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The "Scientific Impotence" Excuse
chichilalescu writes "I've had the feeling for a long time that people refuse to listen to scientists. The following is from an article on Ars Technica: 'It's hardly a secret that large segments of the population choose not to accept scientific data because it conflicts with their predefined beliefs: economic, political, religious, or otherwise. But many studies have indicated that these same people aren't happy with viewing themselves as anti-science, which can create a state of cognitive dissonance. That has left psychologists pondering the methods that these people use to rationalize the conflict. A study published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology [abstract here] takes a look at one of these methods, which the authors term "scientific impotence" — the decision that science can't actually address the issue at hand properly.' The study found that 'regardless of whether the information presented confirmed or contradicted [the subjects'] existing beliefs, all of them came away from the reading with their beliefs strengthened."
... aren't intelligent enough to assess the quality of their own thinking. In fact most people aren't even able to think straight most of the time. The human mind is not built for the kind of obtuse rationality that scientists often communicate in.
Scientists really have to do a better job at communicating clearly with less jargon, I think part of the problem is not being able to demonstrate the effects in a tangible way that is undenibale. I think the use of metaphors and communicating complex things in terms of everyday things that people can understand would go a long ways to help people understanding the contradictions.
You really have to catch people in contradictions in a public venue with an argument that is simple to understand and you'd look like an idiot for not accepting.
That the study was done entirely on slashdot posts.
The stories and info posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only fools would take it as fact.
I think it's more basic than that. Any ideology followed closely and long enough leads to unthinking behavior and beliefs. Ideology requires a lack of thought almost by definition. Whether that is unthinkingly following a religion, an economic system, a political party, or nationalistic rhetoric doesn't really matter, what matters is the fact that people turn off their brains and allow someone or something else make decisions for them. Once turned off a brain is a very difficult thing to get turned back on again.
Activists on both sides of an issue do the same thing. Each side chooses the evidence that supports their predetermined belief.
The other side of "scientific impotence" is "appeal to authority".
Once issues become politicalized it becomes very difficult to make a scientific judgement one way or another because of all the competing agendas and misinformation on both sides.
Part of the problem is that science is a moving target. Look at dietary and nutritional science. If you're a baby boomer, you've heard scientists say umpteen different things over the last 40 years. People don't mind some change, but they don't like their belief systems upturned regularly by a system that is founded on constant change, but says it speaks "the truth". The truth is very slippery. Look at Fred Hoyle. The guy just couldn't come to grips with the Big Bang. And yet, if you want to get technical about it, what we currently think is "the truth" about the origin of the universe is a collection of models that agree with the data to some extent. Some of these models are guaranteed to be overturned.
Is it any wonder that people are resistant to the pressure to change?
-l
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I don't need a psychology degree to tell you right now what the problem is: non-thinking. Non-thinking makes a virtue out of not thinking [tautological/reflexive]. And if you accept rational science then you're doing something morally wrong.
There, fixed that for you. People don't need religion to make them stupid. They're perfectly capable of being stupid all by themselves. Blaming religion is just taking the easy way out.
Even people who don't describe themselves as being religious, or who are very conspicuously not part of any organized religion are like this. I think this is a general human trait that religion hijacks for its own purposes.
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Don't paint all religions with the same brush. I consider myself to be quite religious, but I am not a slave to blind faith. My religion says that the universe was created when a giant cow licked a huge block of salt... while that may be what my religion says, I have zero doubt in my mind that it did not happen that way.
People who fail to examine their religion in the context of which it was written are doomed to falling into the traps of blind faith. Those who can look at their religion for what it is, can rectify it with modern knowledge, and can take into account the effects of history (revisions, political influences, lost texts etc) are able to differentiate religion and faith and have no trouble at all accepting scientific knowledge.
the preceding post was not spell checked... suck it.
I think you'll find that most of the mistrust people harbour about scientists, and science in general, comes from the fact that the media tends to 'definitively' interpret the results of non-definitive studies. Or over-report studies that, when peer-reviewed, fall apart like a... well, like a poorly-built motorcycle.
But never underestimate the power of hucksters operating under the guise of 'chiropractor', 'naturopath', or 'one who speaks for the man/men in the sky'. They tell you with a straight face that these people who have nothing to gain by lying, and who have dedicated their lives to understanding how things work through empirical research, and who aren't trying to take your money, are not to be trusted. The last few decades have given rise to a real resurgence of anecdotal 'fact' over the scientific method, and it's kind of scary.
I'm not sure which is more entertaining, the fact that you're confusing cause and effect, or the fact that your statement directly supports the hypothesis presented by this study.
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I completely understand why many people aren't as quick to believe everything scientists say. Simply because scientific -fact- seems to change every few years. A few years ago scientists said there were 9 planets. Now there's 8. First there was no water on the moon, now there is. As far as science is concerned, theres no problem with updating facts and theories as new information is obtained. But most people don't work like that. As far as they're concerned, you're the same as the guy who keeps changing his story every time you ask a question.
The problem is that scientists will call you ignorant or stupid if you stop believing every word they say just because you know there's a good chance of them saying something different in a short while.
Religion on the other hand, rarely changes its story.
D
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Exzachary. Science is the pursuit of knowledge, not its permanent acquisition. Belief presents itself as acquisition with no need to go any further.
-l
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An important detail is missing here: Scientists don't say those things! The media does. Scientists say "Based on our recent observations/experiments, there may be a correlation with this reading and proof of x." The media follows with "Science proves x beyond a doubt! Panic!"
You seem to misunderstand science.
First off, lets talk about pluto. There are no new "facts" here, just a standardization of definitions. There was a time when "planet" meant "anything big orbiting the sun". When it turned out there were millions of big things orbiting the sun, scientists needed to decide just how big a thing had to be. The only two serious options were one that would increase the number of planets immediately to 12 and probably upwards of 40 eventually, and one that would reduce the number of planets to 8 and probably leave it there.
Next, water on the moon. We looked for water on the moon once, and didn't find it. Scientists announce "we can't find any water on the moon". Journalists announce "there is no water on the moon". Later, scientists crash a lump of metal into the moon with the energy of a small nuclear bomb, and find that there *is* some water, just deeper then they were able to look before. It's no more "scientific fact" changing then it would be if you looked everywhere for your keys and couldn't find them, announced that you probably left them in your car... then found them under the couch in a more through search.
The other scientific development often brought up in this regard is the whole "we once thought the earth was flat" thing. Guess what? We're never going to find out that we were wrong all along, and the earth really is flat. Never. We're never going to find out that the sun rotates around the earth. The reason is because scientific *facts* never change. Scientific hypotheses change every day, and theories change once in a while, but *facts* never change.
And in any case, which is better... being absolutely firm and unchanging (but wrong), or admitting your errors switching to the truth?
"The problem" is people who think there should be a "the" before the word "problem." Especially the ones who then follow that up with a single noun.
The body of science has already exceeded the capability of the human brain to absorb in its entirety. Some people cannot even comprehend the scope, let alone the contents, of what we know as a conglomerate.
At some level, everyone has to take some of the details of areas outside of their scope on credit these days, and it is only going to get worse. It's going go far from believing in the credibility of authority figures or certain groups of scientists. Some form of spirituality is going to become more and more essential to keep the human psyche from freaking out in an endless series of myopic anxiety attacks. Either that or artificial brain enhancement.
None of the above is an excuse to slack off and ignore the world -- everyone should try to be good at something. Nor is it an endorsement of the backward, psychologically abusive religions that are still popular and widely exploited.
But people that walk around thinking killing off "religion" is a panacea scare me as much as the evangelicals.
Someone had to do it.
I think it's more basic than that. Any ideology followed closely and long enough leads to unthinking behavior and beliefs.
Including... science.
Except science isn't an ideology.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
Faith makes a virtue out of not thinking.
That would be a surprising deduction to monks, theologians, and apologists of many faiths throughout the ages. Reason and rational thought are not the sole province of science. In fact, before the Enlightenment (in Europe), reason and rational thought were believed to be the province of priests and lawyers. Logic deals only with deduction based upon accepted assumptions. Assumptions about metaphysics are unprovable/unfalsifiable, so science can say nothing about it (the very topic of this article). Some people with faith will determine scientific results differently than some people without faith because certain assumptions (about which science has no say) necessarily creep into the logic. In short, there _is_ thinking on the part of the faithful, and to disparage them by claiming they are unreasoning fools, fit only for padded cells is short-sighted at best.
If science is an ideology, then two column accounting and engineering are ideologies.
But you are exhibiting another element of cognitive dissonance, in that you attempt to reduce an empirical discipline like science down to the same level as an ideology. This is a standard tactic of anti-intellectuals, post-modernists, Creationists and pseudo-skeptics. Rather than critique a theory or a discipline entire they simply redefine the terminology to make it more expansive.
Science is a tool, a methodology. It has no ideology, any more than a hammer or a matchstick has an ideology. That's not to say that proponents or practitioners can't have ideologies, but part of the design of science is to eliminate the biases by forcing methodological strictures on research. Science is all about the evidence, ideologies are all, so far as I can tell, about ego stroking.
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Rationalism is not an ideology. It cannot be. To be idealistic means forgoing being rational when a particular subject related to that ideology becomes the topic of discussion.
Rationalism and being able to consider viewpoints of others are not incompatible. The problem arises when you are facing what you know is either an irrational or unproven viewpoint espoused as truth by someone else.
A minority of the people mentioned in the study the article talks about are members of this group of thinkers. Scientists *ought* to be. Preconceived notions and science do not do justice to research.
There's a lot of crappy discussion of various scientific topics going on right now simply because the loudest talkers are not the most rational ones...at least until rational people get upset at flagrant opining in the guise of fact-giving.
Rational people are quick to compromise, if given evidence with solid foundations. Irrational people see rational people dismissing unfounded or weakly-supported opinion and think that rational people are unwilling to compromise because *they* cannot step back and examine things in the same way. Being able to resist making up your mind makes you a bad candidate for being, say, a troop commander, but it is the only *defense* to ideology.
Maybe you have a different definition of rational?
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Post an article on Slashdot showing a relationship between violent video games and violence, and watch the Slashdot crowd foam at the mouth. And I doubt it is the fundies who are doing the posting...
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Unblinking rationalism will cause you to lose the ability to appear reasonable to other people.
*appear* reasonable is the key phrase there. The rational always appear unreasonable to the irrational. Is it the rationalist's fault that others don't think enough?
You won't want to compromise, because you think your belief is the only right belief.
Unless presented with evidence otherwise. That's the core of rationalism.
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The other side of "scientific impotence" is "appeal to authority".
There was once a guy on my favorite forum that argued politics a lot, and his favorite trick was to link to an encyclopedia entry on logical fallacies every time someone made an argument against him, pointing out which fallacy they had made. I once asked openly if there was a logical fallacy for people who replied to every question with an accusation of a logical fallacy rather than just arguing the merits of the question. His reply was that there was - but he wouldn't tell me which one it is.
The problem I have with your statement is that there are limits to the Appeal to Authority Fallacy. The A2AF would almost certainly come into play if, say, something was wrong with your company's business and you asked why it wasn't fixed, and you were told it wasn't being fixed because your boss said it was fine. The other stupid extreme there is that if your doctor says that you need a surgery but you argue that it's unnecessary, when your friends try to tell you that you should listen to your doctor, are you going to claim that they're just appealing to the doctor's authority?
There's got to be a hair to split around the difference between appealing to an arbitrary / managerial authority and appealing to a knowledgable / professional authority. There's a point at which appealing to the authority of a person who is highly trained in a specific background with relevant application to a "hard" science, one that is testable and falsifiable, should be relevant against an opposition that does not have that same depth of experience.
Once issues become politicalized it becomes very difficult to make a scientific judgement one way or another because of all the competing agendas and misinformation on both sides.
Many of the truly controversial scientific actions that occur lately have been cases in which one side has a majority of scientists in agreement with them, while the other appeals to a very small subset of scientists who gain notoriety by positing contradictory theories, without even bringing up the issue of who may be funding either group or if they have the relevant scientific backgrounds. We're supposed to believe that the opinions of a few are supposed to be given equal weight and consideration as the greater opinion against them, even without published methods or peer examination. I've got a different logical fallacy for that - the false equivalency.
And what you've just said is a well-known political tactic. If there's a scientific issue that comes out that certain people are nto comfortable with or stand to lose profits as a result, make it a political issue. Introduce contradictory evidence without fully sourcing it. When anyone says that your claims are biased and untrustworthy, claim the same thing right back at them. Claim that those scientists have just as much of an agenda as yours do. In this way, you can invalidate a scientific opinion in the public trust.
Libertarians somehow believe that private businesses should be stronger than governments but weaker than individuals.
People's understanding of issues is heavily determined by how they are framed. The frame sets the questions, which in turn point to the answers. Answering "Which side of the issue are you on?" means choosing one of exactly two sides.
Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity. You may ask, "Do you believe in evolution?" But that is not the question many people will answer. What they really hear is, "Do you believe in evolution, or are a God-fearing person like us?" Then their answer is not so much a negative rejection of evolution as a positive affirmation of who they are and their membership in a community.
How did evolution become incompatible with being part of a community? This happened not by explicit argument, but by subtle framing of politics. You say that there are two sides to an issue. But that division into two is exactly the moment of politicization. Which side are you on? Are you with us or against us? Do you believe in evolution or do you believe in God?
Would you sacrifice your friends and your community and your sense of who you are in order to believe in an abstract theory that has no bearing on your day-to-day life? I think it is perfectly rational to say no regardless of the evidence. We need community to give life meaning. It's in our blood as human beings. But community life is impoverished in our lonely society. We cling to it when we find it.
Nor does this apply only to religious folk. Say you had a revelatory experience of God that showed evolution to be false. Imagine the social and personal implications of denying evolution. Would you believe, or would you imagine it was a hallucination? As an atheist, I can imagine the former would require a wrenching reconstruction of my identity and relationships to other people.
What you say is true in general: people tend to choose the evidence that suits them (though this is not symmetrical: some people, groups and arguments are more honest than others). My point, however, is that the logic you are criticizing is embedded in the very language of your post. Your acceptance that there are two sides - not one, not three - is where the slippery slope begins.
But the idea that the scientific method is the best methodology for determining anything, and that everything can be understood through the scientific method, is an ideology.
The "scientific method", when boiled down to its essence, is nothing more than a belief that evidence is the best indicator of reality.
When you troubleshoot your car or computer, you follow the scientific method. Is it "ideology" that keeps you from taking it to an exorcist instead of probing and prodding to find out what the problem is?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"...Scientists where shown to be just as and in some cases more likely to fail a given puzzle due to reluctance to let go of a given premise and try another one. So we should be careful to equate "scientist" with "right." Facts are facts as we know them. That isn't to say they should be ignored either but skepticism is just as healthy where science is concerned as it is where religion, philosophy, politics, or anything else is."
You did some nice linguistic ju-jitsu by changing "science" to "scientist" as if they're the same thing. They are not.
As I was just lecturing to my statistics class the other day: You can't ever prove anything in science; if anything, science works by disproving ideas. (This is classic Popperian stuff, and Einstein said the same thing.)
In effect: Science advances by two scientists getting in an argument and getting pissed at each other until one guy does some research convincing everyone else what an asshole the second guy was. The fact that most scientists are confident in their own hypotheses is immaterial to the discipline in the long term, once everyone else can replicate the same concrete tests of the natural world.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
The people who complain loudest about politicization of science usually are in reality complaining that science isn't politicized in the way they'd like it to be.
I think it's more basic than that. Any ideology followed closely and long enough leads to unthinking behavior and beliefs.
Including... science.
Except science isn't an ideology.
Except that many DO make "science" an ideology, particularly when attempting to use science as a hammer to force another ideology upon a skeptical populace that will result in worsened economic conditions and reduced freedoms for that populace.
Strat
Why is this modded "Troll"?? I'm genuinely curious.
It's not like this hasn't happened many times in the past, and will most likely continue in the future.
Is it now heresy to suggest that politicians politicize science and so do ideologically-driven scientists?
Strat
Because it's a transparent shot at climate change science, implying that it's all a conspiracy. Apparently practically everyone who is qualified to interpret the data have conspired to deceive the entire world about the subject. I can't think of a single scientific organization in the world that has researched the subject that doesn't agree with the IPCC findings. Yet some folks with no background in the relevant subjects, who haven't done any actual research, feel that they can dispute the findings and allege all sorts of malfeasance. THAT is not science. That's just people with vested interests or ideological loyalties defending their turf and trying to spread FUD in order to prevent any action being taken.
They don't have scientific evidence to back up their claims, they just want to sow doubt. Do they really care if they're wrong? No. They'll simply blame the government for not acting to prevent whatever problems arise, just as the "drill baby drill" folks are now blaming the government for not doing more to prevent the gulf spill and for not fixing it faster now. This, despite the fact that they would vehemently oppose regulations on industry that might affect their bottom line, and that they always claim that government is generally incompetent and industry knows best how to do their jobs. It's all quite self-serving.
How does science tell you how you should behave in society, for instance?
Well, just as a for-instance, games theory shows that a simple tit-for-tat algorithm is one of the most effective strategies in an iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Study of social insects, as well as herd and pack animals, reveals that cooperation among members of a species is a powerful evolutionary strategy. Not the only one, of course, but further study quickly reveals that we are social animals. Studies of the human brain reveal powerful empathic circuitry that may well form the basis for the Golden Rule. It's not as strong as the sex drive (and even that can be suppressed), but there does seem to be a biological basis for some foundational ethics. In fact, it's silly to assume that ethics can or should exist in a vacuum, with no scientific basis.
Of course, science is unlikely to tell us which fork to use at a formal dinner, or why, but it can definitely reveal a lot about basic ethics. I might go so far as to say that if it can't be explained by science, it's not ethics, but manners.
Likewise, science isn't the be-all-end-all in determining what kind of government you should set up
Not at this point. There's a definite paucity of data, as you point out. We've only tried a handful of kinds, and this is something where the negative consequences of random experimentation are too great to risk on live populations. Nevertheless, models and simulations can reveal a great deal, although our current tools limit the scope, and therefore the effectiveness of such modeling. I agree that science is not yet the "be-all-end-all" here, but to suggest that it can't ever be is naive and foolish. Heck, it may well turn out that there is no "best" kind of government--that you always have tradeoffs. Nevertheless, that can only be proven with...wait for it...science. And if science can help us understand those tradeoffs (which, at least in theory, it certainly can), then it can help us make a more informed decision.
Science does have limits, no question, but your view of those limits seems hopelessly naive.
Gotta love strawman arguments! I never said anything along the lines of that. The qualifiers "usually" and "loudest" are very important here and the meaning significantly changes if you ignore them, as you seem to have done. Anyway, like you didn't complain about politicization of science but merely noted it exists, I didn't say you're too deeply set in your ideology to accept scientific theories with mountains of evidence and extremely broad support among the scientific community, I merely noted that such people exist and correlate well with loudly complaining in a manner which you most certainly were not doing.
But let's cut the crap, shall we? You indeed were, and I indeed was. And your original post was complaining about the evil cabal of climate scientists and their bogus theory of anthropogenic global warming. Anyone could see that. Sure, you tried to be vague about it, but the stuff about scientists "forcing their ideology on a skeptical populace" and harming the economy and restricting freedoms (because the freedom to screw over other people is the most essential freedom of all, of course) is a classic AGW denialist stance. Nobody else makes that specific set of claims, particularly the "oh they're going to destroy the economy" line.
And now we come to the central point of the matter, and why your original post was was modded down as a troll. You are claiming that a scientific theory with decades of research, enormous amounts of evidence, broad consensus amongst the relevant experts, and no denial by any international or national scientific body is a fraud, mere ideology-pushing. You are accusing the scientific community (not just climatology, it'd have to be far larger than just that to work) of conspiracy and deception on a massive, unprecedented scale, which somehow over all these years has not had a single insider coming out with the truth. And you are making these accusations without the slightest shred of evidence to show that said theory is wrong, and certainly not enough to prove that it is the product of some immense conspiracy.
You're talking about "research and facts", so let's see what you've got to support your position. Otherwise, your troll moderation was wholly deserved.