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Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science

(reason.com)
473 points Bostonian | 3 comments | 18 Nov 24 22:04 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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refurb ◴[19 Nov 24 00:14 UTC] No.42178748[source]▶
Yikes, quite the scathing article and example of a the politicization of science.

“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.

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senderista ◴[19 Nov 24 00:20 UTC] No.42178808[source]▶
"Trust the science" is the very antithesis of the scientific spirit. The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom. If you treat scientists as some sort of infallible priesthood then you've missed the whole point of science.
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yks ◴[19 Nov 24 00:30 UTC] No.42178888[source]▶
> The essence of science is to distrust authority and received wisdom.

This is not "the essence of science" by any means.

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1. marcus_holmes ◴[19 Nov 24 00:58 UTC] No.42179079{3}[source]▶
"Science advances one funeral at a time" [0]

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...

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2. yks ◴[19 Nov 24 04:07 UTC] No.42180032[source]▶
One funeral at a time is true but “standing on the shoulders of giants” is also true and there is absolutely good science done without redoing all experiments since Newton, like there is a bad science standing on the sand hill of the other bad science. Having distrust by itself will not make one a good scientist and so it can’t be “the essence of science”.
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3. marcus_holmes ◴[20 Nov 24 08:17 UTC] No.42191771[source]▶
Which is what I said...