This article is ironically akin to the 'The Preaching of St Paul', except that instead of burning Galileo's work, the author is trying to burn religious texts and dissenting viewpoints to their "settled science".

When one can't trust the information they're looking at without having to dig into the political backing of the study and the results and without having to wonder which outliers have been trimmed to further hammer home the point of the stakeholders, we're no longer looking at science, we're looking at propaganda.

So the problem isn't science. The problem is the manner in which science is being subverted for financial gain. That's not science.

This is why science is losing credibility and authority outside of scientific circles.

If you want credibility and authority, you have to not only act with integrity, you have to be seen to be acting with integrity. It does't matter how honest your study or how objective your results, if people look at your study and see that it was funded by Monsanto and makes Monsanto look good, it looks like Monsanto paid for a study to make Monsanto look good and therefore it's biased and can be ignored.

This is life. If you want to be seen as having integrity, you have to act with integrity. And when people who were already distrusting of the way science is presented in the media are being told that they can't trust the media by authority figures, as ridiculous as those authority figures may be, eventually people stop listening until the furor abates.

* Is 'Oumuamua an alien spacehip / solar sail?

* Does the Tabby's star have a alien megastructure / partial Dyson sphere?

You can't blame to Monsanto for them.

The article appears, get a huge press coverage, the authors get interviewed, and somewhere the fact that it's only an improbable weird hypothesis is lost.

A few month later the new evidence refute the paper, and people get the idea that scientific discovers are not reliable.

(And there are batteries breakthrough that increase your battery capacity a 80% before disappearing, nutrition recommendation that get reversed after a few years, ... but these are more motivated for money.)

> A few month later the new evidence refute the paper, and people get the idea that scientific discovers are not reliable.

And do this a few dozen times and people stop listening to science because they know a couple of months from now, this study is going to be refuted.

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 anti-intellectual views have naturally always been part of American thought).

The problem today is two-fold. Aside from the corruption of scientific processes others have noted, the other aspect is the majority of people aren't seeing the material gains that science offers the world - science is broadly part of progress and when the average American's life expectancy and median income isn't increasing, why would they believe in progress?

When the studies say so many different things, all contradictory and all purporting to be good and then bad and then good again, people give up trying to understand.

Why should I believe that anything I eat today is bad when tomorrow you're just going to tell me that it's good for me again?

People are tired of listening to science that appears to ebb and flow like the tides.

Take eggs for example.

Here are the 1995 dietary guidelines:

https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga95/9DIETGUI.HTM

> Choose a diet low in cholesterol

> The body makes and requires cholesterol. In addition, cholesterol is obtained from food. Dietary cholesterol comes from animal sources such as egg yolks, meat (especially organ meats such as liver) poultry, fish, and higher fat dairy products. Many of these foods are also high in saturated fats. Choosing foods with less cholesterol and saturated fat will help lower your blood cholesterol levels. The Nutrition Facts Label lists the Daily Value for cholesterol as 300 mg. You can keep your cholesterol intake at this level or lower by emphasizing intakes of grains, vegetables, and fruits and by limiting intake of egg yolks, including those used in cooking.

Here is the scientific report of the 2015 guidelines:

https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/...

> Cholesterol: Previously, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommended that cholesterol intake be limited to no more than 300 milligrams per day. The 2015 DGAC will not bring forward this recommendation because available evidence shows no appreciable relationship between consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol, consistent with the conclusions of the AHA/ACC report, Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.

The sad part, is that there was never any good evidence to limit consumption of cholesterol and eggs.

The actual research is inaccessible to the public, hidden behind paywalls in subscription-only journals, and written in a form that is very difficult if not impossible for the general public to understand.

For most of the general public, the output of the scientific community is just a poorly translated and often misleading headline.

It absolutely is difficult for the general public, but that's not a failing, that's the state of the art.

We do have a problem with nomenclature being fractured, even within fields, never mind between them. But that's not the problem.

The problem is that when you get deep enough into how things work, things just get really complex and they stop behaving in ways and patterns that humans experience the world. They end up being things that cannot be simplified down to a common human experience in any meaningful way. At best, you can take a portion of the concept and make an analogy to some limited portion of a common experience without lying too much. But they are fundamentally not the same, so you cannot use the analogy to discover anything new about the original concept.

There is also a problem of the time it takes to internalize new ideas and concepts. You can't quickly and easily give someone an intuitive understanding of anything - it takes work and experience and time on their part to get there. I don't see how going and reworking nomenclatures of entire fields is going to make people more willing or able to devote their time to this. Mostly you'll have to put in incredible amount of work, convince far too many people to do things a different way because you said so, and all you'll have really done is save some (significant) annoyance from students getting their feet wet in a new field.

I have to disagree that nomenclature being fractured is not the problem. Within any given field, it is true that as you go deep enough into how things work, it gets complicated and hectic. However, as we have done throughout the entire written history of humanity, we have a special set of tools to help us engage with those complications, and reduce them down to complexes of simple objects whose behavior we understand - mathematics. If we are unable to reach deeply enough within a single field, it is because the tools we teach are not up to the task.

A large part of the issue is that the mathematics in common use in these disciplines, and at the elementary level, is in need of an upgrade. That upgrade is in the process of being performed (category theory), and as we learn to apply it in more and more fields, concepts and processes that seem deep, difficult, and essentially different turn out to be related in mathematically precise 'analogies'. This means that the same set of 'deep concepts', applied with different sets base objects and different operators that obey the same rules, will unfold into some of the main ideas in each discipline. Baez's Physics, Logic, Topology, Computation, a Rosetta stone is a good example of the beginnings of this, but googling 'applied category theory' or 'applied category theory course azimuth' ought to bring you some interesting extra links.

More generally, what we see of as specific processes within a particular field, when viewed through the right lenses, I expect we will find are instead instantiations of much more general processes that are the same across most, if not all, fields of discipline. How will we convince everyone to use these different naming systems and toolsets? Because those people who do use them will perform better, and the logic of competition will pull the educational system and society along with them.

If you disagree, I'd love to hear more about it. Nomenclature and Education are near and dear to me - I always jump and an opportunity to discuss with someone who does so in good faith.

News outlets are eager to 'report first' and don't bother correctly framing the science in a proper context of one study //which suggests more research and confirmation is necessary//.

Publish or perish, along with the lack of replication rather than trying to find something exciting to publish, or even enshrining the effort of replicating results (repudiating or confirming) to more strongly establish fact and carefully observe to see if there may be other causes/effects; is ruining the integrity of the scientific methods.

Finally, a lack of stable funding for maintaining and improving what should be public domain (established facts about nature) and the work of students of all ages to re-study and double check as they learn, is nearly the ultimate root cause. The true root cause being greed and the increasing likelihood that as we as a species approach 'abundance' that capitalism ceases to be a good means for wisely allocating resources. Surely that is the case when we are to the point of automated micro-transaction harvesting HFT and fractions of a second of advantage translating to profits in a financial sector that is a vastly over-sized portion of the GDP.

Get some data. Beat it up until you get something attention grabbing. Publish. Get paid. Worry about any fallout later.

The problem of science is that it doesn't have the outlet of, say, high school students learning real science and knowing how it works, that the products of science and technology is wind-up cut-off from the broad processes of experimentation that gave rise to them.

Too many of the studies today are funded to look for evidence to support a narrative instead of chasing the evidence to find the truth. The former is propaganda. The latter is science.

When I say too many, I mean to say that there are enough that people are very very aware of this. This fact alone is a problem because it damages people's perception of what is going on in the scientific community. If people cannot trust scientists to deliver truth rather than deliver support for a narrative, we have a problem. Whether this perception is fair or not, it is so.

If perception is that we cannot trust the scientists delivering the test results, nor the providence of the testing, then how can we trust the information we're being shown?

People need to see integrity before they can trust anything else.

I'm afraid this last bit is a big problem. I suspect there is a certain lag from discovery to perception. And then starting in the 1800 we had wave after wave of discovery, from electricity, magnetism, cars, airplanes, wireless, nuclear bombs, computers... stopping around the 1980s. At this point we can keep talking up science all we want but I fear something like fusion reactors or true AI would be needed to boost the faith.

many of those responsible for science as a discipline throughout the centuries sought to know more of their creator rather than to debunk religion

Even if as most atheists agree the Bible is a fallacy, that still doesn't prove there isn't a God, or multiple Gods. Nor does it even prove our own existence. It just proves our abilities to contemplate and interpret the laws of the physics we appear bound inside this universe.

The only rules we can discover and prove are the ones that constrain the environment we are confined to. Anything outside this environment is opaque to us, which may include a God... or not.

I see it differently. The problem isn't the public. The public has actually done a commendable job sensing what's been going on. It's not fair - however unintentional - to tie the public to the problem. It's bad enough Science keep denouncing the public, when it's Science who has mucked up it's own reputation. The pubic is a mirror.

Science, much like journalism, has been drinking too much of its own Kool Aid. It has forgotten it can't just talk, but it needs to walk that talk, as well.

Science would also be wise to show some humility and admit when it's gotten something less than perfect. Yes, that is part of the process. Does Science understand that? Instead, it just sweeps those aside and keeps self-professing it's eternal greatness, and how we should bow our heads, etc.

Bill Nye? Neil deGrasse Tyson? These are the face of Science? Me thinks they got the wrong end. They are doing more harm than good.

FWIW, I'm about to defend my PhD in a STEM discipline. In my eyes, science has far less credibility to me now than it did five years ago before I saw how the sausage is made. That's an N of at least one that this not only a problem outside scientific circles.

You have the perceptions you have because of the ideals you were sold in school and in your childhood. The role models you choose are those that make you aspire to be the very best human being you can... at least, this was my world. Integrity means something. Honour means something.

So to come out and find that the science I was taught, chase the evidence to find the truth, has been subverted and is now chase the narrative, find the evidence to support the narrative - that's a fundamental problem for me because what is being sold as science in the real world is not what I was taught science was supposed to be in school.

It seems that many others were taught to manipulate the world around them at everyone else's expense to get ahead. They were taught that their own goals and objectives were more important than those of humanity. Are they any more wrong?

Can I blame people for trying to get rich when we're taught in the West that money is success? It buys freedom and happiness. When all the propaganda fed to us by the media every day brainwashes us into believing this narrative, can I really blame anyone for doing whatever they have to, to get rich?

I'm not blaming the public. It's not a trivial problem to solve. We don't live in a culture that rewards integrity. We live in a culture that rewards behaviour that makes people rich.

If you don't put authenticity and integrity at the heart of your cultural beliefs, how can you blame anyone when they ignore it to chase money, which you will be rewarded for?

This is why none of us are masters of everything and we tend to specialize in niches. We want to be told the truth by an authority because we don't have the time to dig into everything ourselves. We want happy fulfilling lives. That means we can't look at everything with our own eyes, we need to be able to trust authorities. The less we can trust what we're being told, the more we have to research ourselves, the less time we're able to spend doing what we love with the people we love, the more miserable and disconnected our lives become.

We need to be told the truth by an authority and we need them to have the integrity to chase the truth and deliver it to us honorably.

It's not that we're not good at looking at the world with our own eyes, it's not that we're not capable, it's that we just don't have the time and we've run out of the energy to do so.

People will and have corrupted every institution ever created.

Having doctors and hospitals getting kickbacks for promoting certain drugs is an ethical problem that needs to be curtailed. This all feeds into public perception.

If you want to be seen as having integrity, you have to act with integrity.

If the situation was that there was a strong evidence-based disagreement about scientific findings, those signs wouldn’t be necessary. The situation is instead that a vast number of scientists are producing findings that contradict certain political preferences, and the response has not been a deeper investigation made in good faith — but rather an outright political rejection of the findings. “I support science” is not shorthand for “I take every scientific study as fact because scientists are gods,” but rather “I am inclined to give weight to scientific arguments in either direction as opposed to political arguments that reject those findings based on non-scientific reasoning.”

Political biases in every aspect from results interpretation to what questions we're allowed to ask, historical "just so" arguments that are sometimes falling flat (much to the detriment of the health of the planet), the lack of "negative results" studies due to funding biases and the replication crisis work together to cause a profound skepticism of the body of scientific institutional knowledge to be in some ways _more scientific_ than just reading and accepting the latest scientific news.

How does a layperson make a deeper investigation on their own? The research is typically paywalled, the jargon is inaccessible, the experiments are prohibitively expensive, etc etc. In effect, there is a priestly caste, and one which arguably excludes from the debate members of the skeptic's tribe (i.e., "people the skeptic might trust to address their concerns"). This is why heterodoxy and political diversity in the academy is soooo important.

You might be inclined to say something like "conservatives select out of the academy" or "it's not my fault reality has a liberal bias" and you might even be right, but I don't think you'll find climate change very sympathetic to your position. In other words, this isn't affirmative action for conservatives, it's affirmative action (of conservatives) for the benefit of humanity.

Disclaimers: I'm picking 'conservatives' and 'liberals' here because that's clearly the bent of the article. I'm also picking climate change since it seems to be the favorite example of science denialism. Of course, contrary to the angle of this article, science denialism isn't even an exclusively conservative phenomenon (blank slatism is a favorite of anti-science leftists--including leftist academics--and flat-earth and anti-vax are bipartisan beliefs).

My friends sometimes try to validate conclusions of the papers or just re-run the data crunching presented in those papers.

They never succeed. Either the data sets don't actually match the data sets in papers, or something in the formulas is off, or the code does not even compile.

I did computation physics in college. We had to write code as the paper of homework/tests. Our TA would never run our binaries. He would take our source code, compile it, feed it two of his data sets (we had one) and check the result. If the student's code did not compile, the student would get an F for that homework. If the student's code bombed on the data set that was shared with students, the student would automatically get an F. And only if the second data set got different results than he expected would he go chasing the errors and potentially still give a good grade. By the end of two semesters everyone knew one never tweaked the code to just run the known data set and get the known result.

Science would benefit tremendously if this was the approach.

This is just the original idea behind science as developed in the renaissance. The resistance to checking each others work is a recent phenomenon.

Edit to add a source:

> "the foundation of scientific societies compelled scientists to change the way in which experiments were presented so that not only members of the scientific community but also the inexperienced reader would be able to repeat them by following the same steps.

[...]

Robert Boyle also played an important role in the evolution of scientific writing (Gotti,1996, 2001; Hunter, 2007). Fulton (1932: 78) has highlighted the contribution of the scientist, describing Boyle’s undertaking “to establish science as an integral part of the intellectual life of ordinary men”. He encouraged scientists to write in a language that their contemporaries could understand, and he undoubtedly did more than anyone of his time to make scientific methodology part of the intellectual equipment of educated men.

[...]

According to Gotti, one of the features of experimental essays is brevity, but this brevity of form does not imply brevity in the exposition of the subject. On the contrary, experiments are usually reported in full, furnishing the reader with all the minutest details. The aim of such a report is, after all, to make it possible for the experiment to be repeated, making the precision of the description an important factor." https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2007.20.06

For example, there's a fairly nasty and debilitating condition called CFS which respected British psychiatrists long ago decided was psychosomatic. So a few years ago, they ran a high-profile clinical trial called PACE which tried to prove this by testing their preferred psychiatric treatments, and naturally it concluded they were right. It was also fairly shoddy, which shouldn't surprise anyone on HN. In particular, the results in the final paper used a different and much weaker criteria for success than they'd intended to use at the start, which is a no-no. (There were a bunch of other issues with it too.)

A few trial patients and some outside scientists noticed this tried to get enough data to see what the results were if the researchers had done the scientifically valid thing and used their planned methodology, and that's when things got nasty. The researchers loudly cried to anyone who'd listen - and plenty did, because they were respected psychiatrists and the patients were officially nuts - that this was dangerous, vexatious harassment of scientists by activists, using their position to frame their pre-existing beliefs as science and questioning them as unscientific. All the proud, clever supporters of science bought into this and kept on doing so.

This was almost a decade ago now. The reason it springs to mind is that a few days ago, Reuters ran a long-form piece uncritically repeating the position that opposition to them is a dangerous attempt to silence scientists through harassment and abuse, and it made HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19377986 Discussion ensued as to whether suing the evil people discrediting their research into oblivion was enough or whether they needed to be jailed, and why universities hadn't fired staff who disagreed with their results yet.

Oh, and the punchline to all this: the researchers were almost all male, the condition in question primarily affects women. It turns out that science, at least as experienced by poor disabled women, might be more accurately described by all those pesky postmodernist complaints from the women's studies department than it is by the scientific method.

2. Even if you’re not qualified to do the science yourself, you try to reject implausible ideas like the notion that there’s some grand scientific conspiracy against your preferred ideas. If you’re inclined to believe in some scientific result that is also the result that would be vastly preferred by industry and the richest people on earth, then you should be pretty confident that scientists who are willing to consider that outcome are getting resources to investigate it, and if those resources were producing credible results they’d be making waves in the scientific community. And if the scientific community was somehow censoring those credible results, we’d be hearing all about it.

You mean like academics who push blank slatism to prop up dubious political outcomes? Or people who push notions of racist math or sexist physics?

The questions are 1) how/why do our institutions allow these frauds to be so prevalent/powerful 2) how do we make the necessary changes 3) how do we help laypeople distinguish between ideologues and real academics?

Or maybe those people, even if they don't have much of a grasp on the scientific method, see the material progress and results of scientific work and conclude that they're going to place trust in scientific authority?

This is an entirely false equivalence. One can trust scientists even without understanding science, on the fact alone that research produces results that everyone can observe.

To suggest that we have too uncritical of an opinion of scientific research in an age were medieval diseases make a comeback because people aren't getting vaccinated, climate change is routinely ignored, and an atheistic scientist would likely not be able to run for high office based on that fact alone, is a joke to be honest.

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.

The difference between scientific and religious institutions is not that the former functions without authority or trust, it's that the success of the former is measured against observable and replicable results and material progress and not based on infallible spiritual promise.

So if someone understands nothing about science at all, and worships it like a religion, at least they had the good sense of picking a religion that puts food on their table, makes their planes stay in the sky and makes them healthy again when they fall sick.

Religion has proven capable of welding large communities together, and that sort of shared belief system wins wars.

If you ignore the fact that the doctrine is more allegorical than factual, religion has a lot of utility when resources are scarce. Being part of a large group is frequently more important than being part of a technically correct group.

I think the last 200 years of history has demonstrated that science is a superior strategy, but it isn't obvious enough to be hand-waved. There is some evidence that to successfully abandon religion societies have to first have an ungodly surplus of resources. The new trend towards no religion hasn't been tested in a war yet either; back in WWII religious/nationalistic sentiment was famously high.

It may be true that our current scientific culture arose from religion, but it's easy to imagine it arising separately. There are even countless stories of times when scientific progress was hindered by religious thinking, situations where people tried to fit their ideas to some religious story and in doing so blocked their progress towards truth.

In addition to that, even if religion was a necessary prerequisite for modern science and we take that science is 'good', that does not mean religion is good. "The USA came about (in part) due to the use of slaves, take away slavery and we wouldn't have the USA" is not a good argument for slavery.

A side note, but the world is not really orderly, though maybe it is understandable. If anything, the world is filled with death, pain, and chaos; if any mind created it, it's a sadistic one.

Atheists were science blockers in Plato's day. They were called sophists, and didn't believe in gods, but used the beliefs of the people and fancy rhetoric to get what they want. Most of Plato's dialogues are debates with sophists.

You claimed that science exists because of religion, but did not show that religion is a requirement (or even catalyst) for science.

Organised science definitely requires a society (otherwise it would not be organised) and it so happens that historical societies tended to have some association with religion, but I would claim science arose from these societies despite religion, not because of it.

If science was an outworking of religion, rather than the society a religion happens to cohabit, why do we not see more and more science coming from societies with more and more religion?

> Atheists were science blockers in Plato's day. They were called sophists, and didn't believe in gods, but used the beliefs of the people and fancy rhetoric to get what they want. Most of Plato's dialogues are debates with sophists.

Sorry, not sure what the link here is.

Atheism is just not believing in gods, in the same way I don't believe we are living in a simulation. Even if the premise is true, as far as we can measure (so far!) there is no impact on us. Not believing in things that we can't experience or measure is the default for us in general.

I would go so far as to say that religions themselves only exist because we were trying to explain the world we live in, and were unable to with the tools and ideas available to us throughout history. Over the course of history many people have observed the same phenomena and come up with a multitude of ideas as to what is going on.

Many of those ideas go on to form the nexus of a religion, many hundreds or thousands of religions trying to make sense of the world. The ideas that hold up to interrogation, that are testable and can be observed repeatably, they become science. Science reduces the set of possible explanations to the ones that are feasible.

Didn't Aristotle basically say a projectile will move in a straight line until it basically "runs out of gas," even though everyone who's ever thrown something can see that's not true, just because he thought it ought to work that way?

Lets take in mind that we talk about a man, one single man with not much more than a deductive and logical brain. No fancy lab apparatus or computers here.

This man was hugely influential in logic. Created the sillogisms and developped one of the first logical syntaxes based in the concepts of true and false. "if A is P (is true) and P is C (is true); then A is C". relationships among true and false in double negatives, predicates, etc.

Lay the foundations of economy as a science and economic though. We call it "economy" because one of his disciples coined the term.

Hugely influencial in occidental medicine. Medicine must be evidence-based, deterring magical procedures.

So called the "father of biology". Wrote the first comprehensive treatise about zoology, covering and classifying more than 500 animals. Wrote a similar treatise about botany (mostly lost if i'm not wrong)

Hugely influencial in development of embryology and teratology. Described systematically the development of embryo in chicken and other animals. Developped laws about gestation time and clutch size related with size of animals that are still vigent.

(Most probably) the first cephalopologist or marine biologist. Described the hectocotylus in octopuses and explained his function.

Deducted correctly that all things in the space were moving in closed orbits. Was wrong about putting earth in the center of all universe, and though that orbits were circular; but to be fair the first telescope wouldn't be invented until, dunno, more than 1500 years later or so.

Introduced the phylosophical concept of first motor, "if there is movement in the universe and all that moves is pushed by another moving object, there must be a first cause for the movement of all the planets and things in the universe". The pale ghost of this concept can be still invoked if you repeat "Big bang" six times in front of a telescope's mirror.

Not to mention the thousands of his phylosofical quotes that are fondly repeated still today in lots of powerpoint presentations and motivational posters all around the world.

"It is during our darkest moments that we must focus to see the light" Harvey Dent? not, Aristotle.

All in just a man's life. The man was wrong in many things, but was incredibly smart, influential and prolific.

If you're talking about wars, you really think a hypothetical civilization with a technological development level of ca.1819 would have even a sliver of a chance against modern weapons?? I think history shows that not to be the case.

But I think that misses the point. The real issue is that the world doesn't care what your belief system is. You may have the most solid shared belief system ever, but if you ruin your environment, a la "Collapse", you won't stand a chance.

However there needs to be a stable society to host the researchers (using the term loosely to include people who invent stuff). That is possible with extreme ethnic homogeneity, possible with strong shared religion and culture and possible with conducive economic conditions where everyone benefits from pulling together.

It isn't obvious that 'science' can fill that role if it displaces religion and we go through 20 years of hard times. A cynic's read of science would support the idea that we stab the neighbor when the going gets tough. Eugenics, for example, was once considered the scientific option until WWII happened, there was a lot of interest in the early statistical community in that sort of thing. Some bits worked, some didn't, but the experience doesn't paint 'the scientific approach' as beyond moral question - there was lot of suffering and some very divisive ideas came to fruition.

I agree with you insofar that if people are living hand-to-mouth it's very hard to achieve scientific progress just because there is not enough time.

In general however this does not require a stable society, just that there are people within the society who have time to think and the resources to test their ideas. We've seen this in the past when 'rich' people sponsor someone to do 'science' even though in general the population is living hand-to-mouth, and we've seen it recently in Europe where science continued even though the land was being torn up by war.

That said, for large scale, wide spread advancement you obviously want more people able to contribute, so a stable society definitely helps with this.

> That is possible with extreme ethnic homogeneity, possible with strong shared religion and culture and possible with conducive economic conditions where everyone benefits from pulling together.

I agree that these things can lead to a stable society, with the correction "religion or culture", but actually think there is something more fundamental going on.

> It isn't obvious that 'science' can fill that role if it displaces religion and we go through 20 years of hard times. A cynic's read of science would support the idea that we stab the neighbor when the going gets tough.

First of all, it's not necessary for 'science' to fill this role, culture is already a fine fit. Indeed, the cases you probably think of when saying religion can form a stable society are better explained with culture (of which religion or religious observances may be a part), especially when we consider the many conflicts in history between groups of people who claim the same religion but have different culture.

Furthermore, 'science' doesn't say anything like "stab your neighbour when the going gets tough". One of the prevailing theories around the question of "why do we cooperate" is that cooperating is more economical, and societies that cooperate are more likely to survive. It is a self selecting trait of successful societies. Individuals within a society may choose to act in uncooperative ways, but even if I thought I could improve my lot in life by stealing from my neighbours, I'm able to recognise that if everyone acted like that it would be bad for me personally. Culture and law - cultural memes, these are the elements of a society that lead to it being stable.

> Eugenics, for example, was once considered the scientific option until WWII happened, there was a lot of interest in the early statistical community in that sort of thing. Some bits worked, some didn't, but the experience doesn't paint 'the scientific approach' as beyond moral question - there was lot of suffering and some very divisive ideas came to fruition.

There are not many people who believe any human endeavour is beyond moral question, but especially not science! Insofar as we can call 'science' the modern organised research institutions, we have entire systems set in place exactly because we (humanity) believe that some things are not worth knowing if you can't discover them without human suffering, or 'not immorally' for whatever we find immoral.

That is to say, 'science' doesn't dictate how we structure our lives or behave ourselves, we do. The institutions we build and the cultures that persist are what lead to stable societies, but it's much easier to make good decisions when you have more knowledge.

Your phrasing makes it sound like you're conflating science and physical reality... that's kind of a pet peeve of mine (sorry). Science provides some of the knowledge required for engineers and doctors to do their jobs, but it's the work they do with that knowledge that accomplishes those things. I think that's an important distinction. We can't credit science with creating the natural world or its mechanisms, though it has enabled us to understand and work with it.

However, in general discussion no one is going to say

> "potentially flawed but workable approximation of natural 'rules' that allow us to to manipulate natural phenomenon in a manner that results in food on our table, planes in your sky, and cures for our sicknesses"

No, it's much more reasonable to say

> science that puts food on our table, planes in our sky, and cures for our sicknesses

I know it is... hence the apology.

But in practice, I don't think it would be inaccurate to say the terms "science" and "natural world" are being used interchangeably in common vernacular. That bugs me. "Science" is not what you see when you look through a telescope or microscope.

It is no longer fine when public policy decisions potentially costing trillions of dollars and affecting billions of people are riding on scientific conclusions. Then the claim that "well, we're just discovering facts about the world" no longer holds water. Nor does the claim that "well, science requires institutions, trust, and authority, so just trust us, the scientists". Members of the public have to be able to independently evaluate the claims so they can make informed decisions about what public policies to support.

Indeed, the motto of the Royal Society is "Take nobody's word for it".

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

The very nature of science means that there should be no such thing as "scientific authority."

(I say this as a person with published papers.)

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.

The discovery of more objects in the solar system led to defining additional categories of objects, most relevant the category of “dwarf planets”.

That's evolving terminology not a change in the science.

Same with the definition of mental conditions. Yet people wield the DSM as science and use it to bludgeon people who are not politically in line with their worldview on mental health

You would know if it's happened to you.

However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion.

The same is true of pure knowledge. You introduce a new paradigm. You don't know how it will effect all the other knowledge that depends on it. Once it's adopted careers of many scientists depend on it... it's only after those scientists die and a new paradigm is found that the next generation can build its career on that old knowledge dies.

None of this is due to wisdom. It's just the way the political economy works. Wisdom only applies to individual action about things that have a small enough scope to have some idea about their impact on decisions. For anything bigger than that, it's political... and I highly doubt the crowds have wisdom especially about untested things.

What other areas of inquiry would that be?

The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable.

Another problem is that the popular media publishes inconclusive studies because they are click bait. People read them because they are interested in living longer and losing weight and being happy.

Fear also turns studies into clickbait. The latest was the blizzard of articles on if bugs are dying off or not.

Then there is the fact that negative studies tend to be ignored and when the study failed or it introduces data that does not conform to general knowledge.

All this makes people question studies where the data is conclusive.

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).

Here is an interesting Stanford Medicine study of individual variation on the impact on low carb vs low fat. The punchline is that they still don't know after a fairly rigorous study.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SBZ4HYOxf0

I find the distance, that analysing behaviour brings, actually helps with the patience, and compassion (if they're having a weird tantrum because they wanted something trivial). I also think it keeps me motivated in consciously raising my kids, rather than just passively whiling away the years.

Maybe I have younger kids, so there aren't really any philosophical issues being raised.

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.

If you have found it a useful communicative tool, then I am glad for you. No doubt communication can be hard, so we've gotta use whatever tools we find effective. But honestly when I try speaking like that, I can't help but feel like a robot or a program. It feels very unnatural and very awkward to me. Perhaps that distance is exactly what lends it efficacy for some people, but that very distance only lends it offputticacy for me.

Am I right and you wrong? No, I don't think so. I have no reason to doubt that you have found success with such an approach. But were I a barkeep and you a patron responding like that when asked "why the long face?", you'd be getting a double of tequila on the house. (Tequila has a funny way of bringing out one's inner party, in my experience—or getting one started where there's yet only a quiet inner evening get-together).

https://i.imgur.com/ShGZjQ6.png

... That would be inappropriate, unhelpful, and unproductive. It would be better to engage with the opponent’s argument with another argument than to resort to talking about personal feelings in that context.

I wonder how many arguments would be defused if both sides could phrase the other side's point of view in a way they would agree was accurately stated.

Psychiatrists paved the way for the Holocaust:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23511221

Many common points exist - showing your reasoning and evidence rather than to appeal to authority, and the idea that hypotheses should be falsifialbe (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) to be central ideas. Both of these very good idea in all situations in which you're actually interested in the truth, rather than having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later situation where you need to act on imperfect information.

There's no disaster waiting to happen, at least not in comparison to other tools of reasoning being misused. Sophism (i.e. people playing mind games to make their claims look better) exists inside and outside of science, just as self-interest and wanting to increase your own sphere of influence do, but that's no fault of the scientific method (any more than it is a fault of religion when it occurs there). Any system that lends credibility and authority to people will (loosely mis-citing Bourdieu) attract power-mongery.

2) excepting this, science in the ideal is indeed a wholly different beast. So you could say it is this the weakest form of religion, or, at least, the religion with the fewest dependencies.

3) in practice, the edifice of science is quite full of people who are hypocritical and flagrantly breaking the rules which you expect would be necessary to maintain the high standard that marks the difference between religion and science. These violations are often swept under the rug quietly and even when they get really big the organization is incredibly good at closing its ranks. I'd say there are a lot of parallels between the science industrial complex and, highly organized religions (such as megachurches and hierarchical institutions like the Southern Baptist or Catholic Church) than most people who see science as a source of power ought to be comfortable with.

A scientist doing science isn't religion. A non-scientist believing everything someone says "because science" is.

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.

Perhaps you can find something analogous to this structure in psychology, but I just don't see it in the rest of the scientific landscape.

I will agree that I don't see this structure elsewhere in science...

Afterwards students were discouraged from original thought around logic and just forced to learn the following mnemoic

Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris. Cesare, Camestres, Festino, Baroco secundae. Tertia Darapti, Disamis, Datisi, Felapton, Bocardo, Ferison habet. Quarta insuper addit Bramantip, Camenes, Dimaris, Fesapo, Fresison.

Scholasticism then went onto have terrible connotations as a scholarly system.

For the average person to look at the scientific method, conclude it (at least mostly) works and believe in the fundamentals of the process, I think, is a good thing.

But the scientific method is based on the idea of an unchanging God / reality. Without that fundamental belief, theres no point in determining how physics behaves in an experiment, because if everything happens at the whims of anthropomorphic gods, then there is no reason to expect the same experiment will produce similar results.

Thus, I don't really see the huge step up, especially given the inhumanity science has sometimes promulgated, and for which it frankly gets a free pass.

Written by Albert Einstein

Some other quotes:

"The highest principles for our aspirations and judgments are given to us in the Jewish-Christian religious tradition."

"Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion."

"His religious feeling takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an intelligence of such superiority that, compared with it, all the systematic thinking and acting of human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life and work, in so far as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages."

"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it." -- Albert Einstein, 1954, letter to Joseph Dispentiere.

Scientific methods differ a lot between the sciences - especially between the physical and special sciences, for example.

"Some philosophers and scientists have argued that there is no scientific method; they include physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Paul Feyerabend (in his Against Method)"

And even the previous paragraphs are not complete either. It says there:

"Scientists then test hypotheses by conducting experiments or studies. A scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable"

Which is not necessarily true - for example, many arguments against the theory of evolution question whether it is a falsifiable theory (which is not saying that it is not true, but if there is no way to falsify it, how can it be said it is a scientific theory?). Many fields within Biology also have no predictive, but only descriptive power.

Scientists who stick to a rigorous scientific method, such as seen in physics would have to reject most other branches of science. For a realist to accept scientific results in multiple fields, they have to use some philosophical reasons to accept the differing methods as valid ways of exploring reality.

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 falsified piece is addressed, and still likely to be called the “theory of evolution” even though the content is different.

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 new species in a laboratory without direct gene editing, there cannot be positive proof for evolution - but till that is done, there is no negative test that would disprove that evolution is the consequence of all its component hypotheses.

Personally, I don't see any reason to doubt evolution, considering it is neat and beautiful. But at the same time, I can see that it hasn't been built via the same scientific method seen in physics.

Being able to do that is no more positive proof of evolution than any of the more or practical tests. Also, speciation has been observed and created in controlled settings without direct gene editing (indeed, some before gene editing was even a thing), so if it was positive proof of evolution, we could mark that off as proven absolutely.

This would be fine. But this is not what people mean when they say "science is real." They mean: "Believe what scientists say," and the definition of a scientist is... a person with a post-graduate degree that is popular on Facebook, probably, like Neil deGrasse Tyson.

If you spend a cursory time searching for that statement, you'll find that it's associated with the March for Science, which is, itself, a reaction to active and successful attempts at having persons in government distort, remove, and ignore science that flies in the face of moneyed interests.

By the way, just about everything you know about Galileo re: perception and persecution is wrong.

People so often miss this. Science is a slow, evolving and never ending process. The day a new study comes out, people want to use it as evidence that something is 'settled science'.

Even things as fundamental to our knowledge of the universe like gravity have evolved over time and are still being understood at deeper and deeper levels.

Similarly all climate science today does in fact have to explain how global cooling observations in the 1970s were found.

No one denying AGW though has ever shown any interest in explaining the data.

That's the catch is that even things that have overwhelming scientific consensus are not "settled science".

There's always more data to collect and more theories to test.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't believe the data or act on the conclusions, far from it. I just don't agree with using the absolute term "settled science". It's not like there's an equation everyone agrees on or a reproducible experiment we can run.

We're still learning as we go and revising projections frequently. But there's no shame in making personal or political decisions based on our best scientific understanding of the day, we do it all the time and it would be just as big of a mistake to act like we know nothing about climate change as acting like we already know everything.

It's trivial, which is why that's exactly what scientists are saying?

What was your point again?

No, "the scientists" don't get on TV. TV selects some scientists who are willing to dumb things down far enough to be compatible with their business model. If you want to know what "the scientists" say, you have to read their papers and reports, and you might be surprised to find that they are scientists.

Yes; and, it's weaponized for political discourse. It's as though we're in some kind of new Puritan era -- this reminds me of how John Cleese was blasted for tweeting on this very topic (3 years ago)[1]. He blasphemed.

[1] https://twitter.com/johncleese/status/683681888687538177?lan...

"I would like 2016 to be the year when people remembered that science is a method of investigation,and NOT a belief system" @JohnCleese [1] 8:10 AM - 3 Jan 2016 [2]

[1] https://twitter.com/JohnCleese [2] https://twitter.com/JohnCleese/status/683681888687538177

Even Sagan, now and then, recognized the necessity for caution ... and he put it on videotape.

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows clear that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources. - Cosmos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MlN7iVIuhk#t=4m09s)

Science is a network of knowledge [1] where central nodes can be assumed to be more likely an accurate representation of something predictive. The literature critical theory claim that it is arbitrary does not acknowledge those relationships, effectively missing the forest for the trees which also explains the shoddy science done in critical theory’s name.

Science is progressed by building new leaf nodes and supporting them through other nodes as evidence, or by showing that core nodes are not as predictive as you thought they were.

[1] https://youtu.be/bxdBRKmPhe4

Due to this layered interdependence, the computer is in fact a shining example of scientific achievement just as much as it is one of technological advancement.

The laws would still be there without physics, but our tools and capability to manipulate them would be greatly diminished.

It is actually a bit intellectually lazy to use literary critical theory To critique things outside literature, because it is obvious it has no explanatory power outside the subjective reading of a book.

From first principles technology is definitely applied science through engineering, but technology is progressed through pushing the boundaries of science and science is the map of where to look. Eg quantum mechanics and optics helped create a map of where to look for new nano scale technology innovations. Technolofy shows the reproducibility of the theories it’s build upon.

The computer is build by innovations created using the predictive powers of material science, quantum mechanics and chemistry.

How do you think the optics used to create the processors were created? The advanced etching technologies to get to decreasing nm processor scale? Materials that respond reliably to store energy in batteries or power puxels in your screen?

The whole "but science is just as bad as religion" argument rings quite hollow.

At the end of the day humans really only have techné, everything else is political... and it's also obvious that the political is generally dysfunctional scientifically -- i.e. inability to manage stability of the environment through science... and also scientifically managing the political is fascist or totalitarian. We get stuck with a set of choices that don't lead to good outcomes... maybe can never lead to good outcomes.

At the end of the day, as usual, those things aren't as much independent entities as classical ideas leads one to believe.

Some of Robert Moses's schemes are a great example. Consider, for instance, how he hoped to deny whole segments of the population in NY access to his parks by making overpasses en route to the spaces too low for buses (which serval poor folks relied on to get around) to travel under. The application of technology and techniques is fundamentally entangled with the wills of the subjects employing said techniques.

I'd go as far as to say human life is inherently "political" in all its aspects. You can't really live and not be politicized in some way--the really baad state to be in is to be unconscious of the political implications of the way you live, which primes you for manipulation by parties that are more 'in the know'. This idea that certain realms of life are free from political influence or external factors doesn't really have any representatives in the real world. I think people often confuse our ability to treat something abstractly and divorced from the concrete situation of present reality with the ontological claim that said thing itself is abstract and can be wholly treated and solved in an abstract manner. That doesn't even hold in the case of a domain as fundamentally abstract as algorithmic time analysis, in which the concrete inputs have a direct impact on the performance of algorithms. In the jargon of historical materialist philosophy such a process is sometimes called reification--thinking the abstract representation of a concept is the thing itself, ignoring all its concrete manifestations. This leads to certain errors. E.g. thinking we can solve problems with schooling in a particular district without having to look at other issues, such as the population dispersion, the distribution of finances, the district's layout, etc. etc. We have to be vigilant of 'nounifying' abstractions and keep in mind that they are the products of thought and a helpful intellectual tool, and means of orienting and structuring the world, not latent realities.

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

At least in the South, that sign would be in opposition to "teaching the controversy" of Creation vs. Evolution in high schools.

Would it be "reverent" to fight to keep non-scientific and indeed proven bad faith attempts at undermining science out of the science classroom?

Also, the Simpsons did it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vxHkAQRQUQ

I find it hard to believe that you've found such a specific correlation in a domain where the numbers are large and half the equation is so nebulous ("these people", i.e. people who often say out loud "we believe in science in this household"??). This is ripe with identity politics, and you're almost certainly projecting your feelings about "those people" as though there is a real correlation that makes "those people" worthy of condemnation.

Similarly, wre can't really expect everyone to know or care why evolution/heliocentrism is a settled topic but it's really helpful for them to trust the scientific process regardless.

This would be fine (mostly). But this isn't what they mean. They believe scientists. Not the methods. This defeats the entire purpose of science.

If the data were available, it would be interesting to see the correlation between this distortion of science and the size of the government in relation to GDP.

The trend of virtue signaling through yard signs is the most ridiculous thing I've seen in an era where ridiculousness has become the norm.

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 good idea, are routinely castigated. Ron Paul became a nonstarter as a Presidential candidate for precisely this reason.

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.

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.

We already know that hyperinflation relative to growth is a way to ruin an economy quickly for instance. Similarly the issue with federal reserve denialism is that they have rhetoric but not much understanding about economic history.

Precious metal backed currency has lead to countless expensive wars and travesties because it effectively started to be a brake/cap on growing economies. Essentially saying you are against the federal reserve period is like admitting you are a homeopath - it goes beyond a difference of supportable opinion and into a sign of incompetence.

I can understand some unease about the role of the federal reserve but it should have some role even if it is stuck on "try to map to economic growth instead of attempting stimulus or bubble deflation".

The federal reserve is a terrible choice because unaccountable bureaucrats with their own agenda are given the power to juice or crash the economy, and they appear to threaten/reward presidents with this power.

Just printing money is a terrible choice because the executive can just run the presses instead of taxing, and thereby cause hyperinflation.

The USA has tried all 3 methods.

That last one has the most potential I think. It could be restricted to reduce misbehavior, perhaps with a time delay before changes take effect.

The primary function of central banks when they were established was to prevent bank runs, acting as a lender to banks. But what if, for example, we had full reserve banking instead of fractional reserve? Would that not eliminate bank runs, make the economy more stable, ensure interest rate serve as a valid signal of consumer time preferences and of the demand for capital, and eliminate the need for a central bank?

Go further into the past and you'll see plenty. The Opium War was from the terrible twos of mercantilism and metallic standards - the British Empire feared the effects of trading silver for tea and had found a substitute agricultural good - opium. Many empires before then engaged in conquest for precious metals only to either hyperinflate themselves or lose the war. There were accounts of terrible attempts to tame inflation with price controls after the Roman empire seized too much treasure.

The 'fairness' in distribution of money based upon holding is also missing the point on several levels. Not only would that be de-facto regressive it would encourage /not/ investing resources but speculative hoarding which isn't a good thing for the economy. It brings to mind a fundamental misunderstanding that is very common. Money isn't wealth. Money is a medium of exchange for the goods and services which are actual wealth.

It is part of why Bitcoin did so terrible as an actual workable currency - everyone just grabbed onto their Beanie Baby 3.0's and didn't use it for actual exchange and it was very unstable.

Fiat currency is essentially 'superficially crazy/stupid but it works' (it isn't so crazy if one understands the role of money is to be a medium of exchange and is thus arbitrary but can serve the systems for good or ill) and a lot of people get hung-up on it.

"Fewer except for the infamous big ones". If that's what you call progress, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

That's true, but it's the best we've got.

Not believing in science is different from disagreeing with conclusions of studies based on data. But just saying "science is flawed so I'm not going to believe it" makes no sense at all, because all other alternatives are worse.

When you wrote that, what were you thinking of, specifically? I don't know what you are referencing. Also I'm curious, are there any big mysteries left in the field of biochemistry?

"We believe science is real" is such a modest, uncontroversial statement. The idea that you'd see it and rail against some imagined dogmatic strawman really says more about you than it does about them.

No, it's not.

Heck, the way the public considers religion today is closer to the way the public considered religion during the time of Galileo than is the way the public considers science.

But when we are talking about vaccines, flat earthers, etc, then how can you possibly justify that it's bad for

>people are castigated for not believing in scientific "truths".

?

Perhaps flat earthers is a silly but harmless phenomenon, but there is real pain and suffering from other kinds of science denial such as the antivaxxers.

---

There's a beautiful article that I think serves as a model example. In the field of education, there's a certain idea that's believed by many teachers, but which scientists (in cognitive psychology / learning science) know to be a myth. Against this background, this article (“Why mythbusting fails”) discusses why the scientists' approach towards transmitting this knowledge fails to convince its audience. It is worth reading, because it is really about persuasion, about dealing with disagreements between people: https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-...

---

Science is many things:

1. A wonderful method for arriving at reliable knowledge. The best we have.

2. The set of facts accumulated via that method. This set will always be tentative, incomplete and contain some fraction of false positives.

3. The set of facts believed by professional scientists today.

What would be good for people to trust would be (1) > (2) > (3), but for people taking sides, the priority is inverted: they care more that people be on the side of science (against religion or whatever), than that they apply the scientific method wherever possible.

---

In his books like The Mosaic Distinction and the Price of Monotheism, the author Jan Assmann discusses the idea of “counterreligions”. Though many people in Western society may no longer be religious in one sense, they still retain certain attitudes picked up from it, like the missionary/crusader zeal of treating those who do not believe in the same things as them as enemies needing to be either converted or fought, general condescension towards “heathens”, etc. We see this in discussions about politics or nearly anything, where people neatly get polarized into opposing sides rather than a gradual spectrum as one may expect.

---

In this very article, see things like:

> Science denial, however, is like crime: combating it requires…

(treating disbelievers as heretics to be fought)

> Galileo cleverly acknowledged the values of his enemies.

I don't know about Galileo's views, but why view acknowledgement of others' values as merely a “clever” device? How about replacing “cleverly” with “sincerely”, and “enemies” with “real people we'd like to persuade”?

I don't really know of any science enthusiasts that want to burn the religious or their texts (well, I did as a teenager, but they grew out of it), but I know more than a few religious who want science out of their schools, deeply believe religion should be more involved in our government, and let's not forget the anti-vaccination movement. These people are neighbors and co-workers, and while they themselves are generally not horrible people those sorts of ambitions feel dangerous at best.

Anyway, my point is - I would rather have a problem with overenthusiastic science fans that could use some perspective, than a problem of people not vaccinating their children and "rolling coal"

When people have lost faith in every institution, it is hard to trust the govt. to work nicely with massive corporations to inject needles in their children, especially in an environment where half the kids aren’t living in iron lungs.

People not "believing" in science is a huge freaking problem, and is just one of many symptoms of the hellbound handbasket America finds itself in right now. Science by definition is not something you choose to have faith in or not. The only way to disagree with science is more science that disproves the previously accepted science, it's not a choice of faith or belief. The way you can tell that science doesn't function as a faith-based enterprise is the fact that one of the greatest accomplishments a scientist could have is disproving long-held scientific assumptions, which itself can only happen with reproducible results.

For example, a Pew Research poll from several years ago showed that fully 2/3 of self-identified Republican voters were Young Earth Evangelicals, meaning they believe that the planet is ~6000 years old and any evidence to the contrary is either wrong, or a literal test of faith by an apparently insecure deity who will only be satisfied by the basest, most unthinking fealty imaginable. That's obviously going to have an impact over the long term.

What does this lead to? People like Lamar Smith being made the chair of the House Science Committee. Someone who literally doesn't "believe" in science, who has used his authority for the last 6 years to literally squash scientific research that didn't lead to the predetermined conclusions that his faith (and more likely, his donors and voters) assures him are true.

TL;DR I am not at all remotely concerned about people putting signs on their lawns stating that their household believes in science. It's a couple decades too late but whatever. It's a sad world we live in where that's something that anyone feels like they need to publicly state support for.

"Hanging in the Louvre Museum in Paris is an imposing painting, The Preaching of St Paul at Ephesus. In this 1649 work by Eustache Le Sueur, the fiery apostle lifts his right hand as if scolding the audience, while clutching a book of scripture in his left. Among the rapt or fearful listeners are people busily throwing books into a fire."

Okay, but in the USA, over the last 60 years we've seen an astonishing loss of religious authority, as well as parental authority, as well as teaching authority. There is no way to bring back scientific authority without also discussing the wider loss of authority.

Nor is the USA alone, but it is not the entire West that is effected. Anyone who wants to see the contrast can visit Britain, and then Poland. In Poland, you can still see the older social structures, and older notions about both religious authority and teaching authority and parental authority.

In the USA, in the year 2019, it is common to see these things:

1. a person at a party says they are "spiritual, but I don't believe in organized religion"

2. a parent spanks their child because their child misbehaved, and the parent is then investigated by the authorities

3. a teacher goes off script to offer their personal opinion of the Vietnam War, and then finds their whole career is at risk

Every single profession is now under attack in the USA. The older spirit of independent professions is now under attack.

I'm not saying this is good or bad, I'm just pointing out it is a fact of life. There has been some progress made in stamping out certain abuses of power, but at the cost of stripping most of the professions of their previous independence.

If you'd like to bring back scientific authority, you need to address the wider issues.

There used to be institutions that were regarded as the gold standard for truth: the FDA, top science journals, the CDC, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and so on.

These weren't necessarily regarded as infallible. But it was widely recognized that they undertook a best effort to get at the truth, and would tend to err on the side of caution.

That trust is falling apart. Many people, including in the HN community, cheer this decline. They see it, not entirely unreasonable, as the downfall of despised "elites" and opening the discourse to other voices, making it more democratic.

But while the tearing down of institutions is well ahead, there is little indication that the envisioned surge of bottom-up publishing is anywhere as successful: almost no structures have appeared, for example, that provide the nitty-gritty coverage of local politics.

Nor can I think of any actual corruption by these organisations exposed by amateur sleuths. Even Snowden relied on traditional media to get his message out. Just today, the Seattle Times (old media) revealed their investigation of the broken process of Boeing's certification of the 737 Max.

"Critical thinking" is what's usually recommended in these times of information overload and bad actors. But the term just seems to give license to everyone to make up their own facts as needed. The result is a discourse devoid of agreed-upon facts. If you cite inflation data in economic discussions, the most likely reply is a conspiracy theory about the data being corruptly influenced. "Think critically", they say, "who profits from <X>, I bet they get a big fat payoff from <Y> for telling this lie".

Wouldn't the simple fact that the CDC now owns patents on vaccines qualify at least as a conflict of interest that would justifiably erode trust?

Trust is power and power corrupts. Its part of a natural cycle that occurs. This is why we develop organizations with strict constraints and methods of accountability such as the separate branches of government.

How many times have you seen this statement on this board alone: "Given the passage of enough time after your death, anything you did won't matter." or some form or fashion.

Ok, maybe transferring authority to individuals as in (1) could be counted as a loss, but in a topic so personal that it would be ridiculous for somebody to claim authority over others in it anyway.

Nope, all of these are in simultaneous rapid decline in esteem and status.