People don’t argue back by claiming divine authority. They argue back by claiming to have the truer scientific authority. Science shouldn't have any other authority then itself. It should be open and reproducible. Everything else can and should be seen with a skeptical eyes on. No expert is incorruptible.
The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
181–190 of 402 posts
Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
#182The way in which public considers science today is much more analogous to the way the public considered religion during the time of Galileo. Think of the way people are castigated for not believing in scientific "truths". I see signs in peoples yard saying that "in this house, we believe science is real". As someone who has studied biochemistry for years, this kind of reverence for science is truly troubling. The one…
Let's not be coy. Laypeople don't have a compelling reason or the expertise necessary to dispute or vociferously defend any scientific conclusions, at the end of the day, there is no science involved here, it's all about politics. Whichever side of the debate you come down on with regard to climate change, vaccines, evolution, the shape of the earth etc, the people in these debates don't really care about science, they only care about policy.
Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find that type of communication childing and dehumanizing. To each their own.
Kinda ironic that your comment is a good example of this style, in describing your feelings using an “I” statement without attacking the speaker.
I would contend that despite the "I" the form of those words implies projection, or at least victimization of oneself.
Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't trusting authority contrary to trusting science? The point of science is that we can verify truths for ourselves without relying on authority. Hence, if any authority, 'scientific' or otherwise, asserts their authority instead of providing individually verifiable evidence of its claims, then we can say they are being unscientific, regardless of title.
I don't think that's the point of science at all to be honest. The point of scientific endeavour is to discover facts about the world. That's a really hard job, and the majority of people are not scientists, and even a trained scientist cannot verify the overwhelming majority of existing science by themselves, which means that science, like any other sufficiently large human collaboration, requires institutions, trus…
is trusting scientific authority the same thing really? Believing the theory of evolution is different than trusting that the $100 genome is around the corner... And unlike religious institutions, scientific institutions typically reflect that difference in their rhetoric.
Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
#185The article is dated 18 March 2019, but it asks "So: what went wrong?" and then mentions neither p-hacking nor the replication crisis in psychology. Perhaps the author has a rebuttal to those who think that questionable research practices have brought about the fall of scientific authority, but he doesn't give it here. Some of the problems lie closer to home than the content of scientific journals. Henry Gee is a sen…
This has been going on since long, long before p-hacking and the replication crisis. And I honestly find these to be very different issues.
It was common for people in the US to reject the idea of smoking as a cause of lung cancer until like the 1980s. Scientific consensus on this fact was reached in the 60s and was suspected for a while before that. Yet, it took like 40 years for the public to agree.
Think about what's happening now with climate change. Scientists aren't undermining their own position, their authority and credibility is under direct attack; originally by moneyed interest, but today mostly through political indoctrinates. People view scientists as left-wingers out to undermine conservative policies and seek to undermine their authority and influence. Today, these people have much more reach and influence than in times past.
Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you? Did you read the article? What in god's name is phd514 arguing with? No where in the damn fine article is the phrase "books of nature" mentioned. The article is describing the context in which modern scientific thought gained currency among the educated and the powerful, both in 17th century Europe and the 19th century Ottoman Empire, how that authority waned in the mid-20th century and today, and how we ca…
As an aside... " ...how that authority [of scientific thought] waned in the mid-20th century and today... " The high point of the authority of science in the United States was probably between ~1950, after Sputnik, and ~1980, say before Reagan's "Star Wars" proposal. Certainly, the descent had started by the early '90s, when a scientist went before a congressional committee and couldn't find anything more useful to s…
It had some trouble in mid 20th century Germany, which is what I gather the article was hinting at during its discussion of Hannah Arendt.
Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would say that an even larger problem exists. Among the public, science has always had some portion of people who understood it's processes as those of a secular priesthood and those who understood it's processes as discovering the truth through skepticism and experimentation. Even among this working scientists, this division has existed (and given a society that never discarded religion, anti-science along with an…
It's like hearing that science says that fat is bad... and then eggs are bad for you... and alcohol is bad... and then another study says that a glass of wine a day is good for your heart... and salt is bad... then sugar is bad... then carbohydrates are bad... and now fat is good as long as you don't overdo carbohydrates... and eggs have good cholesterol and are really good for you... and salt is necessary to balance…
That's not science though - that's a single study or two being blown out of proportion. It's an element of science, a snapshot of knowledge, but the scientific method requires that we continually refine those messages and ideas, and that's not happening - we do an experiment, and then without any more corroboration or reproduction it's released to the public. We are seeing tiny pieces of science, but the problem is we're seeing every step and going "oh look, there's science!" and treating it as absolute truth instead of giving time for things to develop and figure out what it is we're looking at.
Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
#188The title says it all: the author thinks science is supposed to be an "authority". That way of thinking about science is precisely what has to stop.
But that's not what the article says.
Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Comparing book burning, jailing, and being murdered to getting made fun of on internet dot com is just not compelling. The whole "but science is just as bad as religion" argument rings quite hollow.
"Scientific authority" is the source of the genocides of the 20th century, mass sterilization, what we now consider crackpot science, and many social ills. I would say it is actually worse than the religious authority of the past.
"x authority" has been a large source of problems all through human history. Insert religious, ethical, scientific, political, etc, etc. Biggest problem with science is that it has enabled excesses for those in power (be it authoritarian, communist, capitalist, whatever), while somehow remaining meek and pretending to be amoral. It is easy to take the benefits of Science without bothering to learn what it has to say about anything else.
Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry. What other areas of inquiry would that be?
A really good book to read on this is "the Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver. Basically, the scientific method requires modeling the system correctly which only works for certain kinds of systems. Systems where the complexity exceeds the available data causes people to see patterns where they don't exist and to be overly confident in their interpretation of the data. The entire area of nutrition and weight managem…
> The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable.
Note that the issue is that there is a human in that system.
The problem is that we (rightfully!) don't easily allow experiments on humans that might be harmful.
And, as an aside, nutrition and weight management does have people doing real science (things like studies of hunter gatherer societies with deuterated water), it's just that the results aren't very flashy (ie. a human burns roughly the same amount of calories regardless of activity level--so the only way to lose weight is to eat less--moving more is healthy but doesn't contribute substantially to weight loss).