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Its easy to be smug about science; its so often right. If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, I'd always advise taking the side of the scientist.

If one considers all the research papers that have ever been published and retracted, and could enumerate over them and calculate their "rightness" and notices that greater than half are "right" then that would be a fact. As of today, no one has done that, and to assume it to be "often right" is quite dogmatic.

I posit that if one doesn't have time to research the subject themself, one shouldn't form opinion about such subjects beyond that they now know such subjects exist. But I suppose asking that of human beings is too much :P

You typed that on a portable device, right? And without any sense of irony about the unreliability of science.

The rise of a civilization based on technology and information is a towering testament to the successes of science. Lets not fool ourselves.

I didn't argue about the unreliability of science. Do I think such could be quantifiable by what information is available to humans today? Yes. Do I think humans without the aid of technology can say either way to the degree that science is unreliable? Maybe for tiny slivers like meta analysis papers on relatively minute subjects within science, but as a whole? I think not.

DanBC 4034 days ago

That's foolish. Scientists have to work hard to avoid bias. A lot of them don't manage it. Most science isn't as rigorous as eg ATLAS at CERN at avoiding biases.

There are plenty of scientists who are fucking idiots.

There are a vast majority doing good work. Your cell phone is a towering testament to this. To be fair, try making the converse argument: how many religious zealots avoid bias? Zero. Lets not condemn science on the basis of a strawman ("some scientists somewhere are not very good")

> There are a vast majority doing good work. Your cell phone is a towering testament to this. To be fair, try making the converse argument: how many religious zealots avoid bias? Zero. Lets not condemn science on the basis of a strawman ("some scientists somewhere are not very good")

Yet to uphold what people consider science today, you use one example. As if the vast majority of scientists had anything to do with the development of the cell phone (and use the word testament which has a non zero religious connotations), and give no lip service to how many religious people throughout the times have supported scientific endeavors…

I leave other examples to the reader. Hint: point at anything near you. It was the result of science.

As for honoring the religious who supported science. I say, to the degree they pursued religion, they shortchanged their scientific accomplishments. Consider what else Newton might have done, had he abandoned his alchemy and astrology.

From wikipedia:

"Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge"[2]) is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe."

From such definition, if I could point at every person and say it was the result of systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of a testable explanations and predictions about the universe, it wouldn't be a stretch for one to think that such seems to be in favor of an omniscient being :P

Consider that there was probably some function of Newtons alchamey and astrology experience that allowed him to put forth other ideas that we are willing accept from testable hypothesis… or that had their been no Newton, the phenomena that he described, would have still existed, yet people at that time would continued to have no testable understanding of it.

> point at anything near you. It was the result of science.

The result of some particular branches of science where we do, in fact, have reliable knowledge and the ability to make accurate predictions.

But that is very, very different from "science" in general. There are many more fields that are called "sciences" but do not have anything like that kind of reliable knowledge or predictive power. So it's not enough to just say "science"; you have to specify the field, so we know which category it falls into.

> If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, I'd always advise taking the side of the scientist.

If you don't have time to research the subject yourself, it means you don't care about the answer anyway. So why should you take any side? Why not just accept that you don't know?

nitrogen 4034 days ago

I think what's being argued here is that the probability of being right by blindly following scientific consensus is greater than the probability of being right by blindly following non-scientific anything. Nobody's saying that science is never wrong, only that it's less wrong than other sources of knowledge, has a process that makes it even less wrong over time, and when it is wrong, it's only relatively wrong in the way that is described by Asimov.

Asimov wasn't talking about following scientific "consensus". He was talking about things that are nailed down by data. The roundness of the Earth wasn't a matter of scientific "consensus"; it was a matter of making observations that showed the curvature of the Earth's surface (vs. earlier observations which were consistent with flatness), then further observations that showed that the curvature varied from place to place (vs. earlier observations which were consistent with it being a perfect sphere), and so on.

The point is that what is "less wrong" is the understanding we build up by extending the range of our data and our ability to predict what new data that we haven't yet observed will look like. It's not anything we build up by "consensus". So a lay person, trying to figure out what to "blindly follow", should not be looking at "consensus"; they should be looking at what data we have, how reliable it is, what does it cover, and how well we can predict what we will see when we get further data. As you can see, I put "blindly follow" in quotes because you can't do all this blindly; you can't just ask what the "consensus" is. You have to actually look at the content.

nitrogen 4034 days ago

By "consensus" I mean what you describe, the accumulation of data from multiple sources. But even a simple human consensus of scientists would be right more of the time than a simple consensus of non-scientists.

Edit: also, I was referring initially to the arguments from other comments, not to Asimov specifically.

> even a simple human consensus of scientists would be right more of the time than a simple consensus of non-scientists.

This is probably true, at least in fields where we have a reasonably developed science, but you realize, I trust, that it's not a very high bar. :-)