Eh… yes and no. I’ve got an engineering degree, I’ve learned how to design studies and do science properly, and I still struggle when a study is on topics I’m less familiar with. I can’t imagine most people going through these. They’re not accessible.
And if you’re just reading the abstract and conclusion, or worse a science article, you’ve got to hope they’ve interpreted things properly. Which articles are particularly bad at because they need to sound like news.
But then they still need to trust the journalist. And considering how much crap science gets published even in supposedly high quality journals, and how little quality peer review happens, even the journalists don’t have a scientific basis for much of science reporting.
Yes, that’s a huge issue. Another issue is that the reward for doing peer reviews is far too low, and publishing negative peer reviews comes with the risk of making an enemy in the same field, who might do your next peer review. So you only call out egregiously bad science or just rubber stamp every peer review, because there’s nothing in it for you to publish a negative peer review.
I’ve read meta studies that said that huge amounts of published scientific studies cannot be reproduced. I can’t remember the exact number, but it was >30%.
So if the published science itself is already full of garbage, how is a journalist (who is themselves not a scientist or at least not a scientist in the specific field) know what study is good and what is garbage? And even then, how many people read science journalism compared to boulevard media?
John Bohannon comes to mind, with his purposeful bogus study that claimed that eating chocolate can help with weight loss. He used overfitting and p-hacking to create a study that was purposely garbage and got it published. His goal was to show how easy it is to publish a sensationalist-but-garbage paper. This went so well that every trashy boulevard paper but also many major newspapers ran it, often as a title page news story.
In an interview he said that he got hundreds of calls, all on the level of “Which brand of chocolate helps best?”, and only a single serious inquiry doubting his methods.
He published his own debunk shortly after publishing the original story, it it got pretty much no media attention at all.
He basically couldn’t even recall his own bogus study, and to this day many people worldwide still believe that chocolate can help with weight loss.
They don’t need belief and faith, they need to trust it. Something that both Republicans and Democrats have eroded because it didn’t fit their narrative.
So you have to be religious to be faithful to your spouse?
No, faith doesn’t refer to religion. You can have faith that your investment works, you can have faith in democracy or the judicial system, and in many other things.
In fact, if you check out what Wikipedia has to say about it, there’s a whole section on “Secular Faith”, which includes faith in e.g. philosophical ideas, ethics, personal values and principles and so on.
Faith is just a strong conviction or trust, that’s how it’s defined. And sure, you can have faith in God. But you can also have faith that the scientific method works and that the amount of published garbage studies is low enough to not break the system.
And this faith can be shaken when learning about meta studies estimating that about 30% of scientific papers are bogus, plagiarized and/or not reproducible.
Or when learning about John Bohannon, and his purposely bogus study on that chocolate helps with weight loss, which he published to show how easy it is to publish nonsense papers, and not only did this study make it onto headlines of newspapers worldwide, but his retraction of the study totally failed to get any publicity at all. He basically couldn’t retract his own study from public knowledge.
And like with religious faith, learning about these issues can either lead to either increased understanding, a shaken faith in science in general or an angry counter-attack.
If you don’t understand everything in every field of science (and it’s impossible to do so), then you have to trust what you cannot prove. And that’s literally the same thing as faith. Because it is faith. You blindly trust something without having proof, just trusting that when someone else claims to have proof, that they actually do have proof.
Belief has nothing to do with science.
Yes it does. Most people can’t read a case study, and fewer can understand it.
To them, science requires trust in humans and faith that no one is lying.
This is the problem.
Eh… yes and no. I’ve got an engineering degree, I’ve learned how to design studies and do science properly, and I still struggle when a study is on topics I’m less familiar with. I can’t imagine most people going through these. They’re not accessible.
And if you’re just reading the abstract and conclusion, or worse a science article, you’ve got to hope they’ve interpreted things properly. Which articles are particularly bad at because they need to sound like news.
Or they need a competent journalist to translate the findings without being sensational.
But then they still need to trust the journalist. And considering how much crap science gets published even in supposedly high quality journals, and how little quality peer review happens, even the journalists don’t have a scientific basis for much of science reporting.
Part of the problem is the “publish or die” mentality.
Personally, I think the Journal of Negative Results needs more love.
Yes, that’s a huge issue. Another issue is that the reward for doing peer reviews is far too low, and publishing negative peer reviews comes with the risk of making an enemy in the same field, who might do your next peer review. So you only call out egregiously bad science or just rubber stamp every peer review, because there’s nothing in it for you to publish a negative peer review.
I’ve read meta studies that said that huge amounts of published scientific studies cannot be reproduced. I can’t remember the exact number, but it was >30%.
So if the published science itself is already full of garbage, how is a journalist (who is themselves not a scientist or at least not a scientist in the specific field) know what study is good and what is garbage? And even then, how many people read science journalism compared to boulevard media?
John Bohannon comes to mind, with his purposeful bogus study that claimed that eating chocolate can help with weight loss. He used overfitting and p-hacking to create a study that was purposely garbage and got it published. His goal was to show how easy it is to publish a sensationalist-but-garbage paper. This went so well that every trashy boulevard paper but also many major newspapers ran it, often as a title page news story.
In an interview he said that he got hundreds of calls, all on the level of “Which brand of chocolate helps best?”, and only a single serious inquiry doubting his methods.
He published his own debunk shortly after publishing the original story, it it got pretty much no media attention at all.
He basically couldn’t even recall his own bogus study, and to this day many people worldwide still believe that chocolate can help with weight loss.
most people need belief and faith in science because they’ll never understand it
They don’t need belief and faith, they need to trust it. Something that both Republicans and Democrats have eroded because it didn’t fit their narrative.
Faith is a different word for trust. They are synonyms.
Faith specifically refers to religion. Allowing them to use it in regards to science is where we got these loons claiming that science is a religion.
So you have to be religious to be faithful to your spouse?
No, faith doesn’t refer to religion. You can have faith that your investment works, you can have faith in democracy or the judicial system, and in many other things.
In fact, if you check out what Wikipedia has to say about it, there’s a whole section on “Secular Faith”, which includes faith in e.g. philosophical ideas, ethics, personal values and principles and so on.
Faith is just a strong conviction or trust, that’s how it’s defined. And sure, you can have faith in God. But you can also have faith that the scientific method works and that the amount of published garbage studies is low enough to not break the system.
And this faith can be shaken when learning about meta studies estimating that about 30% of scientific papers are bogus, plagiarized and/or not reproducible.
Or when learning about John Bohannon, and his purposely bogus study on that chocolate helps with weight loss, which he published to show how easy it is to publish nonsense papers, and not only did this study make it onto headlines of newspapers worldwide, but his retraction of the study totally failed to get any publicity at all. He basically couldn’t retract his own study from public knowledge.
And like with religious faith, learning about these issues can either lead to either increased understanding, a shaken faith in science in general or an angry counter-attack.
If you don’t understand everything in every field of science (and it’s impossible to do so), then you have to trust what you cannot prove. And that’s literally the same thing as faith. Because it is faith. You blindly trust something without having proof, just trusting that when someone else claims to have proof, that they actually do have proof.
I trust the scientific method, I don’t have faith.
Trust and faith should not be used interchangeably.
Trust means that you have good reason to believe in something.
Faith is just wishing on a star.
You will find that everyone who has faith claims to have a good reason to believe in it.
Faith is trust is believing in something without definitive proof. If you have proof, you don’t trust, you know.
Good reason is subjective. I require evidence before I believe something.
Trust can be placed based on past experiences. I trust my sister will call me. I have faith in nothing.
There’s a little bit in a hypothesis, but I take your point. It just requires good faith approaches and conclusions.
Not in a properly formed hypothesis.
You shouldn’t have faith in anything in science.
Good faith isn’t the same as spiritual faith. It just means good intentions.
Really? Because half a nation of ignorant hayseeds NOT believing in science kind of got us to where we are now.
How about instead of posting pithy uselessness you actually think about things for a moment
Science doesn’t require belief.
The problem is that people believe in religion, and their religious leaders have a vested interest in keeping them dumb.