Sigh, freedom of religion seems like freedom to believe in unscientific bullshit, isn't it.
I wonder what obscure technical solutions exist just because someone has to obey their magical sky fairy... There are ovens with Sabbath buttons, but that doesn't seem obscure enough.
Lately I’ve been thinking about the other side of this, the faith one must have to trust science. Most people will never crack a textbook for real, let alone do the experiments themselves. There are so many people I know who look at an anti-vaxxer and say “how could they be so dumb” but they themselves know nothing except what they parrot. Not to say an anti-vaxxer is correct. It’s just that so many people on the side of science only believe because everyone else does, because it’s just “so obvious” and I can see how someone would lose their way if they didn’t have that faith.
I think this is a bit of a false dilemma. It seems like if you do not have enough skill to evaluate a model, then you have to trust someone who does have the skill. At that point you are now back to trusting someone rather than making your own informed decision.
However, the validity of a model is not a binary state. Models in science are not truth. They are models that are built using observations. Predictions are made with the models and efforts are made to find circumstances in which the predictions do not come true. If we fail to find such circumstances, then it's usually a pretty good model.
The important point is that all models are flawed. A model is not the actual thing. The equations for how gravity work are not perfect. There are things we don't understand and simplifications in our models for things that we don't care about. The model is only there to help us make predictions.
Some models are very good -- no matter how you try it's virtually impossible to find a way where the model does not work exactly as we observe. Some models are very bad -- it's easy to find failing cases. But even bad models can be useful if you understand their limitations.
When you are looking at competing models, it is not usually important to understand the models completely. What you need to be able to do is to "sanity check" them. Are there easy ways that you can say that the model will not work well for your situation? Quite frequently there are.
Often you don't even need to to evaluate how good a model is. You just need to choose the better of a few proposed models. Again, doing some sanity checking can often find ways where you can easily determine that one model is better than another.
The mistake I see people making is that they evaluate models based on trust. I trust the person selling model A, so I will reject model B. This is a very poor way of evaluating models because it does not sanity check the model itself. Instead it's important to look at the predictions of the models and then look at as much data as you can find to see if the observations match the predictions.
This is where people often fall short -- they do not do the leg work. It's one of the real failings of our education system IMHO. Teachers are given the status of the "source of truth". The students trust the teachers and when they leave school the lose that source of truth. They ask "Who should I trust?" Even people who dig into issues look at two papers with different results and they ask "Which result should I trust?" It's a real problem.
If people could be taught to respond with, "I don't know what the real answer is, but for now A seems to have the most consistent data that I've seen", things would be quite a bit better. However, it is very possible that I ask too much from the general person in society...
>It’s just that so many people on the side of science only believe because everyone else does, because it’s just “so obvious” and I can see how someone would lose their way if they didn’t have that faith.
But that's exactly what anti-vaxxers do. They haven't cracked open any textbooks and done the experiments to invalidate vaccine science either, they literally just doubt because they have more faith in their own cynicism and innate belief in conspiracy theory than science.
At the end of the day, everyone puts faith in almost every aspect of what they consider to be the axioms of reality, we're all trapped in the bubble of subjective experience. No one has the time, resources or skill to rediscover and reevaluate the entire body of human scientific knowledge from first principles, and it isn't reasonable to doubt the validity of science, or any particular field of science, simply because the people who accept it haven't done so.
so true. There's a great paper by prof. Ioannidis published back in 2005 [1]. It's also important to remember Feynman's words: "science is belief in the ignorance of experts"
It is difficult to see what your actual criticism is here. Do you object to the tone that people take when criticizing anti-vaccine arguments? Or do you object to the faith that people have in the overall utility of biomedicine? I agree that there is faith there. All it takes to renew faith in the effectiveness of peer review (for instance) is to purposefully spout some half-baked naive nonsense at a well-trained scientist and listen to their honest rebuttal without getting defensive. Science is hundreds of thousands of people doing that, all at once. Maybe the problem is that so many people don’t know any scientists to do that with?
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 29.5 ms ] threadI wonder what obscure technical solutions exist just because someone has to obey their magical sky fairy... There are ovens with Sabbath buttons, but that doesn't seem obscure enough.
However, the validity of a model is not a binary state. Models in science are not truth. They are models that are built using observations. Predictions are made with the models and efforts are made to find circumstances in which the predictions do not come true. If we fail to find such circumstances, then it's usually a pretty good model.
The important point is that all models are flawed. A model is not the actual thing. The equations for how gravity work are not perfect. There are things we don't understand and simplifications in our models for things that we don't care about. The model is only there to help us make predictions.
Some models are very good -- no matter how you try it's virtually impossible to find a way where the model does not work exactly as we observe. Some models are very bad -- it's easy to find failing cases. But even bad models can be useful if you understand their limitations.
When you are looking at competing models, it is not usually important to understand the models completely. What you need to be able to do is to "sanity check" them. Are there easy ways that you can say that the model will not work well for your situation? Quite frequently there are.
Often you don't even need to to evaluate how good a model is. You just need to choose the better of a few proposed models. Again, doing some sanity checking can often find ways where you can easily determine that one model is better than another.
The mistake I see people making is that they evaluate models based on trust. I trust the person selling model A, so I will reject model B. This is a very poor way of evaluating models because it does not sanity check the model itself. Instead it's important to look at the predictions of the models and then look at as much data as you can find to see if the observations match the predictions.
This is where people often fall short -- they do not do the leg work. It's one of the real failings of our education system IMHO. Teachers are given the status of the "source of truth". The students trust the teachers and when they leave school the lose that source of truth. They ask "Who should I trust?" Even people who dig into issues look at two papers with different results and they ask "Which result should I trust?" It's a real problem.
If people could be taught to respond with, "I don't know what the real answer is, but for now A seems to have the most consistent data that I've seen", things would be quite a bit better. However, it is very possible that I ask too much from the general person in society...
But that's exactly what anti-vaxxers do. They haven't cracked open any textbooks and done the experiments to invalidate vaccine science either, they literally just doubt because they have more faith in their own cynicism and innate belief in conspiracy theory than science.
At the end of the day, everyone puts faith in almost every aspect of what they consider to be the axioms of reality, we're all trapped in the bubble of subjective experience. No one has the time, resources or skill to rediscover and reevaluate the entire body of human scientific knowledge from first principles, and it isn't reasonable to doubt the validity of science, or any particular field of science, simply because the people who accept it haven't done so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_Most_Published_Research_Fi...