alt Hacker NewsIronically, being anti-science is pro-science. Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method.
The main reason being scientific consensus can lag reality significantly, especially when career incentives discourage dissent. The history of science includes many cases where consensus was wrong and critics were marginalized rather than engaged.
Deference to science as an authority is the opposite.
Feynman has a quote on this:
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says, 'Science teaches such and such,' he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn't teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, 'Science has shown such and such,' you might ask, 'How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?' It should not be 'science has shown' but 'this experiment, this effect, has shown.' And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments — but be patient and listen to all the evidence — to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at."
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>Ironically, being anti-science is pro-science. Skepticism of institutions and consensus is the scientific method
skepticism is necessary, but not sufficient.
if they merely nay-say institutions and then go with their gut, it's certainly not.
only when someone attempts to rationally disprove a position, offering alternate testable theories and actually performing those tests is science done.
if you suspect an institution is wrong, that's fine, but it's just a hunch until someone does a test.
Skepticism needs to be calibrated based on the weight of the evidence. There's a broad spectrum from being skeptical about the latest overhyped study in subfield X to being skeptical about quantum mechanics. If you want to challenge established science, you need to bring the receipts. To quote Carl Sagan, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
Somewhere there's a quote about how the old guard has to literally die out before certain new ideas can take root; even if the new idea is obviously correct.
I think we've been pampered by a few hundred years of rapid "scientific advancement" and now we're firmly in the area where things are not grade-school science fair easy to see or prove.