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Jayson_Virissimo comments on Publication: the "anti-science" trope is culturally polarizing and makes people distrust scientists - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: ancientcampus 07 February 2014 05:09PM

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Tags: vaccines cultural cognition project

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Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 07 February 2014 08:29:28PM 6 points [-]

Calling anti-vaccination people "anti-science" is a transparently bad persuasion tactic. Leave a social line of retreat.

Also, it probably isn't even true that they're anti-science.

Agreed.

It's more likely their stances on science are inconsistent, trusting it to varying degrees in different situations depending on the political and social implications of declaring belief.

Science isn't a package you have to accept as one huge clump. There is nothing inconsistent about affirming some scientific claims and denying others, especially if you also believe that some sciences are more reliable at arriving at the truth than others (which very few scientists themselves would deny).

Comment author: mbitton24 07 February 2014 09:10:23PM -2 points [-]

Good point, thanks. Skepticism of specific scientific claims is fully consistent with a "pro-science" outlook. I would maintain that people rejecting legitimate scientific claims often are inconsistent, though. Case in point, Young Earth Creationists that completely trust technology and medication that could only work if the scientific case for YEC is false.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 08 February 2014 05:46:01AM 7 points [-]

I would maintain that people rejecting legitimate scientific claims often are inconsistent, though.

They aren't rejecting "legitimate scientific claims", they're disputing which claims are legitimate.

Creationists that completely trust technology and medication that could only work if the scientific case for YEC is false.

Can you give an example of such a technology and/or medication?

Comment author: mbitton24 08 February 2014 04:37:14PM -2 points [-]

Upvoted.

I meant to say that if you believe a scientific claim to be legitimate, there should/are going to be implications of that on other parts of your worldview. When we misjudge what the implications of a belief are, we can believe it while simultaneously rejecting something it implies. (That's what reductio ad absurdum's are for.)

I was under the impression that GPS was such a technology. I also don't see much room for reasonably believing in evolutionary medicine without accepting macro-evolution - but that's a bit of a stretch from my original point. After struggling to find examples, I'm going to downshift my probability of there being many around.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 09 February 2014 02:29:21AM *  0 points [-]

I meant to say that if you believe a scientific claim to be legitimate, there should/are going to be implications of that on other parts of your worldview. When we misjudge what the implications of a belief are, we can believe it while simultaneously rejecting something it implies. (That's what reductio ad absurdum's are for.)

We also tend to overestimate how much parts of our worldview support each other, or as this quote says:

If you were taught that elves caused rain, every time it rained, you'd see the proof of elves.

‌

I was under the impression that GPS was such a technology.

GPS requires corrections for general relativity, it's somewhat of a stretch to say that implies the big bang.

I also don't see much room for reasonably believing in evolutionary medicine without accepting macro-evolution

Well, according to the wikipedia entry for evolutionary medicine the key concepts are:

  • Trade-offs: changes that could make an organism less vulnerable to disease can lead to a decrease in fitness due to effects on other traits.
  • Pathogens evolve rapidly and respond quickly to human intervention.
  • Some symptoms are useful defenses.
  • Because cultural and demographic changes are more rapid than biological evolution, humans are often mismatched to modern environments.
  • Human phylogenetic history leaves a legacy of biological constraint.
  • Cancer is the result of somatic evolution.
  • Humans have not stopped evolving.
  • All phenotypes are products of gene-environment interaction and are often shaped by developmental calibration.

These all involve at most micro-evolution and the observation that humans are well designed for an ancestral environment, neither of which YEC's reject to my knowledge.

Comment author: JQuinton 10 February 2014 07:29:11PM *  6 points [-]

In a geology course I took in undergrad, I was under the impression that successfully locating fossil fuels that can be used for production purposes requires understanding the mechanics of how fossils form and how long the organic material has to be fossilized, which explicitly requires deep time. Young Earth Creationism cannot be used as a model for providing the world's oil, and our professor made sure that we understood those implications.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 10 February 2014 11:49:05PM 2 points [-]

http://youtu.be/MWAbr-SoMAs

Pat Robertson (who considers young earth to be an embarrassment to his sort of Christian) uses that very example.

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