First, so I’m not misunderstood: Science does of course exist and it is not religion. But:

  • Not all published science is, in fact, science. The Replication Crisis is a real problem, meaning that a significant portion of published science is actually incorrect.
  • Only a very tiny portion of the population reads scientific papers and has the ability to understand them. That includes scientists and other well-educated people who don’t have any expertise on the specific field. Being a renown physicist doesn’t mean you know anything about psychology.
  • Scientific papers are filtered through science journalists who might or might not have any expertise in the field and might or might not understand the papers they write about. They then publish what they understood in a more accessible format (e.g. popular science magazines).
  • This is then read by minimum wage journalists with no understanding of any of the science, and they publish their misunderstandings in newspapers and other non-scientific publications.
  • This is then read by the general public who usually lack the skills and/or the resources to fact-check anything at all.
  • These members of the general public then take what they understood as fact and base their world view on it. At this point it hardly matters whether their source of incorrect information is the stack of Chinese whispers I wrote about above, or if it’s just straight-up made up by some religious leader.

There’s thousands of little (or big) misunderstandings in non-science that people believe and have faith in, that forms people’s world views and even their political views. And people often defend their misconceptions, like they would defend some religious views.

(Again, just to make sure I’m not misunderstood: I am no exception to this either. I got my field where I have a lot of knowledge, but for most fields I blindly trust some experts, because I have no way to verify stuff. I, too, for example, put my faith in doctors to heal my illnesses, even though I have no way to verify whether anything they say is true or not.)

  • squaresinger@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
    3·
    1 day ago

    This is completely true. We all benefit from scientific research and engineering, but there’s so much information that a single person just cannot understand everything. I’m a software developer, and it would be completely ludicrous for me to claim that I understand everything that happens inside a computer, down to the lowest level.

    In everyday life, there’s so many things that we have to just blindly trust (aka “have faith in”) that they just do what they are supposed to, and that someone who designed them knows what they are doing, because we just cannot verify any of that. My car could just one day decide to ignore my inputs and just accelerate myself into a wall. The elevator could just drop down. The plane could just disintegrate mid-air or decide that a nose-dive is fun. And nothing of that could I diagnose or prevent, so all that’s left is for me to have faith in these systems.

    • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Sure. I mean I have some grasp of how computers work. I studied computer science and they told us everything from how high level code gets translated down to machine instructions. And then we had some lectures on logic gates and how the processor architecture fetches instructions and how adders and the basic building blocks work, with a short prospect on how CMOS realizes these things and why a transistor works. Of course I don’t know the details of all of this. And manufacturing these things seems magical to me. I have no clue where these silicon wafers / crystals come from, how they’re processed and how the physics at nanometer scale works. It’s just that I have a broad picture and it’s complete enough so there isn’t much room for religion in it. We were forced to do some of the maths on it to make me think I know roughly how it works and the rest is complexity and scaling it up… At least to the point where I hand things over to the electronics people doing their “magic”.

      But your point is very valid. We live in a very complex world. And things change fast. There’s a lot of information out there. We used to have polymaths. But that was a long time ago and in modern times it’s just straight up impossible to know everything even about a single domain.

      I’m also split on this. I drive an old car. It has 3 knobs to control the AC. No display or touchscreen to display error messages to me. The gas pedal has a mechanical link to the motor… I can fix the lightbulbs and some minor stuff. When I was in my twenties I could take off a carburator of a motorcycle. And that’s not how any of the modern technology works. Cars have advanced in the last 20 years so you can’t even replace a lightbulb. Neither can anybody understand how any of that really works. And it doesn’t seem to me like the mechanics know either. They just hook it up to the diagnostics and it’ll be some error #2704 and they order a new flux capacitor from the manufacturer and replace it… There are some advantages though. Modern car lights are much brighter and better focused than my old front lights. And sometimes I wish I had better visibility in autumn when it’s dark, rainy… And modern cars can apply the brakes automatically and prevent some accidents. I think that’s great but it’s also a bit strange how they do things the engineers taught them to do and not what I make them do by my steering wheel and pedal input… And this is added complexity. Same thing with computers and everything and these devices just do some magical stuff in some cloud and the user is just presented with some result… hopefully with what they wanted it to do.

      And I have no clue whether I’m just getting old and it’s a problem with me, or if this is about technology. I mean even with my old car I put a lot of trust in the engineers, that they put reinforcement in the correct places so I don’t die in an accident, and design it to last and not rust after a few years. And seems they did an appropriate job. I don’t think relying on other people’s expertise is anything new. I think the amount of intransparency is, however, a new thing… And we’re at the brink of being unsure about if we’re in control of our devices, or the machines or some external parties are assuming control about how things in our lives get done…