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by hprotagonist 1723 days ago
Only God could be Objective; that whole Descarte's Demon thing makes True claims based on empirical observations a lot more fraught than you'd really like it to be, even in the best of cases where everyone agrees on: what language game we're playing today, what "an observation" is, that it was faithfully reported, and so on.

Nobody's perfect; what builds the sort of trust that permits action is a history of publically doing one's best:

I would like to add something that’s not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you’re talking as a scientist. I’m not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you’re not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We’ll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I’m talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong, that you ought to do when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.

Do that, and you'll earn your Ethical appeal easily enough.