"F*cking magnets, how do they work?!"

[felixgwilliams]

***WARNING: POST CONTAINS MUCH BILE AND RAGE**

I realise that I can come across very agressively when I am pissed off about something I am passionate about. And that my views are my own. If you are looking for an entierly polite and sensible LJ post to read today I suggest you move along, I am not looking to offend anyone. I am just venting.

Comments

[bhriste]

To be honest, while I disagree with it, I have some sympathy with this attitude that has begun springing up where people see science as a monolith of authority that claims things to be "just so".

It's all very well and correct to describe science as observation and collection of empirical evidence and rigorous blah blah, but I think I've only ever heard this description of the scientific method given in response to a challenge to it. Most of the time only the results of scientists are presented to the public with only a passing reference to the evidence that the conclusion is inferred from.

The information will melt your brain. Science? It's complicated these days. There's that famous quote that "if you think you understand quantum theory, then you haven't understood it". If you go looking into the evidence and reasoning behind any given scientific theory, there will eventually come a point where you'd need a good few years of education in the field to actually understand what you're looking at. Now, this knowledge can obviously be made accessibly to lay people. But I think that this is where the "faith" part comes in. You're trusting the scientists here. Trusting that they've got it right, that they know what they're doing, that they're following that method of honestly and boldly perusing evidence regardless of bias in this very noble way that it always described. Now, I do think that's how scientists operate, but I don't know that. I think it's likely. I "believe" it, if you will.

Now, I have good reasons for thinking this, I could go into them, but they're not the same as empirical evidence and it would be rather dishonest of me to pretend as if they were while sneering at others who don't hold this viewpoint.

And then there are people for whom this trust conflicts with the trust they've put in others. Usually, their religious leaders, who've told them for instance, that scientists have it wrong on a certain point. Even for people who don't have this conflict of interests science is still a pretty impenetrable field that can be easily mistaken for an institution rather than a method. It's misguided, but I can see how they got there.

As always, education is the answer.

Also, when are you coming back, we need to do the stuff for that thing!

[mr_jez]

The problem is exacerbated because most folk do not have much of a model of epistemology.

Plato, for instance, suggested that there are four levels of knowledge. Most folk spend most of their lives wholly within the first level, whilst empirical science rises to the second, and theoretical science to the third. Now, this may not be True(tm), but it does help one recognise situations when people are pointlessly arguing from the perspective of different levels and agreement is just not possible.