The "scientific community" is not "science"

One of the tactics of error in our day is to take something that is well-respected, well-regarded as true, and conflate a whole bunch of other things with that original thing (greatly expand the definition, you might say). This accomplishes many things but mainly, I think, the goal is to make it impossible for you to think or speak about the original thing without also seeming to imply all the new stuff. Clear and precise thinking, with careful categories, generally restrains error, whereas muddled and vague thinking is generally good for error, so there are many efforts in our day to produce muddled vagueness.

A hundred examples could be provided, but a classic one at this point is climate change. “Do you believe in climate change?” is the sort of media-political-question that obscures like a dozen sub-questions that ought to be examined individually:

• Is the climate changing?

• How, by how much, is the climate changing?

• To what extent is man responsible for this change?

• Is this change a good thing or a bad thing? (This is kind of a big one for me, actually. Just at a glance, the equator is teeming with life, and the poles are barren. For life, looking back at the geological history of the Earth, warm times seem to have been good, and cold times seem to have been bad. I wouldn’t be living here if Michigan was under two miles of ice.)

• If a bad thing, how much of a bad thing?

• What effect would any proposed mitigations by us actually have?

• Would that effect be worth the negative side-effects?

We could list more. All of these should be examined individually, we should be able to conclude “yes” for three of them and “no” for four, for example. (We should also be able to say “well, it’s a really complicated system, so we can’t really know”.) But the media and many politicians obscure all of that, and you either endorse a belief in apocalyptic scenarios (and the necessity of doing whatever the state says to prevent them) or you’re a “denier”.

The scientific community and science

This post was motivated by a popular tweet from a Financial Times columnist yesterday.

I’ll go ahead and share my reply before we go any further.

But back to the original, you have to roll your eyes a bit at the manipulation. First of all, he acts likes he is wringing his hands at this tragedy… he loves this. His audience wants him to tell them that the Democrats are the Good and Smart and Science people, and Republicans are Stupid people who bury their heads in the sand and resist Progress. If he could drive that red line to 0% by his actions he would happily do so. (This same journalist apparently has a history of labeling comments from actual scientists like Jay Bhattacharya as “misinformation”… of course he does.)

But, happily, a whole lot of people jumped in to say - buddy, if you have a brain and you’ve been awake for the last few years, you’ve had a decline in trust in the scientific community. Not only has the public health community in particular pumped out misleading, scientifically-inappropriate claim after claim (excuse to link Kelley Krohnert’s Substack, she has chronicled a lot of this stuff, though mostly on Twitter), but when challenged or corrected on this stuff they ignored all the corrections… and they heard them, they know, they just aren’t in the business of truth anymore¹. The people called “deniers” because they expressed proper skepticism about claims related to COVID, vaccines, masks, lockdowns, were often correct, it is now clear, and they will receive no apologies. (Just because I have an excuse to link it now, I’ll send you to PoliMath’s post about the “Proximal Origins” paper in Nature, what was perhaps the premiere scientific journal in the world, in which the authors argued that a lab leak of COVID was implausible, while we now know they were privately agreeing at the very same time that it was highly likely. If you notice stuff like this and you have a brain, you’re going to have a decline in trust in the scientific community.)

But as my tweet indicates there, one of the bizarre things to me in our day is that people who couldn’t care less about the real scientific method, dislike the humility, caution, and hesitancy good scientists must employ when making claims², and hardly care at all about what the data actually says, are super eager to make sure everyone knows they are the Science people. Imagine someone who never went to church and didn’t care about what the Bible actually says but wanted everyone to know he was a True Christian. That is literally what is happening today. It’s just bizarre.

The “scientific community”

But finally, per the original graph there, people who are now skeptical of the “scientific community” are labeled “anti-science”. These two things are not the same thing. In grad school I worked in a normal scientific lab setting (in Physics, perhaps the most rigorous of the sciences, which may color the comments which follow), my wife still does, and we “keep up” with that community generally. Based on our experiences, I think we would say that most of the scientists “down in the trenches”, whose work you will never hear about, are doing real scientific work. They actually know and care about the scientific method, they actually care about rigorously demonstrating their claims, they are cautious about what they say. You will never know them, no journalist will ever speak to them about their work. Now they are also affected by ideology, I don’t want to be too aggressive here, but hopefully they put that to the side when they’re running an NMR spectrum of a metal hydride, or what have you.

The “scientific community”, particularly as the term is used by media and politicians, is a vastly expanded phrase, that includes a whole lot of people who aren’t even doing science - “science” journalists, activists in government and even at thinktanks that gave themselves objective-sounding names and get themselves branded as “experts” even though they’re flaming partisan activists, people in high positions in scientific associations who sought that power and do not represent a random sampling of the people they are supposed to be representing. Yeah, this community is badly compromised. My usual comment - you thought public health officials were sitting in a room crunching models with supercomputers and then making a decision. They were not. They were sitting at home watching CNN, and then they came into work the next day and laughed, “this new rule seems about right, eh?”.

But that isn’t “science”. In fact, it is your concern for actual science that will cause you to reject those people. The actual scientific method is great and worth defending. The history of good science, and science done well, is great and worth defending. (The tactic of conflating all the bad with the good wouldn’t work if the good wasn’t actually good.) Science done well is a force for truth. I say this often, Christians, science, real science, is on your side. Don’t go conflating all this ideological rubbish with my good science.

1. And this doesn’t even get into what were “watershed events” in declining trust for some people, I know. That anti-lockdown protest is putting everyone in danger, it’s gonna be a super-spreader event, what terrible people! Two weeks later… oh yeah, racism is a public health crisis too, we should all be at this huge BLM protest. COVID will go away for the good protests. SCIENCE.

2. Feynman’s comment, made in criticism of the social sciences, often comes to mind, where he talks about how he has learned how hard it is to really know something. Real science knows it’s hard work to really know something. The Science (TM) makes grand claims with little supporting evidence all the time.