Why “Trusting the Science” Is Complicated

The only time it really stops working is if people start treating it as doctrine, and demanding that you accept it on faith, and take any questions as evidence that you are an enemy of science. If anything destroys science, it is this line of reasoning.

Skepticism does not require a degree or a license from the government. The only intellectually honest thing is to admit to yourself that you do not know until you are convinced otherwise. Whether other people say they are convinced is honestly quite irrelevant.

When I hear someone say "trust the science", I hear, "institutions have worked out for me so far". As much as we wish it were based on rational belief, it is almost certainly personal experience.

George Carlin was right: "they" want you to be smart enough to keep the system moving, but too dumb to see how inequitable the system is.

EDIT: Addressing the "that's just capitalism, not science" point.

You can't really separate the funding from institutions from the products / science. Governments limit the possible research that can be done, media brings in attention and recognition, universities placate their owners (corporate, government, academic, investors). None of the institutions are really motivated by what the base needs or wants apart from avoiding actual anarchy and chaos. It's not a conspiracy. It is power getting more power and power corrupting, quite naturally and with people making rational choices in their own self interest.

That even people with Ph.D.s fall for this just shows that we, as humans, really like a simpler world, a world with known facts and truths, where you don't have to check things because someone else already did it for you. However, this is not the world we live in. The world we live in is complex, messy, almost entirely made out of shades and very little black and white. Most things are not known and won't be known. People telling and selling you things as fact are invariably acting on agendas. Scientific consensus is not a fixed thing, and concerning many questions it is not a thing at all. The closest thing you can do is "trusting the scientific method", but that is very, very different from what "Trust the Science" means.

Also in rare cases where I can actually read and understand the paper outside of my field that may or may not increase or decrease the belief in its correctness. Realistically outside my field of expertise I'll be only able to see things like dodgy statistical methods, small number statistics, crappy plots which are clues of untrustworthy results, but not proofs.

"Trust the Science" coming out of the mouths of politicians is especially questionable. Politicians are not known to make scientifically sound decisions.

"Trust the Science" is merely a proxy for "Believe in and defend the Neoliberal agenda against scientific criticism".

If you're still uncritical of it, you might want to start reading the science.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10654-021-00808-7

"At the country-level, there appears to be no discernable relationship between percentage of population fully vaccinated and new COVID-19 cases..."

Science is and will always be our best shot at being correct about the universe, but it's performed by imperfect humans. There's very little we can know for certain, so we have to pick our poison - either trust strangers who claim to have done their research, or trust our own fallible instincts.

I don't think there's a single correct answer to that question, but don't pretend like you're not choosing a poison. These "I believe in science" mantras are no more scientific than any other attitude.

"Is it OK to curb freedoms and force medical procedures in order to save a million people?"

"Trust the science" people either think we all agree on those questions or they believe that their positions are the correct ones.

Also, "trust the science" used to mean things like "electroshock your abnormally behaving child." It's hard to fault people for a lack of trust.

Anyone who believes that policy can directly flow from science is mistaken.

It's the job of science to make predictions: if these circumstances occur, we can expect the outcome to look like that. But this says nothing - can say nothing - in judgment of how good or bad that outcome is.

To create policy, we must weigh the costs and benefits of the various expected outcomes. That's not a scientific exercise, it flows only from our values as individuals and as a society.

So if you're interesting in bringing about a particular policy, or forestalling a different one, the way to do this is by making your case for relative values of the outcomes that science predicts - not to hoodwink people into believing something other than what the science predicts.

Examples of such misapplication:

* Science shows that the climate is changing, caused by human action, such that in 50 years, some coastal cities will have ground level below high tide. Therefore we must do everything possible to limit CO2 emissions.

* Science says that after (whatever) weeks gestation, a human baby could be viable outside the womb. Therefore we must forbid abortions after that term.

In both these examples, a value judgment is being smuggled in that imposes unacknowledged values into the situation. Those values have nothing to do with science, and so the conclusion is a-scientific.

(That's not to say that either of the conclusions is wrong given some values, including possibly the prevailing cultural values. But assuming that is so is certainly anti-scientific.)

All fields of science have dogma's. It's the very reason why science progresses one funeral at the time....

Also, no living soul has time to read all the papers that are pooped out by all the worlds scientists, so the shortcut is to fall back on "people in the known" AKA you can pick whom you want to believe. Of course a rational person will say he picked a source because trustworthiness, not because he or she liked that person...

For most of human history you didn't get many options. Before the printing press, King and God were the roots of trust and truth, because churches and states were the only ones with the power to disseminate information reliably on a regional, national, or global scale.

The printing press added newspapers as potential roots of trust. Then radio stations. Then TV stations. Still, with limited papers and channels, and large barriers to entry, institutions arose and the status quo was not too much changed.

Now we have an eruption of information as anybody can create a massive following for any idea with sufficient effort. The implications of this have yet to be realized.

One thing is for sure: You can't really trust the science. Definitely not the media. And certainly not whoever you follow on Youtube, the links you see on HN/Reddit, or the posts shared on Facebook. It's hard to say you can know anything for sure these days.

These sciences are much more open to interpretation than, say, physics. Yet people will link research papers in these fields and push them as 100% fact without thinking critically about these papers.

Let's say that your paper claims "X reduces negative behaviors in children such as aggression". In my experience on Reddit and Hacker News, people will link papers like this and claim you are anti-science for questioning anything.

Yet there are some important questions that should be answered like:

"How do you even measure aggression?"

"Did X also reduce assertiveness (which is linked to aggression)?"

"Is aggression always a negative behavior? Who decided this was an appropriate classification?"

"Holistically, is this a better outcome overall or were there drawbacks to doing X?"

It's to the point where I have serious doubts about the validity of papers in soft science fields. Unless of course your paper measures something directly like serotonin levels.

I live in a rural community of about 15,000 people, attend church, and sports for my kids and generally spend a lot of time with people in the community. These are people who don't trust the science.

They aren't stupid, they aren't uneducated, and they mostly aren't believing radical misinformation. There are two really important things to consider though.

1. They don't have experience with Science or Statistics. Outside of a high school classroom 20 or more years ago. [It's easy to get through college without any meaningful science education]

2. They have been screwed by the medical system, government, and economy.

Their decision making and behavior is primarily driven off of their intuition and second hand information from people they trust. The vast majority of unvaccinated people that I know don't believe in microchips or that the vaccine will kill them. They just think they don't need it cause they aren't at risk or because they have already developed natural immunity.

Some of them are right and some of them wrong. They are just people and doing the best they can.

~ Richard Feynman

“Trust the science” is a dismissive statement intended to terminate discussion/dissent and denigrate the dissenter as a simpleton.

“Science” isn’t some belief you hold.

Putting science aside, how can I be confident that the basic facts presented in, say, a NYT article, are correct? I can trust the reputation of the NYT as an institution, and I can also trust that any inaccuracies in the article will be called out by other publications. But if I feel everyone's in on a conspiracy to push a particular viewpoint, then I need to anchor my knowledge in a different institutional framework - even if that might just be a random Facebook group of strangers, or my weird uncle, or a niche radio station.

This, incidentally, is why the censorious push against "disinformation" is misguided in principle. It's sweeping the underlying problems under the rug in the hope that they disappear spontaneously. In an open society, truth can only be established as a result of public discourse, anything else is just the representation of the perspective and interests of some authority. Whatever its source, the seemingly growing distrust in public institutions will not disappear simply because we make social media companies remove its most obvious symptoms.

"Trust the scientific method."

You come up with an idea, TEST, see if it works, evaluate and so on. That tends to work out a great deal and has provided humanity with a lot of great things / protections we don't have to worry about / progress.

It doesn't mean the outcomes are always optimal, but they're better than every other option if you keep at the process.

Fauci has done more damage to "science" than any 100 religious authorities ever did. The above quote is pretty much what he said when he claimed people criticizing him are criticizing science.

One of the most important things for a scientist to say in public is "Just look at what I wrote; I'm not important."

The main insight I have is that say we found out COVID or one of its variants had a 30%+ death/hospitalization rate as the months went on. I firmly believe more people would get vaccinated due to the obvious severity of it. This current ~1% IFR is at a point such that some think its not deadly enough to warrant the hypocritical restrictions and mandates, and some believe that it is.

Lets say on the other hand that as the months went by, we discovered COVID had a 0.000001% IFR. 1 out of a hundred million people that caught it died. [assume long COVID does not exist]. We could see that ~50-100 people would die worldwide. I think most people would call you foolish if given this IFR, had you been calling for continued mass restrictions.

We are at an inflection point such that we have vaccines, we have mandates, we have restrictions, yet some clamour it isn't enough, while others clamour its too much. These all are based around the perceived deadliness, not the true deadliness of COVID.

(1) - I don't recall the exact number

What matters is that you make a claim that has the potential to be tested. i.e. there exists an observation that could potentially contradict your claim.

And if this observation arises, the result is that the hypothesis has an opportunity to refine itself and the process continues.

Newtonian mechanics were falsifiable, they were falsified in particular domains (the very small and the very large) and now they have been refined as they are still applicable given certain contraints.

From there, it's difficult to have any trust in science at all. I can't blame people.

Trusting the Science means something completely different in the domain of socializing information.

^This takes work, complicated work. And then humans, being human, can muck up the interpretation. And so on...

I blogged about this thing a few months ago. We misunderstand Popper. Hell, Popper probably misunderstood his own ideas. Falsifiability works precisely because it's imprecise. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

For more depth, obligatory link: https://danielbmarkham.com/negatives-stack-positives-dont-a-...

Never. Happened. Disingenuous comments like this are why institutional trust is at an all-time low.

1. Science is a process. If you've ever seen the typical graph explaining the scientific method it's important to note that it's a loop. Science is iterative;

2. I'm not sure I agree with the characterization of falsifiability here as making predictions that can be proven wrong. The essence of scientific theory is to make testable predictions, that is the theory can be used to make predictions that can be experimentally tested. Scientific theories are never proven right per se, at least not without making assumptions. They simply become accepted given enough of a track record of testable predictions and continued failure to find a counterexample;

3. By (2), creationism clearly isn't science. It makes no testable predictions. Efforts to conflate creationism as science continue the long losing trend of religion pitting itself against science (eg Capernicus, Galileo) and it's not science;

4. There are an awful lot of people who don't understand or have no interest in understanding that science is a process and are merely looking for confirmation of what they already believe. These people tend to reject anything that contradicts their world view;

5. In the US in particular, there is a long history of anti-intellectualism that's deeply tied to religion; and

6. Ironically, the people who reject accepted science are typically the most easily manipulated by religious dogma, jingoism or the like; and

7. There are people who are quite willing to manipulate others for financial gain and/or power. It's why every living president, all but ~3 Senators, all but a handful of Congresspeople, all governors and the likes of Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are all vaccinated but continue to fan the flames of anti-vaxxers for their own gain.