Wait you want ME to personally conduct every single experiment that led to language? the internet? books? You do realize that peer review and testing for failure are the reason we can trust science to work right? Tell me you don’t do all the calculations for Relativity between your GPS unit and the pair (or more) of satellites orbiting the earth that will be in communication with your GPS unit so you know precisely how much you need to compensate for time dilation and its effects on the triangulation between the 3 objects every single time you turn the thing on? Do You?
I specifically asked you where it is OTHER than the supernatural that knowledge could come from, you answered with this nonsense. I cannot tell if this is deliberate dishonesty or what?
Lets try one last time, Where does knowledge of the world we live in come from if not from experiment and the sharing of the knowledge gained from experiment?
A Priori, A posteriori, things you can know while sitting on your couch…like All bachelors are single men. Without Language what would you know of the world? A Priori requires you to know something of the world, for example you cannot possibly know, A Priori that all bachelors are single men if you don’t know what a bachelor is, if you have no concept of single/married in the first place.
And it has nothing to do with the OP whatsoever. Unless you are disputing the idea that food/all that other stuff in the op comes from some place else that is…and I am still waiting for where that other place is?
Sorry to further spam this thread, but I’m not happy with how I put this:
Obviously science doesn’t “make” a model useful, it just makes us aware of its possible utility.
And the “while it is making correct predictions” implies I believe scientific theories are routinely refuted, which I do not.
Tentative hypotheses are routinely shown to be false.
Established, repeatable scientific theories are overturned much less often. Usually the closest we get is needing to refine the model to incorporate a new domain of data. This usually means we are coming to a greater understanding of reality (as opposed to fudging).
If anyone is actually interested in this, especially as it relates to the myriad concepts that constitute “evolution,” here is a truly marvelous article you have NO excuse for avoiding - Evolutionary Enigmas. I could get to it from a proxy so it’s not firewalled.
The ultimate point of several that are made is that even seemingly sagacious biases still skew both the data and its interpretation and must ALWAYS be questioned. Actually, it’s not quite that preachy. The bias at issue is something similar to Occam’s Razor. It dictated that it was unlikely that the same complex system would evolve twice. However that not only turned out to be wrong in the case of JC’s but may have been obscuring some underlying truths - maybe not, but the point is, the bias worked so often it became seductive.
Hmmm, the lacuna ate my post. OK, there was originally something in there saying that the article focuses on a class of animals known as comb jellyfish but you’ll have to take my word for that now I suppose. My cat will vouch for me.
I think a lot of the animosity the people have for science comes when it starts to disagree with things that they “know are true” or are “just common sense”. People can see that lizard’s eggs hatch into more lizards and don’t hatch into birds so the reject evolution. Telling them that it is complicated and that scientists know better conflicts with their ego. Further they can point to examples where scientists are found to be wrong (usually proven by other scientists). So they believe that they are just as likely to be right as the scientists are, particularly when the scientific explanation is just a bunch of gobbledygook that contradicts what to them is plain as day.
I was amused by the Franklin anecdote, and suspect that the same forces are in play with regard to the rights denial of climate change. Since the first beginning of religion along with creation, the weather has always been the province of god. He brings the storms, waters the fields and parches the land, and, save prayer, nothing that humans could do could affect it. Saying that emissions humans are having an effect on the weather via CO2 emissions are now taking this out of gods hands and putting it in our own.
I have certainly made the mistake of lumping them together. The basic idea of the op is still essentially the same just expanded to include the above.
No time to add more to this headed out to work.
I think maybe money has a much bigger part on the major push against climate change. You just have to look at where the opposition comes from, who leads it. It’s not scientists and it’s not grass roots movements.
Most of the time people reject science they can’t understand or that goes against personal prejudice, but sometimes it’s just for personal gain.
The issue with society and science is that science is an exercise in logic and humans are not naturally logical. We’ve evolved to be good at spotting patterns, even ones that aren’t really there, to be risk averse, and all these sorts of things aren’t all that compatible with straight logic.
In all of that, though, we do generally come around to new scientific facts over time, but that is becoming less and less true. I think part of that is because some of these things, while difficult to grasp when not thinking that way, are provable in a way that the average person can understand. But now we get into things like Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, and those conclusions fly directly in the face of our every day experiences. That is, I can do a simple experiment and see the concepts of Newtonian physics at work, but conceptualizing a significant fraction of c as the speed of light, mass warping space-time, and basically everything in QM, there’s no way anyone can meaningfully verify it.
Sure, we can tell people that a lot of smart people figured it out, and such and such a device depends on that, but when you really get down to it, to someone layman, how do they decide who to believe? Science has gotten abstract enough that the concepts are difficult or impossible to be brought down to the level of the average person and maintain enough of their shape in the analogy as to still be useful.
And then you get to things like evolution and climate change, rather than dealing with layers of abstraction, we’re dealing with issues of scale. And those are just made worse when you have people who are threatened by them, philosophically, monetarily or whatever, and so their own irrationalities just feed into other people’s.
Lightening rods and relativity do nothing to contradict religion.
Evolution does, at least for conservative Christians. The Bible says “God made the world”, not “E=MC^3”.
I get the idea that a lot of people deny climate change because they don’t want to be told to use those stupid energy efficient light bulbs or drive small clown cars around or even worse be forced to rid the bus, so it’s denial based on their lifestyle. (Right now I side with the deniers because of this, even though I know it’s true and hope that a solution can be found that doesn’t devastate our lifestyle.
It is truly difficult to explain the anti-vaccination movement.
It appears to be rooted in a deep mistrust of governmental authority.
This is an endemic part of the American culture. It has its good points and its bad points, but when you risk the health of thousands of children’s lives by failing to inoculate your child, then you are a threat to public health. Reality trumps belief. If more children die because of an anti-vaccination position than what has been normative for decades, then perhaps you need to reevaluate your basic premises.
You have to keep in mind that also the “devastate our lifestyle” point is also exaggerated by the same deniers.
One fun example of how many are not aware of the progress made: how the electrical White Zombie drag car leaves gas muscle cars in the dust.
The main reason I think one should look at that example is the “Eureka” faces on the people that find what was inside the car that beat them.
Obligatory comic to read:
The sordid tale of Dr. Wakefield and his conflict of interest that caused most of the anti-vaccine movements of today.
I like the end lines that apply to some of the main reasons IMHO why most hang ups with science are with us today, false equivalence used by the media on scientific subjects and relying on just plain ignorance.
Reality absolutely, positively does not trump belief. Reality is trumped by belief. Otherwise, the majority of the planet would not subscribe to some religious belief. Reality (that life isn’t fair, that you cease to exist when you die, etc.) finishes a poor second to comforting, irrational belief.
Re the debate about science vs. knowledge: every single piece of knowledge in the entire human spectrum is a result of the scientific method. Hypotheses were formed and tested. The only variation over time has been in the methodology (for instance, trial and error, though inefficient, is indeed a use of the scientific method).
In the Netherlands there are different reasons for people being sceptical of science.
First, as GIGObuster stated, the media is often misquoting or just stating plain wrong facts. Moreover, the media holds opposing groups to certain studies in the same regard as qualified scientists (the opposition can be almost anyone, no qualification required). This leads to conflicting statements per day/week.
And in 2011 there has been a scandal involving a professor in social psychology who invented his test results for over 55 of his publications. Link (of course the bigger problem here is that the scientific community did not “catch” him earlier)
This leads to mistrust and confusion because the general public doesn’t check the media for what they are reporting.
Hiring qualified scientific journalists that can dissect scientific journals and present them to masses would certainly help the current state of mind in the NL. However, it seems the newspapers are doing just the opposite by closing their science departments.
Because it just doesn’t matter. There’s little to no cost, on an individual level, in believing crazy stuff. Thanks to the wonders of compartmentalization even if you work in a technical field you can hold contradictory views, as long as you do your job.
And there can be advantages, like joining a new social circle, meeting like minded people, and feeling like you’re in the know or working for some great cause.
There are those who don’t actually understand science, don’t understand how it makes the life that they are living right now possible, because it isn’t in front of their nose.
And those are the people who are against investing in science, and indeed are against scientific progress.
So why the hell are we spending money on probes to comets, and orbiting telescopes when they could be spending it on mending potholes in highways ?
Because a lot of people are fucking idiots. Most people can use an iPhone or drive a car or turn on a television. Very few of them know anything about the technology that makes them work. The people praying in the church don’t need to know anything about meteorology or structural engineering or static electricity.
Evolution is one of those areas of science where there is no cost in denying it. If people deny the realities of structural engineering, buildings fall down. Prayer does not get a airplane from New York to Los Angeles or put a rocket on the moon. But if someone chooses to not believe in evolution, it’s not like evolution is going to stop working.
I’ve often thought that there is a cap on human advancement because for every Einstein or Bill Gates or Edison, we have to make a million people who not only don’t add much value, but actually put a drain on progress with their dumbassitude.
Ah well, but you are completely mistaken, and are posing an utterly false dichotomy.
When people start blustering about the supernatural as soon as the contradictions inherent in their simplistic versions of empiricism or materialism are pointed out, it is a sure sign that they are way out of their intellectual depth.
All of those things are examples of how science is fact. You’re railing against immoral uses of an objective truth that you are tacitly admitting to.
I could use the internet to access morally objectionable websites if I so wished, but that wouldn’t be a proper basis for a belief system in which the internet doesn’t exist.
Sorry for the Godwin, but last I heard, Mein Kampf was something that Hitler put down in writing. That doesn’t in any way mean that writing itself is a false technology that deserves to be treated with scepticism and hostility.
