Complex Numbers

Know One

I'm more than a little hung over right now, so I'm not going to have much commentary on this article. But read it anyway. It's a Cracked link, and I think it says a lot about the state of internet media right now that a dick joke site that evolved out of a juvenile magazine gets shit more right than more "serious" publications.

Stop Telling People To Believe The Science  

"But Waltz, you're all about science! How can you post such a thing?"

Well, like I said, it's worth reading.

No one disbelieves science, but we’re all selective in our embrace of it. I “believe” in science, but I still consume alcohol and junk food, which science says are terrible for me.

Doing something that's objectively bad for you isn't the same thing as doing things that are objectively bad for other people. For example, I don't care if you smoke. But lots of people care if you smoke in a crowded restaurant.

Some “believers” in science believe in rather unscientific propositions, from the imminent triumph of transhumanism to Elon Musk not being full of shit.

Transhumanism (feel free to look it up; I can't be arsed right now) is fantasy couched in scientific terms. Kind of like scientology.

Here's the money shot, though:

Science—actual science—isn’t something you believe in. Inertia and friction don’t need your belief to keep existing. A scientific theory, tested by an experiment, will either produce or fail to produce evidence, regardless of what you hope or believe will happen. If you actually believe in science, you should welcome reasonable questions and criticism and skepticism, because that’s how science moves forward.

As I've noted before, science is often wrong. That's part of the deal. It's a feature, not a bug. Unlike with religion, you don't get "infallible" diktats intoned from on high; all you get is support or negation of your hypothesis.

I'm okay with that. Everyone should be okay with that, but I get that some people aren't, and they want certainty.

But there's no such thing as certainty.

In the early days of COVID we were told not to wear masks.

I gotta call this one out because a lot of the moron brigade loves to trot this out whenever the subject comes up. Yes, they told us not to wear masks. This wasn't because masks are ineffective, though (they are not). It was not because "science" said it wasn't transmissible by aerosol (it did not). It was because there weren't enough masks. It wasn't a scientific decision but a pragmatic one. Remember how people hoarded toilet paper back then? Imagine how much worse it would be with a run on something that people generally didn't use at the time. You have to take human stupidity and greed into account, or things get even worse.

There’s a tendency to let “belief” in science slide into scientism, the idea that the scientific lens is always the best way of looking at the world and that scientists could, in theory, solve all of our political and ethical problems if we just got those dumb politicians and philosophers out of the way.

I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but philosophy and science are entirely separate ways to approach knowledge. And yet, philosophy has to be grounded in science... and science must be guided by philosophy. As an example of the latter, think of animal testing. We consider many forms of research on animals to be immoral. But that's a philosophical matter. Science itself is not moral, immoral, or amoral. It's also not a collection of facts; rather, it's an approach.

I watched a thoroughly mediocre science fiction show on Amazon a while back. As part of the plot, a journalist and a scientist walk into a bar (yes, that could be a setup for a joke). The bar is having Trivia Night. The scientist is portrayed as absolutely confident that he will win the trivia contest, and he and the journalist bet each other.

Thing is, scientists are 1) not automatically more intelligent than anyone else; 2) generally focused on one or two narrow fields of study and 3) entirely too immersed in said study to know, or care, who played Steve on Soaps of our Lives or who was the second-string wide receiver for the Raiders in 1997. The show's writers fell into a common trap: conflating intelligence with knowledge.

All else being equal, I'd put all the money on the journalist in a trivia contest against a scientist.

At best, that leads to bizarre assumptions about how knowledge works, like how the media loved to have Stephen Hawking—a theoretical physicist and cosmologist—issue ominous warnings about the threat of AI, aliens, and imminent human extinction.

Hawking has been an ex-Hawking for a while now, and yet I still see articles about his prognostications. Yes, he was brilliant. No, none of his "warnings" should carry any more weight than that of your average science fiction writer. Even the smartest people in the world have their biases.

People have to be engaged on an emotional level, regardless of how unpleasant that task can be, because otherwise we’re ignoring how they reached this point.

To me, that's not just unpleasant, but absolutely disgusting. Still, on a basic level, I understand that it's impossible to reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

Okay, I guess I had more commentary on the article than I expected, hangover or not. Believe it or not, there's a lot more I'd like to say. I'm not going to, though. In case it's not obvious, however, I'm not saying "ignore science." Far from it. Neither is the writer. But I think we all need to watch the movie on a wider screen.