Do you believe the scientific community in 2020?

Disclaimer: following is only my opinion and depends strongly on my experience.

First of all, I get the idea. I think I understand where it is comming from. If you are planing on doing something you dont understand, you will likely consult experts. If you ask 5 plumbers what to do about your problems with plumbing and they all give you the same answer, your best bet would be following that answear.

Secondly, I dont believe there is such a thing as “scientific community” in a way thats represented publicly. You have thousands of scientists working all over the world trying to find a solution to something a theory that explains something or just purely analyzing something as objectively as possible without injecting any opinions into data. Many of these people are working to prove the exactly oposite thing. The information they may be working with may wary and concusions they reach using different methods may wary also as well. Some may just analyze a theory to find if its right of wrong and reach opposite conclusions. There have to be houndreds of thousands contradictory papers published all over the world and so many of them are likely wrong by todays knowledge.

Now there are trends in science, just like there are trends in any profession. Some opinions are held by many scientist and certain approaches to solving problems are popular during certain time periods. A few years ago a large porion of scientists may have believed the HIV may be cured using cerian proceses trigered by some type of medication and few years later most have abandoned it. Many people are looking at what others are doingto come up with ideas for their problems.

Now that I have expressed what I believe the “scientific community” is, how would you define what their “consensus” is. Are we going to study all the different conclusion specific groups reached on a certain topic? You’ll find a lot of contradictory stuff.

I believe that a lot of what people consider “scientific community” is a very small group of “celebrity” scientists who get all the media attention. Dont get my wrong, some of them are experts and did a lot to earn the status they have. Anf yes, many of them have reached consensus on many matters, but thats just a few people. You would find that a lot of scientists dont agree with them at all. Or they dont agree with their methodology, or their conclusions. And there will be a large part that will admire them, agree with everything and dream of such a status. Now add selective media/political filter to the small group and you get your “scientific community consensus”.

This might help:

Anyone in science understands what you mean — that scientists are no less human than anyone else, i.e. they have opinions which vary just like anyone else. I doubt that there exists any two people agree who on everything. But that’s besides the point.

Plus, a scientist’s credibility does not transfer to a domain where they lack knowledge.

But for those less familiar with science it’s important to realize it’s not just a collection of arbitrary opinions. Not all opinions have the same weight. Scientific consensus does exist in sufficiently established domains and is like an averaging and stabilizing effect, much like the law of large numbers.

It does not mean that each data point is the same value or on the same side of the average. It does mean that taken collectively, the “community” achieves something more useful than the individual components: a consensus that tends to be more correct and more stable than without it.

The averaging effect also explains why new ideas face resistance. Some might decry it, with the benefit of hindsight, but don’t forget survivorship bias: we note the good ideas that took time to become accepted, but there are also plenty of bad ideas that got kept out of the body of knowledge by the same virtue. It also emphasizes that science does not and should not rely too strongly on any single data point or scientist. In other words this is a feature, not a bug.

So far I think we are in agreement, we both “assume” or “believe” it will.

That just begs the question.

Again we agree that there is order in the universe.

That’s not an answer, that’s really a different way of asking the same question.

But, it’s not science. It begs the question.

Trusting science that has been observed is one thing, but, the scientific community making accurate claims and or predictions for the future is another. Everyone has biases based on their own individual beliefs.

Science is a method by which we seek to reduce as much as possible the biases we have in testing a hypothesis - whether those biases are based on our preconceived beliefs, past traditions and methodologies, or any other type of bias that can be introduced into a test of a hypothesis. It isn’t science to “trust” in past results to be replicated indefinitely, under all possible conditions.

In science, when we discover that some of our past conclusions are not correct, or sometimes not correct, that is not a failure of science - it is a success. That knowledge leads to refinement of the hypothesis, and further testing. Science is a method - not a conclusion or set of conclusions that is assumed to remain inviolable forever and across all changes in the variables we are trying to predict.

Very well said. I should have changed my "monumental flaw" post to reference mostly those within the celebrity group that more often than not post utter nonsense claiming to be facts.

I don’t see how it is begging the question:

Perhaps my word choice could be improved or at least clarified. The “assumption” of consistency of the physics of the universe over time and space is not taken a priori as a premise. It is a conclusion as a result of extensive observation. Though there is no mathematical/logical proof that it can’t be false, everything we know so far suggests it is true.

I could give you some imagined scenarios where it could be false, but as interesting (and uncomfortable) as it might be to think about, there’s just no evidence for it.

That would be called history. The value of science is that it is not just descriptive, but also predictive.

And then the claims and predictions are evaluated for their consistency with reality.

“The future” is not a fixed reference point, and it eventually ends up in the past. We can pick up the bits of evidence left behind. Plus, we are time travellers going at a rate of one second per second. We get multiple ways to check the predictions. They’re pretty damn accurate as well as incredibly precise, in many cases. And when they’re not, they’re refined until they converge with reality.

Yes, and science helps reduce the impact of those biases or incorrect beliefs by having consistency with reality be the final arbiter.

I wonder, what do you understand to be science?

You know what? For sake of argument let us suppose that we know the future will be different. What impact would that have on science? Would physics change gradually? That would perhaps just require adding some time dependence to quantities we thought to be constant—not a huge deal. Would the change be abrupt? Assuming we survived the transition, would there still be order in the universe to understand? If so, then the process of science would be just as valuable and it simply would be a ‘reset’ of previous knowledge and require rechecking everything.

As interesting as these questions may be in a philosophical sense, I fail to see their relevance in practice. I haven’t envisioned any scenario that undermines current scientific efforts or approaches. It’s like trying to conjure up a variable that we haven’t detected and speculate on its impacts.

Meanwhile, in the face of everything which we know suggesting consistency, what reason is there to suggest an inconsistent future? The “assumption” of consistency is falsifiable. Non-consistency is not falsifiable and also introduces unknown additional complexity, much like Russell’s teapot. By Occam’s razor, the former is preferable. None of this is absolutely definitive, but the evidence and probabilities are very much on one side.

Well, I hope at least someone has fun reading all this.

If so, those people consider incorrectly.

The scientific community, and its consensus in particular, is an emergent property. It is not defined by any one person or group, though there is certainly a usefulness to having science popularizers.

The analogy of an average is helpful again. For a six-sided die, averaging out the values of the rolls will eventually converge to 3.5, despite there being no such value on the die. The average is an emergent property. Similarly, the scientific consensus is an emergent property which no one person necessarily holds exactly.

Consensus, like an average, has the benefit of being stable and on average more correct than any individual data point or person.

Science!

Ohh, don’t know about that.
Pretty sure suckers are born every day is consistent throughout history.
World leaders don’t want educated independent thought from the masses, yeah, consistent.
People are too dumb or stubborn to move from areas where things don’t grow well and will starve, but still have no problem making more babies to starve and continue the cycle.
Haters gotta hate and lots of people will still root for the Dallas Cowboys, again consistent :slight_smile: Alright this one fits into “very short time frames” on a cosmic scale.

It’s all in fun people, lighten up.

I am seeing the word ‘Consensus’ a lot in this thread, what if the group of scientists gathered are all like minded?
The consensus is going to be biased in favour of their like mindedness, completely nullifying the result, yet it would still be a consensus of scientists and released as such.
It was the consensus of most climate scientists that the weather would turn nasty in about 2040/50 yet here we are NOW with severe climate change and very quiet climate scientists :smiling_imp:

Cheers David

Good point. Consensus is like the convergence of an average. It emerges once a pattern becomes clearer, typically on more established topics. On newer topics or the cutting-edge research, scientists are anything but like-minded, as Dr.Phillip pointed out.

Scientists have to be creative and kind of opinionated to explore new ideas. So is there a consensus or not? Again like averages, initially there isn’t and eventually one emerges.

Note that the analogy isn’t perfect since scientists aren’t a random process, and a learning algorithm would probably be a better analogy or model, but it’s sufficient for illustrating the point:

You can find a consensus statement on most any interesting medical or scientific question, it’s a think people do for reference and standard of care purposes.

This is one of the problems with a consensus “it’s a thing people do for reference” the consensus is then referred to as fact, not the opinion of a group which is what it is.

On the news today it was stated that a consensus of scientists said that the planets formed gently, not violently, going against the consensus held for over 60 years

Their “proof” is an image showing one small asteroid that had collided with another one gently, way out in the Ort cloud :weary:

As an aside :- Wish I could ask them how two small planets collide gently :person_facepalming:

Cheers David … who really does respect scientists, but not the ones looking for their 15 seconds of fame.

I think this latest study adds one example to a body of evidence suggesting that the gentle formation hypothesis may be true. The gentle planet formation hypothesis has actually been debated for about 15 years. This one example doesn’t establish a scientific consensus applying to all the planets, even though the study’s author seems to be making some sweeping claims about the new discovery.

That one is fairly dim…the forces are small because the objects are small. The forces will get bigger over time as mass increases. I can’t believe anyone would publish something so easily deconstructed.

nope, too much PC and virtue signaling in scientific community today.

I don’t think the evidence yet shows what happened with larger masses merging. They’re saying the process by which the various particles collided in this particular case was slower and more gradual than depicted under the hierarchical accretion theory - with the various bodies orbiting each other before slowly merging. They didn’t indicate what, if any, evidence there is to support your apparent assertion that the process was more violent and accelerated for larger masses.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00380-2

Good Stuff Elsewhere

One particular annoyance to hear is when the phrase "it hasn't be scientifically proven" is thrown around in a careless manner and in such a way as to denounce a very real experience that really can't be easily proved scientifically at the moment, but is still real nevertheless. It's like saying the universe doesn't exist because we can't prove it 100%. There is a saying that science and metaphysics eventually have to meet and crossover each other. This is becoming much more true today than in the past with all the advancements in quantum mechanics.

In what way is it “careless” to conclude that some cause and effect relationship, or the existence of some phenomenon, hasn’t been proven scientifically, when it can be tested scientifically? You can say anything you imagine is “real,” in the sense that you can really imagine it. And many people have hallucinations. That doesn’t mean: 1) that a scientific test is not appropriate; or 2) that it is careless to state the current scientific evidence, or lack of it, relating to that phenomenon.

In fact, it might be careless NOT to make clear that something hasn’t been scientifically proven. Example: the alleged connection between vaccines and autism. Another example: regular scares about the sources of illness that are passed from person to person and can cause panic and other anti-social responses. Another example: many products advertised as being effective in curing or preventing disease, without any scientific evidence substantiating the advertising claims.

The bottom line is that, if you wish to believe in things without scientific proof, you have that right. You also have a right to declare that you think your experience is very real to you, even without scientific proof. However, other people have a right to believe only in what is proven scientifically, and to declare that such proof doesn’t exist for one phenomenon or another.