It also doesn't help that their only example of intellectual diversity is itself flawed, and not convincing, even to the authors.
I'm not really worried about creationism or climate stabilism competing given those conditions. And if those aren't the conditions, it's not scientific discourse.
The issue is not that scientists, or discerning non-scientists, will take those views seriously, it's that others might (or will, or do). Hence the issue is not with defining scientific discourse, it's with educating a population to be able to apply that definition (or formulate their own functional individual ones).
You can't "disprove" data. Data are the root facts that science is based on, and all data from trustworthy sources is treated the same by all scientists. Nobody ever "disproves" data.
What can be proven or disproven are hypotheses, the truths about underlying mechanisms of the world that we seek to learn about through data. A hypothesis about how something behaves can be proven or disproven with data, the data itself is absolute truth. A good hypothesis explains the data that we see, a bad one will be contradicted by data collection.
There is no such thing as "just a theory". In common parlance sure, but in scientific speech "theory" is a technical term that refers to a hypothesis that has stood up to all feasible tests that could have disproven it. Gravity is a phenomenon, observed by lots of data, all of which discovered so far confirms the theory of general relativity, upgraded from hypothesis after gravitational bending of light (which the hypothesis predicted)was observed in 1919.
"The figures are questionable Angelo Borrelli, the head of Civil Protection, who announces the latest figures every day at 6 p.m., said Saturday night that the 793 new deaths have been caused “by and with” the coronavirus. “We count all the dead, we make no distinction between with and by the coronavirus.” However, one wonders whether these daily figures reflect the situation correctly. The dead are said to have almost all had one or more other diseases, which leaves a question mark as to exactly how deadly the coronavirus is. At the same time, it has become clear that a large number of people who die at home (which is often a retirement home) do not undergo a coronavirus test." https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2020/03/22/als-italie-het-voorland...
Seeking an alternate explanation for the data, which is what scientists do, is not the same as denying the data, which is what zealots do.
This has been true since the first alarm bells in China, and has spread to other nations in a way that is easily observed first-hand, clearly reported by front-line medical staff, and consistent with the spread of a new disease.
That obvious data is what populations and governments are reacting to, not some calculated IFR.
In the interest of correctness, yes you can.
To disprove means "to prove to be false or wrong"[1], and that's exactly what the OPERA collaboration did to their own data that showed super-luminal neutrinos, when they later discovered it was caused by a bad fiber connection[2].
There's also the case of BICEP2[3], where the raw data was not in dispute, but rather the inevitable post-processing required to extract the "science signal" from the raw data.
This is of course why scientists prefer to have multiple independent measurements of the same phenomena, to eliminate possible sources of error and bias. The LHC for example has two independent main detectors[4], built by different teams using different approaches, for this very reason.
That said, at least in the physical sciences (I don't follow life sciences as closely), cases like OPERA and BICEP2 are exceptions.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/disprove
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BICEP_and_Keck_Array#BICEP2
Gravity is a theory (an explaination) of an observable phenonmenon. It is the accepted story until a more compelling story comes around.
Some popular theories that were disproven:
Fleischmann–Pons’s Nuclear Fusion
Phrenology
The Blank Slate
Luminiferous Aether
To your other point. Data is constantly being re-examined. How accurate is the Data is. What the data is really examining are extremely important and change.
After the discovery of standard candles, when the map of the universe was completely reconceptualized, nothing ever changed about astronomical data: observations of stellar position and brightness. What had changed was the explanation for those brightnesses and the meanings attributed to them. The data stays the same, the explanation changes, and if an explanation doesn't match the data, like the milky-way-is-the-universe hypothesis, then it's a bad explanation.
You might think that we are all just wrong. But here's the thing. The vast, vast majority of scientifically literate people in the world believe that climate change is an enormous risk to human prosperity. There might be some disagreement on exactly what the nature of the risk is. But everyone agrees it is a huge problem that must be confronted.
Because we are the overwhelming majority, you need to convince us using very articulate, compelling arguments and the highest-quality analysis. And you need to deal with the fact that most people will assume you are either ignorant or ideologically motivated to misinterpret the evidence -- because, to our eyes, that's exactly what people who compose comments like yours are (and it gets really old after a while).
By posting angsty messages that offer no value from a scientific standpoint, you are admitting defeat from the start.
Just that we need to be open enough to accept a new conflicting theory and not fight against it.
Trying to disprove new data that conflicts with your existing views is fine, as long as you can accept the new data if it holds up to scrutiny.
It isn't about being right, it's about accepting to be wrong.
Hopefully that bridge isn't too far for most.
By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0]
It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines.
[0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-med...
It takes inordinately more time and knowledge to debunk a false claim than it does to make it.
Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that people are afraid of non-scientific ideas–I see them discussed all over online everyday by thousands and thousands of people. No one is afraid of them, we just don’t consider them to be science. There should always remain a sharp dividing line between non-scientific/scientific and for good reason.
That is a patronizing statement. If science can't defend itself then we're more screwed than we thought. Truth exists outside of Science (to state otherwise would not be a scientific statement, thus a contradiction). That leaves room for crack pot theories to potentially have truth in them. To bar them or dismiss them based off personal bias is crime against healthy intellectual discourse. Who is imposing irrational beliefs on whom? That is where the sharp dividing line should be drawn.
I'm also afraid of the measurable societal harms caused by, e.g. the anti-vax movement, where preventable illnesses are making a comeback due to non-scientific belief in the hazards of vaccination.
I don't know how to get anti-vax sentiments out of the mainstream discourse, but I think the world would not be any less intellectually rich, in any meaningful sense of the concept, if no one ever thought those thoughts, and caused harmful policies to be carried out, again.
Right now, of course, I accept it as "gotta take the bad with the good" but that doesn't mean I like that things like childhood measles are on the rise in various anti-vax hotspots; especially because these aren't informed adults opting out of vaccines, but ill-informed parents making decisions for their children that do have serious impacts on childhood health and the potential for serious harms later in life.
I certainly don't see the need to defend some ideas as holding promise for progress ("we could have cured your measles as a child, but some guy made up a story out of his head and that's why you have shingles now") when they are very much regressive ideas.