Vox and others stealth-editing articles, people yelling at you if you don't blindly believe the CDC/WHO, etc.
Science by its very nature is heretical, questioning, skeptical. "Belief" in science is exactly what we should not be doing, yet is pushed by the academic elites.
I’m slightly surprised to see this line of thinking in HN. The so-called “Belief” in science is not driven by blind faith that what people are saying are true. It’s that you understand that before something is believed it goes through a rigorous system of fact checking / experimental confirmation. So if something is considered by people from different fields as true, then it likely is. But as you said, it’s questioning and skeptical so if new data is put forward then it can adjust. Science isn’t just about being right, it’s a system of truth finding and understanding.
>> The so-called “Belief” in science is not driven by blind faith that what people are saying are true. It’s that you understand that before something is believed it goes through a rigorous system of fact checking / experimental confirmation.
Right. None of which happened with the proclamations by the CDC/WHO who also had potential perverse incentives. Globally appointed scientists are not the arbiters of science. That is my biggest issue with the "believe science" movement.
> So if something is considered by people from different fields as true, then it likely is.
This is actually very unscientific, a good chunk of what we currently hold to be true within science disproved previous science. A good example of really strong, good and useful science that was later replaced is Newtonian mechanics.
In reality, science is never finished, but the prevailing view throughout time is "we have most of it figured out" and time and time again this is proven false. Hopefully it continues to be.
And it might not be comforting to confront, but yes, the vast majority of people's belief in science is not analytical or rational, it is dogmatic. It doesn't mean the particular scientific things people believe are wrong, but most people, even scientists themselves, hold a lot of beliefs dogmatically and the idea that it is rational is protection of the ego and comparable to belief in divine wisdom.
You only highlighted one sentence of what I said but left out the part where I said:
> if new data is put forward then it can adjust.
Which is essentially the same as the ideas you put forward.
Also, coming from a Physics background, I would argue that to say that Newtonian mechanics has been completely replaced is false. There are more accurate models of the universe especially as we go to a quantum level or levels approaching the speed of light, but for most models it still works. As the saying goes, “all models are wrong, but some models are more useful than others”. Newtonian mechanics still works, but it doesn’t work all the time.
But main thing is, we are in agreement that Science is not finished; there is a balance between being open to knowing that there might be a better model compared to what we know now, but until it disproves what we know now (or explains things out current models can’t and can be verified experimentally), there is no reason to not trust our currently accepted and verified ones.
> It’s that you understand that before something is believed it goes through a rigorous system of fact checking / experimental confirmation
To be honest, the way you’ve phrased this makes it sound like you’ve totally bought in to state secular scientismic dogma.
The entire concept of “fact checking” (outsourcing your rational facilities to journalists and e-celebs) is diametrically opposed to actual scientific thought.
It’s also completely false that before “something is believed” (by which I think you mean is ensconced as scientismic dogma by the cathedral) it is subject to actual “experimental confirmation” (under any reasonable interpretation of that term). How many times has the FDA changed the official “nutrition science” dietary recommendations over the last 50 years? The entire time, they’ve claimed their approach has been evidence-based, which may be true in some narrow sense, but the predictive confidence of their claims are so bad and noisy that they keep changing the official “scientific” beliefs.
This is not unique to nutrition. Many politically relevant fields have very strong-sounding dogmatic claims made from on high with what is actually extremely weak evidence.
Vox and others stealth-editing articles, people yelling at you if you don't blindly believe the CDC/WHO, etc.
Science by its very nature is heretical, questioning, skeptical. "Belief" in science is exactly what we should not be doing, yet is pushed by the academic elites.