Why Do Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?

[C C]

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/0...nbach-text

EXCERPT: We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change—faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative. And there’s so much talk about the trend these days—in books, articles, and academic conferences—that science doubt itself has become a pop-culture meme. In the recent movie Interstellar, set in a futuristic, downtrodden America where NASA has been forced into hiding, school textbooks say the Apollo moon landings were faked.

In a sense all this is not surprising. Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before. For many of us this new world is wondrous, comfortable, and rich in rewards—but also more complicated and sometimes unnerving. We now face risks we can’t easily analyze.

[...] In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.” But that method doesn’t come naturally to most of us. And so we run into trouble, again and again....

[Magical Realist]

There's an inherent distrust by many smart people in the established paradigm. The fact that so much must be taken as unquestionable and true based on the authority of experts. It is a pattern we only recently came out of with the religion and patriotism of the 1950's. In a post 70's world we have learned to be leery of institutionalized epistemology--of reality and illusion as defined for us by the socially respected and the traditionally honored. There is also an intuition that if science can replace religion so completely, filling in every nook and cranny of the old theistic universe, then it must be the same sort of thing. An ideology of dogmas and theories we are morally obliged to believe in and support along with everyone else. When was the last time we huddled together to sing the praises of a systematic worldview? "And we get on our knees and pray...we won't get fooled again!"

[Yazata]

EXCERPT: We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge—from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change—faces organized and often furious opposition.

Do vaccines really face 'furious opposition'? I don't think so. What people typically oppose is the idea of the government ordering parents to vaccinate their children. Some people believe that kind of thing should be a matter of parental choice. My point is that this isn't really a scientific question at all, it's a politico-ethical one about top-down power of governmental elites vs individual liberty. (Its motivation isn't all that different than the motivation for abortion rights, except that the latter wraps itself in all the 'feminist' associations.)

To the extent that people do have doubts about vaccines, part of the fault lies with the media. Not so long ago, there were all kinds of headlines about military veterans suffering from mysterious illnesses that reporters were attributing to the anthrax vaccinations that the military had given them. That speculative hyperbole was ok, because it fit so well with the righteous anti-war agenda. And we all remember that legitimate scientists were not so long ago hypothesizing that autism was associated with vaccinations. Subsequently, investigators seem to have disconfirmed that hypothetical link, but did the media ever give the disconfirmation equal coverage?

Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts.

Seen from the street, 'the consensus of experts' is nothing more than the familiar age-old argument from authority. People are being told to uncritically believe whatever the elites in white coats tell them. (Not unlike the older pronouncements from elites in priestly robes, whom it's supposedly become smart to doubt.)

When laypeople aren't in a position to weight the science, they are forced to make their assessments of scientists' credibility based on their own assessments of scientists' knowledge (hard for laypeople to judge, it often reduces to institutional affiliation), truthfulness, objectivity and lack of personal bias. Those aren't strictly scientific issues either.

There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative. And there’s so much talk about the trend these days—in books, articles, and academic conferences—that science doubt itself has become a pop-culture meme.

A what?? The whole concept of "pop-culture memes" is a pop-culture meme.

I think that part of the problem is the politicization of so much of higher education since the baby-boomers took it over. That's made scientists seem like partisans in the eyes of the public. There's a lot less public faith in scientific objectivity and impartiality, in the idea that scientists form their opinions based strictly on reason and evidence, and not on what the scientists subjectively want to be the case. The general public has the unsettling feeling that a lot of what they are being told by 'science' is rhetoric designed to manipulate them.

In this bewildering world we have to decide what to believe and how to act on that. In principle that’s what science is for. “Science is not a body of facts,” says geophysicist Marcia McNutt, who once headed the U.S. Geological Survey and is now editor of Science, the prestigious journal. “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.” But that method doesn’t come naturally to most of us. And so we run into trouble, again and again....

And that's precisely the problem. This woman seems to imagine that the importance of science is that it serves as the intellectual basis for activism. The problem that people like myself face is determining whether the body of facts (which she doesn't seem think are all that important) are what drives the activist agendas, or whether it's the agendas that determine which 'facts' scientists tend to favor. Presumably it's still believed that the 'laws of nature' are facts, otherwise it's hard to see why beliefs should to be based on them.