“Trust the science” has always bothered me for two reasons: 1) science is frequently not black and white and anyone who has done hard science research knows there are plenty of competing opinions among scientists and 2) while scientific facts are facts, we still need to decide on how to act on those facts and that decision making process is most certainly political and subjective in nature.
> “If you’re a public-health person and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is.” “So you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never quite recover from.”
I don't expect public health officials to have a utilitarian function that maximizes global health considering second order effects. This should have been stated more clearly at the beginning of the epidemic.
The essence of science is the use of scientific method which have specific meaning and way of doing things. It relies on evidence based knowledge not on any distrust. It does not have to do with authority but you would question if your tools you are using is good (calibrated and not interfering with measurements in an unaccounted way ..etc) or if your methodology is flawed.
I trust that most research is done in good faith and at least some of it is useful. Saying 'Trust the science' might as well be saying 'Trust in God'
"The Royal Society's motto 'Nullius in verba' was adopted in its First Charter in 1662. is taken to mean 'take nobody's word for it'. It is an expression of the determination of Fellows to withstand the domination of authority and to verify all statements by an appeal to facts determined by experiment."
It's highly consistent with the statement above and in many ways is consistent with science as it is practiced.
The Scientific Principle (hypothesis -> experiment -> conclusion and all that) does not pay any heed to authority and received wisdom. And it should not; the experiment results are all that matter.
Academia, the set of very human organisations that have grown to manage our implementation of the Scientfic Principle, are a long way from perfect and are heavily influenced by authority and received wisdom.
So yeah, I don't think it's the essence of science, but distrusting authority and received wisdom definitely required to practice good science.
[0] https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/science-really-does-adva...
I totally agree that the phrase is often misused to mean "trust my favorite authority figure" or "trust the status quo," which is distinctly unscientific. Good news though, if we're willing to actually do the work (the hard part) trust in science is what allows us to change the status quo!
When the actual science was suggesting we take care of the medically vulnerable and elderly. But hey, there’s an election to win!
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Or do they really mean "trust the scientists"?
The essence of science, and what is meant by "trust the science", is to accept theories that fit the existing data until such time as new data contradicts them, while encouraging people to ruthlessly search for just such data which would falsify them.
Sadly, there are a lot of people whose only standard of proof for conspiracy theories is that it contradicts what experts claim.
If I would use it personally I will probably use it to mean trust the evidence based knowledge that the scientific community is using.
Hopefully this is hyperbole. Any faith I have is separate from, for example, if I cancer, I am going to trust the science on the next steps of treatment.
We also knew early on that COVID posed little risk to kids themselves. So it was entirely rational for parents, especially of young children, to value keeping those kids in school over the negligible health risks (to the kids) of COVID exposure.
To even get there requires independent, skeptical, peer review. That often doesn’t happen. It’s questionable how many scientific facts are even science. Much less factual.
I think you claim to much here. Or are using odd definitions, to me at least.
Sure you can extract something about what has been learned with properly made tests administered correctly. It is the tool that is used because it is the tool we have, not because it 'measures learning' in all the ways we want to measure.
> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom
"take nobody's word for it" -> anyone can say anything, that is just a claim, things other than that matter like data, replication, etc.
That is different and superior than a simple, broad, statement to 'distrust'.
- to shut down any debate as the science was “settled”
- to argue for censorship as any discussion that went outside the approved borders of “settled science” was by default false and dangerous to expose people to
- to argue that the “flavor of the month” study was the final word no matter how rigorous the research study was
Where can one find this knowledge? Are you suggesting regular folk go out and review the literature themselves (most of which is paywalled)? And even if they did and were able to understand the contents, they'd still lack the required context to weigh contradicting results, dismiss old studies now known to be wrong, etc etc.
And that's why "trust the science" ends up being an appeal to authority.
I'm not saying I have a better alternative than the scientific method, I'm just pointing out that the "scientific consensus" isn't some magical spark that is immediately obvious when one reads the literature, it's something that evolves over many decades of research, conferences, etc. And that's assuming there is a consensus for a given topic at a given time. And I'm not even going to get into why reasonably questioning the scientific consensus is a good thing (otherwise it stops being science).
In the past, many cultures had priests doing most of the science as well.
Ultimately it all boils down to trust. The common man doesn’t have time nor intellect to evaluate “the science”. When scientists display obvious bias, they lose trust, since they claim to be impartial. It’d be better if they didn’t claim to be impartial.
> Medicine is extremely complex and medical errors are the 4th leading cause of death in the US.
Do you have the source for this? I have never seen it on the list of leading causes of death. For example:
https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/9728/to-err-is-hum...
Since then there have been positive system changes in terms of things like quantitative care quality measures and use of checklists. But it's still a huge problem. Whether it's the 4th leading cause of death is unclear, it depends on how you analyze the data and what assumptions you make.
Why not? It sounds to me that is the ideal scenario. If I go to the doctor I want them to maximize for health, it's up to me to make health concessions
In the same way, we have an entire political class who should be able to look at the health of the population and gauge which measures are worth taking and which aren't, no?
This is an incorrect statement that can be fixed with minutes of research.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.0610941104 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00916...
One might argue about the quality of the research or point out contradicting studies, but saying there was zero basis is flat-out false.
Adding that the idea was "made up" is a great example of bending the idea of science to prop up a point.
They have wildly different rules, designs, systems, and results.
There's an entire realm of people who did great science, won a Nobel prize, and then went on to make absurd unfounded claims about shit they do not know.
It reminds me of a comedian snippet I saw recently who was asking the crowd... "Has life gotten back to how it was before Covid", and one person in the audience yells out, "No"... and the comedian says, "OK, tell me one thing you had before Covid that you don't have now"? And the person says, "My family". The comedian goes -- "Oh yeah, I guess that was the point of it all wasn't it..."
In practice, we instead have centers that focus on first-order effects and who advocate for their position (from an authority based on scientific knowledge, and preparation for emergencies) which are then evaluated and mixed with other centers by political leaders to incorporate the best attempt at considering second and further effects.
Everybody has a different utilitarian model and we don't have enough data or algorithms to predict second or third order effects (we usually fall back on "wisdom" from prior experience).
There is also a weird thing where people will attribute simple natural phenomena to science. Conflating the subject matter with science itself. I recall seeing a post with these colored ants and a caption like "Isnt Science Cool?" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-rainbow-...
Thats not science. Those are ants being colored by food coloring... that would be true with or without the scientific method and you don't even need it to observe the effect. And when you do need science to discover some phenomena (say the nature of black holes) its not science that is amazing if you are simply talking about how amazing black holes are. Its the method applied to understand them that can show how amazing science is. Black holes arent science.
Still not clear to me how they are generating the numbers for putting it at 3rd or 4th. I might have to read the paper rather than listen the author interview in my link above.
That said 98,000 dead from medical error in 2000, from the first link, would put it at 9th in the list that I linked:
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db492-tables.pdf#4
from 2020. So even with that lower estimate it would put it in the top ten.
The definition of a death caused by medical error from [1] seem too board from the likely simplified explanation at least:
"Medical error has been defined as an unintended act (either of omission or commission) or one that does not achieve its intended outcome,"
That "or does not achieve its intended outcome" seems like it would count cases I would not want in a statistic like this. For example surgery to remove cancer to save the patients life did not achieve the intended outcome of saving the patients life so it is counted as death via medical error.
Probably have to look at the full paper to see how they applied the standard, but the pdf is not free on the site I linked. I might come back later and look for a free copy or another source.
"Trust the science" became a campaign slogan during the pandemic, and fell into the same realm as "defund the police" or "trust all women".
So yes, "trust the science" does mean what you said that it is a process that should take data new and old into account. However, the sad thing is it was co-opted by people who used it as a cudgel to silence anyone that didn't toe the line.
Why do you suppose he said that? Do you really think it's different now? It's not.
And there I was, in American schools being told test scores were 80% of my grade with homework accounting for 10% and class projects another 10%. Both high school and university. Fucking liars.
The right wing somehow took "science" to mean "Anthony Fauci"...