> I'm a bit tired of seeing critics of various hypotheses being dismissed out of hand simply "Because Science".
While this is certainly an issue, more often than not I see "critics" claiming broad statements without even trying to verify/falsify their claims scientifically.
And if I have to choose between two sides, where one tries hard to fulfill scientific requirements while the other doesn't care, I'm certainly on the scientific side - even though our current academic landscape is far from perfect.
I would like to point out that you are missing one of the most important stances: one of probability. Sometimes you dont know, but factors indicate a percentage probability, that should be updated as the data changes.
So few understand that most "real life" things involve inductive logic (IE, probability) because real life is simply too complex and variable to give absolute deductive proofs of most things. You can still come to solid conclusions, but those conclusions are still "most probably true" rather than "absolutely true."
That's kinda weird thing really. In science the probability for a given theory to be true is usually not very important. Usually you operate with the best guess that you have, or best guesses that you have. Until shit gets proven. You could argue that "probability" is name for this best guess, but scientific probability is mathematical term, that requires you are able to calculate some sort of numerical value for your probability. You usually can't do that to "most viable alternative". For science this is not a problem, because science only cares about "truth" and there are no time dead lines for finding it or necessary decisions that you have to make before 2030. Allocating probabilities would serve no purpose other than bias researchers.
In politics "probable" is fuzzier concept and often just a cop out. You can justify anything with that idea, but you have no responsibility afterwards (damn, we went to the 5% range after all, sorry!). And you don't need any kind of real sources, just authority or lack of imagination suits just fine.
When we wander into personal world views or some casual conversations, assigning probabilities become really good idea. But then it's often about who's authority you trust most, than what data you can actually consider.
And end of the day most people still gravitate towards either "extremely likely" or "incredibly unlikely" most of the time. You just use likelihood as a way to show that you actually considered that your statement might be false, but you don't actually consider it to be.
This psychological tendency for people to make up their minds, and then not change their minds is actually at the heart of the problem. These "critics" could not have mass following to their bullshit ideas without it. But currently lots of people fail to understand that just providing half decent criticism against an idea does not prove the opposing idea true. Because human beings are naturally bad at not making their minds.
Actually the critics should be dismissed as soon as they criticize scientific findings without demonstrating their knowledge and valid and effective use of the scientific method.
Somebody's ignorance of the background of some scientific claims is absolutely not an excuse to accept to even spend the energy considering his claims of "wrongness." The only thing we should consider is how we can educate as much people as we can, but we certainly should not treat them as having any contribution to the understanding of the topic.
The modern concept of "journalistic balance" (in reality, trying to win the eyeballs by creating "conflict") by representing 99% percent of all world scientists with one person and some group with silly claims with another person and giving these two then the same air time or coverage space is exactly one of the things that produce this effect:
"The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."
Also never ignore the "accidental" fact when the "silly" group represents the interests of the people with immense amount of wealth and/or power, or potential financial or power gain in maintaining the "controversy." That's where the events really get nasty.
For all of its flaws, the scientific method is clearly the correct way to perform such criticism. It isn't perfect (it isn't close), but it is orders of magnitude more effective than any other approach humans have ever tried - assuming applicable area of study.
So that leaves us with the critics. If you can't be bothered to do the work and are taking potshots from the sidelines there really isn't likely to be much value in your criticism.
It's not impossible that there is value there, but the odds aren't very good at all, so you can't really blame people for not engaging with it easily. I agree it is unfortunate when people are quickly dismissive of an idea with "Because Science". But it remains true that by far the best answer to "Because Science" is, "Not, so fast, what about Science".
Picking at potential flaws in a study rarely adds much signal. Suggesting improvements and helping make those happen has potentially immense value.
Arguing about it on the internet usually has negative value.
Yes but in fairness there is a fair amount of BS in any area of human endeavor. There are BS movies, BS politicians, BS music, BS programming languages; it's certainly not unique to science.
Science is a movement that's about simplifying reality to discover principles. (Examples: Galileo ignored friction and air resistance to get at principles of motion. And if something's too complicated, the physicist hands it to the chemist, who hands it to the biologist...)
There's a link between that and critical thinking; one of the first theoretical physicists wrote: "The duty of the person who investigates the writings of ancients [scientists?], if learning the truth is their goal, is to make themself an enemy of all that they read, and ... attack it from every side. They should also suspect themself as they perform their critical examination of it, so that they may avoid falling into either prejudice or leniency." — Alhazen, ~1000, Cairo
However, since science is a social enterprise, it's vulnerable to institutional bullshit. Certainly, Alhazen had to pretend madness to avoid angering the local Powers That Be. Nowadays, scientists must contend with all sorts of brokenness at universities; managerialism/bureaucracy, class/sexism/racism, etc.
While this is certainly an issue, more often than not I see "critics" claiming broad statements without even trying to verify/falsify their claims scientifically.
And if I have to choose between two sides, where one tries hard to fulfill scientific requirements while the other doesn't care, I'm certainly on the scientific side - even though our current academic landscape is far from perfect.