• utopia_dig@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Not trusting in science.

    Edit: Since there are many comments, I would like to clarify my statement. I meant that you should rather trust scientists, that the earth is round / that there is a human-made climate change, etc. and not listen to some random internet guy, that claims these things are false although he has made no scientific tests or he has no scientific background. I know that there are paradigm shifts in science and sometimes old ideas are proven to be wrong. But those shifts happen through other scientific experiments/thoughts. As long as > 99 % of all scientists think that something is true, you should rather trust them then any conspiracy theorist…

      • adderaline@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        i mean i get the impulse, but if we were to blindly trust any sort of knowledge system, science is the one to trust, right? like, any downsides of trusting scientific consensus are necessarily larger when trusting information sources that aren’t scientific, and if you follow through with trusting science blindly, you might ignorantly begin to believe that empirical testing and intellectual honesty is necessary for determining the truth of your beliefs!

        • dudeami0@lemmy.dudeami.win
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          1 year ago

          I would think it’s more about knowing how to trust it. See some news article about “This study said X”, don’t take it as fact. See a study that has been done numerous times by different groups that corroborate a result and you can have a much higher degree of trust in it. There is a reason the scientific method is a continuous circle, it requires a feedback loop of verifying results and reproducibility. The current issue is clickbait headlines getting the attention, people see it’s “Science” and blindly trust it and it becomes a religion like any other.

    • utopianfiat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      What do you mean by “trusting in science”? Science isn’t meant to be trusted, it’s meant to be verified.

      Given the reproducibility crisis occurring right now, nobody should be “trusting” in science as a matter of course- we should be verifying the decades of unverified research and dismissing the unverifiable research.

      We fucked up the entire field of Alzheimer’s research for nearly a quarter century by “trusting in science”. We still bias towards publishing new research in academia over reproducing existing research. Science has a big problem with credibility right now and saying “oh just trust in science” isn’t the solution.

      • justhach@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Ok, but I do not have access to labratories or ways to run my proper experiments. Am I supposed to just stay on the fence about everything that I can’t personally test, or should I trust in the consensus from the scientific community regarding stuff like climate change, virology, etc.?

        • utopianfiat@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The proper scientific answer to that question is not to trust or not trust. You should absolutely do your own testing, whether that means asking good questions of the experts, reading the existing research carefully, up to and including reproducing the experiment yourself where practicable.

          If an experiment is impossible to reproduce, then you should be asking yourself what good its results are.

            • utopianfiat@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I trust a scientist to follow the scientific method.

              The scientific method isn’t an epistemological framework, it’s a framework for practicing science.

              • s20@lemmy.ml
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                1 year ago

                And what part of what I said made you think I don’t know that?

                I’m aspedantic as anyone, but at this point you’re being antagonistic. Either you legitimately don’t know you’re doing it, or you’re intentionally trying to make people feel stupid. But you definitely know what people mean when they say they “trust” science.

                Please stop. You’re making pedants like me look bad.

                • utopianfiat@lemmy.world
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                  1 year ago

                  Why assume I’m being pedantic? The social media landscape is littered with “I fucking love science” clickbait, “amazing nature” accounts that are literally AI generated photos, hell, the entire fields of evolutionary psychology and nutrition ought to be a wholesale indictment of our contemporary scientific establishment.

                  This isn’t pedantry, I am serious as a heart attack.

                  • s20@lemmy.ml
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                    1 year ago

                    I mostly assumed you were being pedantic when you tried to make out that I thought science was epistemological rather than methodological when I had mentioned science as a methodology in my previous post. This lead me to three possibilities (well, likely possibilityies, anyway):

                    1. You didn’t really read what I wrote
                    2. You’re dumb
                    3. You’re being pedantic to belittle people.

                    Now, you’re pretty clearly not dumb, so I just eliminated 2. That left me with 1 and 3 as the most likely. I played the odds that someone who was clever couldn’t possibly have missed the point of the initial comment so many times, so I went with 3.

                    What I didn’t count on was possibility 4: you’ve had to deal with so many morons who don’t know what “science” means that your default assumption is that people mean something dumb when they say “I trust science.”

                    Which is my bad, really. I should have asked. I apologize.

    • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.fmhy.ml
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      1 year ago

      unfortunately my dad who has a diploma in engineering and is working in that field for probably 30y now is still prone to it.

      Whoever spread those conspiracies should die a slow and painful death to experience a fraction of what they brought on to a lot of families and friends.

    • ccunix@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Trust what? Many scientists will quite justifiably have completely opposing views (do vaccines cause autism for example).