I think the real issue is people are given the results not the background experiments.
Talk to an 10 year old about air resistance vs gravity and there probably going to take what you say on faith. Show them a video of a brick and a feather dropped in a vacuum and you words become more meaningful.
There is an interesting journal called JOVE, journal of visualized experiments, which does this. It has peer reviewed videos of experiments. But this has the same problem that many other journals do, it is behind a big pay wall.
I think my main take-away from the forest plots in that paper (and the discussion of the specific studies) is that the evidence for even the dental benefits is really wretched. Not a single randomized trial, and the heterogeneity is insanely high.
(Can you imagine proposing fluoridation of everyone's drinking water these days based on evidence like that? If fluoride were being proposed to the FDA as a drug, it wouldn't even make it to Phase III trials...)
To expand on this: the heterogeneity is so high that they don't (as meta-analysis guidelines say you should) report the figures. This is why in the figures, you see tight confidence intervals around zero, but also equally-tight confidence intervals many effect-size units away. That's an alarm bell for trying to draw any sort of meaningful conclusion: it means there are so many variables at play that you have no idea whether the net should be zero or big. (Also a concern given the observation that many countries have seen dental problems fall considerably as they developed, which is a big confound.)
Is anyone unaware of a single advantage aside from the fact that fluoride does indeed swap with calcium in the tooth enamel apatite and thereby increase the latter's resistance to acid attack? Given the prevalence of fluoride in toothpaste, why mass 'medicate'? The experts consulted are one with those folk who think that stuffing mercury amalgam into a permanent location a few centimeters from the brain is a good idea. Given the biochemistry of Hg, it's not and an increasing number of dental professionals are understanding that.
Both fluoride and mercury amalgam are considered safe by current scientific understanding. You need to build up actual science to disprove that rather than make ridiculous claims based on proximity of fillings to the brain.
The concept of science is a bit complex, and therefore not easily understood in a sound bite.
It is one of those things that requires a level of education beyond a certain level (and by this I don't mean grade level, but a level of ability and understanding and especially respect).
Two curves are meeting: one, indicating the level of scientific understanding necessary to function highly in the new world we live in, increasing rapidly over time—and the other, showing true scientific literacy, the comfort with doubt and the flexibility of the mind to new information, rapidly declining.
We are at a crossroads, and the solution is a renewal of a holistic liberal arts and science education—to instill not only a complete understanding of and respect for science, but also the humanity necessary to wield the complexity of the world.
It seems odd to me to even claim that science is just a "body of facts" as the usual definition of a "fact" is a piece of empirical evidence rather than the hypothesis or theories that science builds to explain these facts.
A major factor missing from the article is that scientists, when they translate their work into layperson's terms, often don't take care to distinguish between different levels of confidence in their conclusions. Scientific theories that are nailed down by massive experimental data and a track record of predictions accurate to many decimal places are talked about the same way, by scientists, as theories that are still being developed and refined and don't have anywhere near the same level of confidence. Even in a single field (e.g., physics), scientists often aren't careful to distinguish the solid base from speculative models at the frontiers (e.g., the Standard Model of particle physics vs. string theory, or the standard hot Big Bang model of cosmology from inflation and various speculations about what came before inflation). This means that, once a lay person sees that any scientific conclusion turned out to be wrong, which is going to happen because science is not perfect, they think it means Science is wrong, period--because the scientists themselves painted the picture that way.
When you're discussing the edge of theory in physics, you can make some pretty neat TV shows and maybe get some kids interested in science. I loved watching those crazy speculative documentaries about the universe and all that.
However, when you're discussing the edge of science in a health or socio-economic field, people "hear about studies" all the time in the news. Many are conflicting. Some things go on and live their own lives. Some things lend themselves to a certain ideological thinking and despite being proven wrong later on, go on to live in very awful ways. Eg: vaccines scares.
The real problem with "hear about studies" is that by the time things filter down to the average person the stories are completely watered down and spun to make some sensational headline.
Even without the simple headline grabbing, all nuance is lost, which is the cause of a lot of the "XYZ is good!" ... "No, XYZ is bad!" confusion - the reality is that "XYZ is good under these experimental conditions, for some definition of good" and vice versa.
Additionally, much medical science (and almost all of social/ psych/ econ "science") is in the very low level of confidence realm (a few studies based on survey / interview data, or maybe just a single study hyped by lame media).
I thought the problem was asbestos, crappy study reporting, and hypocrites or appearance of hypocrisy.
Asbestos was good and now is very, very bad (well, in uncontrolled places). I cannot help but think this lead a fair number of people to question what is really safe. It seemed quite a lot of truths suddenly became dangerous at about the same time. That is just learning, but it felt like a turing point. Heck, a lot of people learned that mistakes cost a fair amount of cash to fix. If you want a science version look at the original polio vaccine. It did give quite a few people polio, but it has had an amazing record since. Flu shots are extremely effective when they guess correctly and a pain (37% this year) when they don't, but they still save lives for a very low risk.
Look at eggs. Are they good for you or bad for you? Red wine? People have been conditioned to think studies are about as reliable as midnight infomercials, and neither of these questions fit in the sound bite length answer that is generally given to science on news programs.
Hypocrisy is painful. The average person knows when someone has a "better than them" attitude, and if you are condescending they will ignore you. As an example, if you're flying around on a G5 and telling the general public they will have to downgrade their lifestyle, then the general public won't listen to you.
Its an interesting cycle and really nothing new. I wish the media would quit blaming the "common people" and start looking at how it presents things. People loose trust in authority when authority starts acting like charlatans. They spend every news cast scaring the hell out of people when the statistics say they shouldn't. That bleeds into government and now we arrest people of letting 12 year olds walk home from school. Why would people believe anything?
tldr: if you are constantly told everything is broken and dangerous, expect people to not care anymore or be afraid of everything.
I believe that too. Actually it's funny when media reports on how anti-vaxxers, et al. are dumb when it's in big part journalism's fault. The whole business model of media - and advertising, and sales - as it is today is based on frauding consumers. So it's quite a bit hypocritical to audaciously lie to people and then be surprised that they don't trust anyone anymore.
"So it's quite a bit hypocritical to audaciously lie to people and then be surprised that they don't trust anyone anymore."
I often wonder if they had done their research with the original story how it would have turned out. We live in a print and fact check later[1] and I think we suffer for it.
I'm sure an anti-vaxxer upon hearing the number of warnings on each new drugs has their opinion validated[2]. Or hearing there was mercury in some vaccines.
Heck, we go about things just stupidly. Get rid of incandescent light bulbs to save the environment. Hey, what the heck, these new bulbs all have mercury?!? I cannot just throw them away and if they break I have to do what?!? Did the change really help or should we have picked that battle a bit later when LEDs were further along? Don't really know, doubt I will see any good reporting to tell me the answer.
I'm really not sure our journalists are equipped for a world that really needs us to weigh risks.
Celebrity is a big part of it these days too. Why we listen to people who are famous for a sex tape is beyond me. I guess reporters like to meet them. I suppose that explains the WHCA dinner[3].
1) it still amuses me the number of times the NY Times has mixed up the state for South and North Dakota Senators.
2) the real danger is obscuring the real big warnings with all the little crap. Look at the warnings on a Tylenol bottle and then find the one that really matters. Why are we telling everyone all the warnings for prescription drugs? Doctors will do that before prescribing and do a better job of explaining.
> Look at the warnings on a Tylenol bottle and then find the one that really matters. Why are we telling everyone all the warnings for prescription drugs?
My pet theory? It's a CYA measure. If you list all, even most rare or absurd possible side effects, you can protect yourself in case someone's body does something weird and the person decides to sue you. Mind you, the "side-effect" can be totally unrelated to your drug, and caused by other illness, genetics, eating something bad the night before, etc. It's often impossible to determine for an average person what caused what in their bodies, but that won't necessarily stop people from going to court.
BTW. on one drug I take I noticed a different way of listing side effects. They divided them into groups labelled (> 1 in 10, > 1 in 100, > 1 in 1000, etc.). This still keeps the CYA value while giving me the ability to prepare myself for what realistically might happen after I take the drug.
> [flu vaccines] still save lives for a very low risk.
AFAIK that's not actually been proven. It's clear that someone who got the flu vaccine this year is less likely to die than someone who didn't, all else being equal. But flu shots only confer partial immunity for 6 months or so, whereas getting the real flu confers partial immunity for decades. At least the last time I looked, I wasn't able to find any convincing evidence that someone getting the flu vaccine every year from birth would be in a better place at age 70 than someone who, say, just got the actual flu every year until they started getting the vaccine at age 70 or whatever. Some relevant research/articles:
> [flu vaccines] still save lives for a very low risk.
"AFAIK that's not actually been proven. It's clear that someone who got the flu vaccine this year is less likely to die than someone who didn't, all else being equal."
Ok, that first sentence says I'm wrong and the second sentence seems to say my statement is correct. I am confused.
"But flu shots only confer partial immunity for 6 months or so, whereas getting the real flu confers partial immunity for decades. At least the last time I looked, I wasn't able to find any convincing evidence that someone getting the flu vaccine every year from birth would be in a better place at age 70 than someone who, say, just got the actual flu every year until they started getting the vaccine at age 70 or whatever. Some relevant research/articles:"
and then three study links with the first one being a study with the line "Contrary to immunity elicited by influenza vaccination, naturally acquired immunity can provide long-lasting protection against subsequent infection by the same viral subtype [22, 23]. For example, when the A(H1N1) virus re-emerged in 1977 after 20 years, people who had been exposed to the virus before 1957 were much less susceptible to infection than those born after 1957 [24]. This long-term protection against influenza viruses of the same type or subtype may be partly due to selection of cross-reactive CTL targeting epitopes on a wide variety of internal proteins [25–27]." - so supporting your statement - sort of
the second an article with no links to any studies from a paper I don't know the reputation.
and the the third having the quote "Our results support the recommendation for annual vaccination, given current vaccine options, as those unvaccinated in the current year appear to be at greater risk when considering both VE and serologic evidence."
So, I have no idea other than I'm just going to keep getting my shot because the years I don't, I get really sick and its not worth the long term gain. I suppose an anti-vaxxer would be screaming "See, See!!!!". I'm not sure I could state they are wrong, either. :(
> I have no idea other than I'm just going to keep getting my shot because the years I don't, I get really sick and its not worth the long term gain.
What makes you think it's not worth the longterm gain? It obviously depends on your utility function, but for most people presumably being sick for a week now is less bad than being so sick that you die 10 years from now. I'm not saying that's necessarily what it comes down to, because the evidence isn't at all clear to me. But I do think that the pro-vaxxers have completely 100% failed to make their case here, so I don't understand why we constantly have these articles with them browbeating others and calling them ignorant when they themselves apparently have no idea about the safety/efficacy of the vaccines that they're calling others stupid and irresponsible for not getting.
Absestos was a particularly unfortunate case. The negative effects of it would not been seen for decades after it was put into good use.
Then again, coal dust and cigarette smoke were also not particularly known to be a problem until about the same part of the 20th century, so maybe it was a focus on diseases of a cardiopulmonary nature as people were living longer that contributed awareness on all such issues...
The more we know, the more fragile our lives seem, and the more dangerous the world looks.
Another problem is no storytelling. Podcasts like Radiolab do well communicating science to the public because they have mastered telling a slow & engaging story and discussing the implications while not jumping to them.
It's quite simple: people don't understand science, and science doesn't understand people.
Several generations of highly specialized education tend to do that.
We need more poets who are scientists, more scientists who are poets. We need a level of breadth that has not yet been seen except in a few diamonds in the rough. These ties between our humanity and our world are more important than we realize.
In practice, this means a better and more widespread liberal arts education—a program that you may not realize is valuable until ten years after graduation, and therefore must be a wisdom passed down to our children and embraced as a society. It needs to be a program that teaches the incredible depth of science, and the humanity to deal with the complex consequences, which are necessarily bigger than our perspective.
Until this shift occurs, we will continue to encounter this divergence of understanding. It's a long bet, but we need it more than ever.
After reading Leonard Shlain's Art & Physics, I agree with you. In the past it was the artists, poets and popular writers who helped the general public consume often difficult to grasp ideas. We do seem to be in a lull where the creatives are either beholden to the mass culture of capitalism or to detached from the world of science to communicate it. Those that do are on the fringe and only noticed by small cliques. Art is blooming everywhere right now, but very little of it is civically minded. This is an era of image over substance.
>In practice, this means a better and more widespread liberal arts education
Or, instead of making the science majors spend more of our very scarce time on humanities courses, couldn't you just make the humanities majors spend more of their less-scarce time on science and math courses?
Why is it that scientists are continually called on to "remain in touch" with "humanity" (as if we scientists are not human!) and "liberal arts" (as if anyone in our work-or-die society is free in the old Greco-Roman sense!), but nobody taking their education outside the sciences is called upon to display the kind of basic scientific literacy shown by passing intro-level courses in calculus, statistics, and research methods?
You'll understand in ten years. I don't mean to blow you off and be all "wise" and crap, I really, truly mean it.
With that said, I absolutely, completely agree that the humanities majors need more than basic scientific literacy. That's 50% of the problem.
But I challenge you to think deeply about why the other 50% of the problem might lie with how scientists understand the humanities, because I really strongly believe that.
Really? I have some extracurricular education in the humanities, actually, with particular focus on politics and the related pieces of philosophy. It's also worth mentioning that I am well away from my own undergrad years.
The problem is not that I find humanities subjects insubstantial from far-away, but that I find them insubstantial from close up.
Whereas I find myself wishing all the time that I had, in previous years, taken more advantage of opportunities to learn science and math.
>I don't mean to blow you off and be all "wise" and crap, I really, truly mean it.
Then I think we should have a much more detailed conversation about what you mean, because you have certainly managed to come off that way.
>With that said, I absolutely, completely agree that the humanities majors need more than basic scientific literacy. That's 50% of the problem.
No. They don't even have basic scientific literacy to start with. To quote the common material on this matter:
>A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: "Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?"
>I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, "What do you mean by mass, or acceleration", which is the scientific equivalent of saying, "Can you read?" — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
I would hope that more than 10% of humanities experts can today answer such basic questions as "What is acceleration?" (the second derivative of position/displacement) or "Explain the significance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to human life" (humans must eat food to survive, and will eventually die). Even if the rate is more like 95%, we are again speaking of scientific questions on the level of "Have you read a classic?" and "Can you read at all?". In fact, I strongly doubt that most "humanists" can answer the question about acceleration, since they mostly never studied any calculus -- it would have dragged down their freshman-year GPA and wasn't required anyway.
Meanwhile, we have not gotten up to the level of talking about interesting hobby material (rocketry or electronics or programming), nor to the level where the "humanists" (or even most scientists) can competently understand scientific concepts essential to public life, such as the Greenhouse Effect, cognitive bias, or p-values.
By the standards of a modern, scientific civilization, the classical humanist is a developmentally disabled child who continues to insist, against all evidence, that he is the jewel of intellectuals and has an exclusive right to make all of society's important choices.
>But I challenge you to think deeply about why the other 50% of the problem might lie with how scientists understand the humanities, because I really strongly believe that.
If you believe it strongly, please provide evidence. I'm of course open to convincing evidence, but I strongly believe the opposite: the problem is not evenly split, it lies almost entirely in the way people holding society's ethical and political reigns disdain and disregard the mere facts uncovered by science and mathematics in favor of their ever-more-sophisticated "human...
You're absolutely right, I was being an arrogant prick by saying that, and I regret it. I've gotta stop doing that. Apologies. I only offer advice, especially for young people which I mistakenly assumed, and I didn't mean it arrogantly. I highly recommend reading one book: "The Immense Journey" by Loren Eiseley.
I completely agree that the problem of the lack of respect nor understanding of science is at an extreme, and it is an immense problem. You're absolutely right.
But the way to attack it is systemically, from both sides. What we are experiencing is a societal divide, and it is not one sided, as unbalanced as it seems. It's highly complex. Science has lost the ability to appeal to humanity in such a way as to be trustworthy in and of itself. For that, I do believe science as an institution (scientists, leaders, new institutions not yet imagined) requires a deep understanding of humanity and the ability to connect with it at a core level. This will be difficult.
There are some things for which evidence will never be enough. If you don't understand that, well—there's direct evidence for the disconnect between science and the humanities. When the scientific world collectively understands that, then, I believe, we will no longer have an issue with how society relates to science. It will have become clear and obvious.
Blaming the individuals for their knowledge will never solve anything. The right question is not what people do not know; but why do they not know? And how do we make it irresistible to know and understand and pursue science? How do we integrate scientific understanding into our very core? That is the question.
There are surveys showing that atheists often know more about the beliefs of various religions than the actual adherents of these religions. No doubt this is true for science as well... It's hard for me to believe that anyone who doesn't doubt science actually knows all that much about science, its history, its epistemology, its current issues, etc.
I think it's funny that science evangelists complain about all the anti-science folks in society, and they're completely unable to produce intellectually honest defenses of actual praxis. All these sorts of articles ever do is point to the same set of success stories or examples of irrationality among 'non-believers', as if that's some sort of intellectually coherent argument. It's ridiculous that these folks won't do an actual cost-benefit analysis of science in practice, presumably because they know the results won't be favorable them, but then browbeat people for not 'converting' based on their theory of science as it would be practiced in some sort of utopia. It's like creationism, but even more stupid.
Don't get me wrong, I spend an enormous amount of time reading scientific research and my knowledge of that is probably my greatest secret weapon as a founder, but at the same time the sort of pro-science evangelism I see on the Internet makes me weep for the future of society.
I don't think it is fair to judge people's disbelief of science as a standalone position. Most people (in the United States at least) receive a poor education across all subjects, and the experience of that learning is more akin to imprisonment than exploration. They know many authorities, from police to teachers and bosses, who are flawed people exercising their powers poorly.
In that context how is it possible to convince someone that science is not also as corrupt as every other institution they've encountered. If my entire experience of education is that it is unfair and run by sadists, then the only people who will succeed in it are those who are willing to subject themselves to what they are told. Their perspective is built into their environment.
These skeptics and deniers can't be convinced, but not because they are stupid. The entirety of their lives lead to the subjectively rational conclusion that everything they are told to do will keep them miserable so they believe and do none of it.
Exactly. When you know enough science (which will likely require you to be biased towards it, as otherwise the education system will make sure you don't learn any of it) things start to increasingly fall into place. You'll see that the whole body of things you know is internally consistent. It has to be, because the reality itself is.
So as you learn more and more facts and see how interwoven they are you're able to evaluate further information without having to base on trust alone. If, say, vaccines were harmful or synthetically produced compounds were somewhat "toxic" compared to the same compounds found in normal food, you'd have to literally throw half of your scientific knowledge away. So you can easily determine that those claims are bullshit. But that requires knowing relatively lot of stuff, which majority of people do not. They have to rely on trusting authorities - which keep lying all the time. So no surprise here that people just don't believe science or government and are drawn towards various pseudoscientific nonsense that is presented as contrarian and promoted by charismatic individuals.
I believe the common and most important reason behind all recent anti-science movements is something that is also behind many other social and political sentiments as well as conspiracy theories - namely, degradation of public's trust in authorities. People don't trust their government, they don't trust corporations, and they don't trust scientist. And I increasingly believe they have perfectly good reasons for that.
You see, governments lie and cheat all the time. Companies at every scale - from startups to mom and pop shops to LLCs to corporations keep abusing the social contract for their own short-term gains. Newspapers report science in ridiculous ways, journalist keep inventing their own lies to spice up the story. It's hard to know who to trust anymore. And so people revert to trusting plausible sounding narratives and charismatic individuals.
This problem is going to hit us hard in the nearby future. I fear this is an existential threat for western civilization. That's also the reason why lying to people is one of the biggest sins in my book. As the quote goes, "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires." I think it's actually underrepresenting the damage lies cause to society.
People nowdays see the failure of trust and strive to design systems that don't depend on trusting its actors at all. I'm not sure it's a good direction. As we increasingly don't expect trustworthiness from other people, we're digging ourselves deeper into the hole.
So yes, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOs, anti-nuclear, et al. are wrong. Stupidly wrong. But it's hard for me to blame them. They've been lied to so many times that it's hard for them to trust authorities anymore.
EDIT: to clarify, in the last paragraph I meant that those people simply arrived to wrong (or dangerously wrong) conclusions, not that they themselves are stupid.
Why is it a surprise that people are having a crisis of trust when they are inculcated by science and Rational Thinkers™ that nothing is to be trusted?
It seems to me that the worldview based on science alone (which is highly prevalent among today's self-described Rational Thinkers™) has reaped what it has sown, which is broad skepticism of everything, including itself.
What I always find interesting reading the comments sections in newspapers, is that certain groups of people deny and dismiss the hard science of climate change, yet the same people seem to believe the very poor science of economics as if it is some kind of proper science.
In part, maybe, but the issue is a little more subtle. People who go all anti-vaxx or anti-GMO are not just saying that science is wrong. Hell, they often try to twist the science into supporting their point. What those people feel is that government and corporations are trying to hurt them. You don't see heated arguments about whether vaccines interact with this or that metabolic pathway. The issues is whether vaccines will hurt your kids, and whether government is forcing you to do something bad to yourself. It's not about facts - it's about trusting authorities that they're not trying to exploit and harm you.
I'm confused then -- why, in terms of correct vs. incorrect outcomes, does skepticism work out so well for those trained in the methods of science, but so poorly for those who are not?
Because you can't just say "I'm sceptical" and expect to magically arrive to the correct conclusion. You have to know exactly why you're sceptical about something. Being "trained in the methods of science" gives you mental habits of analyzing known facts and conclusions instead of just doubting anything which you don't like.
>Because you can't just say "I'm sceptical" and expect to magically arrive to the correct conclusion.
Yes. The idea that "the worldview based on science alone has reaped what it has sown," seems a little silly in this context, as skepticism by itself is not what science promotes. If the skepticism was rooted in science, we might see many other beneficial behaviors associated with scientific method accompanying the skepticism. But we don't, indicating (to your point) that the skepticism stems from distrust for authorities in general, not from middle-school chemistry classes.
> So yes, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOs, anti-nuclear, et al. are wrong. Stupidly wrong.
Why is that? Another reason people lost trust is the arrogance of some scientist that seem to ignore the complexity of their subjects and don't see the limits of their research.
Also people like you that believe that everything that has gone trough a scientific study must be true, science can also get it wrong sometimes, don't stop thinking and questioning.
I suspect if you actually speak to a scientist, you'll find they really do not ignore the complexity of their subjects. However, the public starts at such a base level, that it's impossible to even engage at the limits of their research. And the honesty of the scientists with regards to their understood complexity often times does them more harm then good. Their carefully chosen, complex-laden words are glossed over in news headlines that extinguish the nuance.
Ask a genetic researcher if "GMOs can harm humans" and the answer will likely be, "Probably not". But this actually means - "I can conceive of nothing but the most fantastic route for that to happen. And even if it did it would have to happen by a route currently unknown or at the edge of our entire field." When in reality the public clings to really strange notions that truly are scientifically incorrect.
You can make the argument that being correct for the wrong reasons has its advantages, but in real life no single action ever taken is without risk. It is precisely the scientist who has dedicated her career to her work that understands (and even thrives in) its complexity.
Well, of course I reduced those groups to their most vocal parts. But we do have overwhelming evidence that vaccines don't kill you, GMOs don't kill you, nuclear power is safe and environmentally friendly. Mind you, those don't even require detailed scientific research - just a little common sense, back-of-the-napkin math and realizing that if what those anti-XXX groups are saying were true, we'd see half of the western world being autistic, dying from cancer and giving birth to two-headed mutants.
I agree that arrogance of some scientists is a part of the problem (I'd say caused by communication problems - scientists and non-scientists are often so far apart in their understanding of various subjects that it's very hard for those two groups to communicate with each other).
Also, people saying about "limits of research" are often doing this to support their refusal to accept conclusions. If you can't find any rational argument against a thesis, you can always say that the whole process is wrong and then continue to believe whatever you want to believe. "But there's always a chance, right?".
Even scientists have been increasingly admitting that confirmation bias is strong. Another problem is funding. If all research was funded by non-profit public interest groups, there might be more trust, but when you're talking about GMO research, for example, a lot of it is done by industry for industry. I'm not saying that all GMOs are bad, but it's also impossible to make a blanket statement that all GMOs are good. Obviously that's not the case.
A GMO could be created to be extremely dangerous, just like a prescription medicine could and has been created which is extremely dangerous. The problem is that we're asked to trust people whose immediate interests do not always align with ours. We've seen prescriptions forced through with inadequate testing, so there's no reason to believe that every GMO is going to be adequately tested. The current atmosphere of hostility seems to be helping that testing happen.
The base problem is that we have a society of people whose interests are aligned against each other and a system meant to encourage that kind of competition.
> The base problem is that we have a society of people whose interests are aligned against each other and a system meant to encourage that kind of competition.
This. This might be one of the roots of the lack of trust. And given that people get abused by others all the time, it's really hard for me to blame people mistrusting research done by companies - especially if you don't have even basic understanding of the scientific issues involved, which most people don't have - partially thanks to broken education system, and partially because well, why should they? Not everyone will love science, those who don't should be able to just trust those of us who do. But now they can't.
> Also people like you that believe that everything that has gone trough a scientific study must be true, science can also get it wrong sometimes, don't stop thinking and questioning.
I can't speak for TeMPOraL, but I've never heard anyone claim that science is infallible--and it's certainly not implied by their comment.
Science believers simply recognize that scientifically-vetted ideas are _the most likely to be true_.
Sometimes science is wrong. Often. Maybe even usually. Science is very clearly the most reliable truth-finding mechanism we have.
The options aren't sometimes-wrong science v. omniscience. It's sometimes-wrong science v. more-often-wrong everything else.
Characterizing belief in scientific findings as absolute, undoubting faith is completely inaccurate.
Exactly. I believe in some science. The hard part is knowing which science is reputable, which is just a hidden agenda masquerading as science, and which is just pure ignorance.
I have no formal science training, just read a few books. I keep up to date(ish) with the science sections in reputable magazines and newspapers (Guardian, Economist, etc). And I read web forums like Hacker News and Reddit.
But short of reading everything and developing formal training in everything, how do I decide what's reputable? Whom do I trust? Someone with loads of internet points? Someone who has a well designed personal website? Someone with loads of shelf-space in my local bookshop?
So, for example, with vaccines. I believe in vaccines, I have had my son vaccinated and would recommend to anybody else to do the same. But it's really based on blind faith because I would have no idea where to start if I want to establish the truth myself. I trust my local doctor, and he said we should get vaccines, but that's all I have to go on.
This is a very astute comment, with a recognition not many people have.
The trust chain is extremely important here, and yes, it's breaking down.
That's the reason for people uncertain about vaccines: they're attempting to find something to trust in a truly complex ecosystem of information that's more available and more difficult to parse than ever.
We're teetering on the balance of the above perspective, trusting without information or understanding—and the opposite, just on the other side of the truth, distrusting without information or understanding. Is either truly more or less valid from an individual viewpoint?
And is it any wonder we're in this situation? What is the institution that would uphold this trust? Do we need a new one, and what would it be?
Part of the problem is that we all live in echo chambers that tell us what we want to hear. If I believe that grass is blue, then I live in a neighbourhood of people that believe grass is blue, and all my friends are thus people who believe grass is blue. I watch news that says grass is blue. My Facebook and Twitter feeds frequently show updates that prove grass is blue, and rarely show anything to the contrary other than to scorn it. All these reasonable people that I love and trust all agree that grass is blue. I'm a reasonable person. So if I meet someone who says grass is not blue, my immediate assumption is that they're a wacko, unreasonable, not to be trusted.
It kind of makes total sense. If you don't do this, you start questioning everything, and it's really stressful. You start to become 'that guy', nobody wants to spend time with you because you're so disagreeable, and you prevaricate on every decision. So you simplify the world by limiting your inputs to those that agree with you. For example, "Should I get my child vaccinated? I've read 3 books for, 3 against, asked doctors and health advisors I found on Google, and talked about it on multiple forums. Opinion seems divided. " vs "I know I should get my child vaccinated, because everyone on Hacker News says so."
At some point, the answer is to have trusted in-person relationships. As I said, I believe in vaccinations because I know our doctor quite well. I know he's not a quack, and he says vaccinations are a good thing, and so I believe him. Similarly, if I want to get some good beef, I go to our local butcher who knows my name. I trust him not to sell me horsemeat, in a way that I don't trust a big supermarket chain. There's no way for me to guarantee that either the doctor or the butcher are right, but it feels a more certain way than trusting /r/cleverusername on Reddit. How do you sort the wheat from the chaff in a society of billions?
I often recollect Aristotle's comment that "it is difficult - perhaps impossible – for a city that is too populous to be well managed". At some point, large societies seem to eat themselves, and the result is a lack of trust in everything around you.
If you finished high school, you have actually had quite a bit of formal science training--years of it. But it was probably not very good, and did not leave you feeling that you have the mental tools to evaluate science on your own.
I think that a decline in primary and secondary education systems are causing us all sorts of social problems--in science, but also in government, art, law, etc.
I went to a pretty good school in the 90s, but didn't go to university. I would say that they left me with the mental tools to realise that I couldn't evaluate science on my own. If I hadn't received any education, I might be more confident in believing any old rubbish. Instead, I hear the words of my science teachers talking about testable hypotheses.
I believe that education has improved. My parents both quit school before the age of 16. My Mum was taught mostly how to sew, cook and use a typewriter. My Dad did well enough in science, but my grandparents couldn't afford for him to go to college after 16. When I hear the 'education has got worse' argument, I believe that the average pleb today doesn't receive as good an education as a rich joe 50 years ago, but overall the system is much better.
> So yes, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOs, anti-nuclear, et al. are wrong. Stupidly wrong.
This is actually one of the reasons there's such resistance to science I think. These people are actually expressing a very scientific mentality: that we are not totally certain of the consequences of our influence on a complex system. Yet the response is absolute, which is arguably very unscientific!
Sure, they don't respond to it in the right way, and the discussions are never as nuanced or knowledgable as they should be, but they are fundamentally right about the fact that even science leaves room for doubt and uncertainty. They just don't fully understand why. Yes, we need better science education for the masses, and yes their perspective is fallacious individually, but as you say, it's not their fault. There's a systemic issue here.
Ironically, and perhaps impossibly, we still need to validate this mentality, because it is actually mostly right. We should be doubting science. We should be questioning data presented to us. We should not treat all things that appear equal on the surface as the same without demanding a deeper understanding and evidence. These concepts are correct, the process is correct, and people are being lambasted and called stupid for it. These people are often extremely intelligent for thinking those thoughts, even if their macro scale conclusions are not (even though, at times, they are).
Instead, we should encourage that type of thinking—and guide it. Yes! You're right! We're not 100% certain. But here's why that's okay. Thank you for doubting. Thank you for recognizing uncertainty in the face of complexity. Thank you for being complete in your understanding, because here's all the data. Thank you for trusting us—let's keep working together.
So I agree with you; we need that trust. But what nurtures trust? Is it calling people "stupidly wrong," or is it recognizing their motivations and addressing them with a human understanding? And why aren't we doing that?
I just get the sense that in the face of the truth, we're approaching this problem in a profoundly wrong way, and the societal vitriol and information problem is actually becoming a public health consequence. Really stupid, indeed, but not on the part of an individual: it's the mob that's to blame.
To clarify - I said they're stupidly wrong, i.e. really really wrong - not that they themselves are stupid. They might be very smart, but they arrived at objectively wrong conclusions.
Of course we're not totally certain of this stuff. But the important thing people often miss is that you have to quantify your uncertainity. How much uncertain are we about vaccines causing autism? So uncertain that you'd expect vaccinating your child to be a russian roulette? A little uncertain so that the chances of autism via unknown process is below the benefits vaccines provide? Yes, maybe vaccines do sometimes cause autism. But there's a difference between 50% of times and 0.005% of times, and in case of former, we'd have spotted that long time ago.
I agree - we should encourage people to think for themselves. But we should also teach them not to think in terms of boolean logic, but in terms of probability and tradeoffs.
> So I agree with you; we need that trust. But what nurtures trust? Is it calling people "stupidly wrong," or is it recognizing their motivations and addressing them with a human understanding? And why aren't we doing that?
I don't know. Maybe because it doesn't sell? I'm yet to see a reasonable analysis in media. It's always "this group is wrong" or "that group is wrong".
Yes, it's wrong on so many levels, one of the biggest ones being the social and media response. It doesn't have the ability for nuanced discussion by nature. That system needs fixing, but it may not be possible.
> They might be very smart, but they arrived at objectively wrong conclusions.
In many, many cases, we call that science. Extremely intelligent people are allowed to be wrong for many, many years, and continue searching in the cracks and crevices for the truth—as long as they're wearing a white lab coat.
Of course I realize this is reducto ad absurdum—the general public is not qualified to be making such judgements. But systemically, one of the things that prevents people from making binary judgements about the world is to prevent making binary judgements about them.
And that starts with all of our responses, not just the media. I'm convinced that these anti-scientific (as in, people who disagree with the scientific consensus) people are more influenced by the response of their close social circles in the context of social media than by the oft untrusted old media. It is the responses of hatred from people they do trust that drive them further into their hole.
If we want these people—often your friends and family—to learn nuance and probability and tradeoffs and the ability to think in grayscale rather than black and white, then we need to teach them directly using our responses. We need to lead by example, and that begins with not calling them "stupidly wrong i.e. really really wrong"—even if they are. Often they already are thinking in grays: they have doubt where everyone else has an absolute!
Lots of people have been stupidly, really, really wrong in history. Some of them changed the world. That's not likely in these cases, but it is the perspective that will make an argument rhetorically effective. And in the process, we may discover the small nuanced ways in which they were actually right—that's the beauty of the scientific process, and that's the reason people fight against the black and white. They have more to offer than you realize; and especially more to offer than the label "stupidly wrong" would have you believe.
For perspective, I'm almost sorry to admit it, but my mother is a vaccine... 'doubter.' She is a scientist, a biologist, extremely intelligent. She has a nuanced understanding and soaks up data like a sponge, references studies in her sleep and connects more dots than a first grade class. It's less clear-cut than you might think, and not all vaccines are equal. People like her are fighting against the absolute mentality of the mob and how the issue is thought about in public discourse—not the end result like you might think they are. They're not stupid, they're just living in an extremely complex ecosystem without a guiding light to bring it all together in the right direction. Show them that, instead of pitchforks.
Often they already are thinking in grays: they have doubt where everyone else has an absolute!
The thinking in grays is great; as you point out, that's the basis of science. But when it comes to making a decision, the actions need to be, or end up being, absolute. You can't "play it safe", stick a toe in the water, and get "half vaccinated" (you either follow the schedule or you don't). You can't build half a nuclear power plant. The gray area thinking leads to an absolute lack of action when it comes to further understanding. These kind of projects and scientific endeavors are large, society-befitting advancements, and they require everyone to get on board.
I suspect that some of this actually is laziness and not wanting to learn or participate in the scientific process, or considering science to be inaccessible to the layman. It's useful to say that more education and empathy is required, but these kind of society-level things eventually need to be considered lab tested enough to get used in the field for mass benefit. And we need to be both confident of that field use and cognoscent that that's just another stage of the data collection. We should never stop collecting data, stop trying to understand it, or stop doing science. One might argue that we, as humans, can't stop (we just get into ruts sometimes where we slow down significantly).
Lots of people have been stupidly, really, really wrong in history. Some of them changed the world.
Unfortunately, the people who have been really really wrong outnumber those who were wrong and also changed the world by significant orders of magnitude. Those who were wrong and changed the world changed it because they acknowledged they were on a path to discovering the truth. Others who were wrong weren't out for discovery.
my mother is a vaccine... 'doubter.' She is a scientist, a biologist, extremely intelligent
Despite that your mother is a vaccine "doubter", would she fail to recommend getting vaccinated? It's a healthy scientific process that is open to new data, but when it comes to action the data already collected that is what matters (even if the data collected is not immediately at hand). That being said, the question with vaccination isn't "do vaccines work" (do they satisfy the need for which they are administered), but rather "does the risk of unintended side-effects outweigh the documented benefits". In this light, it comes down to being able to do risk assessment, not necessarily being able to interpret the data and scientific results. I think we know way more about vaccination than we do about autism, and the risk assessment needs to take that into account.
People like her are fighting against the absolute mentality of the mob and how the issue is thought about in public discourse—not the end result like you might think they are.
It's interesting that the mob has an absolute stance, but is made up of individuals who are comfortable in the gray area of their interpretation. Is there something in this dichotomy here that can help further the education and empathy?
>Instead, we should encourage that type of thinking—and guide it. Yes! You're right! We're not 100% certain. But here's why that's okay. Thank you for doubting. Thank you for recognizing uncertainty in the face of complexity. Thank you for being complete in your understanding, because here's all the data. Thank you for trusting us—let's keep working together.
Uncertainty, yes, but not radical uncertainty, in which we begin to doubt that we exist or the sky is blue, nor infinite uncertainty, in which we always invent new reasons to disbelieve whenever presented with evidence.
Correct reasoning is about finite uncertainty, which can be moved towards yes-certainty or no-certainty by evidence.
> People don't trust their government, they don't trust corporations, and they don't trust scientist. And I increasingly believe they have perfectly good reasons for that.
And I feel that most of this can be attributed to the apparition of the Internet. People use to have no alternative other than to trust authorities. Now, they tend to bypass them more and more and equally trust strangers on the Internet since they can relate more easily.
>People nowdays see the failure of trust and strive to design systems that don't depend on trusting its actors at all. I'm not sure it's a good direction. As we increasingly don't expect trustworthiness from other people, we're digging ourselves deeper into the hole.
It's an extremely bad move: at the sociological level, trust shows up as coordination. To reduce the level of trust means reducing the level of coordination, increasing the chances that someone does something stupid and harmful for what turns out to be no good reason.
>So yes, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOs, anti-nuclear, et al. are wrong. Stupidly wrong. But it's hard for me to blame them. They've been lied to so many times that it's hard for them to trust authorities anymore.
Moreover, it's not like anyone bothered to teach them the actual truth-finding and truth-tracking methods of science, so that they could understand the difference between science and authority.
Science does have conspiracies of its own. Any (negative) hot-button areas can not hope for funding or departmental approval. Not conspiracies overtly, but conspiracies nonetheless.
One offhand sentence in the article articulates my biggest fear: specifically about scientists getting involved in advocacy. I fear this would create a dynamic where the science is written off because it is too associated with a cause of the left or right. That has already happened with some issues like AGW. My pet theory why the right is so dead set against believing scientific consensus on AGW? Because the first most people heard about AGW was from Al Gore, so the battle lines were drawn at that moment. Now there is an association that the climate scientists are fighting for the left, making them easier to dismiss by partisans on the right.
I know staying out of the political battles is not going to solve all the problems, but when science has an agenda, it becomes much easier to doubt the results.
Science is a process, not a substance. It is the process by which it is possible to believe things. So if you're having trouble believing something, it's probably because you're not doing science.
Everything else is just politics (and probably wrong).
There are many well-known reasons for (US-based) anti-elitism/anti-intellectualism: religious/religion-influenced cultural beliefs, poor education, mass media failures, insular cultural groups that invent alternate explanations for things, and plain old ignorance. There's also Agnotology - "culturally induced ignorance", which is important to understand (and deal with) in the context of this topic.
There is, however, another reason, which may be less obvious than the above. It applies to people who do, in fact, know better, but maintain laughable/ignorant/ridiculous positions about issues regardless. Let's call them "Future Policy Fearers." There was a brilliant comment on Less Wrong (http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_...) that sums this view up perfectly (this particular example uses climate change/AGW, but it could be about Creationism/Evolution or a hundred other things):
"It becomes a signaling game, in which each choice of belief will be understood as exactly how you would communicate a particular choice of political move, and the costs of making the wrong political move feel very high. So the belief decisions and the political actions become tangled up.
Roughly, people have no way of saying:
'I believe that in terms of pure decision theory, the predicted AGW damage and costs of further investigation and costs of delay are high enough that mitigation attempts should start now. But I don't want to give up my {economic privileges / substantive national sovereignty / chance to get the standard of living of past carbon-emitting nations} without a fight, because I don't want groups in the future like {scientists / profit-hating hippie tree-huggers / freedom-hating U.N. environmental bureaucrats / greedy unfair first-world hypocrites} to think I'll just roll over when they try to impose concessions on me, in the name of premises that will feel psychologically as though they might just as well have been made up. In that future situation, it will be important for me to be able to credibly threaten outrage at being forced into such concessions. But as long as nobody else is going to take me for their fool, the sacrifices needed to prevent AGW are fine with me; we could start today.'
So instead, they say: 'I believe that the case for AGW isn't strong enough. I demand clearer proof.'
If it were possible to negotiate separately about AGW action and about precedents of policy concessions to e.g. scientists' claims, then you might see less decision-theoretic insanity around the AGW action question itself."
This group is just as important when dealing with perceived ignorance as those who are victims of Agnotology. Their actions and positions act as a proxy for a future power struggle, and should be understood as such.
It's not my intention to be pedantic here but you shouldn't "believe" in science in the first place: science is not a religion that proclaims what is true, at most you can "believe" that some scientific study have enough proofs to demonstrate a theory, at some level. And even then, in my opinion, people should be always open to analyze new hypothesis.
Also, imo this idea of a "consensus" in the "scientific community" is a bit dangerous and could be easily misinterpreted by people who have no affinity to science.
The recent flood of generic science-cheerleading pieces such as this one strike me as intellectually lazy.
Science is a good thing? No shit. Of course it is.
The level of polarization being applied in recent discourse on some of these topics is disturbing.
This article in particular is a prime example. Several topics are listed, each cast as black and white, and subsequently lumped together under the same banner. If you have any reservations regarding any of the topics listed, no matter how nuanced, you clearly must be anti-science.
Moreover, this intolerance doesn't seem to discourage the ignorant from continuing to argue their uninformed opinions. On the contrary, it only inflames them.
The few people who do have nuanced, well-researched opinions on these hot-button topics are then shouted down and discouraged from participating. Why risk career suicide or otherwise waste time arguing something when it's completely fruitless anyways.
If I had to ascribe a dynamic to the phenomenon, it might look something like this:
1. Hot-button issue arises wherein the majority of the science agrees with one position, but very specific legitimate issues persist.
2. The uninformed latch on to the issue as a whole, and completely fail argue in any sort of reasonable, nuanced manner.
3. The media, usually spurred on by robust corporate messaging strategies, decide to utterly destroy these people (rightfully so).
4. The general public joins in to fight on behalf of Science™, because the Neil deGrasse Tyson memes on Facebook really spoke to them at some basal level.
5. The uninformed become even more inflamed, and the crazies start coming out of the woodwork.
6. Any semblance of civil or reasoned discourse is completely gone at this point. All that's left is a self-perpetuating cycle that fosters an environment completely hostile to anyone wanting to raise legitimate concerns, but it at least generates heaps of ad revenue.
A cynic might say the last point is by design, though I prefer to think it's simply a dynamic inherent to modern, public forms of communication.
> 1. Hot-button issue arises wherein the majority of the science agrees with one position, but very specific legitimate issues persist.
Yep. I suppose I'm "anti-GMO" in the sense that I view interspecies and intra-species gene transfer (sometimes called horizontal gene transfer) to be different animals. It's been a real let down when I've brought these things up and I'm treated like I just insulted a recently deceased person.
Then I have to "pull my nerd card" to be treated like a human being again and I'm left wondering why we treat people this way. A great part of science is we get to use evidence and leave emotions out of it. If I'm speaking to somebody with a biology background I'm happy to listen, question my beliefs and learn, but dealing with the anti-anti-GMO crowd only makes me feel combative. I can only imagine how people without a science background feel when they try to join the discussion.
Perhaps one reason that science is not believed by more people in the general public is that some public figures make a living by spreading misinformation about science. The public is not just in a state of tabula rasa neutrality before scientists begin communicating with the public, but rather the public has already been stuffed full of misconceptions by people who have something to sell to buyers who are ignorant of science.
"doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts" – this is an argument of authority ("experts"), which in turn is a fallacy, moreover, since when science is a democracy ("consensus").
"In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle, that’s what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”" – I do not even know from where to start. I could write a book on the bullshit of this paragraph alone! Science is not a belief. "Facts" are required as evidence. And Science is actually the human translation of the laws of Nature, which could be right or wrong, but is done in a way using arguments constructed within rationality. The way the paragraph is written it is like it is describing a cult!
"Science, the prestigious journal": again, argument of authority.
"The students, even those who correctly marked “true,” were slower to answer those questions" – of course they were!!! They were thinking!!! Which seems nowadays is a rarity!!! And that is called conducting!!! The study and the paragraph are being used to lead to what the author of the article wants!!! The link with apes is self-evident because it seems we certainly have returned to that stage!
Statistics: really one wants to lie on statistics – there is a planet, on this planet lives two persons, they also have two chickens. One of them eats both of the chickens, but the MEDIUM between them is still one chicken for each person on that planet; nonetheless one of them is still HUNGRY! Nothing against statistics, but we have to be careful in its use. Give any statistics and tell me what you want that it is possible to make it "statistically" happen.
"Of course, just because two things happened together doesn’t mean one caused the other, and just because events are clustered doesn’t mean they’re not random. Yet we have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning." – At least some wisdom a time, who's to say randomness cannot happen?
Oh here we go, "climate-change"! Oh, is this for real? I suppose it is because it is the same bullshit over and over again. I cannot believe I even have to say that: if one has a point to prove, prove it, instead of try to deconstruct what is already a deconstruction. If they are so right and the argument is so strong they just focus on it and not on those saying they cannot sustain their point (which they can't).
Consensus: again, maybe 200% of scientists or all living and the non-living entities on Earth may also agree that gravity doesn't exist, so, since Nature works by "consensus", we would have a gravity-free day and we could all go happily floating around… so not happening!
Now the golden part: "The planet’s surface temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 130 years, and human actions, including the burning of fossil fuels, are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause since the mid-20th century." Firstly, planet average temperature is a useless statistics; it's like saying no one is hungry in my statistical example above. An increase of 1.5ºF = 0.83ºC. That in the MEAN temperature of the Earth, which is to say absolutely nothing! Temperatures on the planet go easily from -50ºC/-58ºF/223K to 50ºC/122ºF/323K or more. Lowest natural temperature ever recorded on the surface of Earth was -89ºC/-128ºF/184K in the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica (21 July 1983), the highest being 57ºC/134ºF/330K at Greenland Ranch in the Death Valley in California (10 July 1913).
Now the puff, out of the blue part: "and human actions, including the burning of fossil ...
Scientists can be pretty damned arrogant (I work with them).
Science is very good at explaining the physical world, but try and point out to them where that ends and you get a lot of dismissal (or down votes here on HN). Point out how little progress has been made by science into the non-physical world for example consciousness, and many of them are just as bad as religious people in holding onto their belief systems despite a lack of evidence.
Its like politicians. Maybe if they admitted what they don't know, the average person would have a far greater respect for them.
It's not even required to believe that the physical world ends, merely that the complexity becomes intractable. There are many, many systems that exhibit chaotic behavior (the weather is the most famous example) and thus can't be well predicted by any science, despite being wholly physical. You don't need to invoke any (possibly controversial) idea of a non-physical world to show that science can't predict everything.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadTalk to an 10 year old about air resistance vs gravity and there probably going to take what you say on faith. Show them a video of a brick and a feather dropped in a vacuum and you words become more meaningful.
The argument is compelling, but I am not one who knows either way.
What studies show Fluoridated water's benefit?
Just like with creationism, vaccinations, the environment, and fluoride; if you polish the bullshit enough, people will follow.
(Can you imagine proposing fluoridation of everyone's drinking water these days based on evidence like that? If fluoride were being proposed to the FDA as a drug, it wouldn't even make it to Phase III trials...)
To expand on this: the heterogeneity is so high that they don't (as meta-analysis guidelines say you should) report the figures. This is why in the figures, you see tight confidence intervals around zero, but also equally-tight confidence intervals many effect-size units away. That's an alarm bell for trying to draw any sort of meaningful conclusion: it means there are so many variables at play that you have no idea whether the net should be zero or big. (Also a concern given the observation that many countries have seen dental problems fall considerably as they developed, which is a big confound.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_fluoridation
Both fluoride and mercury amalgam are considered safe by current scientific understanding. You need to build up actual science to disprove that rather than make ridiculous claims based on proximity of fillings to the brain.
"Science is not a body of facts," ... “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”
It is one of those things that requires a level of education beyond a certain level (and by this I don't mean grade level, but a level of ability and understanding and especially respect).
Two curves are meeting: one, indicating the level of scientific understanding necessary to function highly in the new world we live in, increasing rapidly over time—and the other, showing true scientific literacy, the comfort with doubt and the flexibility of the mind to new information, rapidly declining.
We are at a crossroads, and the solution is a renewal of a holistic liberal arts and science education—to instill not only a complete understanding of and respect for science, but also the humanity necessary to wield the complexity of the world.
However, when you're discussing the edge of science in a health or socio-economic field, people "hear about studies" all the time in the news. Many are conflicting. Some things go on and live their own lives. Some things lend themselves to a certain ideological thinking and despite being proven wrong later on, go on to live in very awful ways. Eg: vaccines scares.
Even without the simple headline grabbing, all nuance is lost, which is the cause of a lot of the "XYZ is good!" ... "No, XYZ is bad!" confusion - the reality is that "XYZ is good under these experimental conditions, for some definition of good" and vice versa.
Additionally, much medical science (and almost all of social/ psych/ econ "science") is in the very low level of confidence realm (a few studies based on survey / interview data, or maybe just a single study hyped by lame media).
Asbestos was good and now is very, very bad (well, in uncontrolled places). I cannot help but think this lead a fair number of people to question what is really safe. It seemed quite a lot of truths suddenly became dangerous at about the same time. That is just learning, but it felt like a turing point. Heck, a lot of people learned that mistakes cost a fair amount of cash to fix. If you want a science version look at the original polio vaccine. It did give quite a few people polio, but it has had an amazing record since. Flu shots are extremely effective when they guess correctly and a pain (37% this year) when they don't, but they still save lives for a very low risk.
Look at eggs. Are they good for you or bad for you? Red wine? People have been conditioned to think studies are about as reliable as midnight infomercials, and neither of these questions fit in the sound bite length answer that is generally given to science on news programs.
Hypocrisy is painful. The average person knows when someone has a "better than them" attitude, and if you are condescending they will ignore you. As an example, if you're flying around on a G5 and telling the general public they will have to downgrade their lifestyle, then the general public won't listen to you.
Its an interesting cycle and really nothing new. I wish the media would quit blaming the "common people" and start looking at how it presents things. People loose trust in authority when authority starts acting like charlatans. They spend every news cast scaring the hell out of people when the statistics say they shouldn't. That bleeds into government and now we arrest people of letting 12 year olds walk home from school. Why would people believe anything?
tldr: if you are constantly told everything is broken and dangerous, expect people to not care anymore or be afraid of everything.
This requires a new level of education to understand. I'm glad we're having the discussion, but science is not to blame—we are.
I often wonder if they had done their research with the original story how it would have turned out. We live in a print and fact check later[1] and I think we suffer for it.
I'm sure an anti-vaxxer upon hearing the number of warnings on each new drugs has their opinion validated[2]. Or hearing there was mercury in some vaccines.
Heck, we go about things just stupidly. Get rid of incandescent light bulbs to save the environment. Hey, what the heck, these new bulbs all have mercury?!? I cannot just throw them away and if they break I have to do what?!? Did the change really help or should we have picked that battle a bit later when LEDs were further along? Don't really know, doubt I will see any good reporting to tell me the answer.
I'm really not sure our journalists are equipped for a world that really needs us to weigh risks.
Celebrity is a big part of it these days too. Why we listen to people who are famous for a sex tape is beyond me. I guess reporters like to meet them. I suppose that explains the WHCA dinner[3].
1) it still amuses me the number of times the NY Times has mixed up the state for South and North Dakota Senators.
2) the real danger is obscuring the real big warnings with all the little crap. Look at the warnings on a Tylenol bottle and then find the one that really matters. Why are we telling everyone all the warnings for prescription drugs? Doctors will do that before prescribing and do a better job of explaining.
3) http://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/204881-whit...
My pet theory? It's a CYA measure. If you list all, even most rare or absurd possible side effects, you can protect yourself in case someone's body does something weird and the person decides to sue you. Mind you, the "side-effect" can be totally unrelated to your drug, and caused by other illness, genetics, eating something bad the night before, etc. It's often impossible to determine for an average person what caused what in their bodies, but that won't necessarily stop people from going to court.
BTW. on one drug I take I noticed a different way of listing side effects. They divided them into groups labelled (> 1 in 10, > 1 in 100, > 1 in 1000, etc.). This still keeps the CYA value while giving me the ability to prepare myself for what realistically might happen after I take the drug.
AFAIK that's not actually been proven. It's clear that someone who got the flu vaccine this year is less likely to die than someone who didn't, all else being equal. But flu shots only confer partial immunity for 6 months or so, whereas getting the real flu confers partial immunity for decades. At least the last time I looked, I wasn't able to find any convincing evidence that someone getting the flu vaccine every year from birth would be in a better place at age 70 than someone who, say, just got the actual flu every year until they started getting the vaccine at age 70 or whatever. Some relevant research/articles:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870374/
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/08/28/study_raises_re...
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2014/11/study-add...
"AFAIK that's not actually been proven. It's clear that someone who got the flu vaccine this year is less likely to die than someone who didn't, all else being equal."
Ok, that first sentence says I'm wrong and the second sentence seems to say my statement is correct. I am confused.
"But flu shots only confer partial immunity for 6 months or so, whereas getting the real flu confers partial immunity for decades. At least the last time I looked, I wasn't able to find any convincing evidence that someone getting the flu vaccine every year from birth would be in a better place at age 70 than someone who, say, just got the actual flu every year until they started getting the vaccine at age 70 or whatever. Some relevant research/articles:"
and then three study links with the first one being a study with the line "Contrary to immunity elicited by influenza vaccination, naturally acquired immunity can provide long-lasting protection against subsequent infection by the same viral subtype [22, 23]. For example, when the A(H1N1) virus re-emerged in 1977 after 20 years, people who had been exposed to the virus before 1957 were much less susceptible to infection than those born after 1957 [24]. This long-term protection against influenza viruses of the same type or subtype may be partly due to selection of cross-reactive CTL targeting epitopes on a wide variety of internal proteins [25–27]." - so supporting your statement - sort of
the second an article with no links to any studies from a paper I don't know the reputation.
and the the third having the quote "Our results support the recommendation for annual vaccination, given current vaccine options, as those unvaccinated in the current year appear to be at greater risk when considering both VE and serologic evidence."
So, I have no idea other than I'm just going to keep getting my shot because the years I don't, I get really sick and its not worth the long term gain. I suppose an anti-vaxxer would be screaming "See, See!!!!". I'm not sure I could state they are wrong, either. :(
What makes you think it's not worth the longterm gain? It obviously depends on your utility function, but for most people presumably being sick for a week now is less bad than being so sick that you die 10 years from now. I'm not saying that's necessarily what it comes down to, because the evidence isn't at all clear to me. But I do think that the pro-vaxxers have completely 100% failed to make their case here, so I don't understand why we constantly have these articles with them browbeating others and calling them ignorant when they themselves apparently have no idea about the safety/efficacy of the vaccines that they're calling others stupid and irresponsible for not getting.
Then again, coal dust and cigarette smoke were also not particularly known to be a problem until about the same part of the 20th century, so maybe it was a focus on diseases of a cardiopulmonary nature as people were living longer that contributed awareness on all such issues...
The more we know, the more fragile our lives seem, and the more dangerous the world looks.
Several generations of highly specialized education tend to do that.
We need more poets who are scientists, more scientists who are poets. We need a level of breadth that has not yet been seen except in a few diamonds in the rough. These ties between our humanity and our world are more important than we realize.
In practice, this means a better and more widespread liberal arts education—a program that you may not realize is valuable until ten years after graduation, and therefore must be a wisdom passed down to our children and embraced as a society. It needs to be a program that teaches the incredible depth of science, and the humanity to deal with the complex consequences, which are necessarily bigger than our perspective.
Until this shift occurs, we will continue to encounter this divergence of understanding. It's a long bet, but we need it more than ever.
Or, instead of making the science majors spend more of our very scarce time on humanities courses, couldn't you just make the humanities majors spend more of their less-scarce time on science and math courses?
Why is it that scientists are continually called on to "remain in touch" with "humanity" (as if we scientists are not human!) and "liberal arts" (as if anyone in our work-or-die society is free in the old Greco-Roman sense!), but nobody taking their education outside the sciences is called upon to display the kind of basic scientific literacy shown by passing intro-level courses in calculus, statistics, and research methods?
With that said, I absolutely, completely agree that the humanities majors need more than basic scientific literacy. That's 50% of the problem.
But I challenge you to think deeply about why the other 50% of the problem might lie with how scientists understand the humanities, because I really strongly believe that.
Really? I have some extracurricular education in the humanities, actually, with particular focus on politics and the related pieces of philosophy. It's also worth mentioning that I am well away from my own undergrad years.
The problem is not that I find humanities subjects insubstantial from far-away, but that I find them insubstantial from close up.
Whereas I find myself wishing all the time that I had, in previous years, taken more advantage of opportunities to learn science and math.
>I don't mean to blow you off and be all "wise" and crap, I really, truly mean it.
Then I think we should have a much more detailed conversation about what you mean, because you have certainly managed to come off that way.
>With that said, I absolutely, completely agree that the humanities majors need more than basic scientific literacy. That's 50% of the problem.
No. They don't even have basic scientific literacy to start with. To quote the common material on this matter:
>A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: "Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?"
>I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question — such as, "What do you mean by mass, or acceleration", which is the scientific equivalent of saying, "Can you read?" — not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
I would hope that more than 10% of humanities experts can today answer such basic questions as "What is acceleration?" (the second derivative of position/displacement) or "Explain the significance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics to human life" (humans must eat food to survive, and will eventually die). Even if the rate is more like 95%, we are again speaking of scientific questions on the level of "Have you read a classic?" and "Can you read at all?". In fact, I strongly doubt that most "humanists" can answer the question about acceleration, since they mostly never studied any calculus -- it would have dragged down their freshman-year GPA and wasn't required anyway.
Meanwhile, we have not gotten up to the level of talking about interesting hobby material (rocketry or electronics or programming), nor to the level where the "humanists" (or even most scientists) can competently understand scientific concepts essential to public life, such as the Greenhouse Effect, cognitive bias, or p-values.
By the standards of a modern, scientific civilization, the classical humanist is a developmentally disabled child who continues to insist, against all evidence, that he is the jewel of intellectuals and has an exclusive right to make all of society's important choices.
>But I challenge you to think deeply about why the other 50% of the problem might lie with how scientists understand the humanities, because I really strongly believe that.
If you believe it strongly, please provide evidence. I'm of course open to convincing evidence, but I strongly believe the opposite: the problem is not evenly split, it lies almost entirely in the way people holding society's ethical and political reigns disdain and disregard the mere facts uncovered by science and mathematics in favor of their ever-more-sophisticated "human...
I completely agree that the problem of the lack of respect nor understanding of science is at an extreme, and it is an immense problem. You're absolutely right.
But the way to attack it is systemically, from both sides. What we are experiencing is a societal divide, and it is not one sided, as unbalanced as it seems. It's highly complex. Science has lost the ability to appeal to humanity in such a way as to be trustworthy in and of itself. For that, I do believe science as an institution (scientists, leaders, new institutions not yet imagined) requires a deep understanding of humanity and the ability to connect with it at a core level. This will be difficult.
There are some things for which evidence will never be enough. If you don't understand that, well—there's direct evidence for the disconnect between science and the humanities. When the scientific world collectively understands that, then, I believe, we will no longer have an issue with how society relates to science. It will have become clear and obvious.
Blaming the individuals for their knowledge will never solve anything. The right question is not what people do not know; but why do they not know? And how do we make it irresistible to know and understand and pursue science? How do we integrate scientific understanding into our very core? That is the question.
I think it's funny that science evangelists complain about all the anti-science folks in society, and they're completely unable to produce intellectually honest defenses of actual praxis. All these sorts of articles ever do is point to the same set of success stories or examples of irrationality among 'non-believers', as if that's some sort of intellectually coherent argument. It's ridiculous that these folks won't do an actual cost-benefit analysis of science in practice, presumably because they know the results won't be favorable them, but then browbeat people for not 'converting' based on their theory of science as it would be practiced in some sort of utopia. It's like creationism, but even more stupid.
Don't get me wrong, I spend an enormous amount of time reading scientific research and my knowledge of that is probably my greatest secret weapon as a founder, but at the same time the sort of pro-science evangelism I see on the Internet makes me weep for the future of society.
In that context how is it possible to convince someone that science is not also as corrupt as every other institution they've encountered. If my entire experience of education is that it is unfair and run by sadists, then the only people who will succeed in it are those who are willing to subject themselves to what they are told. Their perspective is built into their environment.
These skeptics and deniers can't be convinced, but not because they are stupid. The entirety of their lives lead to the subjectively rational conclusion that everything they are told to do will keep them miserable so they believe and do none of it.
So as you learn more and more facts and see how interwoven they are you're able to evaluate further information without having to base on trust alone. If, say, vaccines were harmful or synthetically produced compounds were somewhat "toxic" compared to the same compounds found in normal food, you'd have to literally throw half of your scientific knowledge away. So you can easily determine that those claims are bullshit. But that requires knowing relatively lot of stuff, which majority of people do not. They have to rely on trusting authorities - which keep lying all the time. So no surprise here that people just don't believe science or government and are drawn towards various pseudoscientific nonsense that is presented as contrarian and promoted by charismatic individuals.
You see, governments lie and cheat all the time. Companies at every scale - from startups to mom and pop shops to LLCs to corporations keep abusing the social contract for their own short-term gains. Newspapers report science in ridiculous ways, journalist keep inventing their own lies to spice up the story. It's hard to know who to trust anymore. And so people revert to trusting plausible sounding narratives and charismatic individuals.
This problem is going to hit us hard in the nearby future. I fear this is an existential threat for western civilization. That's also the reason why lying to people is one of the biggest sins in my book. As the quote goes, "Promoting less than maximally accurate beliefs is an act of sabotage. Don't do it to anyone unless you'd also slash their tires." I think it's actually underrepresenting the damage lies cause to society.
People nowdays see the failure of trust and strive to design systems that don't depend on trusting its actors at all. I'm not sure it's a good direction. As we increasingly don't expect trustworthiness from other people, we're digging ourselves deeper into the hole.
So yes, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOs, anti-nuclear, et al. are wrong. Stupidly wrong. But it's hard for me to blame them. They've been lied to so many times that it's hard for them to trust authorities anymore.
EDIT: to clarify, in the last paragraph I meant that those people simply arrived to wrong (or dangerously wrong) conclusions, not that they themselves are stupid.
It seems to me that the worldview based on science alone (which is highly prevalent among today's self-described Rational Thinkers™) has reaped what it has sown, which is broad skepticism of everything, including itself.
Yes. The idea that "the worldview based on science alone has reaped what it has sown," seems a little silly in this context, as skepticism by itself is not what science promotes. If the skepticism was rooted in science, we might see many other beneficial behaviors associated with scientific method accompanying the skepticism. But we don't, indicating (to your point) that the skepticism stems from distrust for authorities in general, not from middle-school chemistry classes.
Why is that? Another reason people lost trust is the arrogance of some scientist that seem to ignore the complexity of their subjects and don't see the limits of their research.
Also people like you that believe that everything that has gone trough a scientific study must be true, science can also get it wrong sometimes, don't stop thinking and questioning.
Ask a genetic researcher if "GMOs can harm humans" and the answer will likely be, "Probably not". But this actually means - "I can conceive of nothing but the most fantastic route for that to happen. And even if it did it would have to happen by a route currently unknown or at the edge of our entire field." When in reality the public clings to really strange notions that truly are scientifically incorrect.
You can make the argument that being correct for the wrong reasons has its advantages, but in real life no single action ever taken is without risk. It is precisely the scientist who has dedicated her career to her work that understands (and even thrives in) its complexity.
I agree that arrogance of some scientists is a part of the problem (I'd say caused by communication problems - scientists and non-scientists are often so far apart in their understanding of various subjects that it's very hard for those two groups to communicate with each other).
Also, people saying about "limits of research" are often doing this to support their refusal to accept conclusions. If you can't find any rational argument against a thesis, you can always say that the whole process is wrong and then continue to believe whatever you want to believe. "But there's always a chance, right?".
A GMO could be created to be extremely dangerous, just like a prescription medicine could and has been created which is extremely dangerous. The problem is that we're asked to trust people whose immediate interests do not always align with ours. We've seen prescriptions forced through with inadequate testing, so there's no reason to believe that every GMO is going to be adequately tested. The current atmosphere of hostility seems to be helping that testing happen.
The base problem is that we have a society of people whose interests are aligned against each other and a system meant to encourage that kind of competition.
This. This might be one of the roots of the lack of trust. And given that people get abused by others all the time, it's really hard for me to blame people mistrusting research done by companies - especially if you don't have even basic understanding of the scientific issues involved, which most people don't have - partially thanks to broken education system, and partially because well, why should they? Not everyone will love science, those who don't should be able to just trust those of us who do. But now they can't.
I can't speak for TeMPOraL, but I've never heard anyone claim that science is infallible--and it's certainly not implied by their comment.
Science believers simply recognize that scientifically-vetted ideas are _the most likely to be true_.
Sometimes science is wrong. Often. Maybe even usually. Science is very clearly the most reliable truth-finding mechanism we have.
The options aren't sometimes-wrong science v. omniscience. It's sometimes-wrong science v. more-often-wrong everything else.
Characterizing belief in scientific findings as absolute, undoubting faith is completely inaccurate.
I have no formal science training, just read a few books. I keep up to date(ish) with the science sections in reputable magazines and newspapers (Guardian, Economist, etc). And I read web forums like Hacker News and Reddit.
But short of reading everything and developing formal training in everything, how do I decide what's reputable? Whom do I trust? Someone with loads of internet points? Someone who has a well designed personal website? Someone with loads of shelf-space in my local bookshop?
So, for example, with vaccines. I believe in vaccines, I have had my son vaccinated and would recommend to anybody else to do the same. But it's really based on blind faith because I would have no idea where to start if I want to establish the truth myself. I trust my local doctor, and he said we should get vaccines, but that's all I have to go on.
The trust chain is extremely important here, and yes, it's breaking down.
That's the reason for people uncertain about vaccines: they're attempting to find something to trust in a truly complex ecosystem of information that's more available and more difficult to parse than ever.
We're teetering on the balance of the above perspective, trusting without information or understanding—and the opposite, just on the other side of the truth, distrusting without information or understanding. Is either truly more or less valid from an individual viewpoint?
And is it any wonder we're in this situation? What is the institution that would uphold this trust? Do we need a new one, and what would it be?
It kind of makes total sense. If you don't do this, you start questioning everything, and it's really stressful. You start to become 'that guy', nobody wants to spend time with you because you're so disagreeable, and you prevaricate on every decision. So you simplify the world by limiting your inputs to those that agree with you. For example, "Should I get my child vaccinated? I've read 3 books for, 3 against, asked doctors and health advisors I found on Google, and talked about it on multiple forums. Opinion seems divided. " vs "I know I should get my child vaccinated, because everyone on Hacker News says so."
At some point, the answer is to have trusted in-person relationships. As I said, I believe in vaccinations because I know our doctor quite well. I know he's not a quack, and he says vaccinations are a good thing, and so I believe him. Similarly, if I want to get some good beef, I go to our local butcher who knows my name. I trust him not to sell me horsemeat, in a way that I don't trust a big supermarket chain. There's no way for me to guarantee that either the doctor or the butcher are right, but it feels a more certain way than trusting /r/cleverusername on Reddit. How do you sort the wheat from the chaff in a society of billions?
I often recollect Aristotle's comment that "it is difficult - perhaps impossible – for a city that is too populous to be well managed". At some point, large societies seem to eat themselves, and the result is a lack of trust in everything around you.
I think that a decline in primary and secondary education systems are causing us all sorts of social problems--in science, but also in government, art, law, etc.
I believe that education has improved. My parents both quit school before the age of 16. My Mum was taught mostly how to sew, cook and use a typewriter. My Dad did well enough in science, but my grandparents couldn't afford for him to go to college after 16. When I hear the 'education has got worse' argument, I believe that the average pleb today doesn't receive as good an education as a rich joe 50 years ago, but overall the system is much better.
This is actually one of the reasons there's such resistance to science I think. These people are actually expressing a very scientific mentality: that we are not totally certain of the consequences of our influence on a complex system. Yet the response is absolute, which is arguably very unscientific!
Sure, they don't respond to it in the right way, and the discussions are never as nuanced or knowledgable as they should be, but they are fundamentally right about the fact that even science leaves room for doubt and uncertainty. They just don't fully understand why. Yes, we need better science education for the masses, and yes their perspective is fallacious individually, but as you say, it's not their fault. There's a systemic issue here.
Ironically, and perhaps impossibly, we still need to validate this mentality, because it is actually mostly right. We should be doubting science. We should be questioning data presented to us. We should not treat all things that appear equal on the surface as the same without demanding a deeper understanding and evidence. These concepts are correct, the process is correct, and people are being lambasted and called stupid for it. These people are often extremely intelligent for thinking those thoughts, even if their macro scale conclusions are not (even though, at times, they are).
Instead, we should encourage that type of thinking—and guide it. Yes! You're right! We're not 100% certain. But here's why that's okay. Thank you for doubting. Thank you for recognizing uncertainty in the face of complexity. Thank you for being complete in your understanding, because here's all the data. Thank you for trusting us—let's keep working together.
So I agree with you; we need that trust. But what nurtures trust? Is it calling people "stupidly wrong," or is it recognizing their motivations and addressing them with a human understanding? And why aren't we doing that?
I just get the sense that in the face of the truth, we're approaching this problem in a profoundly wrong way, and the societal vitriol and information problem is actually becoming a public health consequence. Really stupid, indeed, but not on the part of an individual: it's the mob that's to blame.
Of course we're not totally certain of this stuff. But the important thing people often miss is that you have to quantify your uncertainity. How much uncertain are we about vaccines causing autism? So uncertain that you'd expect vaccinating your child to be a russian roulette? A little uncertain so that the chances of autism via unknown process is below the benefits vaccines provide? Yes, maybe vaccines do sometimes cause autism. But there's a difference between 50% of times and 0.005% of times, and in case of former, we'd have spotted that long time ago.
I agree - we should encourage people to think for themselves. But we should also teach them not to think in terms of boolean logic, but in terms of probability and tradeoffs.
> So I agree with you; we need that trust. But what nurtures trust? Is it calling people "stupidly wrong," or is it recognizing their motivations and addressing them with a human understanding? And why aren't we doing that?
I don't know. Maybe because it doesn't sell? I'm yet to see a reasonable analysis in media. It's always "this group is wrong" or "that group is wrong".
> They might be very smart, but they arrived at objectively wrong conclusions.
In many, many cases, we call that science. Extremely intelligent people are allowed to be wrong for many, many years, and continue searching in the cracks and crevices for the truth—as long as they're wearing a white lab coat.
Of course I realize this is reducto ad absurdum—the general public is not qualified to be making such judgements. But systemically, one of the things that prevents people from making binary judgements about the world is to prevent making binary judgements about them.
And that starts with all of our responses, not just the media. I'm convinced that these anti-scientific (as in, people who disagree with the scientific consensus) people are more influenced by the response of their close social circles in the context of social media than by the oft untrusted old media. It is the responses of hatred from people they do trust that drive them further into their hole.
If we want these people—often your friends and family—to learn nuance and probability and tradeoffs and the ability to think in grayscale rather than black and white, then we need to teach them directly using our responses. We need to lead by example, and that begins with not calling them "stupidly wrong i.e. really really wrong"—even if they are. Often they already are thinking in grays: they have doubt where everyone else has an absolute!
Lots of people have been stupidly, really, really wrong in history. Some of them changed the world. That's not likely in these cases, but it is the perspective that will make an argument rhetorically effective. And in the process, we may discover the small nuanced ways in which they were actually right—that's the beauty of the scientific process, and that's the reason people fight against the black and white. They have more to offer than you realize; and especially more to offer than the label "stupidly wrong" would have you believe.
For perspective, I'm almost sorry to admit it, but my mother is a vaccine... 'doubter.' She is a scientist, a biologist, extremely intelligent. She has a nuanced understanding and soaks up data like a sponge, references studies in her sleep and connects more dots than a first grade class. It's less clear-cut than you might think, and not all vaccines are equal. People like her are fighting against the absolute mentality of the mob and how the issue is thought about in public discourse—not the end result like you might think they are. They're not stupid, they're just living in an extremely complex ecosystem without a guiding light to bring it all together in the right direction. Show them that, instead of pitchforks.
The thinking in grays is great; as you point out, that's the basis of science. But when it comes to making a decision, the actions need to be, or end up being, absolute. You can't "play it safe", stick a toe in the water, and get "half vaccinated" (you either follow the schedule or you don't). You can't build half a nuclear power plant. The gray area thinking leads to an absolute lack of action when it comes to further understanding. These kind of projects and scientific endeavors are large, society-befitting advancements, and they require everyone to get on board.
I suspect that some of this actually is laziness and not wanting to learn or participate in the scientific process, or considering science to be inaccessible to the layman. It's useful to say that more education and empathy is required, but these kind of society-level things eventually need to be considered lab tested enough to get used in the field for mass benefit. And we need to be both confident of that field use and cognoscent that that's just another stage of the data collection. We should never stop collecting data, stop trying to understand it, or stop doing science. One might argue that we, as humans, can't stop (we just get into ruts sometimes where we slow down significantly).
Lots of people have been stupidly, really, really wrong in history. Some of them changed the world.
Unfortunately, the people who have been really really wrong outnumber those who were wrong and also changed the world by significant orders of magnitude. Those who were wrong and changed the world changed it because they acknowledged they were on a path to discovering the truth. Others who were wrong weren't out for discovery.
my mother is a vaccine... 'doubter.' She is a scientist, a biologist, extremely intelligent
Despite that your mother is a vaccine "doubter", would she fail to recommend getting vaccinated? It's a healthy scientific process that is open to new data, but when it comes to action the data already collected that is what matters (even if the data collected is not immediately at hand). That being said, the question with vaccination isn't "do vaccines work" (do they satisfy the need for which they are administered), but rather "does the risk of unintended side-effects outweigh the documented benefits". In this light, it comes down to being able to do risk assessment, not necessarily being able to interpret the data and scientific results. I think we know way more about vaccination than we do about autism, and the risk assessment needs to take that into account.
People like her are fighting against the absolute mentality of the mob and how the issue is thought about in public discourse—not the end result like you might think they are.
It's interesting that the mob has an absolute stance, but is made up of individuals who are comfortable in the gray area of their interpretation. Is there something in this dichotomy here that can help further the education and empathy?
Uncertainty, yes, but not radical uncertainty, in which we begin to doubt that we exist or the sky is blue, nor infinite uncertainty, in which we always invent new reasons to disbelieve whenever presented with evidence.
Correct reasoning is about finite uncertainty, which can be moved towards yes-certainty or no-certainty by evidence.
And I feel that most of this can be attributed to the apparition of the Internet. People use to have no alternative other than to trust authorities. Now, they tend to bypass them more and more and equally trust strangers on the Internet since they can relate more easily.
It's an extremely bad move: at the sociological level, trust shows up as coordination. To reduce the level of trust means reducing the level of coordination, increasing the chances that someone does something stupid and harmful for what turns out to be no good reason.
>So yes, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMOs, anti-nuclear, et al. are wrong. Stupidly wrong. But it's hard for me to blame them. They've been lied to so many times that it's hard for them to trust authorities anymore.
Moreover, it's not like anyone bothered to teach them the actual truth-finding and truth-tracking methods of science, so that they could understand the difference between science and authority.
I know staying out of the political battles is not going to solve all the problems, but when science has an agenda, it becomes much easier to doubt the results.
Everything else is just politics (and probably wrong).
It's far more troubling to believe the Earth goes round the Sun when my daily experience of life suggests otherwise.
There is, however, another reason, which may be less obvious than the above. It applies to people who do, in fact, know better, but maintain laughable/ignorant/ridiculous positions about issues regardless. Let's call them "Future Policy Fearers." There was a brilliant comment on Less Wrong (http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ph/youre_entitled_to_arguments_but_...) that sums this view up perfectly (this particular example uses climate change/AGW, but it could be about Creationism/Evolution or a hundred other things):
"It becomes a signaling game, in which each choice of belief will be understood as exactly how you would communicate a particular choice of political move, and the costs of making the wrong political move feel very high. So the belief decisions and the political actions become tangled up. Roughly, people have no way of saying:
'I believe that in terms of pure decision theory, the predicted AGW damage and costs of further investigation and costs of delay are high enough that mitigation attempts should start now. But I don't want to give up my {economic privileges / substantive national sovereignty / chance to get the standard of living of past carbon-emitting nations} without a fight, because I don't want groups in the future like {scientists / profit-hating hippie tree-huggers / freedom-hating U.N. environmental bureaucrats / greedy unfair first-world hypocrites} to think I'll just roll over when they try to impose concessions on me, in the name of premises that will feel psychologically as though they might just as well have been made up. In that future situation, it will be important for me to be able to credibly threaten outrage at being forced into such concessions. But as long as nobody else is going to take me for their fool, the sacrifices needed to prevent AGW are fine with me; we could start today.'
So instead, they say: 'I believe that the case for AGW isn't strong enough. I demand clearer proof.'
If it were possible to negotiate separately about AGW action and about precedents of policy concessions to e.g. scientists' claims, then you might see less decision-theoretic insanity around the AGW action question itself."
This group is just as important when dealing with perceived ignorance as those who are victims of Agnotology. Their actions and positions act as a proxy for a future power struggle, and should be understood as such.
Also, imo this idea of a "consensus" in the "scientific community" is a bit dangerous and could be easily misinterpreted by people who have no affinity to science.
Science is a good thing? No shit. Of course it is.
The level of polarization being applied in recent discourse on some of these topics is disturbing.
This article in particular is a prime example. Several topics are listed, each cast as black and white, and subsequently lumped together under the same banner. If you have any reservations regarding any of the topics listed, no matter how nuanced, you clearly must be anti-science.
Moreover, this intolerance doesn't seem to discourage the ignorant from continuing to argue their uninformed opinions. On the contrary, it only inflames them.
The few people who do have nuanced, well-researched opinions on these hot-button topics are then shouted down and discouraged from participating. Why risk career suicide or otherwise waste time arguing something when it's completely fruitless anyways.
If I had to ascribe a dynamic to the phenomenon, it might look something like this:
1. Hot-button issue arises wherein the majority of the science agrees with one position, but very specific legitimate issues persist.
2. The uninformed latch on to the issue as a whole, and completely fail argue in any sort of reasonable, nuanced manner.
3. The media, usually spurred on by robust corporate messaging strategies, decide to utterly destroy these people (rightfully so).
4. The general public joins in to fight on behalf of Science™, because the Neil deGrasse Tyson memes on Facebook really spoke to them at some basal level.
5. The uninformed become even more inflamed, and the crazies start coming out of the woodwork.
6. Any semblance of civil or reasoned discourse is completely gone at this point. All that's left is a self-perpetuating cycle that fosters an environment completely hostile to anyone wanting to raise legitimate concerns, but it at least generates heaps of ad revenue.
A cynic might say the last point is by design, though I prefer to think it's simply a dynamic inherent to modern, public forms of communication.
Yep. I suppose I'm "anti-GMO" in the sense that I view interspecies and intra-species gene transfer (sometimes called horizontal gene transfer) to be different animals. It's been a real let down when I've brought these things up and I'm treated like I just insulted a recently deceased person.
Then I have to "pull my nerd card" to be treated like a human being again and I'm left wondering why we treat people this way. A great part of science is we get to use evidence and leave emotions out of it. If I'm speaking to somebody with a biology background I'm happy to listen, question my beliefs and learn, but dealing with the anti-anti-GMO crowd only makes me feel combative. I can only imagine how people without a science background feel when they try to join the discussion.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/the-food-babes-war-on-ch...
"In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle, that’s what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”" – I do not even know from where to start. I could write a book on the bullshit of this paragraph alone! Science is not a belief. "Facts" are required as evidence. And Science is actually the human translation of the laws of Nature, which could be right or wrong, but is done in a way using arguments constructed within rationality. The way the paragraph is written it is like it is describing a cult!
"Science, the prestigious journal": again, argument of authority.
"The students, even those who correctly marked “true,” were slower to answer those questions" – of course they were!!! They were thinking!!! Which seems nowadays is a rarity!!! And that is called conducting!!! The study and the paragraph are being used to lead to what the author of the article wants!!! The link with apes is self-evident because it seems we certainly have returned to that stage!
Statistics: really one wants to lie on statistics – there is a planet, on this planet lives two persons, they also have two chickens. One of them eats both of the chickens, but the MEDIUM between them is still one chicken for each person on that planet; nonetheless one of them is still HUNGRY! Nothing against statistics, but we have to be careful in its use. Give any statistics and tell me what you want that it is possible to make it "statistically" happen.
"Of course, just because two things happened together doesn’t mean one caused the other, and just because events are clustered doesn’t mean they’re not random. Yet we have trouble digesting randomness; our brains crave pattern and meaning." – At least some wisdom a time, who's to say randomness cannot happen?
Oh here we go, "climate-change"! Oh, is this for real? I suppose it is because it is the same bullshit over and over again. I cannot believe I even have to say that: if one has a point to prove, prove it, instead of try to deconstruct what is already a deconstruction. If they are so right and the argument is so strong they just focus on it and not on those saying they cannot sustain their point (which they can't).
Consensus: again, maybe 200% of scientists or all living and the non-living entities on Earth may also agree that gravity doesn't exist, so, since Nature works by "consensus", we would have a gravity-free day and we could all go happily floating around… so not happening!
Now the golden part: "The planet’s surface temperature has risen by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 130 years, and human actions, including the burning of fossil fuels, are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause since the mid-20th century." Firstly, planet average temperature is a useless statistics; it's like saying no one is hungry in my statistical example above. An increase of 1.5ºF = 0.83ºC. That in the MEAN temperature of the Earth, which is to say absolutely nothing! Temperatures on the planet go easily from -50ºC/-58ºF/223K to 50ºC/122ºF/323K or more. Lowest natural temperature ever recorded on the surface of Earth was -89ºC/-128ºF/184K in the Soviet Vostok Station in Antarctica (21 July 1983), the highest being 57ºC/134ºF/330K at Greenland Ranch in the Death Valley in California (10 July 1913).
Now the puff, out of the blue part: "and human actions, including the burning of fossil ...
Science is very good at explaining the physical world, but try and point out to them where that ends and you get a lot of dismissal (or down votes here on HN). Point out how little progress has been made by science into the non-physical world for example consciousness, and many of them are just as bad as religious people in holding onto their belief systems despite a lack of evidence.
Its like politicians. Maybe if they admitted what they don't know, the average person would have a far greater respect for them.