[DontchaKnowit]

Yep. This is why it makes me nearly physically ill when I hear people use terms like "science denier" or say things like "<insert political party here> don't believe in science" or "our laws should be based on science".

It is invariably some of the most scientifically illiterate, ideologically entrenched, and intellectually lukewarm people who spout this garbage as a retort to any sort of argument with which they do not wish to engage.

[arp242]

The tricky bit is there really are people who think that science is "just an opinion, man". See e.g. "teach the controversy" regarding evolution vs. creationism. There's certainly a place for "<X> don't believe in science" and "our laws should be based on science".

But the argument is so often misapplied that it's become meaningless.

I have argued against 5G deployment for example, not based on outlandish "zomg Bill Gates George Soros mindcontrol!!!11" or "brain tumours!!!11" nonsense, all of that is clearly nonsense. But the science is a lot less clear that there are zero effects than is sometimes made out to be, and there are also the ethical considerations of informed consent. I was, of course, immediately lobbed in with the crazies and called a science-denying conspiracy theorist, by someone with no expertise in the field who said I need to "listen to the science", in spite of my argument looking nothing like the anti-scientific nonsense from David Icke and the like.

Don't even get me started on COVID – any attempt to inject even the slightest sort of nuance was met with "you are literally murdering people with your unscientific nonsense!" and you were immediately lobbed in with COVID-denying anti-maskers or whatnot. At some point this stopped being a debate about trade-offs involving science and medicine on one hand and basic liberties and freedoms on the other and became some sort of moral crusade (and it seems it still is; there was a conference this month where masks at all times, full proof of vaccination, and a PCR test was still required, which seems a bit much for 2023).

A big issue is that any sort of nuance is often met with the most uncharitable interpretation because the genuinely crazy people have been getting so much attention.

[brightball]

The thing is, based on so many examples of people who cite “the science” that are clearly exaggerated or unsupported “just an opinion” isn’t too far off.

It shouldn’t be this way, but there’s a lot of undermining of trust in science because of this stuff.

Take evolution as an example. How many layers of scientific expertise have to be understood to really claim that you understand how evolution works? Archeology, biology, history, geology, genetics…potentially more?

At some point there’s a trust factor involved in accepting evolution.

Now apply that same realization with climate change.

The more complex, the more moving parts, the easier it is to find a part to be skeptical about and people will do exactly that. Especially if they are given reason to believe that the science is just there to support a political objective.

In the end, unless science can be easily replicated and demonstrated (gravity, boiling water, killing bacteria, generating power, flywheels, etc) it will boil down to trust for the vast majority of people.

[rayiner]

Your last point is critical. People at the end of the 20th century had come to “trust the science” because it conferred tangible power on those who wielded it. “Science” could send a man to the moon or a bounce a phone call off a satellite to the other side of the world. Your average person doesn’t have to understand the rocket equation, or trust NASA. They can watch a launch in Florida and see with their own eyes the awesome power of “science.”

Then, folks started invoking the authority of “science” in connection with disciplines that don’t confer tangible power. For example, if “education science” worked, we would know it. It would convey power the results of which people could see with their own eyes without needed to pore through studies, or putting any faith in “education experts.”

[Sakos]

I've come to the conclusion that science needs to be just another form of religion (without the theistic element). I don't have the time or the energy to go through the research to determine if climate change is real. I put my faith in the scientific process, which is probably the most successful thing we've ever come up with as a species. I'm not sure why I should believe some random dude, whoever he might be or what credentials he might have, on the radio/TV over the scientific community. Sure, they've gotten things wrong, but their success rate and their usefulness to our species is infinitely better than some politician being a climate change denialist just to appeal to voters. What process does he have and why should I trust it more than the scientific method?

[rnk]

I disagree with that attitude. I think most scientific information that comes to us through the media is reliable. If people stop trusting science (or they continue to stop trusting science), we are just left with superstition and religion. It was really hard for people to cope with the fact that during covid we started with the best explanations and then as we learned we improved on it and some ideas or expected safety practices changed. Good example is that many viruses spread through touch and covid spread through the air and that was a surprise.

People take that in and say I just don't trust anything. That is a problem with America because people stop believing in objective facts, saying that it goes against their beliefs. This is a major problem why America doesn't have enough engineers and scientists and mathematicians, because people haven't learned that your intuition can be wrong and you can overcome your strong expectation about something by studying something, debugging a program or whatever.

[jeegsy]

> I think most scientific information that comes to us through the media is reliable

Your general point is well taken but is severely and gravely undermined by the belief expressed in above.

[magarnicle]

Yes. Even if the original information is correct it tends to be quite distorted by the media (the headlines are almost always hyperbolic), let alone when it gets picked up by the public and repeated.

[rayiner]

It depends on how you define the “scientific community.” If your kid has a staph infection, there are people who make antibiotic creams that will make it disappear in days. They’re scientists. Their science gives them power you don’t have to “believe in,” because you can see the results.

Most people with a Ph.D. in a field with “science” in the name aren’t scientists. They work in fields that don’t have the same level of rigor as nuclear physics. (My degree is in aerospace engineering, and many real scientists would consider us bumpkins in how comparatively undisciplined our field is compared to their’s.) Those fields confer little to no power to produce tangible and undeniable results.

[musicale]

> Most people with a Ph.D. in a field with “science” in the name aren’t scientists

Computer Science. ;-)

Perhaps an appropriate assessment, given that CS seems to be half engineering/tinkering, half applied mathematics, and half nonsense.

[brutusborn]

Like how North Korea is a ‘democratic republic.’ If you have to put ‘science’ or ‘evidence based’ after your discipline, it’s probably not science (or science with lots of problems).

See: Social science Political science Evidence based naturopathy/chiro

[pmarreck]

You're right about this. And it makes discussion, much less "debate", so difficult. I'm pro-5G but willing to entertain the anti-5G evidence because what if there was some and it was true or at least unexplained?

[l33t233372]

One problem is that often science says nothing about policy.

_Science_ doesn’t say we should ban fossil fuels, but it does make predictions about what will happen if we continue to use them at the current rate.

It’s not science denial to be against the policy.

[rnk]

There's another important part of this though, oil companies pay scientific researchers to publish views against the veracity of climate change, research and predictions. That's why they say it's science denialism because those people are making shoddy arguments. Disagreeing about whether you care about global climate change is not science denialism but making up things to say there's no science is denialism.

[brutusborn]

That’s an important distinction, but is lost on 99% of the population.

Try to voice any skepticism about climate change policy and most people will call you a climate denier.

Same with vaccines; express a skepticism of efficacy and suddenly you are an anti-science anti-Vaxer.

The irony is that skepticism and asking annoying questions is essential to science. Ignoring ‘anti-scientific’ arguments is inherently anti-science.

[DontchaKnowit]

yes certainly science can inform policy decisions. How do I put this...

Science has nothing to say about what we should set as the objectives of our policy. Science can, however, inform our approach to attaining that objective.

[brutusborn]

To oversimplify my view:

Politics = applied philosophy Science = applied epistemology

Pretending that science can create policy leads to things like eugenics (but Darwin said it would make us fitter so it must be ‘good’!)

[bdowling]

My favorite term like that was “scientific consensus”. I used to point out that up until the 17th century the scientific consensus was that the Sun revolved around the Earth. I would get nothing but blank stares in response. It turns out that people who talk about “scientific consensus” typically don’t know whether the Earth revolves around the Sun, or vice-versa.

[o_____________o]

I'm staring blankly too. The idea is to forever invalidate consensus because people were wrong in the past?

[bdowling]

Consensus means that people agree; it doesn’t mean that they are right.

[o_____________o]

Yeah, but it means they're far more likely to be correct. Iconoclast / Galileo gambit outliers are near nil.

We collectively know more about everything every year, science has generally given us a self-correcting living corpus.

The argument you're making is the same made by anti-intellectuals: don't trust institutional knowledge and consensus because it's been wrong in the past, look at mistake X. It's something like a systemic ad hominem.

[brutusborn]

They are not near nil. Every idea ever conceived has either been rejected or altered to match new observations.

That means that most ideas will end up being wrong in some way. The smoking-gun laws of nature are few and far between.

If you consider what % of ideas throughout history were plain wrong, it’s hard to believe that we have finally figured it all out and the consensus finally reflects reality most of the time.

[o_____________o]

We're talking about wrong as in Galileo, as in radically upending, not modifications or normal gradients of wrongness. Knowledge is generally accretive, but we pay a lot of emotional and categorical attention to perspectives that break dogma. The vast majority absolutely do not, and they fade innumerably into the background of the industry they support.

It's easy (and trite) to cite the extremely limited pool of successful dogma-contrarians over time. Try making a list of the failed contrarians, and then another of all the knowledge (and its contributors) that didn't need fundamental reconsideration at some point in modernity.

[jeegsy]

> Yeah, but it means they're far more likely to be correct

I know what this means from a statistical perspective but I dont know what it means with regard to practical day to day decision making.

> The argument you're making is the same made by anti-intellectuals Isn't there some sort of fallacy that you are yourself deploying here?

[brutusborn]

The fallacy is assuming that consensus = probably true.

This is only correct when we have good evidence and good methods. That is why consensus breaks (like heliocentrism) occur during technological changes (development of telescope).

The critical point the parent is missing is that many fields have terrible data and terrible methods so the ‘consensus’ isn’t likely to be true (eg smoking is good for the nerves, butter is bad for you, the globe is too big for humans to cause changes)

It takes a lot of intellectual integrity to admit that many disciplines are not generating anything resembling ‘truth’. It’s easier to ignore and say: but the consensus is the best we have! Sometimes the heterodox view is the best.

[DontchaKnowit]

It is especially frustrating when scientific ideas are applied to moral dilemmas. I see this from the far left wing frequently. The irony is that this same mindset is what led to the proliferation of eugenics apologists in the 1800s. The scientific consensus had absolutely no objections to eugenics on scientific grounds. In fact, "science" would seem to support it. Yet it is widely agreed that this practice is morally reprehensible nowadays, because humans were able to put aside their hubris and apply their moral reasoning.

[rnk]

Plenty of people realized that eugenics was unacceptable who were in the scientific world then, just like plenty of people understood that slavery was wrong. Which doesn't take away from the fact that plenty of terrible policies came out because leaders did have those views. I don't know what left wing ideas you've seen that are wrong, I'm sure that I've seen some left wing ideas that are wrong. I'm more worried about what do the leaders and the effective speakers in groups promote. Saying that I'm making you more free by taking away your choice of library books, or your choice about medical care, that's not an extreme view that only 1% of people have. It's pretty much the consensus leadership view of Republicans.