Of course you can’t trust scientists on politics

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Many people make the same claim as this tweet. It’s obviously wrong. Yes,, the right-wing has a problem with science, but this isn’t it.

If you think you don’t trust scientists, you’re mistaken. You trust scientists in a million different ways every time you step on a plane, or for that matter turn on your tap or open a can of beans. The fact that you’re unaware of this doesn’t mean it’s not so.

— Paul Graham (@paulg) July 26, 2021

First of all, people trust airplanes because of their long track record of safety, not because of any claims made by scientists. Secondly, people distrust “scientists” when politics is involved because of course scientists are human and can get corrupted by their political (or religious) beliefs.

And thirdly, the concept of “trusting scientific authority” is wrong, since the bedrock principle of science is distrusting authority. What defines sciences is how often prevailing scientific beliefs are challenged.

Carl Sagan has many quotes along these lines that eloquently expresses this:

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

If you are “arguing from authority”, like Paul Graham is doing above, then you are fundamentally misunderstanding both the principles of science and its history.

We know where this controversy comes from: politics. The above tweet isn’t complaining about the $400 billion U.S. market for alternative medicines, a largely non-political example. It’s complaining about political issues like vaccines, global warming, and evolution.

The reason those on the right-wing resist these things isn’t because they are inherently anti-science, it’s because the left-wing is. They left has corrupted and politicized these topics. The “Green New Deal” contains very little that is “Green” and much that is “New Deal”, for example. The left goes from the fact “carbon dioxide absorbs infrared” to justify “we need to promote labor unions”.

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