this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Not trusting in science.
Edit: Since there are many comments, I would like to clarify my statement. I meant that you should rather trust scientists, that the earth is round / that there is a human-made climate change, etc. and not listen to some random internet guy, that claims these things are false although he has made no scientific tests or he has no scientific background. I know that there are paradigm shifts in science and sometimes old ideas are proven to be wrong. But those shifts happen through other scientific experiments/thoughts. As long as > 99 % of all scientists think that something is true, you should rather trust them then any conspiracy theorist...
That's unironically the point. Science should not be blindly trusted.
i mean i get the impulse, but if we were to blindly trust any sort of knowledge system, science is the one to trust, right? like, any downsides of trusting scientific consensus are necessarily larger when trusting information sources that aren't scientific, and if you follow through with trusting science blindly, you might ignorantly begin to believe that empirical testing and intellectual honesty is necessary for determining the truth of your beliefs!
I would think it's more about knowing how to trust it. See some news article about "This study said X", don't take it as fact. See a study that has been done numerous times by different groups that corroborate a result and you can have a much higher degree of trust in it. There is a reason the scientific method is a continuous circle, it requires a feedback loop of verifying results and reproducibility. The current issue is clickbait headlines getting the attention, people see it's "Science" and blindly trust it and it becomes a religion like any other.
What do you mean by "trusting in science"? Science isn't meant to be trusted, it's meant to be verified.
Given the reproducibility crisis occurring right now, nobody should be "trusting" in science as a matter of course- we should be verifying the decades of unverified research and dismissing the unverifiable research.
We fucked up the entire field of Alzheimer's research for nearly a quarter century by "trusting in science". We still bias towards publishing new research in academia over reproducing existing research. Science has a big problem with credibility right now and saying "oh just trust in science" isn't the solution.
Ok, but I do not have access to labratories or ways to run my proper experiments. Am I supposed to just stay on the fence about everything that I can't personally test, or should I trust in the consensus from the scientific community regarding stuff like climate change, virology, etc.?
The proper scientific answer to that question is not to trust or not trust. You should absolutely do your own testing, whether that means asking good questions of the experts, reading the existing research carefully, up to and including reproducing the experiment yourself where practicable.
If an experiment is impossible to reproduce, then you should be asking yourself what good its results are.
That is an impossible standard for folks to love by. I can't do that, and neither can you.
When I say I "trust in science" I'm talking about the process and the method. Which means I trust the results when people follow that process. i also trust that the answers may change if there's new information, because that's part of the process.
I don't have the equipment to perform all those experiments. Even if I did, I wouldn't trust the results because I don't have the education to set up, run, and interpret an experiment more complicated than improving my chili recipe.
So, in much the same way that I trust a mechanic to fix my transmission and a.plumber to fix my pipes, I trust a scientist to follow the scientific method.
That's what "trusting science" means.
The scientific method isn't an epistemological framework, it's a framework for practicing science.
And what part of what I said made you think I don't know that?
I'm aspedantic as anyone, but at this point you're being antagonistic. Either you legitimately don't know you're doing it, or you're intentionally trying to make people feel stupid. But you definitely know what people mean when they say they "trust" science.
Please stop. You're making pedants like me look bad.
Why assume I'm being pedantic? The social media landscape is littered with "I fucking love science" clickbait, "amazing nature" accounts that are literally AI generated photos, hell, the entire fields of evolutionary psychology and nutrition ought to be a wholesale indictment of our contemporary scientific establishment.
This isn't pedantry, I am serious as a heart attack.
I mostly assumed you were being pedantic when you tried to make out that I thought science was epistemological rather than methodological when I had mentioned science as a methodology in my previous post. This lead me to three possibilities (well, likely possibilityies, anyway):
Now, you're pretty clearly not dumb, so I just eliminated 2. That left me with 1 and 3 as the most likely. I played the odds that someone who was clever couldn't possibly have missed the point of the initial comment so many times, so I went with 3.
What I didn't count on was possibility 4: you've had to deal with so many morons who don't know what "science" means that your default assumption is that people mean something dumb when they say "I trust science."
Which is my bad, really. I should have asked. I apologize.
Trust in the process of Science, not its insitutions.
unfortunately my dad who has a diploma in engineering and is working in that field for probably 30y now is still prone to it.
Whoever spread those conspiracies should die a slow and painful death to experience a fraction of what they brought on to a lot of families and friends.
The irony!
Trust what? Many scientists will quite justifiably have completely opposing views (do vaccines cause autism for example).
^ this right here
Howโฆ
Scientists don't have opposing views on thats specific thing*. It's an example used right up there with thinking the earth is flat.
One completely discredited study linked the combined MMR vaccine to a new, made up gastrointestinal disorder. That disorder was supposedly linked to autism. The guy who ran the study had financial ties to a company that manufactured a measles vaccine separate from MMR. He had a financial motive. He paid children for blood samples at his kid's party and bragged about it. He's a monster responsible for every death caused by the measles since his evil, fake, completely made up study came out.
You want to know what makes a person seem ignorant? Being anti-vax or buying into the abject nonsense that ASD is caused by vaccines.