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by fooker 1156 days ago
> If you have strong scientific arguments, it does not matter even if the whole world is against you.

That’s a nice idealistic thing to say.

Academia has shown this to be false again and again.

Most groundbreaking ideas or arguments which go against the current wisdom get buried in the best case, and the proponents scorned and driven out of research in the worst case.

It has been like this since the beginning of organized scientific communities, which is understandable. Scientists are humans with the usual shortcomings like ego and pride.

1 comments

According to your logic then, science should not have been able to advance at all from the very beginning
The idealistic view of scientists as unbiased arbiters is just not true. Science advances because:

1. Some of the time, scientists behave in an objective manner

2. Theories that are correct have predictive power and are therefore useful (i.e. get results, enable new technologies) and therefore tend to win out

3. "Science advances one funeral at a time" -Max Planck

There’s a cynical notion that science advances one funeral at a time, attributed to Max Planck.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planck%27s_principle