Part of the problem is how people learn what science is. Science, despite the name, is really all about doubt. Unfortunately in school it’s taught as certainty.
In school you do “experiments” and if the answer doesn’t match what is in the book you are marked down. Often you have to memorize a bunch of assertions or even simply names, without any epistemic context.
Then in the real world you discover that scientists contradict each other or even themselves. They don’t say things straight out but are always hedging (“high probability”) or even admitting they don’t know!
>Science, despite the name, is really all about doubt.
This is a popular misconception on HN, and it's why so many here think they're being scientific by dismissing every journal article on the front page. Doubt plays a crucial role in science, but it's not what science is "really all about."
You can doubt every single data point and sensory impression. There is no empirical way to "prove" a single thing if one is determined to doubt it. Not one.
That is the default position in science. An encouragement to never be absolutely certain, because you never know what may turn out to be 'wrong.' Doubt is the wrong word, but 'question everything' is I think a perfect statement for science.
> In school you do “experiments” and if the answer doesn’t match what is in the book you are marked down.
This is unsurprising and probably obvious. The purpose of the exercise is learning how to do experiments reliably so that at some later point when doing experiments to test a hypothesis you can have some confidence that the results you produce are actual data and not just noise.
When doing science class "experiments" of this sort perhaps it would illuminate things to students better by going up one level: the hypothesis under test is "student can perform experiment reliably". The putative subject of the "experiment" isn't the actual subject in inquiry: you are. On the other hand maybe this would just confuse students. (I've observed wildly varying capacity for abstraction and meta-cognition among the people I work with as a software developer so I suppose this is something that varies among individuals generally.)
>In school you do “experiments” and if the answer doesn’t match what is in the book you are marked down. Often you have to memorize a bunch of assertions or even simply names, without any epistemic context.
I don't know what school you went to, but this doesn't match my experience.
It matches mine: A general chemistry lab where we were tasked to grow crystals and attempt to write formal reports of our scientific experiences. If experiences didn't match with current expected outcomes, we still recorded our observational data and tried hypothesizing on conditions of reason for divergent results.
There's the desire to teach the scientific method, and also the desire to convey the established literature in preparation for the (standardized) exams.
So, you design "labs" where the students "experiment."
This is my experience at a high school in Florida.
The point is that’s now how it is framed by the school. So people grow up thinking there’s an absolute, precise, and “correct” answer and anything else is “wrong”
Agree. Saying "I dont know" at school is persecuted. And here we are. Everybody have opinions on everything and it is hard to hear "I don't know." in public space.
Imagine that politicans would say that they don't know anything.
A lot of people think that they know everything, but only few really know something.
It seems to depend very much on when and where you went to school.
I did Nuffield chemistry for A-Level, '72-'74. It was very much about learning experimental methods and how to analyse the results. Physics was similar with great emphasis on analysis. But in conversations with others at university afterward (Exeter uni, Physics) I discovered that many of my fellow students had endured exactly the situation that your quote mentions.
We should respect people questioning science as long as they are doing it in good faith and are showing willingness to learn. We should even respect flat earthers and climate change deniers. They improve rigour and identify blindspots.
The problem with the flat earthers, and the more conspiratorial portion of the climate deniers, is it's not clear even the people making the claims believe it. They don't seem to mind ideas that contradict theirs, so long as the central belief that there is some sort of vast conspiracy is upheld.
You can't really engage with people who aren't all that interested in what's actually true.
Assuming your premise is true, is a strongly held belief a prerequisite to conduct a scientific inquiry? Or couldn't it just be any hypothesis, however crazy? It seems to me you are imposing a constraint that doesn't need to be there, and parent is arguing it doesn't deserve to be there, either.
>it's not clear even the people making the claims believe it. They don't seem to mind ideas that contradict theirs, so long as the central belief that there is some sort of vast conspiracy is upheld.
That seems like a truly bizarre statement, how would that make sense?
Some people would embrace ideas they would not believe in, to further the public's perception that there is an ongoing conspiracy?
That seems perfectly lunatic.
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to try to tie in that the conspiracy peddlers are incentivized to push completely insane theories in order to cover for other, true, conspiracy theories (e.g. the NSA's surveillance pre-Snowden leak).
Some have mental issues, that is a given, but that is not generally seen as a valid way to discredit or validate a theory (e.g. cleaning OCD is not seen as proof that hygiene is bad).
I think the major hurdle to that statement is that false balances are hard to quantify in the moment. Worse, when "false balance" is claimed and it turns out that the popular belief at the time was both wrong and influenced in some way it damages public trust even further.
Climate Change "deniers" like Richard Mueller was, are useful, flat earthers and climate change grifters solely confuse the public and distract (usually extremely overworked and underpaid) scientists.
I'm struggling to find it, but an article I read and found enlightening explained how there was seemingly a uniform struggle with education in every story the author was told by the people she talked to at a flat earther's convention.
They all had some profoundly negative encounter with the education establishment, and usually as a result of a learning disability that they had.
It's anecdotal and not a complete view, but a mistrust of academia seems requisite for many of these conspiracies to take root in a person's mind, and that seems pathologic to me.
In which case, all the better a reason to engage in good faith discussion, so as to identify those academic failings that create such movements and help address them decisively and appropriately
This is highly speculative. And dyslexia and learning difficulties are not mental illness (at least not in the way you imply).
I would have far less reason to believe such populations would be 'more' likely to engage in critical thinking (flawed or otherwise), compared to simply uncritically following mainstream thought.
I'm not implying anything, I'm directly stating that there's a correlation between mental disorders that cause learning difficulties and participation in conspiracy theories such as QAnon and flat earth.
Yes it's speculative, but it's also predictive. If you can engage people who belong to these groups honestly, you will hear, over and over again, stories about how academic establishments have failed them in some traumatic way or another, leaving them mistrustful of what is, in effect, the entire concept of learning. And nearly every one of these stories you will be told originate at some form of mental disorder.
These people aren't just stupid, they're actively anti-learning, which makes them so much worse than stupid; they want to make others stupid too.
I’m with the other poster, I don’t see how flat Earth is inherently crazier to believe than any of the large number of religions that people identify with.
Holding a belief that cannot be reconciled with reality can be harmless if it can stay isolated, but in practice that doesn't always seem to be the case.
What ends up happening is that these things sooner or later lead to an internal conflict. To fix this, a healthy person realizes that their belief is silly, and over time adjusts to realign more with reality again. This doesn't have to be a conscious process, but it helps to be self aware and open-minded.
In a different group of people, what happens is that they double down. Their belief X conflicts with reality Y, so a new explanation Z is needed. Z also conflicts with reality, so the pile grows. What makes is worse is that the internet created spaces for these people to find each other and provide increasingly absurd extensions to their twisted view of the world.
Someone who starts out thinking the election was rigged may find themselves in a group that claims COVID was part of the election fraud plot, that it will go away when the new president is sworn in. Then it doesn't, so a new explanation is needed: The idea of microchipping/depopulation/etc. solidifies. Someone needs to be blamed and there happens to be a leftover grudge from the elections, and look at them promoting masks and the jab! It's obvious, they're not even hiding it anymore. And on and on it goes. Eventually we arrive at "there are no coincidences" and "symbolism will be their downfall", where Twitter timestamps are somehow proof of a hidden agenda, and words mean whatever the listener wants them to mean.
I find it hard to believe most flat earthers are perfectly normal people living well balanced lives, when you believe that literally every government, institution, physicist, airplane pilot, airline, map maker, etc etc is all on some big great conspiracy that the globe is roughly spherical.
I wish I could believe your assumption that there are no flat earther politicians, educators, physicists, pilots or mapmakers, but somehow that's being too hopeful.
azinman2's belief that flat earthers' lives are unbalanced is also freedom of speech, and flat earthers' beliefs do not supersede the freedom of expression of their critics, either. End of story.
Those people are obviously less smart and educated than any rational man who seriously pondered whether the Earth's flat and could be bothered to do a couple of simple experiments.
But at the same time they're step ahead of majority of the population that just believed what they were told as kids and never, once in their life, expressed any doubt in it, or thought about how it was proven, or how they would be able to check that proof themselves.
Strongly disagree. Rational people do not feel the need to prove every fact independently for themselves. Instead, they develop a rational system of qualified trust. You don't blindly trust expert consensus, but you do weigh likelihood based on the source. Flat Earthers would be better off if they simply accepted the consensus rather than being mislead into believing they're coming to their own conclusions based on evidence.
But most people aren't rational and don't prove any fact independently for themselves, or have the capability to do so. They believe in what they're told. They were told god and heaven are real so they believe it. Their scientific beliefs are similarly founded.
I think your point is supported by the number of times you hear people talking about having "faith" in science. This idea that science requires faith is something that confuses and annoys me.
The whole point of science is that it (in general) does not require faith as it provides evidence. There are some aspects of science where the presentation of hypothesis verges on faith, many aspects of cosmology where falsifiable experiment are not possible, but that is a very small part of science.
That's true, however the vast majority of science is sufficiently complex that only another scientist in the field is capable of understanding and evaluating that evidence.
My point is that the solution is not to teach people to come to their own conclusions, but rather to determine how much trust is due to various sources of information.
Well people aren't doing that either. Expert opinion is a type of evidence. You still have to be investigating and questioning to apply reasoning to that evidence that can lead to a rational conclusion.
> We should even respect flat earthers and climate change deniers. They improve rigour and identify blindspots.
They don't. They add lies and manipulations into the mix. They force everyone to either step up their popular convincing political game or just drop out of discussion
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It's an interesting thought exercise to take some belief and ask yourself how you know, and asking until you get to some first principles or axioms or articles of faith. Part of that exercise could include coming up with plausible alternate explanations for what you perceive.
Flat earth is just a ridiculous version of such a thought experiment. It's a good exercise to make sure your understanding of the world around you is based on some consistent logic and not faith. Those who reject the idea of the earth being flat just because "science tells us" have no intellectual high ground over devout flat earthers, if they exist
Most of the time, "science tells us" means "this question is not sufficiently interesting or relevant, and human life is several orders of magnitude too short to question everything". We all resort to "trusting the experts" in almost every action we take, because there are no feasible alternatives.
Believing in flat earth is basically a result of poorly calibrated trust heuristics. People may believe in it due to lack of education, for social/political/ideological reasons, or because they are contrarians. Or due to a random chance because the question is not particularly relevant to them.
I get what you're saying, but do you really need to "prove" it in this case?
I mean, assume that the Earth is flat, and then think through the consequences. It requires a long-running, global conspiracy at all levels of society. And all to hide the fact from... whom?
Edit to clarify: even if you can't "prove" it directly, you can probably show that it would have effects you do not observe.
You are allowed to appeal to authority. The "Argument from Authority" fallacy only applies when you appeal to a false authority, such as listening to your yoga instructor's opinions on vaccination.
I don't think you or the replies to your comment are addressing the parent point. It's not a game where something is "allowed" or not. They are saying that they suspect most people would not be able to themselves demonstrate that the earth is round, and that their argumentation would end up relying on faith. Whether such reliance is "allowed" is irrelevant
(This made me think of a kind of inverse example that came up recently: I had made a point in an online discussion and offered an argument for it in my comment. Someone replied and said they looked up what I was talking about and didn't see anything about what I'd mentioned, and so didn't accept it. The disagreement was not about the merits of the argument, but that they couldn't find that argument anywhere, and so apparently instead of considering it, they just rejected it as invalid. I've seen more variations of that recently, the whole "citation needed" thing, where people think that an "authority" is automatically necessary vs just thinking about what they were told and deciding if it does or doesn't make sense)
People on HN tend to hate appeals to scientific authority, but you are right. Our resources for obtaining out own knowledge and expertise are limited, and trusting other experts is a useful heuristic that, while imperfect, is more effective than alternatives.
Anyone who claims they have the requisite expertise and resources to verify most scientific facts on their own is lying.
There are clear cases where "true authorities", however defined, have been wrong about all kinds of subjects, so the fallacy still applies. If you can only justify a belief by appealing to the assumed superior knowledge of experts and specialists, you cannot justify that belief as strongly as someone who can argue from first principles or a clear chain of evidence. The appeal to authority is not necessarily fallacious, but it's more likely to be so.
If you can only justify a belief by appealing to the assumed superior knowledge of experts and specialists because you lack such expertise yourself, you're probably going to be wrong a lot less often when you appeal to authority than when you decide to disagree with them simply because experts are fallible.
That may well be true, depending on the quality of experts and specialists in your society (and assuming they aren't generally serving vested interests that could skew their views), but, epistemologically, you can't prove it without further appeals to authority. So it's experts all the way down!
Exactly. Believing in narrated science is no different than believing the mumbo jumbo they throw at you in scifi movies. For me the halting problem seems like common sense / basic science but it’s not for everybody. That’s where we need to recognise that what’s obvious or basic to us isn’t so for others. And that is a good thing!
Faith and trust are subtly different things, and trust is both a skill and talent. When a poker player makes bets, one of the things they do is ask how much they trust a reading of the situation, and often times that's the best they've got. A poker player also does not rely on axioms because almost all propositions they could come up with would have no answer.
For most people, life is more like poker than math.
That's not really how high level poker is played -- it actually is all about the math. That's why top poker players are ALSO top players online where you can't see the other players.
No, it's not all about math, and there is a disparity between online play and real life tournament play.
If poker were all math then we'd see far more mastery by poker bots beyond just heads-up play. If the only thing you have in your pocket is math, then you are missing out on advantages.
In online poker players may purchase large databases of player histories. But constructing advantages from player history is ultimately a psychological theory notwithstanding whether math is employed. The reason is because mathematical axioms do not provide insight into how player history should translate into player futures.
Literacy does not imply believing in the round earth. Proving the earth is round to yourself without trusting outside influences is not a trivial pursuit.
It's much harder to prove the Earth is flat. You run into really basic questions like, where is the edge, and why does no one find it?
The theory only "holds together", with the assumption that everyone that works in any field even vaguely related to travel or communication is part of a conspiracy to hide the truth.
Doesn't Erastosthenes's experiment merely allow you to calculate the size of the earth if you already accept that it is spherical? As I understand the experiment it does not (nor was it meant to) prove that the earth is a sphere.
It's probably going to depend on what you mean by 'the phenomenon'. Do you mean that the sun casts shadows at different angles at the same time of day based on your location? Then yes, it absolutely does. In fact some believers in the flat earth theory use the experiment to establish the distance of the sun from the earth.
If you mean something else, then I have no idea. I'm not a proponent of the flat earth theory, nor am I a mind reader.
The experiment you proposed does not disprove the theory of a flat earth though, parsimoniously or otherwise.
It sounds like you may have rejected the notion of a flat earth purely on faith after all?
Unfortunately, atmospheric effects make it hard to completely remove doubt. This is definitely evidence that round earth is true, but not conclusive.
It also requires you being able to derive those equations which is more than many people would be comfortable with.
Especially if you think that "they" are lying to you, this could be a repeatable but cherry-picked piece of evidence that has a requires a more complicated explanation.
The point is that there are many relatively straightforward ways to calculate curvature, from the sunrise/sunset technique to Erastothenes to watching sailing ships dip below the horizon and many more.
The math may be beyond some people but the effects at play cannot be explained by a flat Earth.
Part of the overall thread was along the lines of we should respect flat earthers, they improve rigour. It seems to me that the only sensible responses to that are the counter illustrations of just easily disproved a notion it is.
Far more effort goes into supporting this ridiculousness than did into establishing rough shape and size.
If that's all it takes to prove the earth is round it seems consistent to accept Fata Morgana as proof that gravity can fail once you get far enough away from the coast.
The thing is that functionally speaking, the flat Earth movement isn't about proving whether the Earth is round or flat. It's about camaraderie in the quest for the hidden knowledge that "they" don't want you to have.
It's a rather enlightening exercise to work out how and why the earth is curved purely from the perspective of a human able to see maybe a small patch.
This is directly analogous to how general relativity models spacetime as being intrinsically curved, and you need to be able to do the same sort of thinking without being able to immerse the manifold in a higher dimensional space.
So it's not exactly stupid to pretend to be naive.
Also, why and by how much is the sun bigger than the moon? How far are they away from earth? We've known for thousands of years. It's not exactly obvious to derive this purely from geometry.
To many, though perhaps not most, organized religion is seen as equally ridiculous as flat-earth theory. Are religious people illiterate or not worth debating or worthy of some basic respect?
>I would respect flat earthers if they published in peer-reviewed journals.
Except their peers would reinforce the anti-scientific superstitions rather than reject them.
Not altogether differently than the way some recognized journals publish less-scientifically-sound output due to the credentials of the contributors rather than any conclusive results to report.
Or more commonly than ever, complete non-progress being wildly exaggerated as if it was an actual finding.
Even though there's more PhDs each year, you have to be more careful than ever what you want to regard as a science any more.
"To me, the phenomenon of widespread trust in goofy claims is much more interesting than the fact of goofy claims not being real. What does it mean to trust science?"
Science is a system to distinguish between a fact and a shibboleth. That process is at the core of epistemology, and it is always non-trivial, because goofy is in the eye of the beholder. Whatever your politics or religion, you can easily see these shibboleths in other tribes, but they are usually invisible in your own. To apply science to your own tribe's shibboleths is an act of distrust.
Trust is a shortcut. You could verify everything diligently, but it takes time, so you rely on others, hence trust.
Scientists' job is to verify as much as possible (not to take the shortcut). Laymen can take the shortcut and trust the scientists.
If a layman wants not to trust the scientists, which is OK, then they should understand that trust is a BIG timesaver, and they have to put lot of effort into educating themselves about WHY scientists say what they say.
Too often, we see laymen questioning the scientific conclusions without putting up the work needed to educate themselves (at the very least, understanding the theories they disagree with). This has worse outcomes than lack of due diligence among scientists.
(And that's why argument from authority is a fallacy among scientists, but is not wrong to apply among general public, where it is a useful heuristic based on trust.)
In any decent society, not really. This risk can be greatly mitigated by regulations, occasional independent review and transparency.
For example, I can rely that I won't get food poisoning in a restaurant. This is because we have rules of how to handle food (designed by expert consensus), and the restaurants are inspected from time to time if they follow these practices.
Is it a matter of "trust" or a matter of misaligned interests & incentives?
Person A approves Person B's manuscript/grant/etc. They do it because it's good for them and their careers, not because it's "good for science" (whatever that means nowadays).
At some point, this article uses the phrase the inexact sciences. I have traditionally heard the phrase soft sciences for things like psychology.
Human psychology and social phenomenon are inherently hard to study well for myriad reasons and much of this article is about psychology.
The bits about outright fraud and problematic medical studies are more worthwhile things to be concerned about, but if your primary conclusion or concern is "human psychology is hard to study scientifically" (ie with exactness and ready replicability) then I'm going to be all "Well, duh!"
> if your primary conclusion or concern is "human psychology is hard to study scientifically" (ie with exactness and ready replicability) then I'm going to be all "Well, duh!"
The way that I read the "inexact sciences" critique is one that takes aim at the certainty of their rhetoric. An uncertain and "hard to study" science should use words that reflect that rather than an inappropriate level of determinism which seems to be what the article is actually discussing.
There are more ways to come up with firmer conclusions. They do exist.
They just have something of a tendency to not fall under the love that so many seem to have of treating people like lab rats.
Someone found that when men decide a female celebrity is hot, they google up nude photos. When women decide a male celebrity is hot, their first search is to determine "Is he currently married?"
So when someone wants to deal privately with their own feelings of attraction or sexual desire, men and women have different initial impetuses when no one is looking, when they have no expectation that anyone is judging them, etc.
This suggests a distinct gender difference.
Whether that's somehow socially influenced or biological, I don't know. But it seems significant.
And it's not the kind of thing you are likely to find in most so-called studies because people like to ask questions of people who volunteered for your study. So when they do studies that find that "everyone" is secretly having threesomes and orgies, that's probably selection bias. Because folks who actually value their privacy and don't casually sleep around probably aren't part of your pool of volunteers wanting to blab about their sex life to a total stranger. Duh.
One of the things she talks about is the problem of scientists trusting other scientists. I wonder whether trust is the right way to put it, or if a lot of the time it's that they're afraid to speak out against colleagues for fear of reprisal. So many of these domains are small enough that everybody knows everybody else, and bad blood can poison people's careers.
It's not just replication that's the problem. It's poorly designed studies, intended from the start to support a narrative, whose results are poorly interpreted by members of the media for their own benefit.
Group dynamics in humans lead them to think and act in a cohesive way. The cohesion of the group depends on trusting a set of beliefs.
Science is supposed to re-test assumptions and resist trust indefinitely. But questioning a group's assumptions is antithetical to group cohesion.
So we fudge the results. We say something is scientific fact if it's been replicated a bunch of times and has the same outcome. But we don't mention that the replication is subject to the group dynamics, ensuring it conforms to the group's assumptions.
Since human groups require trust, and all scientific results must be distrusted to function correctly, humans cannot practice science correctly. We need a new science that works with group dynamics, or we need something other than groups of humans to practice science.
We've just had a far reaching tsunami from the Hunga Tonga eruption and no one will explain why.
That is a trust issue.
Do they know how volcanos work or not? Can they get that knowledge to the public or not?
The mathematics is high school level in many cases to disprove possible causes of the tsunami.
The reality is people do know how volcanoes work but the field is so full of charlatans that info can't get out.
This is every field of science now.
[And the idea the info doesn't need to get out quickly is BS, it shows structural problems in the field, on top of that in this case Tonga and aid orgs needs to know what might be possible in the next few weeks and the truth helps with that]
I don't understand what you mean by "We've just had a far reaching tsunami from the Hunga Tonga eruption and no one will explain why." Surely the answer is there was a huge eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano that destroyed 1/3 of the island? What more do you want?
The "science" derived from ultra-skewed samples collected by grad students or even tenured academics for social scenario experimentation is inherently shaky and does not merit much trust.
In school you do “experiments” and if the answer doesn’t match what is in the book you are marked down. Often you have to memorize a bunch of assertions or even simply names, without any epistemic context.
Then in the real world you discover that scientists contradict each other or even themselves. They don’t say things straight out but are always hedging (“high probability”) or even admitting they don’t know!