I’m not arguing that no one should be entitled to express a view on a factual matter, or to vote on it unless they have spent 10 years learning about it. No one can be an expert on everything, and trusting the people who are - the IPCC and other sources you listed in the case of climate science - is the appropriate thing to do as a default position. But you seem to be suggesting that “don’t try to understand the subject, don’t look at the evidence, just trust in the Experts” is an appropriate message to give people. I hope that’s not what you are saying, because that is disturbingly authoritarian (not to mention completely antithetical to fighting ignorance).
Expert consensus has been wrong enough times in that past to warrant caution on accepting it uncritically: facilitated communication, recovered memory therapy, Satanic ritual abuse, trans fats, cholesterol in food, freely prescribing opioid painkillers because long-acting ones ‘aren’t addictive’. And this isn’t an academic discussion; all of these caused real and significant harm to people. The idea that traditional and social media should censor anyone who disagrees with the current consensus is an alarming one, and disturbingly popular on the left.
Neither of you should be arguing that your position is valid because you’ve done lots of reading. WTF. That’s not even an argument. If you’re going to have a debate, you should be showing them the evidence, which you ought to be pretty familiar with after 10 years of study. It’s said that ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’; but you can’t take knowledge away again. The only cure is more knowledge. If your ‘person of a conservative bent’ knows a few studies that contradict the consensus on climate change, you need to show him the 100s that agree with it. And if someday on a different subject you discover the consensus is based not on 100 published studies, but zero, then maybe it is you who needs to rethink just how reliable that consensus is.
Oh, and you can fuck off with the ‘disingenuous’. There’s nothing disingenuous about arguing for something you believe in, and I’m tired of these bullshit insults and accusations. I’m sure you can come up with better arguments if you try.
The disingenuous part from you is to pretend that was not done, even in the SDMB, and that was not enough for many contrarians and willful deniers. Still, though, that is what I continue to do; but what me and others like @wolfpup did and do is also ignored by you.
Sure it is, as usual the disingenuousness comes when the one believing a wrong thing continues ad nauseam by willfully ignoring the evidence presented already.
I mentioned. upthread (I believe it was in this thread) but the issue is the distribution of voters and elected officials is not equal anymore. The change has been rapid, IMHO taking place mostly since the 2020 election among elected officials and since the 2016 election among the voters. We no longer have a bell shaped distribution from left to right. The Democratic Party. is mostly concentrated in the center left and is wagging a small radical fringe on the far left. The Republican Party is mostly concentrated on the far right, and the tiny tail on the center right is trying to wag the huge dog on the far right, but has no chance of actually succeeding in doing this. Therefore the positions of the far left and far right may be both equally far from the mainstream, but the far right has a lot more support and potential ability to get their agenda enacted than the left does.
Did you happen to see those three little words “in the past”? They are kind of important.
But after reading about it again, it seems facilitated communication was always controversial, so I shouldn’t have given that as example. You can replace it with the idea of continental drift, which was widely rejected up until the 1960s.
There’s a middle ground between “just trust uncritically” and “try to understand the subject” (because, as you say, we can’t be experts in everything). Our degree of confidence should be based not only on the consensus of experts, worldwide, but on the fact that their data and methods are publicly available and scrutinized and debated.
This is a pretty sorry list; out of the set of all areas of science and expertise we got two that were fringe science at best, one idea that maybe caught on in the US, and maybe one that landed (trans fats).
And with this last one, it’s worth revisting how we know things. We gain confidence in a model based on its predictions and inferences. The claim that trans fats were safe was at best a default assumption, scientists that made such a claim prior to more detailed data were wrong to do so. Claims about climate change are not like this.
I’m not saying claims about climate change are like that. It wasn’t me who brought up climate change and I’m not disputing it. I’m saying not every subject is so well studied, not every consensus is so well founded (or claimed consensus, sometimes it is the press that is guilty of misrepresenting how strong the evidence is).
Yes, doctors who advised us that vegetable shortening containing trans fats was heathier than traditional saturated fats were wrong to do so. Should anyone who disagreed with them have been banned from talking about it on the SDMB back then?
Yes, and you seemed to imply that wrongful “expert” thinking of the past means that all science is flawed. I’d say that it’s not science’s fault and blame it on ratings-hungry media. Scientific procedure can last for decades through peer review, but it can be prematurely countermanded with hysteria and moral outrage due to shock-inducing headlines, like stem cell research. Dr. Frankenstein, the peasants are storming the gate, armed with pitchforks and torches.
In the course of the pandemic the Wuhan Lab Leak theory has been proposed, considered, dismissed, derided, derided some more, and resurrected as a possibility that requires further investigation. Now, I very much doubt this pandemic is something that was started in a lab but it can’t be said that it’s a possibility that’s been scientifically eliminated either. At least not to my knowledge.
Science has a long track record of reaching one conclusion and on further research and new evidence, reaching another. Which does not in any way imply there is not settled science on various matters. Nor is it controversial to suggest that scientists sometimes get it wrong makes the scientific process imperfect. Most of us surely agree it’s an admirable feature of science that it is self-correcting rather than dogmatic.
@DemonTree, it seems we’re largely in agreement then.
I was just trying to head off any “what the <bleep> do we know” nonsense. The key thing is to appreciate that there are levels of confidence, and climate change is way over in the high confidence end for a thousand good reasons.
Has it though? I know that’s the impression some might get from following US media.
But in science circles, it was always considered possible, but very unlikely, and still is. No change.
I know some politicians have accused Fauci of a U-turn, but I can’t find any time he ruled out the lab leak, nor him saying it’s likely now, so what’s the change?
One can certainly understand why. You couldn’t trust the Trump administration not to lie about the time of day. So any suggestion they made of this being a virus leaked from a lab had huge overtones of bigotry on top of their casual relationship with truth and facts. Media that wasn’t the propaganda branch of the Trump administration dismissed it as such.
When the Biden administration said, ‘It’s worth looking into…’, the media was much less critical of the suggestion. In fact, they were not critical at all.
Now, among the scientific community, everyone may well have yawned. But most people aren’t exposed to the inside baseball of scientific circles.
But I see the point you’re making, and I used a bad example in the post to which you responded.
If you don’t know enough about American politics to know that Palin was a big part of the Tea Party, maybe you shouldn’t be commenting on that part of the conversation? When the Tea Party are held up as “good” conservatives, that means Palin is included.
Thing is that even on the virus issue, a lot of the narrative from the right has been based on dogmatism. Now, that dogmatism would then be a relatively harmless thing in the background if science or experts were consulted more than tweets, but that has not been the case. Starting with a denial of what modern biologists are saying about evolution, to denials about what climate science and vaccine science are telling us, dogmatic positions rule the day for a conservative party in the US.
There are many, many examples of groupthink in science. What makes science work is not that it’s a system for finding really smart people and giving them expertise, but that it insists on objective proof for assertions.
There are no left-wing vs right-wing factions regarding the existence od the Higgs Boson, because we have objective tests that satisfy everyone. This is why Karl Popper said that falsifiable prediction is a key component of real science.
We have far too many ‘sciences’ now that push unfalsifiable theories and have them validated through consensus. Freudian Psychoanalysis was accepted for many decades mainly because Freud was a ‘Great Man’, and his theories were unfalsifiable. They also turned out to be horseshit.
Another example would be ulcers, which were ‘known’ to be caused by stress and for decades were treated with things like sedatives or anti-depressants. It took a lot of time to change that consensus.
Consensus opinion is even more dangerous when it is used to censor opposing viewpoints and dismiss challenges to orthodoxy.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” - Richard Feynman
That said, if you are a layman and aren’t really equipped to evaluate the evidence, then the consensus of experts is usually your best guide, and you should be skeptical of fringe thinkers who claim that everyone else is wrong. They might be correct, and you should keep an open mind to further data, but the way to bet is that the consensus is right.
I understand the desire to distance yourself from a variety of specific individuals (Palin, Trump, etc…). But it cannot be denied that they were integral to some specific ideologies that you in fact support. I realize you don’t get to choose who represents those views, nor which lunatic opportunists gets on that train. But when you find yourself on an express train going in the right general direction but about to go off the rails, perhaps it’s too late to jump for your life and claim you didn’t know it was all going to end up a train wreck.
At some point you have to take responsibility for buying that ticket.