* Is 'Oumuamua an alien spacehip / solar sail?
* Does the Tabby's star have a alien megastructure / partial Dyson sphere?
You can't blame to Monsanto for them.
The article appears, get a huge press coverage, the authors get interviewed, and somewhere the fact that it's only an improbable weird hypothesis is lost.
A few month later the new evidence refute the paper, and people get the idea that scientific discovers are not reliable.
(And there are batteries breakthrough that increase your battery capacity a 80% before disappearing, nutrition recommendation that get reversed after a few years, ... but these are more motivated for money.)
> A few month later the new evidence refute the paper, and people get the idea that scientific discovers are not reliable.
And do this a few dozen times and people stop listening to science because they know a couple of months from now, this study is going to be refuted.
Among the public, science has always had some portion of people who understood it's processes as those of a secular priesthood and those who understood it's processes as discovering the truth through skepticism and experimentation. Even among this working scientists, this division has existed (and given a society that never discarded religion, anti-science along with anti-intellectual views have naturally always been part of American thought).
The problem today is two-fold. Aside from the corruption of scientific processes others have noted, the other aspect is the majority of people aren't seeing the material gains that science offers the world - science is broadly part of progress and when the average American's life expectancy and median income isn't increasing, why would they believe in progress?
When the studies say so many different things, all contradictory and all purporting to be good and then bad and then good again, people give up trying to understand.
Why should I believe that anything I eat today is bad when tomorrow you're just going to tell me that it's good for me again?
People are tired of listening to science that appears to ebb and flow like the tides.
Take eggs for example.
Here are the 1995 dietary guidelines:
https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga95/9DIETGUI.HTM
> Choose a diet low in cholesterol
> The body makes and requires cholesterol. In addition, cholesterol is obtained from food. Dietary cholesterol comes from animal sources such as egg yolks, meat (especially organ meats such as liver) poultry, fish, and higher fat dairy products. Many of these foods are also high in saturated fats. Choosing foods with less cholesterol and saturated fat will help lower your blood cholesterol levels. The Nutrition Facts Label lists the Daily Value for cholesterol as 300 mg. You can keep your cholesterol intake at this level or lower by emphasizing intakes of grains, vegetables, and fruits and by limiting intake of egg yolks, including those used in cooking.
Here is the scientific report of the 2015 guidelines:
https://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/...
> Cholesterol: Previously, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommended that cholesterol intake be limited to no more than 300 milligrams per day. The 2015 DGAC will not bring forward this recommendation because available evidence shows no appreciable relationship between consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol, consistent with the conclusions of the AHA/ACC report, Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.
The sad part, is that there was never any good evidence to limit consumption of cholesterol and eggs.
The actual research is inaccessible to the public, hidden behind paywalls in subscription-only journals, and written in a form that is very difficult if not impossible for the general public to understand.
For most of the general public, the output of the scientific community is just a poorly translated and often misleading headline.
It absolutely is difficult for the general public, but that's not a failing, that's the state of the art.
We do have a problem with nomenclature being fractured, even within fields, never mind between them. But that's not the problem.
The problem is that when you get deep enough into how things work, things just get really complex and they stop behaving in ways and patterns that humans experience the world. They end up being things that cannot be simplified down to a common human experience in any meaningful way. At best, you can take a portion of the concept and make an analogy to some limited portion of a common experience without lying too much. But they are fundamentally not the same, so you cannot use the analogy to discover anything new about the original concept.
There is also a problem of the time it takes to internalize new ideas and concepts. You can't quickly and easily give someone an intuitive understanding of anything - it takes work and experience and time on their part to get there. I don't see how going and reworking nomenclatures of entire fields is going to make people more willing or able to devote their time to this. Mostly you'll have to put in incredible amount of work, convince far too many people to do things a different way because you said so, and all you'll have really done is save some (significant) annoyance from students getting their feet wet in a new field.
I have to disagree that nomenclature being fractured is not the problem. Within any given field, it is true that as you go deep enough into how things work, it gets complicated and hectic. However, as we have done throughout the entire written history of humanity, we have a special set of tools to help us engage with those complications, and reduce them down to complexes of simple objects whose behavior we understand - mathematics. If we are unable to reach deeply enough within a single field, it is because the tools we teach are not up to the task.
A large part of the issue is that the mathematics in common use in these disciplines, and at the elementary level, is in need of an upgrade. That upgrade is in the process of being performed (category theory), and as we learn to apply it in more and more fields, concepts and processes that seem deep, difficult, and essentially different turn out to be related in mathematically precise 'analogies'. This means that the same set of 'deep concepts', applied with different sets base objects and different operators that obey the same rules, will unfold into some of the main ideas in each discipline. Baez's Physics, Logic, Topology, Computation, a Rosetta stone is a good example of the beginnings of this, but googling 'applied category theory' or 'applied category theory course azimuth' ought to bring you some interesting extra links.
More generally, what we see of as specific processes within a particular field, when viewed through the right lenses, I expect we will find are instead instantiations of much more general processes that are the same across most, if not all, fields of discipline. How will we convince everyone to use these different naming systems and toolsets? Because those people who do use them will perform better, and the logic of competition will pull the educational system and society along with them.
If you disagree, I'd love to hear more about it. Nomenclature and Education are near and dear to me - I always jump and an opportunity to discuss with someone who does so in good faith.
News outlets are eager to 'report first' and don't bother correctly framing the science in a proper context of one study //which suggests more research and confirmation is necessary//.
Publish or perish, along with the lack of replication rather than trying to find something exciting to publish, or even enshrining the effort of replicating results (repudiating or confirming) to more strongly establish fact and carefully observe to see if there may be other causes/effects; is ruining the integrity of the scientific methods.
Finally, a lack of stable funding for maintaining and improving what should be public domain (established facts about nature) and the work of students of all ages to re-study and double check as they learn, is nearly the ultimate root cause. The true root cause being greed and the increasing likelihood that as we as a species approach 'abundance' that capitalism ceases to be a good means for wisely allocating resources. Surely that is the case when we are to the point of automated micro-transaction harvesting HFT and fractions of a second of advantage translating to profits in a financial sector that is a vastly over-sized portion of the GDP.
Get some data. Beat it up until you get something attention grabbing. Publish. Get paid. Worry about any fallout later.
The problem of science is that it doesn't have the outlet of, say, high school students learning real science and knowing how it works, that the products of science and technology is wind-up cut-off from the broad processes of experimentation that gave rise to them.
Too many of the studies today are funded to look for evidence to support a narrative instead of chasing the evidence to find the truth. The former is propaganda. The latter is science.
When I say too many, I mean to say that there are enough that people are very very aware of this. This fact alone is a problem because it damages people's perception of what is going on in the scientific community. If people cannot trust scientists to deliver truth rather than deliver support for a narrative, we have a problem. Whether this perception is fair or not, it is so.
If perception is that we cannot trust the scientists delivering the test results, nor the providence of the testing, then how can we trust the information we're being shown?
People need to see integrity before they can trust anything else.
I'm afraid this last bit is a big problem. I suspect there is a certain lag from discovery to perception. And then starting in the 1800 we had wave after wave of discovery, from electricity, magnetism, cars, airplanes, wireless, nuclear bombs, computers... stopping around the 1980s. At this point we can keep talking up science all we want but I fear something like fusion reactors or true AI would be needed to boost the faith.
many of those responsible for science as a discipline throughout the centuries sought to know more of their creator rather than to debunk religion
Even if as most atheists agree the Bible is a fallacy, that still doesn't prove there isn't a God, or multiple Gods. Nor does it even prove our own existence. It just proves our abilities to contemplate and interpret the laws of the physics we appear bound inside this universe.
The only rules we can discover and prove are the ones that constrain the environment we are confined to. Anything outside this environment is opaque to us, which may include a God... or not.
I see it differently. The problem isn't the public. The public has actually done a commendable job sensing what's been going on. It's not fair - however unintentional - to tie the public to the problem. It's bad enough Science keep denouncing the public, when it's Science who has mucked up it's own reputation. The pubic is a mirror.
Science, much like journalism, has been drinking too much of its own Kool Aid. It has forgotten it can't just talk, but it needs to walk that talk, as well.
Science would also be wise to show some humility and admit when it's gotten something less than perfect. Yes, that is part of the process. Does Science understand that? Instead, it just sweeps those aside and keeps self-professing it's eternal greatness, and how we should bow our heads, etc.
Bill Nye? Neil deGrasse Tyson? These are the face of Science? Me thinks they got the wrong end. They are doing more harm than good.
FWIW, I'm about to defend my PhD in a STEM discipline. In my eyes, science has far less credibility to me now than it did five years ago before I saw how the sausage is made. That's an N of at least one that this not only a problem outside scientific circles.
You have the perceptions you have because of the ideals you were sold in school and in your childhood. The role models you choose are those that make you aspire to be the very best human being you can... at least, this was my world. Integrity means something. Honour means something.
So to come out and find that the science I was taught, chase the evidence to find the truth, has been subverted and is now chase the narrative, find the evidence to support the narrative - that's a fundamental problem for me because what is being sold as science in the real world is not what I was taught science was supposed to be in school.
It seems that many others were taught to manipulate the world around them at everyone else's expense to get ahead. They were taught that their own goals and objectives were more important than those of humanity. Are they any more wrong?
Can I blame people for trying to get rich when we're taught in the West that money is success? It buys freedom and happiness. When all the propaganda fed to us by the media every day brainwashes us into believing this narrative, can I really blame anyone for doing whatever they have to, to get rich?
I'm not blaming the public. It's not a trivial problem to solve. We don't live in a culture that rewards integrity. We live in a culture that rewards behaviour that makes people rich.
If you don't put authenticity and integrity at the heart of your cultural beliefs, how can you blame anyone when they ignore it to chase money, which you will be rewarded for?
This is why none of us are masters of everything and we tend to specialize in niches. We want to be told the truth by an authority because we don't have the time to dig into everything ourselves. We want happy fulfilling lives. That means we can't look at everything with our own eyes, we need to be able to trust authorities. The less we can trust what we're being told, the more we have to research ourselves, the less time we're able to spend doing what we love with the people we love, the more miserable and disconnected our lives become.
We need to be told the truth by an authority and we need them to have the integrity to chase the truth and deliver it to us honorably.
It's not that we're not good at looking at the world with our own eyes, it's not that we're not capable, it's that we just don't have the time and we've run out of the energy to do so.
People will and have corrupted every institution ever created.
Having doctors and hospitals getting kickbacks for promoting certain drugs is an ethical problem that needs to be curtailed. This all feeds into public perception.
If you want to be seen as having integrity, you have to act with integrity.
When one can't trust the information they're looking at without having to dig into the political backing of the study and the results and without having to wonder which outliers have been trimmed to further hammer home the point of the stakeholders, we're no longer looking at science, we're looking at propaganda.
So the problem isn't science. The problem is the manner in which science is being subverted for financial gain. That's not science.
This is why science is losing credibility and authority outside of scientific circles.
If you want credibility and authority, you have to not only act with integrity, you have to be seen to be acting with integrity. It does't matter how honest your study or how objective your results, if people look at your study and see that it was funded by Monsanto and makes Monsanto look good, it looks like Monsanto paid for a study to make Monsanto look good and therefore it's biased and can be ignored.
This is life. If you want to be seen as having integrity, you have to act with integrity. And when people who were already distrusting of the way science is presented in the media are being told that they can't trust the media by authority figures, as ridiculous as those authority figures may be, eventually people stop listening until the furor abates.