Reposted from William M Briggs’s Substack Science Is Not The Answer
The second sentence of the abstract of a new paper about trust in scientists, which is generally high but in some places low, provides the very reason for distrust: “Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Climate change” is not a crisis, and it is absurd for scientists to claim it is. The covid panic was. But only because scientists in the name of Science first created the damned bug, and then repeatedly botched its “solutions”. What rulers and Experts did to the body politic in the name of Science would make a San Francisco bathhouse habitué blush.
Incidentally, trust in scientists, they say, and not in Science. An interesting and important distinction.
The paper is “Trust in scientists and their role in society across 67 countries” by Viktoria Cologna, Naomi Oreskes, whom we have met several times, and a legion of others. We have met, and have not enjoyed meeting, Oreskes many times before.
Like the abstract, the paper itself begins in a bizarre way: “Public trust in science provides many benefits to people and society at large.”
Yes and no. Sometimes the fruits of science provide benefits, true, but sometimes they provide harms; e.g., gain-of-lethality research and nuclear bombs. Perhaps the net, at least at the date of this writing, is a benefit, but this is unclear. To be clear we’d have to have an agreed upon definition of The Good. We would have to know the purpose and meaning of life, and how our toys and machines fit into this scheme.
Which is not the purview of science. And which, in our decaying culture, our Experts, elites and rulers never discuss.
This is important because this paper, as in most minds, production of tools and toys are conflated with science. Science is the understanding of the nature of world. Controlling the world via this understanding is not science, but something else. Confusing the two leads to scientism.
Now this paper is a mess, and there is no point taking it too seriously. The ambiguity of translating the questions asked, the state and history of country-level science education and production, culture itself, and things like this mean that absolute numbers cannot be used or compared with anything close to certainty. For instance, a picture (their Fig. 1) shows Egypt (!) and India far outpacing other countries in scientist trust. Japan and Russia are near the bottom.
Then the authors say things like this: “Societies with high public trust in science dealt with the COVID19 pandemic more effectively, as citizens were more likely to comply with non-pharmaceutical COVID-19 interventions and had higher vaccine confidence.”
No they didn’t. The USA, which Followed The Science, had one of the highest crap-out rates. Sweden, which did not, did much better.
Who really knows, though, because countries reported numbers with different levels of assiduity. Complying with idiotic and vain “non-pharmaceutical” “interventions” is a definite strike against trusting scientists. Follow the arrows on the floor or die! Wear a mask standing but not sitting or die! Break the 6 foot barrier and die!
What struck me as bizarre was this:
Trust is significantly associated with attitudes towards science. We find positive relationships between people’s trust in scientists and their willingness to rely on scientific advice and thus make themselves vulnerable to scientists, the belief that science benefits people like them, and trust in scientific methods.
Make themselves vulnerable to scientists. Drips with effeminacy and toxic femininity. Same kind of stuff you see from synodalians listening and accompanying us on our spiritual journey together. Mental sugar poisoning. Vulnerable to scientists forsooth!
We also find that science-related populist attitudes—that is, beliefs that people’s common sense is superior to the expertise of scientists and scientific institutions—are associated with lower trust in scientists.
Here’s where the scientism really creeps in. Knowing how the world works does not, in any way, tell us the best and worst ways of manipulating the world. Ordinary people can often tell when they are being shafted by Vlad The Scientist Impaler. Their commonsense solutions can work better than scientist “solutions”.
The mistake the paper makes is assuming scientists’ expertise is always better than people’s. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. But never always.
Think of the scientist whose bright idea it was to put lithium in water supplies to calm the indigenous populants—and make them love scientists more? Or the scientist who wants to—and I swear this is true—shrink people to make war on “climate change.”
Scientists, even PhD-bearing mathematical prodigies, can be stupid. Because of DIE and the work, that stupidity on public display increases.
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By William M Briggs · Launched 2 years ago
The philosophy of science and scientism, and putting uncertainty in its place.
That’s because some of those that call themselves ‘scientists’ are really academics.
Trust is not given, it’s earned
All I can hear in my head is Shaggie “Itt Wasn’t Me”
The Simpsons: Mensa International
This morning, my final consult after operations on both eyes caused the opthalmic surgeon to enthuse that, aged over 80, my eyes now had effective 20:20 vision. So, today I liked the Science of Opthalmology and I liked the medical Scientists who performed the surgery.
OTOH, there are some criminals who are executed by injection. A medical Scientist, using chemical Science materials, injects lethal poison into another person. I do not like this medical person or that Science.
The point is, you cannot generalise in broad terms, that all medical doctors are good or bad, that all Science is good or bad, or that all Scientists are good or bad. It all depends …
However, I can state with evidence and conviction that the overall standard of a small, recent branch self-named “Climate Science”, has demonstrated consistently a poor quality of research and persistently poor standards of comment by such Scientists about their Science.
Climate research and climate researchers are having a public, deplorable impact on the standing, reputation and achievements of established Science.
Established Science is usually conducted under a set of principles named The Scientific Method. There are many arrangements so that those who want to indulge in Science need to meet standards created or approved by other Scientists with records of achievement. (Medical Science, almost alone now, enforces legal requirements for ability through examinations and membership of learned Societies, preserving the right to punish imposters).
Older Science used a guideline, that if the results of a method did not prove the model correct, the model was wrong, not the data. Today in climate research, some say that the model is right even though the data do not support it.
Most established Science has arguably existed to advancd the state of human knowledge and measurable human comfort, with data like personal lifetimes becoming longer. Climate research, on the other hand, has a core of unhappy people trying hard to decrease human comfort and enjoyment of life, largely for personal gain by the pushers. (What good has author Oreskes done?) This is so anti-Science that I am surprised that more people not not see it and rebel.
Still, all fashions will pass with time, like my eyeballs.
Geoff S
I say decarbonise the climate scientists in order to decolonise them-
End fossil-fuel era to address colonial injustices, urges prominent historian (msn.com)
and we’ll see how that works by 2100.
The best available evidence on COVID was that they didn’t know and failed utterly in presenting that irrefutable evidence. Same thing for climate: Temperatures rise for a time. Temperatures fall for a time. We do not have proof to explain. We can’t rule out that temperatures will drop precipitously starting tomorrow.
With the internet, it is much easier for agencies like the UN to spread false propaganda worldwide. It was much harder in the past with only letters and phone calls available.
It’s usually much easier to make a mess than it is to clean it up.
It’s much easier to change history and climate records with the internet.
Just a few keystrokes rather than burning a bunch or books.
(TheWayBackMachine is our friend!)
There are over 8 billion people on earth who are living longer, healthier, wealthier and more productive lives because of human efforts to learn and apply the rules of how things work in the natural world (science). Along the way that understanding has brought serious negative outcomes as well such as environmental damage, wars, authoritarian rule, mass killings but, over time, each of these negatives has diminished in terms of their affect on human society and the environment by applying the same process of discovery.
The human footprint on the natural world shrinks as people urbanize and industrial agriculture allows us to grow more food on less acreage. The amount of wild land left to nature is also improving in many areas and the mythical extinction epidemic just isn’t happening. The Malthusian fear that I grew up with of population explosion and resource depletion never happened and, in fact, we now know many populations in developing and developed countries are now in decline with global population likely to trend downward by midcentury, not because of famine or resource depletion but because of development and family planning.
Our most pressing threat these days isn’t resources, hunger, population, pollution, or even conflict. It is our own tendency to confuse science and the scientific process with authority. Authority allows pseudoscience to have the same impact as real discovery. It allows hapless politicians to make decisions that will degrade society based on ideas never tested or supported by real scientific exploration. It is presently allowing us to dedicate a huge part of our collective wealth to projects that degrade human quality of life, the natural environment and our precious pool of resources in the name of saving the planet from a hazard, the existence of which, science has not provided any reliable evidence of.
As for trust in scientists and other authorities who have such outsized impact on our lives, well the climate change cult and the CoVID debacle are all the explanation needed to understand why simply having authority or stature doesn’t induce trust among the victims of bad policy.
As soon as the name Naomi Oreskes appears, you know the paper is complete BS. No reason to read the rest of the article.
https://www.alamy.com/margaret-hamilton-as-the-wicked-witch-of-the-west-the-wizard-of-oz-1939-mgm-file-reference-33848-639tha-image270996155.html?imageid=3BA832DA-A17D-4F7B-99B1-630163AEEA2F&p=729507&pn=1&searchId=7450497b5e13a32536a73e9197210e24&searchtype=0
(Apologizes to Margret Hamilton. Very good actress. Not her fault she resembles a real wicked witch of the west.)
VI. Scientists like money, too: Despotism Made Easy
History shows us that just about every person has their price when it comes to buying their loyalty. But for some reason, scientists are overlooked in regards to purchasing their personal/professional debasement. But don’t be fooled — scientists can be persuaded, coerced, and enriched just like the usual suspects.
Depending on the scale of your reform, (regional, national, or global,) scientific collusion adds credibility and gravitas to your agenda. The ability to impress scientific illiterates in the political, business, and entertainment classes with scientific smoke and mirrors is invaluable. In turn, these influencers cajole others in the populace into accepting the new wisdom.
In economic terms, this is called the multiplier effect. In a reform environment it’s called survival.
The robust vanities within the scientific community facilitate the co-opting of its members. These vanities, harnessed to an imaginative use of scientific data and computer modeling, mean the science supporting your agenda quickly becomes “ settled.”
You will find it encouraging to note the rapidity in which the scientific community self— censors and represses dissent once the prevailing wind of reform has been determined. This good fortune should be fertilized by becoming the preferred source (i.e. the only source) for funding. While it is always true that money wins friends and influences people, it is especially true during the ascendancy of reform. Money will be the glue that binds scientific inquiry to social justice.
While the term reverse engineering is usually associated with manufacturing and high technology, it has applications to scientific inquiry as well. When a scientific truth would prove useful to your reform agenda, do not be deterred by the fact that it doesn’t exist or isn’t supported by the evidence.
With enough money and the right kind of research, it’s not difficult to find the evidence to support the desired conclusion.
It is a given that neither you nor your helpers will be scientifically literate. This is a net positive rather than a negative, for it empowers you to think out of the box when it comes to implementing your vision for an improved human condition. Finally, make sure to use an anthropomorphic perspective. After all, why consider the bigger scientific picture when a small constrained interpretation will further your reform?