Scientist 2: we tried this and found that if the water is cooling that it doesn’t work, it has to remain at a constant temperature.
Scientist 3: we tried it with refined and unrefined sugar. unrefined sugar did not work.
scientist 1: we took another look - it seems there was some weird additive in the refined sugar, when this additive added to water at 74.7373 degrees centigrade the water turns pink.
that’s a very silly and stupid example of “challenging” other scientist’s work. you precisely explain what you tried and how it differed, in the hope it leads to a more specific and accurate picture down the line.
flat earthers et. al just “say stuff” they think is right, where the evidence does not actually challenge any hypothesis or existing evidence because the claims are just … bad.
this is not “challenging” science. it is stubborn ignorance. pure and simple.
most of it is so easy to refute any random youtuber with a spare hour can do it (read: 6-12 months [0])
- https://youtu.be/2gFsOoKAHZg
however, your point about platforming is important, because people who wouldn’t have had a soapbox 15 years ago, now have a soapbox anyone in the world can find them on.
if you’re looking for something to confirm your world view, there’s something on the internet for you.
rule 1 of the internet should be spammed in front of everyone’s eyes for seven minutes before anyone is allowed to use a web browser — don’t believe anything you read on the internet.
[0]: there’s a running joke about how long this person takes to make new videos.
Scientific American hasn't seemed very healthy after the 80s. In the decades before, it was an unusual labor of love by one or two chief editors (I don't remember specifically).
Who is actually being cancelled and for saying what?
This is what I find a little frustrating. There's very little censorship and when it does happen it's usually not against those that most loudly cry about censorship.
For example, did you know you can no longer use the Futurama Farnsworth quote on Facebook "we did in fact evolve from filthy monkey men"? Meanwhile, I've reported and had the report rejected nutters I know literally calling for the stoning of gay people using Bible quotes. (Lev 20;13).
Exactly. "In this house we believe ... science is real." is about the most unscientific sentiment possible. There, the word "science" exists to give the air of authority to a set of ideological and policy positions.
We could spin up a theorem generator that just starts from mathematical axioms and exhaustively recombines them to create theorem after theorem. This would create facts, but the process would be almost entirely useless. A pure undirected "search for truth and fact" does very little for us.
Researchers decide what problems to tackle. Funding organizations decide what research to fund. Researchers make choices about how to tackle these problems. Research labs are staffed depending on things like admission decisions and immigration decisions. Journals decide what papers to publish, not just on validity but on impact and novelty. Journals then charge money to access this research as part of a profit-driven business model.
All of these human elements bend the "search for truth" and a failure to recognize these institutions and their many historical analogues just means that you miss out on some rather important understanding when interacting with the literature.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTfhYyTuT44
(Folding Ideas, "In Search of a Flat Earth")
He takes a couple of their claims seriously about what one will see when attempting particular experiments involving a very large lake, attempts them, sees the results one would expect if the Earth were curved, and reports this to some flat earth community forum, refining the experiment as they suggest ways he may have screwed it up, and continuing to find curvature (obviously).
The real story is how they react to contrary evidence delivered entirely on their terms, and where that community was heading four years ago (beware—I guess—that part also becomes necessarily "political").
[EDIT] I guess I buried the lede for this site's interest, which is that the video devotes a fair bit of time to how the Youtube "algorithm" took a little success for Flat Earth videos as a cue to aggressively promote them to people it identified as maybe liking them (those inclined to fall down that particular rabbit hole—which involves a lot more than just the specific belief that the earth is flat), but now flat earth is in decline, because that and other "algorithms" started sending the same folks to... Q-anon content instead.
Incidentally, there was a somewhat-big documentary on Flat Earth some years ago that included some folks from a flat earth convention trying some experiments very similar to the ones depicted in this video (involving visibility of objects across a large lake), with predictable outcomes.
>...As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, "Science teaches such and such," he is using the word incorrectly.
>Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, "Science has shown such and such," you might ask, "How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?"
>It should not be "science has shown" but "this experiment, this effect, has shown." And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments--but be patient and listen to all the evidence--to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at. https://feynman.com/science/what-is-science/
I always took that for granted but seems some don't.
1. Science has always been political, this isn't new. Some of the first major experiments were performed in Nazi camps. Cancer treatment began with torturing Black Americans. The entire idea of ethics is political in nature.
2. Science is still the search of truth. If it doesn't match your truth, then that doesn't mean the science is wrong.
3. Challenging scientific conclusions IS encouraged, but there is also a danger to it. Look at Covid. In the US alone, 500,000 Americans died from Covid. Challenging social distancing, masks, and vaccinations costs lives. I mean literally costs lives. The people challenging this were doing it for political purposes, i.e. most of them had absolutely no idea what the science said or how it might be wrong.
There are so many cases in which the interpretation of the data is difficult. There are many cases in which there are either experiments with seemingly conflicting data, and two different plausible interpretations of existing data. I consider myself highly intelligent and reasonably well informed and yet, were I the one setting policy, I would still need to rely on the opinions of experts in various fields to interpret what data we have on various issues.
This does match any reality I know of. What political agenda has government twisted science to?
The government is quite responsive to the science, and generates science, but the NCI and other bodies have little partisan politics, thigh of course the arguments in science get political just like any other group of people. It's just not Republican/Democrat politics.
> Challenging scientific conclusions should be encouraged not cancelled.
Scientific conclusions are challenged all the time. It is highly encouraged. Entire research programs get challenged to justify their existence. Should we really be running all these SNP chips for GWAS? Turns out that it wasn't a great investment, but it seemed promising at the time...
Too often people are doing two things, one good such as challenging science conclusions, and one bad such as lying or being dishonest or arguing in bad faith. And when they get critiqued for the bad one, they retreat to treating it as criticism of the good thing they were doing. I see it all the time.
Vaccines are on the docket for cancellation, which to be fair, will last only as long as a swath of the population sees their kids incapacitated by some completely preventable virus infection. But do we really have to go through an epidemic (again!) to understand that the science of vaccines is solid?
There is such a thing as settled science.
There is also such a thing as people too uneducated and non-expert to understand what science is settled.
There should be such a thing as not listening to non-experts about settled science.
FWIW the moment I started wondering if we were losing liberal norms actually was reading Dawkins in the 00s calling for scientists to coordinate against debating creationists. Like I was with him in being convinced even "scientific" creationism is powered by Christianity and not any good evidence from nature, and I guess I need to say I had absolutely no problem with any scientist choosing not to engage with any creationist. But there's something anti-science in a campaign to expel a belief from public debate, by a means other than better arguments. That can conceivably be a good thing in some case; but it's the opposite of science.
Relying on Facebook is a bad idea because it's a corporation operating under different pressures than healthy discourse, further trying to direct your attention in its own interest, applying resources it gains this way to modeling you. You can try to improve its moderation but besides the trouble you bring up, probably any success you can get that way will just seed a competing platform. I prefer to give my energy to an open protocol such as Bluesky's (admittedly I haven't looked at its protocol spec) -- unless you can take away everyone's personal computers, everyone's not going to live under your favorite monitor. An open protocol is compatible with choosing among competing moderators. (BTW the pre-web Xanadu vision included open-ended moderator choice, and how different system designs could have different social effects, and the importance of getting it right.)
That's a particularly clear cut example. There are many more complex scenarios where "trust the scientific experts" is dubious because science has a limited domain of applicability. When you pretend that non-scientific decisions must be made on a scientific basis, people see through it and become sceptical.
"Political decision" as a euphemism for allowing non-experts to decide how to minimize deaths? The same non-experts who couldn't even get the Monty Hall problem right, let alone the complexity of medical probability and statistics of [false | true] [positives | negatives] in Bayesian scenarios?
Good luck with that.
Wait, when did "how to use these truths" become part of science?? How you use science to develop things that benefit people (or organizations) is normally called engineering! Science is normally concerned only with finding useful facts about the world. There are some exceptions, like when you're using the scientific method exactly to figure out what benefits people (or any living organism), for example, using pharmacology to develop drugs that help people. But I would argue that even then, the main concern of pharmacology is to figure out what kinds of drugs have what effects on humans in certain conditions - i.e. it fits perfectly into the definition of "searching for truth and facts".
How you apply that knowledge science gives you to solve problems that affect society is called policy - and policy, while can be analysed using the scientific method, is normally not itself science. It's hard to use the scientific method to study policy, though, because there are far too many factors involved in anything to do with large groups of people, and far too little room to do experiments on them.
We have overpopulation anyway. And we don't have shortage of normies by any measure. In fact some social problems like monopolies are due to overabundance of normies.
And plenty of medical experts get the Monty Hall problem wrong.
I assume you're implying that people who advocate for cultural support of science are hyper liberal and would be hostile to any science conducted by a hyper conservative. I reject this assertion.
"Trust the science" means that peer reviewed science and scientific consensus should carry weight, and too many people are anti-intellectual.
Then they're not experts on prob and stats in medicine, and you shouldn't choose them to guide policy making when prob and stats in medicine are relevant. The alternative is to choose those who aren't experts in prob and stats in medicine, which results in policy bred from ignorance of the relevant math and science.
Choosing people who are ignorant of the relevant math and science over those who are knowledgeable is certainly one way to make policy, and it seems that is what folks want, so I guess we'll see how well that it works out.
That's many years beyond usefulness now that governments and companies communicate official information through the internet. You might as well say "don't believe anything ever" which makes the advice useless.
It's fine that people believe false things like flat earth. Why so much pressure to stop that? False beliefs are the default for most people, and they actually serve a purpose. We're mostly not emotionless truth-seeking Spocks. We can have religion and other beliefs that improve our quality of life by providing a sense of belonging or importance, an identity, or a community. You wouldn't go around telling Jews that no, God didn't give the 10 commandments to Moses, stop believing unscientific rubbish just because you read about it in some scroll.
As a tangent: even if you're correct that what scientists decide or are allowed to research is mostly political, the facts they find are not, at least if the scientific method is being used properly. Facts are never racist. Facts do not have opinions. And science should look for true facts, not opinions. Hence, even if your focus is on things you find political, the scientific facts and hypothesis you end up with must not be.
All I can say is (－‸ლ)