Scientists still know more than you do

Offering methodology starts to get hairy when you talk about new technologies being put out onto the market though. When I was doing the lit review on HP's memristor development, there were only a few experiments whose results were made public because they have to play it so close to the chest. This resulted in a lot of press release statements *

that sound like they're breaking some hard physical barriers *

^{(writing data to an external device an order of magnitude faster than it can propagate through a few centimeters of circuitry to get there)}

— and while there are conceivable if very difficult workarounds they could be employing to do it, we don't know if they actually managed some of them or are just hyping.

edited 5th May '11 12:39:32 PM by Pykrete

@ OP: If you're talking about things that pretty much have been proven, with overwhelming mounds of evidence-because they don't want to, and because they don't understand how science works.

If you're talking about anything else, probably because scientific reporting sucks, and because scientists themselves aren't sure about things out on the boundary edges.

About Mythbusters being unscientific: I should bookmark this, for how often I have to use it.

Look, you can't make me speak in a logical, coherent, intelligent bananna.

[1]◊

Hopefully, they'll start replacing newspapers with Pot Hole articles soon.

Fight smart, not fair.

Credible scientists obviously know more on a specific topic than the average layperson, but that can be a double-edged sword. Expertise can be used to confuse and mislead, to further an agenda. The scientific consensus can be wrong by intention or mistake, and we must never forget that whilst respecting the intensive knowledge of experts in their fields. Scientists need to respect the concerns of laypeople and do their best to explain the principles of their work. People have every right to criticise a scientific investigation if its circumstances suggest that it was commissioned with a selective bias. It is up to scientists to defend themselves from accusations of partiality towards their paymasters.

edited 5th May '11 8:56:32 PM by Shichibukai

Requiem ~ September 2010 - October 2011 [Banned 4 Life]

I suppose this is why peer-reviewed journals exist. You get a bunch of people who know what they're talking about on the subject and have no stake in the results to tell the public if it's 'good science' or not.

Not that the public reads peer-reviewed sources, they read newpaper articles written by someone who spoke to someone in a peer-reviewed source.

Be not afraid...

^ Highly recommended (and entertaining, too, even though I know little about science.)

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

One big problem is laypeople not correctly understanding the terminology used by scientists. People hear, say, "Theory of Evolution" and think that theory means "conjecture" when in fact a scientific theory is a model constructed from mounds of evidence, years of work, and is as far as we know, the closest thing to the truth.

I typically try avoiding a decision (or caring at all!) unless there's some sort of consensus. Though I typically lack the knowledge to perform any more than a very dodgy check of a study's methodology, I trust that the peer-review process will in the long term do a pretty good job.

Wax on, wax off

Generally, I find that if the original article is available, for free, on-line, then I can find a debate over the conclusions and methods somewhere which will help me understand the research better. But if the article is published, as so many are, in a subscription only format, or worse, if the details of the study are copyrighted, then I am much less likely to learn anything more about it.

I think there’s a global conspiracy to see who can get the most clicks on the worst lies

Useful tip: when authors publish papers in subscription protected journals, they usually first post their submitted version on their personal webpage and/or on paper repositories such as arxiv.

That's perfectly legal — the journals retain the copyrights on the final version, not on the original one — and if the paper is relatively recent, more often than not you can find it in that way.

These papers may contain a few more typos, but apart from that they are usually fine — sometimes, they are even better than the final versions, because the journal may require to cut out explanations because of length constraints.

If all else fails, sending an email to the authors and asking pretty please for a copy almost always works .

edited 6th May '11 12:42:20 PM by Carciofus

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Richard Dawkins points this out in his book The Greatest Show on Earth and suggested an alternative word: "theorum". But that's unrelated.

Seconding Carciofus, in an on-topic point.

Tell the truth. This isn't about "scientists" or people believing they know "more" than scientists.

This is about Atheism and how incensed Atheists (and you) are that people stick to what they believe in no matter what others say.

You want the answer to your quandary?

Free Will.

edited 7th May '11 3:31:15 AM by victorinox243

We already have too many atheism threads. Go post in one of those, thanks, and don't derail this one.

edited 7th May '11 3:40:52 AM by LoniJay

Be not afraid...

That sounds like some sort of new chemical element, though.

If we want to change the language, why not use a term like "model" instead? After all, that's what scientific theories are: they are abstract representations of Real Life phenomena, created to allow us to better understand and predict their behaviours.

But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

Science is as heavily politicised as any other field. I'm not saying you should plug your ears and ignore anything you disagree with, but at least acknowledge that the popular image of science as 'detached' and 'objective' is a sweet (and dangerous) lie. There is always going to be a political and personal component to every scientist's viewpoint and it will affect how they gather and present information.

Science is a lot more heavily politicized than it ought to be, but as heavily politicized as any other field? That's a claim I'd have to challenge.

I have to say, it gets awfully frustrating hearing people introduced to scientific findings that are unappealing to them immediately positing alternate explanations, without sparing a second's effort to investigating, whether the scientists have already investigated and falsified those explanations. Unless it's a very recent study, they usually have. Some scientists are not that smart, but as a layperson, it rarely pays to assume you know better than the scientific community.

...eventually, we will reach a maximum entropy state where nobody has their own socks or underwear, or knows who to ask to get them back.

This ties in pretty well to the global warming thread—like I said there, you get a lot of botanists and geologists saying that global warming is a hoax, versus climatologists saying it isn't, and the newspapers call them both "scientists" and weight them equally, giving an artificial impression of conflict among climate experts.

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

Hence why journalists shouldn't be allowed to use the word "scientist" in an article.

Fight smart, not fair.

We already have the word "theorem", which is synonomous with "axiom".

It looks like the above poster is mispelling it and then claiming that Dawkins made up a new word. I think rather that he was probably trying to educate the public on the difference between the words "theory" and "theorem".

One of the best known useages of the word "theorem" is "Pythagorean Theorem", from geometry.

People also don't know the base meaning of the word "theory". It has never meant the same as "hypothesis" in any context. "Theory" means "a system of ideas that address a specific problem or topic." Thus, you have not only "Theory of Evolution" and "Theory of Gravity", "Germ Theory of Disease", "Superstring Theory", but also "Personality Theory", "music theory", etc.

"There are two refuges from the miseries of life: music, and cats." Albert Schweitzer

Short answer:

The average person knows more about science than a scientist is able to convey.

Full Stop.

If you want to go deeper, you're already admitting you're a moron. Upon finishing a one year course in the general sciences, a person has access to physics, biology, geology, and astronomy. You can't graduate without knowing something about gravity, DNA, magnets, and the solar system. However, science has become increasingly specialized, like all fields as knowledge is being constantly added. Any scientist the average person meets will be talking about a small subset of what they learned in school, in a technical language that is increasingly difficult to understand. Any attempt to follow the conversation deeper will only convince the layperson of how little they really know about things that have no immediate effect on them. If you want to go deeper, you're already admitting you're a moron.

Full Stop.

So someone is a moron because they want to learn more about the world, even if it's mostly limited to a specific field out of sheer necessity due to the vast amount of information?

"This thread has gone so far south it's surrounded by nesting penguins. " — Madrugada

Maybe someone has already said this, but there's a weird belief among the general population that a 'theory' has like, maybe a 40% chance of being correct and isn't actually based on years and years of research, so you get dialogue like this:

'Evolution isn't true, it's just a theory! I can theorize that people came from fish, and from now on there will be a theory of Fish-volution, that all the elementary schools have to present as scientific fact to all the kids! I just outsmarted science!'

That isn't a real theory. The thing is, theories only become Law when you have proved it with every given thing in the universe. That's why it's still called Cell Theory, is because even though any 8th grader will see a cell under a microscope, we would have to get every living thing in the universe, everywhere', at all times that have ever been or will ever be, and prove conclusively that it is made up of cells, which is obviously impossible.

And so there will never be a Cell Law, or a Law of Evolution, or even the Pythagorean Law (because for it be elevated from Theorem to Law, you would need to test it with triangles with every possible set of legs/hypotenuse, which is impossible because you can't even know all of the numbers ever.

Or at least, that's my understanding.

Point is, Doe, Joe Average doesn't know this, and thinks that because it's a theory, it has any kind of probability (Ok, fine, it does have some probability, but it's so low that... You know what, forget you.) of being incorrect.

Still Sheepin'

I'm not sure that's sound reasoning. Knowing that a car contains piston cylinders does not mean I know as much as a mechanic.

Fight smart, not fair.

Almost. Pythagoras' result is not a theory; it is a mathematical theorem, and so is provably correct in perpetuity throughout the universe for all possible (relevant) scenarios. It cannot possibly be wrong, unlike even scientific theories.

edited 11th Aug '11 4:13:12 AM by Yej

Da Rules excuse all the inaccuracy in the world. Listen to them, not me.