sold out to moneyed interests. They made claims that were not 100% supported by the facts, but they did it anyways because their sponsors asked for it very nicely. Then, when (some of) those claims turned out to be false... it was not the sponsors or the guilable individual scientists who received the hit to their reputations, Science-the-institution did.
So, people have reason to distrust. And the fact that you refuse to acknowledge that much and demand compliance because you happen to be donning a white labcoat makes all of us look bad.
You say that it is unfair that others only point to our mistakes and forget our successes. That's Standard-Operations-Procedure in politics, everybody does it. Heck, even you do the same, it is just that you don't notice.
So given that the other people are not going to listen to you... what's to do? Throw a tantrum? Or engage the others with the tools of the politician?
There are problems both on the producing side and the consuming side. Any scientist knows that research is often driven by politics, money or ego.
The bigger problems are probably on the consumer side, though, and not only in under-educated social groups. Here's an interesting post I stumbled across recently: "People who trust science are less likely to fall for misinformation -- unless it sounds sciency" (https://digest.bps.org.uk/2021/08/10/people-who-trust-scienc...)
This confirms my sense that we easily glom on to things that "sound right", and if you're a scientist or engineer "sciency" statements sound right to us. Do we really have the time to dive in deep enough to figure out whether it's pseudoscience?
We shouldn’t be surprised by any of this. Scientists are human and have human motivations and flaws. They are political, they cover their ass, they suffer from results oriented thinking.
“Science” should be trusted within its domain, but it’s not a replacement for all of the processes western society has developed to address the reality that nobody can be trusted with power. Everyone needs to perform their roles. Reporters still need to be skeptical and question scientists’ motivations and investigate the story. And politicians still need to be in charge of translating scientists’ judgments as to various scenarios and probabilities into the political decisions of figuring out what to do accounting for the entire universe of economic and social considerations that are within their ambit.
You are onto something very important. No one can be expert in every domain. So, one has to trust judgments of the people from other domains and institutions. However, if people with authority (not institutional authority) conflate science with policy positions, these 'authoritative' people and institutions lose their authority. That's how conspiracy theories emerge. Authoritative people and institutions have 'abused' their positions.
And scientists aren't very good liars. If you could science your way through a campaign then there would be more scientists going for it, but unfortunately that doesn't work.
As I wrote somewhere else, Science is an algorithm, not data. That algorithm was honed over hundreds of years. That algorithm is the reason that the ideas of some patent clerk in Switzerland were able to dethrone the ideas of one Isaac Newton, who some consider the greatest genius who ever lived. It's not about trusting scientists at all (ideally).
My whole spiel here is that you should ask experts in their field of expertise. Would I take medical advice from a career politician like Hillary Clinton or advice on climate change from Ted Cruz? Absolutely not. Would I take Obama's advice on how to raise money or negotiate a deal with Netflix? Maybe, he seems to be good at that.
Edit: Haha, what's with the downvote? Hillary being worried that I negatively impact her side-career as a chiropractor?
Do you mean ideally? Because obviously modern science and academia is mostly steered by external interests and public opinion. I know many scientists who entertain research projects from companies only because they're fully paid for, meanwhile they struggle with funding and publishing projects they want to do because there's so few opportunities available for funding. To then conclude that companies or government entities may want to do certain research according to what best serves them is not too hard of a stretch to make. It's happened numerous times before, especially within climate science, medicine, and tobacco.
I'm not saying one should distrust science, especially papers published by reputable sources, done by reputable labs, or otherwise have good methods and sensible conclusions. But that's the problem, right? One has to contend with what's "sensible". If someone published a paper tomorrow actually showing a strong causal effect between consuming fluoridated water and the calcification of the pineal gland, not only would it be seen by no one except weird fringe communities, but the scientists involved would be ridiculed. The area has been politicized, and in that case it's hard to see how it couldn't be, it's a ridiculous idea, but it does make a clear example of this politicization if you understand the context. Something similar happened with the origins of SARS-CoV-2, where the assumption is (from my personal experience) that only certain political machinations could convince someone to come to conclusions that SARS-CoV-2 origin could be a lab leak. Now maybe this isn't the case anymore. I haven't thought about this in like... a year, nor looked at public discourse for about that long either. But regardless I feel like public opinion is still largely the same, and judging by the article, the politicization of the topic is still in full swing. Thus, we're not only dealing with reality, but a manufactured reality as well.
The scientific method is great, but TRUST has nothing to do with it. That's the point! The method is about being able to verify things for yourself. So, what info have you verified personally? Any at all? For myself, I have heard the claims of water rising, hot summers, etc and cannot see anything different or exceptional. I can verify nothing.
Perhaps you are unaware of the replication crisis, where 70% of studies cannot be replicated, even by the authors. Perhaps you are also unaware of what I think is the 'funding crisis', where funds for science are given out by the government, corporations and the military. This triumvirate work together, you see this in technology quite clearly, eg Google was funded by inqtel, and hands over data to the government.
Given the above, do you think it is possible that the governance system we have (corporations and government, aka fascism) works together to create narratives that better support their agenda? Do you see how climate change is supportive of technocracy, and plans to hand over fine-grained control of all resources to nameless bureaucrats? The trick is to get people to cheer for this, and that is what climate change is for.
Most of us, on the basis of no evidence we can see, will cheer as we lose access to cars, pay more in taxes, are unable to travel, cannot visit distant places, live in small, densely-packed urban areas, as NGOs (billionaire foundations) take control of the world's resources, etc, etc.
PS those quotes are true and verifiable. They have told us what is planned.
I think there are valid reasons why people don't trust science. It's not that we think scientists are malice, it's just they can be lazy and incompetent like people in other careers. In addition, incentives are clear in industry, they are either not clear or completely broken in academia, so the quality of their work is too much dependent on their integrity.
The whole point of science is that you don't need to trust someone's words, you can repeat the experiment for yourself.
I trust physicists (in re: physics) more than I trust my mother.
But if you can't repeat the experiment, if you can't make precise predictions that can be invalidated, is what you're doing really science?
This is crucial when it comes to fixing policy: economists, sociologist, psychologists and other quasi-scientific folks are the astrologers and numerologists of our current age. They trade on the successes of genuine science to garner political legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. But by doing that they tarnish the public perception of the impartiality of the proper scientist, diminishing their own glamour and polluting the public's appreciation for the value of genuine science.
Science gets respect from pretty much everybody (whether they own it or not. Very few anti-science folks go so far as to deny themselves the benefits of science like electricity and aspirin.)
It's the "soft sciences" that can't make predictions, that can't be tested, and that are used as political leverage that people (rightly IMO) don't trust.
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Let me throw out a personal example. There's a system of knowledge and practice called "Neurolinguistic Programming" that I know from personal experience works really really well, but if you go look at the Wikipedia page for it it's decried as pseudo-science. I have little respect and no trust for the "scientists" who can't replicate NLP stuff because I've been able to do it as well as tens or hundreds of thousands of other people pretty easily. Now that's bad enough but if these "scientists" managed to persuade legislators to make laws against NLP on the basis of their "science" I would see that as a very serious problem. (Although not a problem with science. Science isn't the problem because science is not what they are doing.)
Yet I am not an anti-vaxxer nor a climate denialist.
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Bottom line: Science has nothing to prove. Repeat the experiment for yourself. E = mc² for everybody everywhere. That's science.
The flaw in your logic is that you assume any important outcome of said study will be seen as valid by the people in power who can do something about the results of the study. Many high power people in the government actively try to present scientists as liars and frauds, and you think we should just let the data speak for itself? How's that working out so far?
I think it's more to do with the those claiming things in the name of science that puts many people off.
Science is a process, a method by which we can answer certain types of questions. To often people hear things like settled science, or the science is crystal clear, not up for debate.. These are political posturing and have little to do with actual science. It's absurd, and some people realize this.
As with any science, data comes in late, or sometimes not at all. There are quite a few FDA prescription drugs that were approved and later recalled, some with devastating effects on their consumers.
The truth is, science is done by people, people who are infallible. People who make mistakes, who see things from a certain point of view, or who don't have all the data yet. Additionally, prediction models can be tweaked to say exactly what you want to, with devastating effect on our community.
You can't say anything though. Even in grad school labs, to make certain statements or even hint about things can lead to problems with your advisor, or research, or worse yet, peers.. Academia is a great place, at least it has been for me, as long as you keep your head down and focus on research.. i dont think it's the best place now if you truly want to question everything. I wouldn't even venture where you could go for that now.
I think this has led to a generalized mistrust, and it falls on all of us. The reality is that data is always changing, models change, etc.. People who put policies into legislation need to balance not only the aspect of the science, but the overall big picture; cultural, societal, expectations, desires etc. as well. That's politics. I think it was Russ Roberts who said you can engineer a bridge, but you can't engineer society in the same way. And i think that's right, too Often we miss that.
Very true. That's a problem that in principle can be fixed, though. Your "fake" sciences can in principle all be approached using the scientific method. They are actually real sciences. It's just a portion of the practitioners that hurt their credibility. My guess is that it's the inherently complex subject matter that allows politically-charged crackpots and other non-scientists to squeeze their way in and call themselves scientists.
Do you work in science? Because since I have, I agree with some of the "conspiracy theories". I didn't before but as someone who'd always been fascinated with knowledge, research and human progress from a young age, I was thoroughly disappointed when I discovered the reality of it isn't as I had imagined in my almost religious belief in science. The reality was I found people who worked in it like a regular job. They were not driven by by a desire to further truth and expand human knowledge, but rather just like most other people they care about their salaries, funding, promotions, intrigues/political games, etc.
The mistake is thinking there must be a conspiracy to make it true. In reality it's just human nature and group behavior. One might think some of the most critical thinkers work in science, and it can be true in some cases, but more often than not those are actually the ones that get filtered out. Ironically, you must not question too much if you're a researcher who wants to receive funding. The safest thing to do is research one of the latest hypes and have findings similar to what other groups find. Don't go against the current, that gets you in trouble.
As for technocrats: I find it hard to trust anyone who thinks their policy positions are simply the result of direct application of pure logic. That's not how it works. Logic and science can help you arrive at a policy position once you decide what your goals and priorities are, but different people have different goals and priorities, and those aren't determined by logic. Maybe there are some good technocrats out there, but to me it seems like their goals and priorities tend to somehow always gravitate towards the goals and priorities of lobbyists, think tanks, and wealthy people generally. Maximize shareholder value and don't rock the boat.
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