The Science Delusion, a talk banned by TED

[Tero]

Most scientists are smart enough to put in conditions to disprove the hypothesis they go in with. This is the difference between scinece and the public. The public still believes vaccines could cause autism.

[FBM]

That's painting with a very broad brush, I think. More members of the public are prone to that belief, but they still comprise a small minority of the public as a whole. We're not all tinfoil hat wearers.

[laklak]

Speak for yourself.

[Tero]

That's painting with a very broad brush, I think. More members of the public are prone to that belief, but they still comprise a small minority of the public as a whole. We're not all tinfoil hat wearers.

This is a known thing. The public understands some numbers but decides safety issues by gut feel. "The study must have missed something."

[FBM]

Speak for yourself.

What a dumbass. You need 6 spikes on that kind of tinfoil hat in order to ward off invasive influences from each of the 4 cardinal directions, plus zenith and nadir.

[FBM]

That's painting with a very broad brush, I think. More members of the public are prone to that belief, but they still comprise a small minority of the public as a whole. We're not all tinfoil hat wearers.

This is a known thing. The public understands some numbers but decides safety issues by gut feel. "The study must have missed something."

I suspect that you're over-generalizing/stereotyping here. I am not a scientist, and am therefore one of "the public," but I don't do that. I doubt Ratz has many who do, despite being non-scientist members of the public. Nor do the majority of my real-life "public" friends and associates. To be fair, though, I selectively don't associate with people who do think like that.

[Tero]

I see them all the time.

We had a strike years ago. We had to work the plant jobs. We college trained staff are all about Ratz level thinkers. The temps we hired, high school graduates, to work beside us, were all the kind I described, gut feel folk.

[FBM]

I see them all the time.

We had a strike years ago. We had to work the plant jobs. We college trained staff are all about Ratz level thinkers. The temps we hired, high school graduates, to work beside us, were all the kind I described, gut feel folk.

"All"? Are you sure? Did you question each and every one of them? And how do they comprise "the public", rather than a very small sampling?

[Tero]

There were dozens of them. I tested them with simple tasks. We were in a packaging job, so some rudimentary math was occasionally needed. Also, one had to be able to track down an error that was done say half hour earlier. None of them could do it.

Or they were lazy. If they were on their own, I guess they would just wait for college folk to show up to fix the error. Taking a pen and pad to figure out a problem was alien to them. They were 10-20 years out of high school.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Speak for yourself.

What a dumbass. You need 6 spikes on that kind of tinfoil hat in order to ward off invasive influences from each of the 4 cardinal directions, plus zenith and nadir.

And it works far better in a thunderstorm...

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Not quite. He was legit about the need for scientists to confront the degrees of uncertainty in their work;

Which science doesn't do? I agree that fringe science often doesn't - but mainstream science goes to great pains to do exactly that! Why do you think that 2 separate, blinded experiments were carried out to find the Higgs particle? And why wait until a 5-sigma level of certainty was found at both before declaring the possibility of a discovery? And why perform even more, more finely-tuned experiments before finally claiming to have found the beastie?

Science that doesn't confront its level of certainty is bad science.

[Tero]

There were dozens of them. I tested them with simple tasks. We were in a packaging job, so some rudimentary math was occasionally needed. Also, one had to be able to track down an error that was done say half hour earlier. None of them could do it.

Or they were lazy. If they were on their own, I guess they would just wait for college folk to show up to fix the error. Taking a pen and pad to figure out a problem was alien to them. They were 10-20 years out of high school.

Maybe I should mention that country music was played, and several of them headed straight for the casino on payday?

[Mr.Samsa]

Not quite. He was legit about the need for scientists to confront the degrees of uncertainty in their work;

Which science doesn't do? I agree that fringe science often doesn't - but mainstream science goes to great pains to do exactly that! Why do you think that 2 separate, blinded experiments were carried out to find the Higgs particle? And why wait until a 5-sigma level of certainty was found at both before declaring the possibility of a discovery? And why perform even more, more finely-tuned experiments before finally claiming to have found the beastie?

Science that doesn't confront its level of certainty is bad science.

Sheldrake (and FBM there) are referring to the certainty in the extra-scientific assumptions (like the idea that materialism or scientific realism is an accurate view of the world), or at the very least the assumptions that the scientific method itself makes (like the idea that parsimony is a tool that we should use), which isn't tested by science because it's not an empirical or scientific issue. So it's not a case of having certainty in the conclusions you draw from your research but rather a question of the certainty about how valid the method you're using is.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Not quite. He was legit about the need for scientists to confront the degrees of uncertainty in their work;

Which science doesn't do? I agree that fringe science often doesn't - but mainstream science goes to great pains to do exactly that! Why do you think that 2 separate, blinded experiments were carried out to find the Higgs particle? And why wait until a 5-sigma level of certainty was found at both before declaring the possibility of a discovery? And why perform even more, more finely-tuned experiments before finally claiming to have found the beastie?

Science that doesn't confront its level of certainty is bad science.

Sheldrake (and FBM there) are referring to the certainty in the extra-scientific assumptions (like the idea that materialism or scientific realism is an accurate view of the world), or at the very least the assumptions that the scientific method itself makes (like the idea that parsimony is a tool that we should use), which isn't tested by science because it's not an empirical or scientific issue. So it's not a case of having certainty in the conclusions you draw from your research but rather a question of the certainty about how valid the method you're using is.

The methods work to an incredible degree of accuracy. Of course, the entire universe might just be the dream of a supernatural, hyper-shaman, living in a field of anti-pronouns and semantic bosons, but such speculation is pretty pointless. Science does an amazing job of explaining what the universe is if we assume that it is what it appears to be and that is plenty for me!

[Mr.Samsa]

The methods work to an incredible degree of accuracy. Of course, the entire universe might just be the dream of a supernatural, hyper-shaman, living in a field of anti-pronouns and semantic bosons, but such speculation is pretty pointless. Science does an amazing job of explaining what the universe is if we assume that it is what it appears to be and that is plenty for me!

And I think Sheldrake would agree with that - there's no problem with saying that science does a good job of describing phenomena. The problem is more when people start making extra claims which require interpretations beyond the scientific evidence; for example, the claim that the supernatural can't exist or that science has disproven/made less likely gods, or that science has debunked substance dualism (the concept of mind/soul/spirit/etc).

There are simply no real scientific grounds to make those claims but you'll still find many people, including scientists, making those mistakes. And to avoid confusion, that obviously doesn't mean that those positions mentioned are reasonable or true but rather that if they are to be challenged, it's not done on a scientific basis.