alt Hacker NewsI 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.
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> Disagreeing with some consensus is not "anti-science".
Yes, science requires the ability to disagree. You can even see in my history me saying a scientist needs to be a bit anti authoritarian!
But HOW one goes about disagreeing is critical.
Sometimes I only have a hunch that what others believe is wrong. They have every right to call me stupid for that. Occasionally I'll be able to gather the evidence and prove my hunch. Then they are stupid for not believing like I do, but only after evidenced. Most of the time I'm wrong though. Trying to gather evidence I fail and just support the status quo. So I change my mind.
Most importantly, I just don't have strong opinions about most things. Opinions are unavoidable, strong ones aren't. If I care about my opinion, I must care at least as much about the evidence surrounding my opinion. That's required for science.
Look at it this way. When arguing with someone are you willing to tell them how to change your mind? I will! If you're right, I want to know! But frankly, I find most people are arguing to defend their ego. As if being wrong is something to be embarrassed about. But guess what, we're all wrong. It's all about a matter of degree though. It's less wrong to think the earth is a sphere than flat because a sphere is much closer to an oblate spheroid.
If you can't support your beliefs and if you can't change your mind, I don't care who you listen to, you're not listening to science
I don’t think that’s quite right. Disagreement for the sake of disagreement is not particularly meaningful. The basis for science is iteration on the scientific method. Which is to say: observe -> hypothesize -> falsify.
Anti science means to make claims that have no basis in that process or to categorically reject the body of work that was based on that process.