this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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[โ€“] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago (6 children)
[โ€“] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That's unironically the point. Science should not be blindly trusted.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

i mean i get the impulse, but if we were to blindly trust any sort of knowledge system, science is the one to trust, right? like, any downsides of trusting scientific consensus are necessarily larger when trusting information sources that aren't scientific, and if you follow through with trusting science blindly, you might ignorantly begin to believe that empirical testing and intellectual honesty is necessary for determining the truth of your beliefs!

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I would think it's more about knowing how to trust it. See some news article about "This study said X", don't take it as fact. See a study that has been done numerous times by different groups that corroborate a result and you can have a much higher degree of trust in it. There is a reason the scientific method is a continuous circle, it requires a feedback loop of verifying results and reproducibility. The current issue is clickbait headlines getting the attention, people see it's "Science" and blindly trust it and it becomes a religion like any other.

[โ€“] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.?

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Trust in the process of Science, not its insitutions.

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

unfortunately my dad who has a diploma in engineering and is working in that field for probably 30y now is still prone to it.

Whoever spread those conspiracies should die a slow and painful death to experience a fraction of what they brought on to a lot of families and friends.