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The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

nature.com

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Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#101

Post by ConceptJunkie »

war1025 wrote: post #57
lmm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's meant as a punishment it's not "to get their attention"; it's done to inflict pain. Again, it wouldn't be acceptable with an adult; just apply the same standard.

Children are driven mainly by emotion. Particularly young children. Pain is an emotion that tends to override other emotions. A brief, sharp pain can snap them out of an emotional loop they found themselves caught in. Since the pain is very brief, they tend to revert back to a much more reasonable state afterwards. All that said, yes there is a difference between parenting and abuse. However, children are not tiny ad…

And 99% of the non-spanking arguments ignore these truths and seek to treat children like tiny adults. If treating children like adults were possible, then we would redefine them to be adults and let them go on with their lives.

If someone acts the same way at 25 that he acts at 13, that person would be a sociopath. But 13-year-olds are rarely sociopaths (i.e., they are only when truly mentally ill).

Children can't function the same way adults do, and we can't treat them the same way, full stop.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#102

Post by agent008t »

pdonis wrote: post #66
happytoexplain wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a difference between being skeptical of scientifically-arrived-at conclusions (which is healthy and I don't share your opinion that people are largely "castigated" for that) and explicitly ignoring science, and experts in general, based purely on the fact that their conclusions conflict with one's socio-political convictions, which I think is a real problem that people may feel castigated for falling into (w…

> it's this trend of elevating skepticism to denial simply for political reasons Well, there's just as much of a trend of claiming your position is "science" when it isn't, simply for political reasons. For example, by any reasonable standards, economics is not a science; yet people who question the current orthodoxy in economics, for example by questioning whether having the Federal Reserve print money is really a g…

The problem is the level of debate in society in general, and in particular when it comes to political economy. The debate is basically non-existent.

You don't get it in Congress/Senate/Parliament. You don't get it on the news channels. You sometimes - very rarely - still get it on the radio.

I want to see two people with opposing views debate a single issue for 2-3 hours, without being allowed to evade answering a question. Would happily pay a subscription fee to get that.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#103

Post by scotty79 »

charliesharding wrote: post #5

The 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…

> The one thing you learn in high level science is that nobody really knows what they're talking about, paradigms shift, and further study is required.

High level science is on the borders of vast body of scientific knowledge. It's only to be expected that people who work there don't know much about the things they try to figure out. What they know a whole lot about is the foundation of that vast body of scientific knowledge they try to build new understanding upon.

Nobody expects reverence at high levels of science. But a little bit of reverence for scientfic method and for what vast knowledge science was able to establish without a dubt so far would be nice.

Established science is not what's in the news. It's mostly what's in the textbooks. News pretty much broke the public relationship towards science.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#104

Post by [deleted] »

war1025 wrote: post #57
lmm wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's meant as a punishment it's not "to get their attention"; it's done to inflict pain. Again, it wouldn't be acceptable with an adult; just apply the same standard.

Children are driven mainly by emotion. Particularly young children. Pain is an emotion that tends to override other emotions. A brief, sharp pain can snap them out of an emotional loop they found themselves caught in. Since the pain is very brief, they tend to revert back to a much more reasonable state afterwards. All that said, yes there is a difference between parenting and abuse. However, children are not tiny ad…

[deleted]

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#105

Post by killaken2000 »

diegoholiveira wrote: post #91
dymk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion and science derive understanding about the world in fundamentaly different and incompatible ways. To call it religion is just incorrect.

> Religion and science derive understanding about the world in fundamentaly different and incompatible ways. They are not incompatible, as the pope John Paul II states: Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth.

An alternative idea is that the pope is only saying that so the science-minded folks don't leave.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#106

Post by killaken2000 »

superqwert wrote: post #100
dragonwriter wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is not necessarily true - for example, many arguments against the theory of evolution question whether it is a falsifiable theory The “theory of evolution” is a large composite explanatory story wrapped around a large number of testable (mostly thoroughly tested) hypotheses. It's falsifiable by falsifying any of the components, though the replacement is liable to look remarkably similar but for who the falsif…

Of course, any number of subsets of the theory being disproved could falsify the super-set theory. But if there are two super-set theories, and you cannot falsify one over the other, then those collections are not falsifiable. Some philosophers argue that all the subsets of evolution - genetics, mutations, natural selection could still support permanence of species with local changes. Until you can create an entirely…

What is the scientific method used in physics

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#107

Post by pdonis »

agent008t wrote: post #102
pdonis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's this trend of elevating skepticism to denial simply for political reasons Well, there's just as much of a trend of claiming your position is "science" when it isn't, simply for political reasons. For example, by any reasonable standards, economics is not a science; yet people who question the current orthodoxy in economics, for example by questioning whether having the Federal Reserve print money is really a g…

The problem is the level of debate in society in general, and in particular when it comes to political economy. The debate is basically non-existent. You don't get it in Congress/Senate/Parliament. You don't get it on the news channels. You sometimes - very rarely - still get it on the radio. I want to see two people with opposing views debate a single issue for 2-3 hours, without being allowed to evade answering a q…

I agree the level of debate in our society is typically awful.

However, in many cases, better debate won't fix the problem, because the problem in many cases is not that the "right" views aren't getting air time. The problem in many cases is that we can't even do controlled experiments in the domain, so our understanding is very limited and we simply don't know enough about the domain to give useful input to public policy decisions. For example, I think that's true of economics; nobody knows enough about economics to give useful input about most public policies.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#108

Post by gabbygab »

"Scientific authority"? Science isn't a religion, it isn't politics. Why talk of it in that manner?

There shouldn't be an appeal to "scientific authority" but rather to empirical replicable testing and theories.

Also, the basis of science is the humble admission that what we believe to be true today is only true until further testing disproves it. It's the basis of scientific theory that it is true ( not forever ) but only until future tests may show it to be false. And this is why modern science has continually progressed since there isn't an "authority" to prevent new discoveries and thoughts and ideas. It's why the current "lamarckian" epigenetic studies can happen which goes against the "darwinist orthodoxy" of biology the past 150 years.

The problem with science today is the same problem with news, media, religion, schools, etc. Politics. Somehow politics has pushed its way into every facet of our life and politics tends to ruin everything it touches.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#109

Post by igor47 »

featherrust wrote: post #99
stdbrouw wrote: post #76

Earlier 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?

Interpersonal relationships?

I'm a fan of NVC(non-violent communication) and that framework could be summarized by the sentence, "when you do X,I feel Y". You basically become an instrument that reports on your internal state, plus you're also supposed to avoid assuming anything about the other person's internal state.

This is a lot more like science then the usual default of blaming and assumptions and implicit expectations that most people conduct their relationships in.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#110

Post by CharlesColeman »

charliesharding wrote: post #5

The 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…

> The 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".

IIRC, the term for this is "scientism," and I don't think it's restricted to just members of the general public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

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