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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."
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.
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.
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.
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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There is no polite way to tell someone that the science directly conflicts with the religious/political/social tenets that they've been taught were sacred since they were a child. It's not the understanding that's the problem. It's the *implications* that people have a hard time accepting. Some people just can't handle the idea that Pluto's original classification as a "planet" was a mistake, after having been taught that it was a planet for their entire lives. Uncertainty is scary. And the idea that new science can come along and just yank away your most basic beliefs at any time is just too much for most common folk to bear.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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?
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.
The truth is very slippery.
Truth isn't slippery. Truth is absolute. The problem is that things are presented as truth when they are not. A scientist does a study and finds that cows fed fatty diets die of heart attacks more often than regular cows. That is truth. But that study is published, and by the time it gets to the ordinary human it comes out as a health book explaining why all fat is bad. That isn't truth. It is an interpretation: a generalization from a subset of scientific information summarized and handed down.
The pseudo-scientists, news reporters, and pundits purport to offer truth when they offer interpretation. And after a while, the average person doesn't know what to believe any more.
We see this on Slashdot all the time. A paper published in Nature, summarized by a reporter, published, blogged, and respun until "I found a way to improve transistor density 2.5%" becomes a Slashdot headline like "AI robots will take over the world by next Tuesday." Somewhere... there was a grain of truth behind that headline.
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
"...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
A scientist does a study and finds that cows fed fatty diets die of heart attacks more often than regular cows. That is truth.
No, that is theory, which the study failed to disprove. What is truth is that in the population studied by the scientist, death from heart attack was positively correlated with body fat percentage; and, generalizing, that there is a particular low p-value for observing that correlation if the hypothesis were not true and the sample were unbiased. Truth may be "absolute", but only when expressed in the correctly slippery context. You can blame the media for blowing things out of proportion, but you also have to realize what the GP is getting at.
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.