this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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What do you mean by "trusting in science"? Science isn't meant to be trusted, it's meant to be verified.
Given the reproducibility crisis occurring right now, nobody should be "trusting" in science as a matter of course- we should be verifying the decades of unverified research and dismissing the unverifiable research.
We fucked up the entire field of Alzheimer's research for nearly a quarter century by "trusting in science". We still bias towards publishing new research in academia over reproducing existing research. Science has a big problem with credibility right now and saying "oh just trust in science" isn't the solution.
Ok, but I do not have access to labratories or ways to run my proper experiments. Am I supposed to just stay on the fence about everything that I can't personally test, or should I trust in the consensus from the scientific community regarding stuff like climate change, virology, etc.?
The proper scientific answer to that question is not to trust or not trust. You should absolutely do your own testing, whether that means asking good questions of the experts, reading the existing research carefully, up to and including reproducing the experiment yourself where practicable.
If an experiment is impossible to reproduce, then you should be asking yourself what good its results are.
That is an impossible standard for folks to live by. I can't do that, and neither can you.
When I say I "trust in science" I'm talking about the process and the method. Which means I trust the results when people follow that process. i also trust that the answers may change if there's new information, because that's part of the process.
I don't have the equipment to perform all those experiments. Even if I did, I wouldn't trust the results because I don't have the education to set up, run, and interpret an experiment more complicated than improving my chili recipe.
So, in much the same way that I trust a mechanic to fix my transmission and a.plumber to fix my pipes, I trust a scientist to follow the scientific method.
That's what "trusting science" means.
The scientific method isn't an epistemological framework, it's a framework for practicing science.
And what part of what I said made you think I don't know that?
I'm aspedantic as anyone, but at this point you're being antagonistic. Either you legitimately don't know you're doing it, or you're intentionally trying to make people feel stupid. But you definitely know what people mean when they say they "trust" science.
Please stop. You're making pedants like me look bad.
Why assume I'm being pedantic? The social media landscape is littered with "I fucking love science" clickbait, "amazing nature" accounts that are literally AI generated photos, hell, the entire fields of evolutionary psychology and nutrition ought to be a wholesale indictment of our contemporary scientific establishment.
This isn't pedantry, I am serious as a heart attack.
I mostly assumed you were being pedantic when you tried to make out that I thought science was epistemological rather than methodological when I had mentioned science as a methodology in my previous post. This lead me to three possibilities (well, likely possibilityies, anyway):
Now, you're pretty clearly not dumb, so I just eliminated 2. That left me with 1 and 3 as the most likely. I played the odds that someone who was clever couldn't possibly have missed the point of the initial comment so many times, so I went with 3.
What I didn't count on was possibility 4: you've had to deal with so many morons who don't know what "science" means that your default assumption is that people mean something dumb when they say "I trust science."
Which is my bad, really. I should have asked. I apologize.