I guess my perspective (from watching struggles with public health & vaccine development information during early COVID-19) is that modern intellects aren't well exercised with respect to uncertainty.

Our predecessors lived in a culture suffused with unreliable information. There weren't even "alternate" facts, because there were few accepted ones to have alternatives to.

On the one hand, we know more than they did (stronger & longer mandatory education + post-primary + informal access). On the other hand, we've forgotten how to responsibly handle uncertainty.

Or, as I sum it all up: science should be a verb (aka process), not a noun (result).

> On the other hand, we've forgotten how to responsibly handle uncertainty.

No, we're actually (thankfully) a lot better at that than 15th Century Europe.

Local minima aren't the historically average bar to exceed.

> Local minima aren't the historically average bar to exceed.

I wasn't picking out a local minims on either end (well, not intentionally); I was picking out the times being compared (that of Columbus vs. now) from the context of the discussion.

But really, the same applies to the whole of history from the ancient period up through and including all of the early modern period vs. say, any time from the mid-20th century on, to avoid any problems with overspecificity on either end.

History renders comparisons murky and imprecise, but my point was more contingent on the availability of quality information than behavior.

Now, we know many things. Then, we did not know many things (although we perhaps believed more).

So an every-person (I'm talking generally, not only of the most scientific), plucked from a more ignorant time of history, would have a more developed method of dealing with confusion.

I don't quite buy the counter-argument (if this is yours?) that we're a more scientific society. I would have before COVID, but not now...

We don't know more than we did. We have a strong belief that our cumulated knowledge, tools and infrastructure are leading to more accurate knowledge. We accomplish technological advancements that comfort us in the idea we know better. That's all.

Science could be made a verb, but like wisdom, calling something science doesn't de facto make it so.

Not sure if you're arguing from an epistemological or objective basis, but I'll assume the latter.

We know that our knowledge better describes the results we reliably reproduce in the world around us.

We have knowledge about things that our ancestors did not.

If that doesn't constitute "knowing more than they did," I'm not sure what does.

We don't know that. All we know is that we have further knowledge that at certain points in time.

We have a tendency to assume we know more than at any other time before on the basis that we know more than our rather recent ancestors.

> All we know is that we have further knowledge that at certain points in time.

What does that mean, if not "we know more than they did"?

We actually do know more. Sure, physics is basically modelling and observations. Our current models might be completely wrong - even if their predictive power is far greater.

But we've also made some genuine proofs. For example, we know that Fermat's last theorem is correct. That was suspected, but not known.

Yes, this applies basically to all of maths - and even to other disciplines that produce proofs. Another example: we know that one model of gravity permits black holes, wormholes, and warp drives. Sure, the model might not accurately reflect reality. But still: this is something we know nowadays, that we didn't know 105 years ago.

Not to mention all the things we collectively have done - we know it's possible to leave Earth, to live in orbit for a while, to convert sunlight directly into electricity, that it is (barely) possible to run the 100m in under 10 sec, what the earth looks like from a distance, how to make fusion bombs, how to fly... we know a lot more than folks from even the early 1900s, let alone further back.

It's a new theology ...

I think decades of diluting the word "science" with observational studies and other psuedoscientific junk was a mistake.

Vaccine efficacy and safety is one of the few things mentioned in the media as science that really is actually science.

Yes and no. The public's (and media's) inability to differentiate between preprints, efficacy vs safety trial stages, and basic statistics boggled my mind.

I guess pre-COVID I would have said "Some people are ignorant." Post-COVID experience, I'd agree more with "Some people are ignorant and refuse to admit their ignorance, to the extent of cherry picking reality."

It's like expecting some people were bad at math, but getting a stack of tests back where half have multi-page essays on why numbers don't exist.

The effect of constructionism coupled with post modernism offering an attractive alternative to the complicated math.

And it isn't only half idiots promoting these ideas.

Just take a look at The Craft of Writing Effectively from the university of Chicago, social science of course. You will be even more baffled, it is a hard to believe and difficult to watch lecture. Apparently these things are university approved and now watched in the millions on YouTube.