alt Hacker News > Almost nobody is "anti-science".
- 15% of Americans don't believe in Climate Change[0]
- 37% believe God created man in our current form within the last ~10k years
(i.e. don't believe in evolution)[1]
They're large enough numbers that you should know multiple people who hold these beliefs unless you're in a strong bubble.
I'm obviously with you in news and pop-sci being terrible. I hate IFuckingLoveScience. They're actually just IFuckingLoveClickbait. My point was literally about this bullshit.
90% of the time it is news and pop-sci miscommunicating papers. Where they clearly didn't bother to talk to authors and likely didn't even read the paper. "Scientists say <something scientists didn't actually say>". You see this from eating chocolate, drinking a glass of red wine, to eating red meat or processed meat. There are nuggets of truth in those things but they're about just as accurate as the grandma that sued McDonalds over coffee that was too hot. You sure bet this stuff creates distrust in science
[0] https://record.umich.edu/articles/nearly-15-of-americans-den...
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/647594/majority-credits-god-hum...
Replies
The stats you mention seem to suggest you are a believer in `The Science` - an anti scientific idea if ever there was one and one that's undergoing erosion day by day.
According to your model, scientists who believe in God are anti-science.
That's almost weirder than declaring that 15% of people not believing in anthropogenic global warming is some sort of crisis. It's a theory that seems to fit the data (with caveats), not an Axiom of Science.
It's actually bizarre that 85% of people trust Science so much that they would believe in something that they have never seen any direct evidence of. That's a result of marketing. The public don't believe in global warming because it's "correct"; they have no idea if it's correct, and they often believe in things that are wrong that people in white coats on television tell them.
I think one of the most important 'social values' for science to thrive is a culture with a freedom to disagree on essentially anything. In most of every era where there was rapid scientific progress from the Greeks to the Islamic Golden Age to the Renaissance and beyond, there was also rich, and often times rather virulent, disagreements over even the most sacred of things. Some of those disagreements were well founded, some were... not. It's only in the eras where disagreement becomes taboo that science starts to slow to a crawl and in many cases essentially die.
Disagreeing with some consensus is not "anti-science". The term doesn't even make any sense, which is because it's a political and not a scientific term. I mean imagine if we claimed everybody who happens to believe MOND is more likely than WIMPs as an explanation for dark matter, to be "anti-science". It's just absolutely stupid. Yet we do exactly that on other topics where suddenly you must agree with the consensus or you're just "anti-science"? I mean again, it makes no sense at all.