Illusions of understanding in the sciences

It is a slippery slope. At the moment you started to avoid talking about some things because your political opponents could use your ideas to promote their agenda, you stopped being a scientist and became a politician. You thinking is no more scientific, it is political. You are not a scientist anymore, you are a politician.

I dramatize a bit, it doesn't happen all suddenly, but before you started to devise a strategy of censoring discussion due to political reasons, you should find a way to do it without inhibiting thought and free flow of ideas.

From the other hand, I don't understand the discourse at all. If you don't like what anti-scientific crowd says, just don't read them. They will find talking points with you or without you. I believe, people are mistaken that you can curb somehow anti-science movement.

Lets take for example that story with "vaccines cause autism". If the paper claiming that was not published, there would be no antivaxxers, oder? I believe it doesn't matter. They would find something else, the whole point of their ideology "science is a conspiracy which hides things". So not published paper comes into the category of hidden things. They always find something. It is dynamic system with a chaotic behavior, you can try as hard as you like to remove triggers created by science, but conspiracy theories would be spawn by something "smaller".

It is not about censoring or playing politics. It is about the wording of the title of the OP article and its rather well-known thesis. All Scientists know the limitations of their own understanding and continuously revise it using the Scientific Method.

Given the very real negative agendas out there, it is every scientifically-minded person's duty to be aware of how their own words might be turned to discredit Science itself even though they did not mean it originally. The fact that the anti-scientific crowd might find something else to attack is beside the point. Science does not exist in vacuum but is subject to societal context/pressures and hence scientists must learn to navigate them judiciously in their writings.

As Isaac Asimov noted; The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

https://youtu.be/_Zxr9STGwbQ?t=3m39s

There's an upcoming book, mentioned in the blurb

> Illusions of understanding can take several (overlapping) forms. Some that are commonly encountered are: (1) Illusions of explanatory depth (we think we personally understand things in more detail than we do). (2) Illusions of explanatory completeness (even if we don’t think we fully understand it ourselves, we think the best experts do). (3) Illusions resulting from understanding something other than the goal (e.g. we believe we understand the formation of memories because we understand the anatomy of the brain site, the hippocampus, that is needed for such learning). (4) Illusions due to simple statements giving a feeling of insight (such as when tautological statements seem insightful because they are framed in a reductionist manner). (5) Illusions (as described earlier) that one understands the cause of phenomena because there exists a model or procedure that predicts well. (6) Illusions of causal strength (attending to an observed relation makes one believe the causal connection is stronger than it is). (7) illusions that one can describe causes simply. (8) Illusions by the explainer that the recipient understands what the communicator intends. (9) Illusions by the recipient of an explanation that the communicator understands well and that the explanation is correct and complete.

Are we to infer that these observations are unsupported by evidence? Are we to assume that the research work is so poorly constructed that they did not do research to find evidence of the existence of the classifications in existing research?