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If this were so simple then we wouldn't have had a problem in the first place. It is not enough to recognize your own biases. For example, one problem is that science has become so specialized, broad and expensive that believing in science means trusting scientists. If a physicist tells you something about the properties of a neutrino, how can you know if she's telling you the truth? You don't have the equipment to do an experiment, and when she claims she's done the experiment at the particle accelerator where she works, you have no way to know if she's lying to you about the results. But it's not just a matter of equipment, but the breadth of modern systems of facts. Even mathematics has become broad enough that no one person can know all of mathematics, and trusting that all theorems of mathematics are, indeed, theorems, requires trusting mathematicians. Ultimately, believing in facts today requires trusting a certain social system. If trust in social systems is eroded (as it is especially among some Americans) then so is acceptance of facts. Conversely, acceptance of facts requires trust in the social system that claims to discover them.



This erosion is anecdotally real to me among some friends and family. A pattern I’ve noticed: when people are physically far removed from the people doing this scientific research, they trust the science less.

Think of it as Scientists Without Borders, but for places in the USA / pick your developed nation.

What if more people employed in scientific research lived in places where little scientific research traditionally happened? I’m talking towns without big research universities, and without companies doing much scientific work. Encourage scientists whose work can be done remotely to move there.

One massive upside: cost of living is much lower. An NIH grant goes a lot further to house, clothe, and feed a researcher anywhere in Iowa - whether in the same city as a large university or a small rural town - than it does in most populated parts of California.

By getting employed scientists living in communities that typically do not have many scientists, they become neighbors and have the spontaneous conversations with people in the community - at cookouts, at town events - which can help restore trust and understanding of science by having direct knowledge of someone doing that work every day.

Someone typically trusts their neighbor they’ve lived beside for 15 years more than the new neighbor who just moved in, and there’s likely no easy shortcut to rebuilding that trust, although it can be broken by institutions with a vested interest in breaking trust.

Get fast internet everywhere and encourage people who can move to get jobs there, and two parts of the challenges of making this a reality are gone. The ease of meeting and networking with new people when living in a place that’s more densely populated with scientists still wouldn’t quite be solved, though...


The government has tried this (Ames national lab, LIGO), but by and large good scientists would prefer not to live in State University Town X (at least among my sample of friends)


One of my friends moved from New York to West Virginia, and got a lot of funny looks from her New York friends. She ended up meeting more interesting people there than she'd met in New York. I went to visit, and also ran across more interesting people there than I have in New York.

Urbanites can be pretty provincial in their own ways.


I always thought the term 'provincial' was backward - urbanites have been embedded in their support infrastructure - their city - all their lives. They are inordinately proud of how they are integrated into it seamlessly. I call it 'dependent'. I've been to the city; I've also lived significant amounts of time (decades) outside it. Without all that infrastructure. Who is more 'provincial'? Who less capable of moving confidently through challenging environments?


This is true and I don't know why your comment is grey.

Why don't all the software developers move out of SF?


I think this is an excellent point (and idea).


The issues that are actively disputed are not esoteric matters - a great many non-specialists can, and do, understand the issues that are most often challenged in evolution, climatology and medicine, so long as one does not assume a vast yet undetectable conspiracy to falsify data. You are right in saying that there are difficult problems here, but it is probably beyond the capabilities of either science or philosophy to solve them. You can lead a man to reason, but you can't make him think.


But that's the point: thinking alone is no longer sufficient; trust is necessary. How do you know evolution is true (if you haven't yourself done experiments)? Things like Price's equation alone aren't enough, because you have no idea whether they model reality well. And how do you know that Fermat's last theorem is a theorem? Have you checked the proof?

The answer is that you trust experts. This is not "reason" but a certain model of society which you have, that you (and I) believe to be true, but it is not one that is necessarily true in every imaginable society. Some people believe that the society we live in is not as you or I imagine it to be, but an altogether different one.

It may be the case that their model of (a conspiratorial) society is inconsistent with certain definitive observations we can make (e.g., the state of technology), but even this claim is one that is not easy for non-experts to verify, and you must still trust the experts who tell you this is the case. It is not reason that leads you (at least these days) to believe in science, but faith. I am not claiming that this faith is contentually similar to religious faith, but it is epistemologically similar, i.e. it is justified by similar personal experiences that has little to do with "reason."


Fermat's last theorem is an example of my point, in that the people who actively oppose the scientific position are not basing their opposition on a rejection of Fermat's last theorem, or of anything else that can only be understood by a tiny minority of specialists. For the most part, those who oppose the application of science in certain areas of public policy are not doing so on the basis of an epistemological question over how science reached its current position, they do so on the basis of not liking the outcome.


Excellent point! I've been a deeply religious Evangelical until my early twenties, and I find it interesting how large the gap is between the rather conspiratorial world view I used to have, and the one I've spent most of the rest of my life having (academic/secular/urban/liberal).

I feel a big part of the problem is that my 'new' world just truly doesn't get the extent of this difference, so any attempts to bridge this gap, however well-meaning, fail and unfortunately often lead to easy dismissal, or hostility/frustration.

An additional problem is that despite the fact that I've rejected this Evangelical world view, I feel there are so many aspects of it that would be extremely helpful to many of the problems that people in my current world face. I wish I knew how to get both sides to properly get to know each other, so to speak, because it would benefit everyone.




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