"I think science has earned its lack of credibility with the public. If you kick me in the balls for 20-years, how do you expect me to close my eyes and trust you?"
I'm really happy to see that someone else sees this. I've been harping on this for a long time -- that the reason people believe things like anti-vaxx propaganda is not because they are idiots but because scientific authorities, the media, and the medical establishment have not earned their trust.
People subscribe to kooky conspiracy theories and fringe/quack medical ideas because those advancing those points of view appear more credible than our society's institutions. Much of that appearance of credibility is by default -- it's more that our institutions have ruined their own credibility by being overconfident or in some cases actually deceptive. I personally think it extends way beyond medicine. When the president tells us we're invading Iraq because it has "weapons of mass destruction," and that turns out to be almost entirely hot air, should people be considered stupid for suddenly trusting Alex Jones more than they trust the POTUS?
Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. In addition when you have someone trust and then stab them in the back, the emotional reaction from that is far worse than if you never had any trust to begin with. Betrayal inspires some of the deepest negative emotions.
Edit:
Another phenomenon that I think is at work, especially with people like Alex Jones and wacky conspiracy theories, is a kind of "fuck you factor" that they have. Believing such things and perpetuating them is an act of (often subconscious) protest -- akin to things like calling yourself a "Satanist" in protest against fundamentalist religion. You might call these kinds of things "protest beliefs."
I have a friend who leans toward the view that we didn't land on the moon. He's a very intelligent person. I personally believe -- and I've told him this -- that this "belief" is more of a big fuck you to the backward-and-sideways direction NASA and America in general has taken post-Apollo. "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you." He didn't really deny that, just kind of shrugged.
The blame is misplaced here, though. There's no real avenue for science to interact with the public currently (except for /r/AskScience, which is a terrific development). A vast majority of the misleading described is perpetuated by news headlines ending in question marks and "doctors" with mail order degrees trying to sell books.
If there's any blame to be placed on scientific institutions it's not that they are bad at communicating to the public, but rather that they need to start communicating to the public. This is really a question of incentives - what do scientists have to gain from communicating reasonable conclusions about their results? And how can they compete with exaggeration by media outlets?
What about cases where prestigious scientific institutions have deeply held and advanced utterly wrong ideas for decades?
Nutritional science is particularly bad in this regard. The recommendations that were advanced from (roughly) the 70s through the 90s lead to obesity and heart disease.
One thing in particular comes to mind: margarine.
I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever communicated? Vastly and systematically exaggerating your knowledge and certainty of something in order to present a "unified message to the public" is dangerously close to just lying.
I also think science is much more vulnerable to corruption by moneyed interests than many people will admit. Research payola is very real.
While I'm personally pretty convinced the CO2 problem is real, I do not blame people from being skeptical when government-backed science and jet setting rich do-gooders tell them they must accept higher energy costs and possibly a reduced standard of living in order to combat a threat they cannot directly perceive. It's particularly easy to understand in cases like China and India where fossil fuel energy is lifting billions out of abject poverty. I could afford to pay 3-4X for energy. A Chinese peasant or an American member of the working poor can barely afford to pay 1.01X for energy.
The view on Fat moved a lot less than you might think.
People used to eat a lot of fat which we still think is a bad idea. More recently we found that eating too little fat was also a bad idea.
As to dietary guidelines, if you pick a target for a 2,000 calorie diet and someone on a 5,000 calorie a day diet tries to hit that same target there is a clear miscommunication going on. And yes, you can eat a relatively healthy 5,000 calorie a day diet if you’re tall and active enough. Or, you can rapidly become morbidly obese on 3k/day if you’re short and inactive.
PS: I would suggest to most people that they talk with a registered dietitian nutritionist (RDN). Diet is far from a one size fit's all thing.
We used to think that eating too much saturated fats caused heart disease. We switched people onto different types of fats. Tragically, we switched people onto trans-fats which we know now are terrible.
The current advice (avoid saturated fat) is questioned by some calm scientists.
It's frustrating that shifting scientific advice provides space for fucking wingnuts to spout nonsense.
Shifting advice coupled with dogmatic and unflinching posturing of authority provides ample space for fucking wingnuts to spout nonsense.
It even works against religions -- this sort of thing led to the protestant reformation. "I am infallible, but the last Pope was wrong..." If you really look into the history of it, the protestants led by people like Calvin were often as bad as or worse than the Catholic Church and the understanding of theology was often quite crackpot. They gained power because the Mother Church discredited itself through hypocrisy, corruption, and self-contradiction.
Your post is full of the science that people no longer trust. There is plenty of evidence that fat doesn't cause weight gain or heart attacks, and that exercise doesn't lead to weight loss because it makes you hungry. I don't know the correct answer, but I know there is a lot of uncertainty now, and there seemed to be no uncertainty in the food pyramid days.
Right, and perhaps one of the biggest things to understand is that, while thermodynamics does apply to human exercise and consumption and is really easy to understand and reason about, the conclusions you get from that tend to be overly simplistic. The problem is a fallacy along the lines of "all humans are perfectly uniform, rational decision-makers." Instead different foods release different chemicals in your brain over different timelines, causing your cravings for food to be different.
Just to take the simplest case, there is something like a 20 minute delay between food hitting your stomach and any sort of satiety signal hitting your brain. So if you have an abundance of easy-to-eat food, then you may end up consuming more calories than someone who doesn't. (You could call this the "second bowl of cereal effect": when you've eaten a bowl of cereal and still feel hungry afterwards, it's because you ate too fast because you didn't want the cereal to get soggy.) Easy weight loss plan: cook your own meals, tasting along the way; by the time you're sitting down with the food you won't be quite so hungry.
And none of that picture has to do with calorie-counting. Calorie-counting is important if you can stick to it, but most people keeping informal calorie-counts will be victim to their cravings, and those cravings are dictated by parameters of the food other than the food's caloric content.
The current science does suggest eating too much fat is still bad.
EX: "The American Heart Association’s Nutrition Committee strongly advises these fat guidelines for healthy Americans over age 2:
•Eating between 25 and 35 percent of your total daily calories as fats from foods like fish, nuts, and vegetable oils."
Note both the lower and upper bound. Eating say 75% of your daily calories as fat is generally a bad idea for most people. But so is limiting yourself to 1%.
PS: This is one of those cases where oversimplification can be harmful. But, while looking at people with extremely high fat diets demonstrated a problem the translation from limit to eliminate is what most people heard.
According to that page you need to lower saturated fat to 5%-6% of calories. I'm suggesting that current science does not support the connection between saturated fat and heart disease. Nor does current science support their recommendation to cut salt. The AHA recommendations have been a dietary disaster for 30 years because they suggest that low fat food can be eaten without consequence, which has led to a massive uptake in the consumption of sugar and processed carbohydrates. And it was largely based on bad science.
> According to that page you need to lower saturated fat to 5%-6% of calories. I'm suggesting that current science does not support the connection between saturated fat and heart disease.
Studies, including recent ones, show that replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat reduces cardiovascular disease risk (IIRC, in both sexes, but moreso in men than women.) Mostly, what's changed is that we now also have evidence that replacing saturated fat with trans fat or carbohydrates is, at best, no better than just staying with saturated fat.
There is probably no harm replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, but that's not what happened based on decades of AHA and govt. recommendations. What happened was that people replaced saturated fat with simple carbohydrates and trans fats, got fat, and had heart attacks. Take a look the heart safe foods the AHA currently approves. Bagels, rice, tortillas, orange juice, potatoes, cheerios. It is a recipe for obesity and illness.
You can't just pigeonhole fats into three categories and be done.
Butyric acid and stearic acid are both saturated fatty acids, but they serve very different roles in the diet. Similarly, ALA and LA are both essential unsaturated fatty acids, but they compete for the same desaturating and lengthening enzymes in the body. So if you eat sufficient quantities of those fatty acids in the wrong ratio, you can still see symptoms of dietary deficiency. And different people produce different quantities of those enzymes or different variations with greater or lesser effectiveness.
The AHA made insufficiently informed recommendations, and the nonscientific population followed them, often by replacing animal-based fats with vegetable-based fats with vastly different fatty acid ratios.
These were sometimes chemically treated to turn them into trans-fats, which in a key-keyhole model of body chemistry is like bending a kink into the key to your front door, then jamming it into the lock with a hammer and forcing it with vise-grips every time you wanted into your house. The trans fats resembled saturated fats enough to be used in the same way, but that kink in the key would cause persistent damage.
And foods manufacturers also replaced fats with sugars and sodium salts, which caused different problems.
Different foods have different fat profiles, just as they have different protein profiles. Eggs and milk have amino acid ratios that very closely match what humans need, whereas beans and rice are insufficient in isolation, but complete in combination. Similarly, beef suet, pork lard, olive oil, coconut oil, and soybean oil have different fat profiles.
We still don't know what the "best fat" food is, like we know that poultry eggs are very nearly the "best protein" food. And "fat quality" might not even be as homogenous between individuals as it is for the amino acids.
Any recommendations at this time are almost certainly unfounded or unsupported by rigorous and repeatable research. You really have to do your own homework on this one, and avoid making any conclusions based on insufficient evidence.
> There is probably no harm replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat, but that's not what happened based on decades of AHA and govt. recommendations.
One of the leading hypotheses is that omega-6 fat - which is a subcategory of polyunsaturated - is very very bad for you. So there is absolutely potential for harm in replacing saturated fat with polyunsaturated fat.
Exercise on its own doesn't lead to weight loss (in order to burn the necessary calories, you'd have to be exercising all day long), but it is not uncommon for exercise to suppress appetite, thereby reducing the calories in component of the weight loss equation. Unless of course hunger signals are being ignored, as in the case of unconscious, binge, or comfort eating.
> Exercise on its own doesn't lead to weight loss (in order to burn the necessary calories, you'd have to be exercising all day long)
Assuming that you were in perfect calorie balance before, any additional exercise without additional calorie consumption will produce a calorie deficit. This may or may not produce weight loss depending on the exercise profile and a lot of other factors (including, IIRC, what and when you eat relative to when and how you exercise), since its possible to gain weight with a calorie deficit while if you are building muscle fat enough (since fat stores more energy per unit mass than muscle.)
To be sure, there are many factors. But going by what a lot of people do, they will get a workout of thirty minutes burning maybe 200-300 calories, then reward themselves with a Big Mac at 550 calories, and they probably already had a caloric intake in excess of maintenance (hence why they are exercising to lose weight, and more likely to go for that reward). Heck, even one Snickers[1] bar can counteract that workout. Not saying this is everyone, but it seems to be a common pattern: most people don't realize they need to control their intake, even if they don't reduce it, otherwise all the exercise in the world won't lead to weight loss.
> But going by what a lot of people do, they will get a workout of thirty minutes burning maybe 200-300 calories, then reward themselves with a Big Mac at 550 calories,
The effect of exercise plus an additional Big Mac does not reinforce the claim that "exercise on its own doesn't lead to weight loss", because "plus a Big Mac" is not "on its own".
> and they probably already had a caloric intake in excess of maintenance (hence why they are exercising to lose weight, and more likely to go for that reward)
The reason why they are exercising to lose weight is probably that they have a current weight above their desired weight. That doesn't mean that they have a current calorie surplus -- plenty of people seek to lose weight when their current weight is stable but above their desired weight.
Speaking of recommendations that lead to heart disease, three sarcastic cheers for massively understating the risks associated with abstinence from alcohol. Mostly I just hear "moderate consumption is associated with some health benefits", which isn't anywhere close to conveying the findings (questionable, as always!) that not drinking is almost as risky as "heavy" drinking. Especially considering that you practically have to be a raging alcoholic to fall into the "heavy" category.
FYI: In regard to articles published in the Daily Mail about cancer research results, alcohol is still in the mixed camp, but leaning toward 'causes cancer'.
Adams has a good point relating to alcohol, though. They haven't been unable to untangle correlation and causation. I used to be a "moderate drinker" until I developed (unrelated) health problems that mean taking medication every day. When I take my meds I can't drink. These health problems are statistically likely to end me sooner than most people.
So I'm likely going to be in the "doesn't drink dies earlier than average" column, but it has nothing to do with alcohol.
"...they must accept higher energy costs and possibly a reduced standard of living in order to combat a threat they cannot directly perceive."
That's a tough one. From the perspective of a person whose livelihood depends on CO2-producing resources, or for whom the additional cost would push them into poverty, I can't blame them for feeling resistant - particularly when there is still debate as to the veracity, credibility and authenticity of the science. On the other hand, what if the climate scientists are correct? The idea that we must immediately take action or risk consequences ranging from disruption to extinction is terrifying.
It is my hope that rather than forcing a small segment of the population to fall on their swords for the rest of us, we could instead transition gently to alternatives. This requires that we heavily invest in research and development for renewable sources in addition to providing tax incentives so that this reaches price parity with fossil-fuel-derived energy. I think that's very doable, but it means making this a priority; this is why Palin's "drill baby, drill" instantly lost my vote.
And here is where the general population's mistrust in science makes us dig our own graves. You have all sorts of movements, from lobbies to NIMBYs to "environmentalist" organizations blocking transition to sustainable energy. And sadly, I just can't imagine a modern democracy really committing to an infrastructure project as big as rebuilding the power grid. We need more Elon Musks, who will push the right solutions in spite of the market, and in spite of what people say.
Honestly, I agree. In some ways when I think about the future I feel very hopeful; advancements in narrow AI and medical technology in particular are very easy to imagine as beneficial. Mostly though I feel very cynical and depressed by what appears to be the cultivation of ignorance as a virtue. I am convinced that we are fucked, barring a massive breakthrough in photovoltaic efficiency or nuclear fusion.
> Mostly though I feel very cynical and depressed by what appears to be the cultivation of ignorance as a virtue. I am convinced that we are fucked, barring a massive breakthrough in photovoltaic efficiency or nuclear fusion.
I share that. I actually suffered a short-term deppressive period because of that (as weird as it sounds, for few months I felt guilty and afraid whenever I turned on the gas stove). We have maybe 50 years to fix worldwide energy usage if we want to maintain a technological civilization, and so far every attempt at that seems to be torpedoed by a combination of lobbies and ignorant fear-mongering.
Maybe the better word for such people is 'practical'. Here in Iowa I see these boondoggle wind turbines being put up every day. They don't break even for decades. This 'sustainable' energy source is only sustained through federal subsidies. Makes you weep.
>I understand the nature of scientific theory, and that scientific theory is not dogma or absolute revealed truth, but does the public? And was that ever communicated?
Yes, people are generally not hostile to science and understand it's a best-effort work-in-progress-type thing. The problem is that the Science Zealots haven't gotten this memo, and go around flashing "studies" in peoples' faces (often completely without specificity) like it justifies something. When they do this, people get defensive. The "rejection of science" is the rejection of science as inviolable truth, dogma, religion, not the rejection of the continuing enterprise of cooperative human improvement.
If someone says "I can't even speak to someone who is anti-vax/anti-climate change/anti-same-sex marriage/etc", this is religiously motivated bigotry.
The anti-vax thing isn't even a science issue, it's fearmongering based on nothing. The burden of proof is on the people claiming all these different kinds of vaccines have negative effects.
I don't know why the hell you brought up marriage.
You have a point about people getting zealous about climate change, but I think that's a response to people's horrific innate reaction of doubling down when faced with evidence against something they believe.
The Science-as-religion movement, which I personally call fundamentalist positivism, is doing more harm to science than a million creationists and anti-vaccinationinsts and faith healers could possibly do. It undermines science from within by performing a kind of deep epistemological bait and switch -- replacing scientific epistemology at the root with religious epistemology while leaving the layers above superficially unchanged. Destroy it with fire.
I've seen this a handful of times, where someone with legit science credentials will say something like "the lesson of science is" and then follow it up with an entirely philosophical conclusion. Like "... there is no purpose to the universe" (that comes from Dr. Jerry Coyne.) I'm not aware of any scientific experiment or framework to test the hypothesis that there is or isn't a purpose to the universe, nor even the possibility of creating such an experiment. But a fairly well renowned scientist made that claim -- essentially a philosophical-religious claim -- under the label of science.
I wouldn't say that does more harm to science than creationists etc. Instead, I'd say it contributes to the same mentality. It treats science as a label for a certain belief system, rather than a label for a set of processes and the data/explanations tied to those processes. As you say, it replaces scientific epistemology with religious epistemology -- stripping away the thing that makes science universal, and replacing it with something that makes it tribal.
Well, the NSF, in order to assist with this effort, is now making 'outreach' a 20% graded portion of all grants. This is a HUGE step in the right direction, I think, galvanized by the shutdown 2 years ago. Finally, the eggheads saw that Sarah Palin decrying fruit fly research was not something to laugh at, but to be scared by.
That said, I am taking a grant writing course here in grad school, and have been specifically told that the 20% outreach portion is 'complete bull.' The grants are still graded on the feasibility portion and not much else. The PIs teaching the class were, to me at least (take it with a grain of salt), disdainful that they had to ever go out and justify their research to the general public whatsoever. I got the impression that they felt it was a gimmick to appease Washington. Their general reaction to the public, at least in one meeting, was of disinterest verging on contempt. Again, this was my read, and may be totally offbase.
> And how can they compete with exaggeration by media outlets?
Well, we've seen lately an uptake in science evangelists like Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson. Both have been around for a long while, building reputation, but as-of-late both have been on a full assault against fallacies perpetuated by the media and the like.
We need more publicly-accepted household-named science evangelists to promote science, how it works, it's principles, etc.
While pretty good about science, Neil Degrasse Tyson has aided in perpetuating misunderstandings of history and philosophy that make me shy away from supporting his work.
Thing is - the tribal caveman in us craves to hear from a wise man (or wise woman). We didn't evolve with that sort of thing being specialized. So, knowledge celebrities will be in an environment that encourages pontificating on subjects they aren't experts about.
I think that this is deeply wrong. "The Media" is a popular punching bag, but the media largely repeats what large institutions tells it. Journalists don't (for the most part) have the skills necessary to dive deep into scientific literature.
For every big "scientific" view that has an agenda behind it that either vastly overreaches the available research or lags decades behind the available research, you can generally point a finger at one or more corporations, government agencies, or not-for-profits.
GMO fearmongering? Largely environmentalist NFPs.
Breast cancer overdiagnosis? Largely cancer fundraising NFPs.
Nutritional science? Largely the government.
Let's tell pregnant women to live in a thick cocoon of craziness? Medical insurers.
If I understand you correctly, you're saying that it's not the media's fault, because the media just blindly repeats whatever they're told. This is exactly why it's the media's fault!
If a journalist doesn't have the skills to understand what they're reporting on, then they shouldn't be reporting on it. We wouldn't put up with a report on Afghanistan that says the place is full of Arabs because the reporter was told that by some nutcase and couldn't be bothered to check the CIA World Fact Book before he went on the air, but we're constantly exposed to the scientific equivalent.
The world is an inherently confusing place. Media's job is to filter out the noise and present us with the signal. Instead, they just amplify it all, and we all know that amplifying a noisy signal doesn't really help.
I'm sorry, but you're holding the media to an impossible standard. This isn't about "checking the CIA World Fact Book," it's "Read dozens of dense studies that assume PhD-level study in the relevant fields."
The media does light fact-checking, and it's exactly that fact-checking that allows institutions to set an agenda. If a reporter sees a press release about a new study in, say, the field of cancer, and they try to fact-check it, they're likely to go and talk to the American Cancer Society. Which, as it turns out, has a point of view about cancer that it promotes.
What the hell else is the journalist going to do? They Just Can't read up all the relevant literature -- that's a full time job, and they already have jobs.
Interview some random scientist whose name they pulled out of a hat? That's not likely to help.
They could at least stop making up bullshit claims in headlines and text. Research institution don't usually go saying they're 100% certain something is this-or-that and has huge implications for everything. It's the media outlets that add those things to the articles.
> What the hell else is the journalist going to do? They Just Can't read up all the relevant literature -- that's a full time job, and they already have jobs.
Well, you're telling us that Reddit and Hacker News can do what journalists can't, even though people posting there are definitely not employed to fact-check things.
>They could at least stop making up bullshit claims in headlines and text.
The problem there is that journalism has been decimated and they have to do something (to get clicks) to survive. I'm just pointing that out, not defending it.
> The media does light fact-checking, and it's exactly that fact-checking that allows institutions to set an agenda.
This is true only of some media. For example, The New Yorker has a fact-checking department that holds their journalists to high standards. Reading their long-form articles, it is clear that the writers have taken the time to understand things deeply. Nobody writes a 10,000-word essay on science the night before on a deadline.
It's quite reasonable to expect a journalist reporting on science to read dozens of articles (or review papers) about a field and to interview many scientists. It's not hard to find people with that level of understanding in a field who would be happy to write public-facing magazine articles. Many of the best science writers do.
If they can't properly fact-check what they report, then what good are they? Any monkey with a laptop can regurgitate press releases these days. I suppose this is why traditional media is rapidly becoming irrelevant.
You know, I think that the job they do is pretty important, if also kind of far from the idealized view of the media as this almost omniscient gatekeeper institution.
If someone wants to pour over tens of thousands of press releases, do some light fact-checking on them, discard the ones that are just obviously crazy or unimportant, and sort them by topic, maybe get a bit of context on them or flesh them out a little, then that strikes me as pretty useful. Certainly I don't want to deal with a raw torrent of press releases. I want someone to filter them for me, if even lightly.
If the end result is not a one-stop shop for all the truth and accuracy in the world, well, that's unfortunate, but it also strikes me as life. It'd be great if someone could just synthesize raw, objective truth out of all that data, but I don't believe that's possible. Given that it's not possible, I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And since those institutions-with-agendas are pushing their agendas in other ways than just through the media, we should probably try to address that problem at the root instead of just blaming journalists.
> It'd be great if someone could just synthesize raw, objective truth out of all that data, but I don't believe that's possible. Given that it's not possible, I won't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
What would be certainly possible though is for them to stop putting lies inside. Exaggerating claims and inventing linkbait nonsense actually requires work - work which shouldn't be done in the first place.
> If someone wants to pour over tens of thousands of press releases, do some light fact-checking on them, discard the ones that are just obviously crazy or unimportant, and sort them by topic, maybe get a bit of context on them or flesh them out a little, then that strikes me as pretty useful.
Its simple really, within a generation its just as likely they will flip on what is certain and what is uncertain so why is it not safe to wait?
There are a few things we are pretty much past the flip stage on, vaccines are one, smoking is another, but get much beyond that and its up in the air. Welcome to Woody Allen's Sleeper; hell he got it right on the phone company.
Then throw in, who watches the watchers, as in who polices those who claim to know. When you see government and education malfeasance everyday these institutions become even less likely to earn or hold the trust of the public
I think there's also a general problem with people interpreting what's communicated to them. They need great storytellers to get across the correct information with the correct nuances. Otherwise you get media institutions with bogus headlines and misleading quotes to build hype and panic. Fox News is notorious for this, but most media prefers to sell snake oil over science because people want a simple message. Unfortunately science is not always simple.
The problem here is not with science itself, but the expectation of what science is, and what it tells us, and how. People are not educated on science, period.
The popular perception is that science tells us facts about the world. This is false.
What science is, at its core, is a complete and utter acceptance of an extremely high level of doubt and uncertainty. It is living with the unknown, and working with it anyway to try to get closer to the truth.
Framed this way, science always "changing its mind" about what's right should be revered and celebrated by everyone in the world! We're looking at the advancement of civilization with our own two eyes! Not always grand and not always perfect, but that's how science works, in its own extremely productive way.
But we don't teach this. We do not teach, deeply, this version of science. No people except a chosen few will reach this level of understanding. The 99% of society which are not scientists will look at it as untrustworthy, because it always looks like it's wrong, all the time.
That is what needs to be changed. Not science itself, not what we recommend based on science—which is just the best thing that we know at the time—but the public perception of science itself. Science education must be deep, ingrained, and profound; not simply functional.
It would solve a great many problems of society if the average person were able to look at a situation with a respect for both what we know and what we do not, and understand the procedure for moving closer to truth, and respect it. It is unlikely to ever happen, but that is the systemic problem, and that is where we should direct our attention.
Adams wasn't criticizing science's updating of beliefs on new evidence.
He was criticizing the practice of shouting "Hey! We're ultra-certain about this! Very important! You've got to do this!" when the truth was more like, "We kind of have some preliminary evidence this might be bad for you, stay tuned."
(And I don't buy the claim that it's just the media overblowing this; why weren't the national academies of science criticizing the food pyramid, at least in the sense of "okay it's not actually that important to eat 11 servings of bread a day".)
The point, then, is: don't be surprised when people are skeptical in those cases where you really are deservedly confident (e.g. vaccines).
If your evidence isn't very good and prone to being updated, that's fine! Just don't pretend to be confident it it.
>>He was criticizing the practice of shouting "Hey! We're ultra-certain about this! Very important! You've got to do this!" when the truth was more like, "We kind of have some preliminary evidence this might be bad for you, stay tuned."
This is almost always a result of the "Science News Cycle."
Aside from that, there's a lot of pressure on scientists to produce actionable results. People who fund science don't really understand it, and approach it with a mindset of, "I'm investing X dollars per year into this, and I should get Y dollars in return." So scientists either fake confidence in their findings, or fake their data to support their benefactor's cause.
If it were just an issue of media hype, that would be a valid explanation for the food pyramid failure.
But it's not just that. It's the fact that a) government experts believed it b) with high confidence that c) isn't justified, and d) are so confident that they plaster it in every classroom with all their authority behind it, and e) no scientific authorities go on record saying the real state of the research in case anyone bothers to get the real story.
Well, yes, it's "Autism, autism, autism." That's why people are generally hesitant to vaccinate, and that's what the majority of the articles would be about.
I confess that I had not noticed the "Vaccines Did Not Save Us - 2 Centuries of Statistics" article, and when you mentioned it, it did give me pause. However, I went back, found it, and read it. Did you? It sounded very "sciency", with lots of graphs and data. Is it correct in it's conclusions? Should be, if it's data is correct. Is it correct in it's data? I honestly have no idea. Is my gut instinct to discount it? Yes, absolutely it is. However, I certainly can't refute any of the data it's presenting me with, so why am I so quick to discount? I shouldn't be.
You're either able to independently judge the veracity or lack of veracity of any given scientific claim, or you're not. If you're not, you need to remind yourself of that, and not be a voice in the mob. I need to remind myself of that too.
> Believing such things and perpetuating them is an act of (often subconscious) protest -- akin to things like calling yourself a "Satanist" in protest against fundamentalist religion. You might call these kinds of things "protest beliefs."
This is fascinating to me. I've read ample studies about how people do this, and I can't understand it as anything but the worst form of petulant childishness. Changing which FACTS you believe in because of personal reasons? I suppose this excludes people who don't actually believe them but just say they do, but then I guess those people aren't just stupid, they're just kind of dicks...
It makes more sense if you notice that the facts they're rebelling against are also things most people "don't actually believe ... but just say they do." Humans hold all sorts of crazy far-mode beliefs (especially about religion and morality) that completely fail to influence how they react to situations in their day-to-day lives.
Unless you're a member of the space program or know someone who is, whether the moon landing happened or didn't won't change your predictions about anything else. And precisely because of this, it's something that can be debated on either side to signal allegiance to some greater ideal.
It's a form of protest -- meaning a challenge or accusation levied against the powerful by the less powerful.
Such things are inherently dickish and often a bit petulant. Our evolutionary forebears liked to fling their own feces to express these kinds of emotions. We do it symbolically. Go listen to some punk rock.
"Punk" style and sentiment isn't popular around here -- this is largely an upper class forum full of top-ten university graduates. When the system is good to you, it's hard to understand why others hate it so much that they're willing to engage in this kind of petulant rage-driven feces-flinging behavior.
Having been raised in a barn in the flyover country on food stamps, I personally really get it. I do not think Apollo was a hoax, but I do think advancing that crackpot theory is a good way to say fuck you to NASA for losing the will to actually go anywhere and to the US government for deciding that Vietnam was more important than humanity's future.
The "fuck you beliefs" effect is IMHO a bit broader than I implied. One of the reasons people are not vaccinating their children is that the president lied to us about Iraq. That's because if you are middle to lower class, the "authorities" start to look like an unreachable monolithic bloc from your perspective... like how a light source loses detail and vanishes into a point at infinity. This effect is magnified if you are both socially and physically distant from your authorities -- which is why a number of these beliefs are much more popular outside of coastal alpha world cities.
Edit:
I thought of another way to explain it, returning to the moon hoax theory...
If you are living in an underwater house in the flyover country somewhere and are working a dead-end job to service that and your mountain of student debt, "we" did not go to the moon. They went to the moon -- the same they who hold your writs of indenture and tell you what you must inject into your children. That "accomplishment" is one of the things they lord over you, so denying it is a way of denying their authority over you. Not vaccinating your kids is another. You don't have the power to escape your socioeconomic situation, but you do have the power to do those things. Protest, like water under pressure, will find whatever holes in a structure it can.
This process is only semi-conscious, and is driven by emotion. The process whereby an elite comes to believe itself above law and decency and to lord its "meritocratic" status over people is also only semi-conscious and driven by emotion. We all share 99.9~% the same genetic material, and none of us are perfectly rational beings.
The popularity of these "antagonistically irrational" beliefs is a major leading indicator of social trust collapse. This will be followed by the collapse of our society, since mutual trust is the basis of civilization. I think the rolling out of things like the surveillance state are due in part to our elite's understanding of this coupled with the fact that they lack the spine to take the high road and actually repair their lost trust by owning up to past mistakes and offering to remedy current wrongs. This in turn will only accelerate our social collapse as people, contrary to popular belief, are not utterly oblivious and see these moves for what they are.
I think your second point is important. Many people simply don't trust those in authority because, so often, those in authority lie. This applies to both the public and private sector. We are constantly lied to by authority figures, so it becomes difficult to trust those who are telling you things "for your own good."
I agree, but I wouldn't put that much of blame on scientist themselves - what I think did most of the damage is science reporting, which is yet another case of audacious journalist lies. Most people do not learn "what science says" from research papers, they read about it in lifestyle magazines, on news sites, and now on Facebook. It is there where "coffee possibly linked to cancer (p < 0.1) (study on 100 people)" gets turned into "Your Morning Coffee Will Give You Cancer" (and cue in articles with opposite conclusions next week).
I don't get why people have such tolerance for being lied to. People should be fired from their jobs for spewing such nonsense and misrepresenting facts. Of course news sites and marketers have zero incentive to say the truth, but I hoped that at least the recipients would care. Apparently, most of them don't.
As a side note:
> "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you."
Well, I recently learned that US Congress basically got fed up with all those "visionary projects" and preemptively shut down the space race. From [0]:
"Wernher von Braun also proposed a manned Mars mission using NERVA and a spinning donut-shaped spacecraft to simulate gravity. Many of the NASA plans for Mars in the 1960s and early 1970s used the NERVA rocket specifically, see list of manned Mars mission plans in the 20th century.
The Mars mission became NERVA's downfall. Members of Congress in both political parties judged that a manned mission to Mars would be a tacit commitment for the United States to decades more of the expensive Space Race. Manned Mars missions were enabled by nuclear rockets; therefore, if NERVA could be discontinued the Space Race might wind down and the budget would be saved."
I think you are greatly underestimating the impact of two things: one, the explanation based on science is often subtle and also often requires a significant amount of intuition for probabilities and statistics; and yet, two, there are people out there who loudly yell easy answers that prey on our biases.
My point: I find it difficult to talk about "earned trust" when not also acknowledging that the truth is often confusing yet boring, and there are people who actively espouse a simple, exciting, yet false alternative.
I've noticed a different motive for many of the more kooky science-deniers. I think that kind of denialism is rooted in their own insecurities about their intelligence. In essence, if they can rig up some quick way to prove the experts wrong, then they are smarter than all the experts. Another way of putting it is this: Rather than put in the hard work of understanding a difficult or nuanced argument, they come up with an easy solution that shows, in their mind, how smart they are.
> I personally think it extends way beyond medicine. When the president tells us we're invading Iraq because it has "weapons of mass destruction," and that turns out to be almost entirely hot air, should people be considered stupid for suddenly trusting Alex Jones more than they trust the POTUS?
The scientists were actually pretty clear about that particular bit of data.
> because scientific authorities, the media, and the medical establishment have not earned their trust
Given the developments and accomplishments of science and medicine in the last few hundred years... if that doesn't earn peoples' trust, what will? When it provides cancer cures and hoverboards, will that satisfy people, or will they still want more? Sorry NASA hasn't done anything as cool as the moon landing, but if your friend thinks pretending it didn't happen will get us flying cars or space elevators any sooner, I don't have much sympathy for his position.
I too am glad this is being realised by some people
As an example with vaccines. Mercury containing substances have been phased out (thiomersal). Doctors and news outlets keep pumping information about the bad side of Mercury, etc, etc (which are true for the most part, but maybe exaggerated)
But thiomersal is still used in a lot of vaccines. So people get all the negative messages about Mercury but they're supposed to think "it's OK to be used in vaccines"?!?
Very good point about mercury. What are people supposed to think? "Mercury is so bad I'm barely allowed to purchase or handle it, but then I'm supposed to then inject it into my baby?"
Yes there's a lot of nuance here, and a lot of cost/benefit analysis around the risk of a tiny amount of mercury (in excretable compound form) vs. the risk of nasty diseases. But it becomes harder to communicate that nuance and be believed when you've just been telling people to eat margarine (artery plaque) for 50 years.
similar with dental amalgam ( "particularly to boys with common genetic variants.")
"New science challenges old notion that mercury dental amalgam is safe"
Mercury dental amalgam has a long history of ostensibly safe use despite its continuous release of mercury vapor. Two key studies known as the Children’s Amalgam Trials are widely cited as evidence of safety. However, four recent reanalyses of one of these trials now suggest harm, particularly to boys with common genetic variants. These and other studies suggest that susceptibility to mercury toxicity differs among individuals based on multiple genes, not all of which have been identified. These studies further suggest that the levels of exposure to mercury vapor from dental amalgams may be unsafe for certain subpopulations. Moreover, a simple comparison of typical exposures versus regulatory safety standards suggests that many people receive unsafe exposures. Chronic mercury toxicity is especially insidious because symptoms are variable and nonspecific, diagnostic tests are often misunderstood, and treatments are speculative at best. Throughout the world, efforts are underway to phase down or eliminate the use of mercury dental amalgam.
Here's a thought I wrote on HN five years ago [some typos fixed]:
"Imagine an engineer who normally comes to work in jeans and a t-shirt. One day the boss says "I want you to present your product tomorrow. Here's the address." So the engineer cobbles together a demo, dresses up in his khakis and a polo shirt, and shows up to present... at a nationally-televised, black-tie event. That's analogous to the situation in which climate scientists now find themselves.
For the most part, climate scientists are doing normal science, and thinking in terms of presenting their work to other scientists. But their work has become the centerpiece for huge global initiatives with large economic, environmental, and political impacts. This means their results, methods, and even personalities are being subject to an unusual degree of criticism (some valid, some not.)"
This creates a credibility gap. The science they're doing is perfectly acceptable in the "getting less wrong all the time" sense, but not really acceptable in the "we have a completely proven solution" sense.
We've all heard "science ... it works, bitches". Yeah, science works and planes fly -- but individual scientists will tell you it's more like http://www.twisteddoodles.com/image/86414780702 or https://electroncafe.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/scientific-pro... . Loads and loads of uncertainty, repeating experiments, interpreting results, criticism from other scientists, and then eventually you get something that improves on pre-existing ideas by a small amount. So the emphasis on the "planes fly" kind of science ends up increasing the credibility gap for the sort of ordinary science done by most scientists, because most science doesn't have flashy "now we have airplanes" type results.
Then there's the problem of science being presented by polarizing figures rather than scientists, and often being tied to specific policy recommendations that aren't actually all that closely tied to the science. Politicians are both overconfident in the science, and overconfident in their favored solutions.
So people end up buying anti-vaxx BS, even though that's an area where the science works in the "airplanes fly" sense. The data is overwhelmingly in favor of vaccinating for things like measles. But if people can't tell the difference between that kind of science and Al Gore saying "we need cap and trade" or some guy on TV selling nutritional supplements who uses the word "science" 12 times per minute in his infomercial, they'll have a hard time trusting even the best science.
I'm really happy to see that someone else sees this. I've been harping on this for a long time -- that the reason people believe things like anti-vaxx propaganda is not because they are idiots but because scientific authorities, the media, and the medical establishment have not earned their trust.
People subscribe to kooky conspiracy theories and fringe/quack medical ideas because those advancing those points of view appear more credible than our society's institutions. Much of that appearance of credibility is by default -- it's more that our institutions have ruined their own credibility by being overconfident or in some cases actually deceptive. I personally think it extends way beyond medicine. When the president tells us we're invading Iraq because it has "weapons of mass destruction," and that turns out to be almost entirely hot air, should people be considered stupid for suddenly trusting Alex Jones more than they trust the POTUS?
Trust is hard to earn and easy to squander. In addition when you have someone trust and then stab them in the back, the emotional reaction from that is far worse than if you never had any trust to begin with. Betrayal inspires some of the deepest negative emotions.
Edit:
Another phenomenon that I think is at work, especially with people like Alex Jones and wacky conspiracy theories, is a kind of "fuck you factor" that they have. Believing such things and perpetuating them is an act of (often subconscious) protest -- akin to things like calling yourself a "Satanist" in protest against fundamentalist religion. You might call these kinds of things "protest beliefs."
I have a friend who leans toward the view that we didn't land on the moon. He's a very intelligent person. I personally believe -- and I've told him this -- that this "belief" is more of a big fuck you to the backward-and-sideways direction NASA and America in general has taken post-Apollo. "Fine then... if you're going to cancel visionary projects so we can have more war and tax breaks for the financial industry, then I'm going to deny that you ever did it in the first place to spite you." He didn't really deny that, just kind of shrugged.