Apparently Stephen Carpenter is an anti science dumbass

I suppose if I think about it, religion can be innocuous. Even if it is technically anti-science and logic, plenty of followers can take it as a personal comfort when dealing with mortality, without developing the absolutist fanaticism of others to impose said belief on public policy, or target the civil rights of deemed "outsiders".

But anti-vax and anti-science sentiment is active and declared conflict with critical thinking, with all kinds of real and dangerous consequences for health and public policy.

 

I think you're literally mansplaining what science is to an actual scientist.

You're also conflating "science" and "scientific method."

 

because this is a thread about flat earth and vaccines.

 

I'm surprised to see this thread make it to 9 pages. If I had to be annoyed by every person with a huge following that has an ignorant opinion I'd be mad all the time.

 

Good sir, have you seen the internet? Everyone is mad at everything, always.

 

Science is weaponised all the time. That's one of my main points. And everybody does it by picking and choosing findings which they agree with - whether across economics, social sciences, biomedical sciences etc.

Unfortunately it's human nature to be biased and to quickly reject things which clash with our pre-conceived ideas. And nobody is really immune from that. It doesn't matter your job, your political leanings or anything else.

I think you might have hallucinated me having a viewpoint which I don't. Is that possible?

Also, 2 posts by one person is a pretty light "brigade", I must say. I also didn't take any sort of political or ideological side.

I also said nothing about 10 papers standing between me and any position. That's a strawman. My point is that it's impossible for the lay person outside of a field to interpret the evidence, weigh up the quality of experimental methods, assess how experiments and analyses were performed, double-check the statistics etc. So they're left to just believing "experts" on TV or Facebook who report whatever they want.

This is true for all of us, even if you think you are one of the smart people. I haven't personally read the papers about how we determined the earth is a sphere, and I don't personally understand the physics. Nor have I gone into orbit and looked down on the earth to see it with my own eyes. But obviously I don't believe the earth is flat because I'm choosing to listen to experts (and a bit of common sense too). I assume it's the same for you unless you are a physicist. Obviously flat-earth is an extreme example. If you take something simple like "is saturated fat bad for you?" you'll get divergent opinions from hardcore vegans, carnivores, and plenty of authoritative figures, doctors, scientists (and celebrities, youtubers etc) on both sides arguing polar opposites about what the evidence says. And you'll even find meta-analyses coming to not much conclusion at all. So holding up "science" as something with all the answers is just feel-good nonsense to make people feel smug and clever and justified in their views.

Unfortunately, yes, some people are absolutely treating it like a religion. Look at all the weird "I fucking love science"-type Facebook groups. There's people basically worshipping Fauci and holding him up like some sort of hero (and people who see him as some sort of anti-christ). That's pretty religion/cult-like.

Look the way reddit and twitter will jump on any sort of study that supports their viewpoints and actually attack journals and scientists for work they don't like. For example, there was a recent randomised clinical trial showing masks did nothing to prevent spread of Covid in their study, https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-6817). There were people actually campaigning for the journal to retract it, and the authors have been personally attacked and are being hounded on social media, which is just insane. If the authors did the study and reported it legitimately, there is zero rationale for retraction just because you don't "like" the result. The authors even say that it shouldn't be taken as a recommendation either way, and of course the anti-mask people are using this as justification that they were right all along. Again, taking a smug position by finding some experts who agree with you.

I was more using your post as a jumping off point for a large statement. Not really meant to be a direct argument against you or anything

As for vaccines, I agree that a good vaccine will eventually come along. But my personal position is that I will wait for a while before choosing to have one. As a person at very low risk of death or serious complications from Covid, the vaccine is definitely not essential for me. The equation would be different if I was at higher risk from Covid.

I didn't mention the world being flat. Mostly because I think the number of people actually believing that (and not just trolling) is miniscule. Even Steph - I had a pretty good feeling he's trolling and attention seeking. Whereas apparently a shitload of people believe in homeopathy, including actual faculty position professors, doctors, physicists (the whole "water memory" thing) and other professionals, which seems crazy to me.

Science is not "what we know" at all. "Science" really is a process by which we test hypotheses, assign some sort of probability to their truth, and then change our views accordingly. And technically, most of the time you are ruling out or disproving hypotheses, not really confirming them.

The process is extremely messy and the general public are getting a bit of a "look behind the curtain" now, and it's not pretty. What the "science religion" people don't really appreciate is that the majority of published papers are probably wrong, and it usually takes decades to reach true understanding and consensus.

 

One could make the argument that this trait was once a useful survival mechanism, but has since (I'm looking at you Bernays) been perverted into just another social control mechanism. Be that as it may, please know that I was in no way trying to ideologically pigeonhole your previous posts. In fact, I'm in full agreement with them. Rather, it was my intention to poke a little fun at the scientific shibboleth itself, and not towards any of the views you've personally expressed thus far.

That said, does it not seem as though the internet behaves, for all intents and purposes, very much like a morphogenetic field?

 

But what's your point with all this ranting? Justifying not taking the vaccine?

A lot of the stuff you say about the shortcomings of science I more or less agree with. But so what? "Oh no, the process isn't perfect." You expected it to be? You have a better alternative to science?

And about the vaccine, I think
1) Your belief that you're personally better off not taking it initially is probably not even true. I think the risk of a serious side effect is lower than the risk of getting a bad case of covid.
2) It's not just about you. It's also about reducing the rate of transmission and the strain on society. What about the people you transmit it to if you do catch it? And the people they transmit it to? Those people might not be as young and healthy as you are. And if any of you end up in the hospital, those hospital beds could have been free for other patients if you'd taken the vaccine.

 

Doesn't mean I'm wrong though, does it? If I'm wrong, then correct me. Otherwise, I don't care who I'm explaining it to. People are people. Scientists can still get the definition of science wrong.

Literally just type the word science into google:
"the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment."

It's an activity. It's a process. It's not a collection or source of knowledge. If I'm wrong, then argue against the point I'm making, instead of appealing to people's job titles.

Edit:
And the point I'm trying to make is that while we're basically using threads like these to call people stupid on the basis of science, we're also getting the idea of what science is wrong.

There are lots of people here and everywhere who I'm sure are incredibly smart, and understand how to interpret scientific writing, etc. - but lots of people don't. Some just know that "science says stuff" therefore it must be true - but that's not how it works. Sometimes science gets things wrong. Sometimes science is up for debate or interpretation. Sometimes people get pointed in the wrong direction because of either actual science, or bad takes on some actual science.

On that basis, I'm willing to forgive people for either standing too firmly behind something "because science said so", but also willing to forgive people who are overly critical of science.

 

Well, if you bothered to read the full definition you would see that it also means:

"a systematically organized body of knowledge on a particular subject"

Or clicked the first link or two vs. the Google header when you searched "science definition".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/science

https://www.britannica.com/science/science

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/science

Again, it seems what you're looking for is "scientific method", as defined:

https://www.britannica.com/science/scientific-method

This is a decent breakdown:

https://www.livescience.com/20896-science-scientific-method.html

Did we really need to copy and paste definitions? You couldn't look at what I said, looked it up yourself and gotten the same understanding?

 

Fair enough, you got me on that.
My original point of it not being the source of information in itself still stands though. I don't know what there is to be gained by trying to argue that knowledge literally comes from science.

I mean, the core of the point that I'm making is still valid. Science doesn't create or decide truth, it finds it, or organizes it.

 

And as soon as I post that, someone I know posts a video with a headline about how science supposedly says dreams could be the key to time travel........ the video is just some interviews with two people who talk in mostly metaphors, and the narration decides that what the two researchers said must mean that dreams=time travel. No links to anything, no studies to read about or anything. Kind of an amusing coincidence to come up as I'm in this thread.

 

Wow, this topic has really branched out!

I'd argue that anything trying to look like science that decides facts and then looks for evidence to reinforce those is pseudoscience.

There is a shitload of pseudoscience out there right now.

Has anyone read Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World? Pretty relevant stuff to this discussion. If I can paraphrase it in very general strokes with my own interpretation, it says that as our economy goes down the toilet, people tend to look more into superstition and fantasy in order to trick themselves into believing that their level of knowledge is special. As that feeling galvanizes, they'll study conventional knowledge less and less, until their belief system is completely ungrounded, at which point those people can become very aggressive toward conventional ideas or ideas that have been formally vetted, if those ideas erode the base of their beliefs.

He frames this almost as a prediction of the future, but it also seems to me to be a descriptor of what spiraled out of the depression to ignit world war two.

Putin said that whichever nation leads in AI technology will lead the world. Generally speaking, I think that whichever nation leads in technology in general leads the world, but AI might be the next hot thing. In the aftermath of WWII, it was nuclear technology, then computer technology, and continues to be (AI would be a subset of that).

If we turn our backs on science to the point where we no longer use observed facts as evidence, we cannot progress with technology. If, instead of playing around with doping silicon to make transistors, we just clutched onto our crystals and prayed for an economic boom in the 1950's and 1960's, someone else would have taken the reigns.

And honestly, even though people from all over the world still come to the USA and Canada and the UK to study at University, places like Russia and China and Japan and India are becoming generally more scientifically literate than people in the USA especially. The cilture of the West is starting to slowly crumble apart. But Stef's weird worldview isn't a cause, it's a symptom. I mean, we still have a President that fucking told people to inject bleach, and that Easter would somehow stop a global pandemic, because he just felt like that would happen, despite tons of contrary evidence and tons of the world's top experts advising him otherwise.

 

don't forget pandemics. the power grab is immense.

 

This does not change my opinion of him in the slightest and it shouldn’t change yours either. I rely on Steph to come up with fat ass riffs, not run the CDC, dictate policy, or educate me. If you’d listened to him speak for 2 seconds at any point you’d already know that the dude is a dumbass. The idea that this “irresponsible” is frankly silly. The dude said some stupid shit and now the entire internet thinks he’s an idiot. If you think him saying stupid shit is going to effect or change anything in any meaningful way you need to get off your high horse.

 

No, but large scale dumbassery is the sum of small scale dumbasseries. It's the same with littering - when enough people don't give a shit or think that a tiny bit won't make a difference, you get crap everywhere.

Same with replying to this sort of stuff. Obviously, a thread on a forum won't make a difference, but the alternative is to say nothing. And if everyone says nothing all the time, more dumbassery will surely ensue.

 

It’s tough to say, because while saying nothing surely won’t change his mind it’s unlikely that everyone dunking on him and calling him a piece of shit will change his mind either. I still believe that people are making a WAY bigger deal out of this than it needs to be, and if anything everyone clambering to shit on him has blown up the story and given his stupid ideas a way bigger platform than they would have had.

 

Talking shit on internet forums is a long, respected tradition

 

i say this explains why Gore sucked so hard