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Trust in science down; trends worst in minorities, Republicans
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2023
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Trust the evidence, not the scientists. If you have better evidence, show it, but without better evidence you should accept the current evidence and the conclusions you can draw from it.
Problem is, anyone who doesn't believe in science thinks that peer-reviewed evidence is secondary to anecdotal evidence. That's how you end up with Karen turning into an antivaxxer because her nephew got vaccinated as a toddler and was later diagnosed with autism. It doesn't matter if every scientist under the sun disagrees. She knows what happened and all those scientists just lie for money, or in service to some liberal conspiracy.
I have an engineering degree, so I know my share of physics. I can smell bullshit about mechanics and engineering no doubt. I can gather the evidence, I know where to find it, how to judge the quality and conduct experiments to test my theories. But my knowledge is limited to my domain.
My knowledge of biology or climate science is limited. I'm not an expert nor do I try to be an expert. I don't have the time or the skill set together better evidence comb through the different theories and the mountains of data to come to my own conclusions. I must trust the scientists of their fields because they trust me with my knowledge. It's impossible to be an expert in multiple domains in today's world.
It's unreasonable to ask to draw conclusions of highly complex systems that most people will need, at minimum, a domain specific university degree to understand.
In reality, no one can be trusted, because we're all just apes, some of us apes have a degree. We're not some enlightened species, we're full of biases and unconscious flaws and agendas that are really hard to impossible to avoid.
But still, some are better than others at identifying these, and some are better than others at mitigating them. Scientists in general are probably a group better at those things.
This only works with good information literacy. The ability to find, gather, read, and assess information gathered is what's necessary. The majority of people can't ve bothered to read a summary of a summary, let alone journal articles.
Actually if the best evidence you’ve got doesn’t allow for strong conclusions, then you should think of it as a situation where you don’t know, not a situation where you know whatever explanation has the most certainty.
That being said a science is flawless, ppl definitely aren't. Inherent bias finds its way into all kinds of studies.
Sometimes evidence is treated as the gospel with little to no peer review.
Science is not flawless….thats way too broad a statement to make for it to have any meaning. The concept at the core sure, but in practice you can’t account for so many infinite variables that ultimately impact the ability to practice it with 100% accuracy. That’s not a people flaw either, that’s just how complex systems work.