Trust and Belief in Science vs Conjecture and Philosophy

[hackenslash]

f someone says to me they are of the opinion they speak Urdu, but they have never heard the language spoken or written it, should I be defending their right to that opinion or calling them out on their extremely obvious idiocy?

If you are acting scientifically, you should test their hypothesis and (one assumes) find it wanting. To simply say, "That is impossible - you are an idiot," while undoubtedly true, is unscientific. One conversation with an Urdu speaker would be enough to demonstrate or refute their claim and that would be the scientific method of verification. In a case such as this, where the opinion proffered is so abstruse, you would also be within your rights scientifically to insist that the burden of proof rested with the claimant and to insist that they produce a corroborating, native Urdu speaker before you would take them seriously.

I would say that the following process should be followed when presented with any opinion in debate.

1. Does the opinion agree with your understanding of science? Then accept it.
2. Does the opinion contradict your knowledge of science? Then reject it.
   1. Is it easily refuted? Then explain the faults in the opinion and provide corroboration if required.
   2. Otherwise demand proof. If possible, provide the mechanism by which that proof could be shown. (Obviously, a combination of these two is often required.)
3. Is your understanding of the science behind the opinion insufficient to decide its veracity to your satisfaction? This is the basis of a true scientific debate. There are several options available here. The aim being to arrive at either condition 1 or 2.
   1. Ask the person to explain in more detail/in terms that you can understand.
   2. Research the subject more thoroughly.
   3. Seek advice from those whose capabilities you trust in the relevant field. (Again, a combination of these approaches is often required.)

Minor niggle with regard to use of the word 'proof' aside, this is an excellent post.

[epepke]

OK, I do think that trust and belief in the scientific method(s) are essential to the modern worldview. As long as Hume's problem with induction goes unresolved, it seems this will always be the case. We don't actually know, for example, that the laws of physics apply equally throughout the universe; we just have to assume that in order to make a coherent model. It's a leap of faith. Small, maybe, but a leap nonetheless.

Edit: Come to think of it, it's not a small leap at all. It's huge.

I've been looking through this thread looking for something to talk about, and now I think I have it. No offense to the OP, but I didn't really see what we were supposed to debate here. Now I might. Trouble is that I'm not terribly good at philosophical statements. I'm a lot better at making scientific statements.

hackenslash has pointed out a fair amount of the clearly empirical data. When we look at galaxies that are extremely far away, they give off the kind of light that we would expect if they were made up of the same sorts of atoms that we know and love and eat. What they are doing seems consistent with General Relativity.

There's more, of course. Noether's theorem shows that the idea of the laws' being the same everywhere (translation symmetry) is equivalent to the conservation of momentum, presuming that the math is right. The trouble is that the conservation of momentum has been verified to extremely high precision. So, if Noether's theorem is correct, then we can conclude at least that the laws are the same within a ridiculously huge distance of us.

I can't make any philosophical statements as easily. But maybe the OP is talking about people who don't know about Noether's theorem and maybe don't want to but who still want to have an opinion anyway. To which my only scientific response is that they don't know what they're talking about. I think that they should learn what they are talking about and look at the evidence, but they don't seem interested. If they don't do those things, then they can deal with the situation where they have to have "faith" or "trust" or something like that.

Now, there is a point where individual human beings have to trust somewhat simply because there is too much for a single brain to digest, but the common reactions to this are so far from that point that I don't see any value in talking about it. Despite his myriad faults, Rush Limbaugh is probably intelligent enough to look at the evidence for global warming, but he doesn't, and why should he? He's making lots of money calling it a hoax, which people give him for the service of preventing them from thinking, which is apparently in great demand.

[Twiglet]

f someone says to me they are of the opinion they speak Urdu, but they have never heard the language spoken or written it, should I be defending their right to that opinion or calling them out on their extremely obvious idiocy?

If you are acting scientifically, you should test their hypothesis and (one assumes) find it wanting. To simply say, "That is impossible - you are an idiot," while undoubtedly true, is unscientific. One conversation with an Urdu speaker would be enough to demonstrate or refute their claim and that would be the scientific method of verification. In a case such as this, where the opinion proffered is so abstruse, you would also be within your rights scientifically to insist that the burden of proof rested with the claimant and to insist that they produce a corroborating, native Urdu speaker before you would take them seriously.

I think it's pretty scientific to state out of hand that someone with no exposure to Urdu will be unable to speak it. For sure, to test it, we can do everything you suggest - but are we just flattering ourselves for the sake of going through the process? The hypothetical situation is set up to be ridiculous because essentially the research has already been done. There has been no exposure to this language and hence the person isn't going to be able to speak it.

If we take the rocket-fuel out of a rocket, do we need to light the fuse to have a scientific opinion on whether it will take off?

I appreciate that there is always room for error. The rocket may have retained a tiny amount of fuel enough for it to jump out of the bucket. The non urdu speaker might accidentally say 2 or three words that sound coherent to an Urdu speaker, but in both situations I think it actually is quite reasonable from a scientific perspective to call out idiocy. For sure, we can put it to the test but I think you may be flattering to decieve here.

If you put yourself in a real situation where someone maintains they speak Urdu and you know for a fact they have never been exposed to the language, is your offer to test it really scientifically motivated, or are you just being polite?


As far as I'm concerned I'd be calling out the obvious idiocy. I have enough trust in my theory to predict the result of the experiment very vocally before I conduct it. Especially in this case where I set up the thought experiment with terms which I think make the outcome of the experiment blatantly obvious from the outset.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

f someone says to me they are of the opinion they speak Urdu, but they have never heard the language spoken or written it, should I be defending their right to that opinion or calling them out on their extremely obvious idiocy?

If you are acting scientifically, you should test their hypothesis and (one assumes) find it wanting. To simply say, "That is impossible - you are an idiot," while undoubtedly true, is unscientific. One conversation with an Urdu speaker would be enough to demonstrate or refute their claim and that would be the scientific method of verification. In a case such as this, where the opinion proffered is so abstruse, you would also be within your rights scientifically to insist that the burden of proof rested with the claimant and to insist that they produce a corroborating, native Urdu speaker before you would take them seriously.

I think it's pretty scientific to state out of hand that someone with no exposure to Urdu will be unable to speak it. For sure, to test it, we can do everything you suggest - but are we just flattering ourselves for the sake of going through the process? The hypothetical situation is set up to be ridiculous because essentially the research has already been done. There has been no exposure to this language and hence the person isn't going to be able to speak it.

If we take the rocket-fuel out of a rocket, do we need to light the fuse to have a scientific opinion on whether it will take off?

I appreciate that there is always room for error. The rocket may have retained a tiny amount of fuel enough for it to jump out of the bucket. The non urdu speaker might accidentally say 2 or three words that sound coherent to an Urdu speaker, but in both situations I think it actually is quite reasonable from a scientific perspective to call out idiocy. For sure, we can put it to the test but I think you may be flattering to decieve here.

If you put yourself in a real situation where someone maintains they speak Urdu and you know for a fact they have never been exposed to the language, is your offer to test it really scientifically motivated, or are you just being polite?


As far as I'm concerned I'd be calling out the obvious idiocy. I have enough trust in my theory to predict the result of the experiment very vocally before I conduct it. Especially in this case where I set up the thought experiment with terms which I think make the outcome of the experiment blatantly obvious from the outset.

Which is why the burden of proof is laid at their door. You state your opinion that they are wrong and ask them to back it up it before you will give their theory any credence. Why do you need to call them an idiot as well?

The Urdu speaker is an extreme case. Most arguments are not with someone with quite such a cut-and-dried level of bollocks.

[Twiglet]

Which is why the burden of proof is laid at their door. You state your opinion that they are wrong and ask them to back it up it before you will give their theory any credence. Why do you need to call them an idiot as well?

The Urdu speaker is an extreme case. Most arguments are not with someone with quite such a cut-and-dried level of bollocks.

Right. If the person who claims to speak Urdu is put to the test, and to my utter shock, they speak it perfectly, I will probably look for all the possible flaws in the experiment (hidden earpieces, were the background checks true blah-de-blah) before conceding that my ideas about how language is learned might be wrong, but if all the other options prove fruitless, I will hold my hands up.

But I think a big problem for scientists in public debate is that they are falling over themselves to admit a level of uncertainty to a media which relates that uncertainty in the terms of gambling. With climate science it's not gambling. A 95% confidence interval doesn't mean that if you roll the dice 20 times, you will be wrong once, it means that the result is 95% likely to fall within the experimental error quoted, and far more likely to fall within twice the experimental error.

Just like the odds of the test subject producing a coherent sentence in Urdu are vanishingly small.

Effective communication requires both the speaker and listener to have broadly the same understanding. When scientists admit there is a chance that they are wrong, the public generally misconstrues (and is led to misconstrue) what that means.

By calling outthe person claiming they can talk Urdu, I am in fact putting the burden of proof on them in quite an appropriate way (aside from being a bit rude). I am not seeking to baby their ridiculous belief with flattery, I am putting an active demand on them to prove me wrong which leaves nobody under the misapprehension that I'm sweetly "allowing for the possibilit they might be right". If you press me on the issue, I will admit that I think there's a microscopic chance I might be proven wrong, but I'm not going to accord it equal weight.

Do climate change deniers have much more right to public airspace than flat-earthers?

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Now you are talking about public airtime. A very different thing to scientific debate. But a number of the same rules apply. Notably, resorting to insults almost always weakens your case.

[Twiglet]

Now you are talking about public airtime. A very different thing to scientific debate. But a number of the same rules apply. Notably, resorting to insults almost always weakens your case.

We communicate ideas in language, and the language scientists tend to adopt speaking with each other tends to adopt different forms to those which are typical in the public arena.

If I'm given a single sentence to explain whether the person in the above example will speak Urdu, I don't think I need to perpetually qualify my answer to acknowledge a microscopic bit of uncertainty.

The reason for that is because "probably" and "almost certainly" convey a different linguistic meaning to non-scientists than they do to me, and in the public arena, how often have we heard the legalese type argument "so you acknowledge you may be wrong" followed up with "so why should we proceed as if you are right when even you acknowledge you might not be" - with implication (linguistically) being that because uncertainty has been acknowledged, there is "reasonable doubt" and we should therefore ignore anything we don't like.

In other words scientific uncertainty in the public domain is frequently conflated with legal uncertainty as it applies to obtaining a conviction, and because an honest scientist will most always acknowledge uncertainty, the media and politicians manipulate that into an excuse to ignore science they don't like the look of.

I also disagree that courtesy has anything much to do with honesty (I appreciate your point was that rudeness doesn't generally reflect well on the person being rude, but for myself I'd take rude honesty over polite mendacity any day of the week. Most politicians are scrupulously polite in public). I also maintain it's much easier to retain a cool head and a cool mouth while lying with impugnity than it is to keep your cool when you are trying to convey science honestly in the face of mendacious questioning which deliberately misrepresents you. Sometimes you have to call out cowards and liars and not pander to the micropossibility they are right (as with climate change). If they are right, it is through randomness and not reason, and the very nature in which they conduct debate is fundamentally dishonest and misleading, which from where I sit is a far greater sin than dropping the F word or calling someone out.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

So you would resort to the F word even though those mendacious politicians are deliberately trying to goad you into it? Odd that!

[Twiglet]

So you would resort to the F word even though those mendacious politicians are deliberately trying to goad you into it? Odd that!

That's not quite what I'm saying

I am saying that in public debate, scientists usually address science while politicians usually address the audience, and so the audience on the whole tends to adopt the politicians belief about the science because the politician is far more adept at conveying their belief to the audience.

The trouble is that both the scientist and politician tend to be talking to an audience to win support for their opinion. Scientists skills are honed to develop theories consistentent with experimental observations, not explain the nuances of experimental uncertainty to an audience which barely passed GCSE maths. Both the politician and the scientist are asking the audience to take them "on trust", and the audience is generally too lazy learn the science.

Scientists in the public arena need to learn to speak to their audience. It's something Dawkins' books do very well. It's something comedians like Bill Hicks did very well when discussing politics. Every author and speaker needs to consider their audience. Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh have gained massive cult-of-personality followings for their beliefs and neither one of them is polite.

Sometimes winning hearts and minds needs a bit of passion.

[FBM]

I've been looking through this thread looking for something to talk about, and now I think I have it. No offense to the OP, but I didn't really see what we were supposed to debate here. Now I might. Trouble is that I'm not terribly good at philosophical statements. I'm a lot better at making scientific statements.

hackenslash has pointed out a fair amount of the clearly empirical data. When we look at galaxies that are extremely far away, they give off the kind of light that we would expect if they were made up of the same sorts of atoms that we know and love and eat. What they are doing seems consistent with General Relativity.

There's more, of course. Noether's theorem shows that the idea of the laws' being the same everywhere (translation symmetry) is equivalent to the conservation of momentum, presuming that the math is right. The trouble is that the conservation of momentum has been verified to extremely high precision. So, if Noether's theorem is correct, then we can conclude at least that the laws are the same within a ridiculously huge distance of us.

I can't make any philosophical statements as easily. But maybe the OP is talking about people who don't know about Noether's theorem and maybe don't want to but who still want to have an opinion anyway. To which my only scientific response is that they don't know what they're talking about. I think that they should learn what they are talking about and look at the evidence, but they don't seem interested. If they don't do those things, then they can deal with the situation where they have to have "faith" or "trust" or something like that.

Now, there is a point where individual human beings have to trust somewhat simply because there is too much for a single brain to digest, but the common reactions to this are so far from that point that I don't see any value in talking about it. Despite his myriad faults, Rush Limbaugh is probably intelligent enough to look at the evidence for global warming, but he doesn't, and why should he? He's making lots of money calling it a hoax, which people give him for the service of preventing them from thinking, which is apparently in great demand.

I agree with everything you and hackenslash have said so far. I've never said that it was an unreasonable assumption; I only highlighted that it is an assumption, not a known. Like I said, science is the best game in town. When we want to know how the physical world really is, we should look to science, which is a manifestation of philosophy. What we shouldn't do is look to religion, but nobody here (yet) has been defending that position.

[epepke]

I agree with everything you and hackenslash have said so far. I've never said that it was an unreasonable assumption; I only highlighted that it is an assumption, not a known.

Actually, you said it was a leap of faith. This is philosophical language that I cannot easily deal with. Even the concept of "assumption" is something I have a hard time dealing with. To me, an assumption is something that you assume, and usually one makes an assumption to try out an idea.

For example, I might assume that the laws of physics are different somewhere. Then I would work out the implications of this assumption. One of the implications would be that we'd have to come up with some other additional ideas to explain why atoms in distant galaxies seem to behave the same way, and why the conservation of momentum works around here.

I think I know what you are trying to say, and I'm not simply being perverse. The reason I'm saying these things is that I think that physics, at least, has a lot fewer assumptions than people who do philosophy generally (ahem) assume it does.

A fairly important example is that the assumption that things either happen or they don't (sometimes called "realism") and the assumption that things happen for some reason (sometimes called "causality" or "determinism") haven't been a part of physics for nearly a century, and there are a couple of classical philosophical assumptions that I can't remember now. Quantum behavior put the kibosh on them. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell us which are wrong. Physicists are free to make up "interpretations" that make them more-or-less happy, but they aren't scientific statements. (Which is probably why there is so much argument over them.)

[Xamonas Chegwé]

So you would resort to the F word even though those mendacious politicians are deliberately trying to goad you into it? Odd that!

That's not quite what I'm saying

I am saying that in public debate, scientists usually address science while politicians usually address the audience, and so the audience on the whole tends to adopt the politicians belief about the science because the politician is far more adept at conveying their belief to the audience.

The trouble is that both the scientist and politician tend to be talking to an audience to win support for their opinion. Scientists skills are honed to develop theories consistentent with experimental observations, not explain the nuances of experimental uncertainty to an audience which barely passed GCSE maths. Both the politician and the scientist are asking the audience to take them "on trust", and the audience is generally too lazy learn the science.

Scientists in the public arena need to learn to speak to their audience. It's something Dawkins' books do very well. It's something comedians like Bill Hicks did very well when discussing politics. Every author and speaker needs to consider their audience. Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh have gained massive cult-of-personality followings for their beliefs and neither one of them is polite.

Sometimes winning hearts and minds needs a bit of passion.

I agree completely that passion is required but there is a fine line between passion and 'losing it'. Once one stoops to ad hominum arguments, one has crossed that line. Interesting that you champion Dawkins' approach, as he (usually) manages to convey great passion when he speaks and to communicate his disdain for idiotic ideas without being personally offensive towards his opponents.

[FBM]

Yep. "of faith" was a careless choice of words on my part.

[Twiglet]

I agree completely that passion is required but there is a fine line between passion and 'losing it'. Once one stoops to ad hominum arguments, one has crossed that line. Interesting that you champion Dawkins' approach, as he (usually) manages to convey great passion when he speaks and to communicate his disdain for idiotic ideas without being personally offensive towards his opponents.

A book is not a discussion forum or a televised debate. I am not advocating that the first resort in an argument should be to attack someone and swear at them, but I do think there are circumstances where calling someone an outright liar, a twister of truths, intellectually lazy etc can be justified, especially when it can be substantiated. I think there is now a pretty wide consensus that tobacco industry executives deliberately lied, twisted truths and misrepresented data for years, and that it was entirely obvious to health professionals that they were doing so. I would argue the same holds true with the way oil companies are causing confusion over global warming now.

It's not about "winning the arguments with science". The scientific argument is a walkover. It's about winning public support over to a belief in the science, and frankly, I think ad hominem arguments are entirely justified when they are demonstrably true. Misrepresenting scientific findings ***is itself an ad hominem attack on all the scientists involved in gathering them, especially when the findings are being attacked on the basis of disbelief, rather than scientific grounds***.

[Farsight]

What is it that distinguishes a scientific idea from speculation about how the world works?

Evidence, understanding, rigor, prediction, refinement, further experiment, etc, cycling round the scientific method to end up with application and engineering. If there's no evidence and no prediction, it remains speculation. One typically requires mathematical rigor to make firm prediction.

Is it necessary to understand a scientific concept to question it's validity, and if not, why not?

Yes and no. If one asks for somebody to provide understanding and evidence, and they cannot, and nobody else can, then it's acceptable to question the validity. But if one doesn't ask and doesn't bother, then it's unfair to question the validity.

Should the general public trust ideas imparted by scientists, such as those on climate change?

Yes and no. If the evidence is there to back it up, then yes. Otherwise no. Scientists are people, not perfection.

Whose responsibility is it to ensure that science which affects the public is understood by the public?

Ideally it is the responsibility of scientists, but they do not always live up to that responsibility.

It's easy to identify topics that raise these kinds of questions in the most serious way. E.g. Is humanity causing climate change, to what extent, and to what effect?

IMHO one would be unreasonable to assert that human activity has no affect upon the climate, and can have no effect upon the climate. But it would be reasonable to question how much, and how important this is as compared to other risks such as overpopulation, pandemic, energy security, nuclear terrorism, slash & burn, rape of the seas, etc.

Does smoking cause cancer, or is smoking merely correlated with a higher incidence of cancer?

The evidence says it does.

I want to leave those questions open as inspiration for discussing this point: "Everyone has a right to their own opinion". We've all heard that trotted out, and in scientific arguments open to public consumption, it is often used to provide a platform to pit climate scientists against skeptics. There are, after all, two points of view. But should they be accorded equal weight?

Yes, because we need science to be impartial, and to offer free speech rather than censorship and enforced consensus. But your division is the wrong division. Some "skeptics" are climate scientists, and some who "promote" AGW are not.

Also, should some distinction be made between an "opinion" and a "reaction"? If someone says they don't "believe in climate change", and is asked why, they might well say they saw something on the news where the climate scientist didn't seem very convincing. But is that really an "opinion" or is it simply a **reaction**?

I'd say no. Beliefs, opinions, and reactions shouldn't matter. Evidence should.

It seems to me that those who perpetually advocate the "right to an opinion" are really advocating their right to react, and usually at the expense of their willingness to reason. Perhaps because reason involves some work on their part, whereas anyone can react and form an opinion (which they have every right to) - on that basis. The right to an opinion, and the advocacy of that right was instrumental in promoting genuine democracy and scientific advancement, but in terms of what it is now used to justify, I fear it has become little more than an advocate's argument for idiocy.

The newspapers are full of it, on both sides of debate. But sadly, even scientific opinion is sometimes short on evidence.

It speaks to the heart of scientific debate. Scientists test their ideas against nature, and where nature finds those ideas wanting, they must be re evaulatated until they fit or be discarded for their irrelevance. The people involved in that work are not generally selected on the basis of their charisma or ability to communicate to a wider audience, and the very nature of the work they do often pushes it far beyond the realms of easy communication. One only has to look PhD level research paper in chemistry or physics to see just how alien.

But sometimes they don't test them enough. String theory is a case in point. It is promoted as "the only game in town", but it remains unsupported by scientific evidence.

If someone says to me they are of the opinion they speak Urdu, but they have never heard the language spoken or written it, should I be defending their right to that opinion or calling them out on their extremely obvious idiocy?

Neither. You should ask them to supply the evidence. If they can speak Urdu, they can. If they cannot, then you call them out.

I have noticed in the public arena that the areas which the public feels qualified to dispute most are those with a political agenda attached to them. I await the day I hear a layman arguing that semiconductors don't act as transistors because silicon isn't a metal. I have not found anyone who doesn't believe in computers on the basis of that supposition because it's ridiculous.

They feel justified rather than qualified to dispute assertions for which the evidence is lacking. Your example is IMHO an exaggeration.

And yet on the much bigger issue of compromising the future survival of our civilization and preservation of biodiversity, the public seems only too willing to have an opinion, despite, on the whole, knowing no more about climate science than semiconductors. Thoughts?

The public have a right to their opinion. They're being asked to pay. They have a right to demand the evidence. If that evidence is in some way deficient, then the public have a right to further opinion.