
Why We Don't Believe in Science - dwynings
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/frontal-cortex/2012/06/brain-experiments-why-we-dont-believe-science.html
======
saurik
So, I /am/ a scientist (computer, but still: I was in the PhD program for a
long time, and am mainly interested in theoretical issues in parsing and type
systems) and most of my friends are as well (everything from chemists and
physicists to public health researchers), and even I don't "believe in
science" (to mean, if someone sais to me "science claims X", and even shows me
a bibliography with quotes from the authors, that I now believe X). If it
weren't for my background and experience knowing that science could actually
work, or having not spent the time to look into and learn the individual
arguments being made and seeing that some of them actually are sound, I could
easily see myself discounting something like evolution as a passing fad.

The problem is that 99% of your average person's interaction with "science" is
by way of newspaper articles claiming "scientists say red meat is bad" and
then three years later "scientists say red meat may be good". Another three
years go by, and they see "scientists say red meat is bad for you after all".
In reality, some scientists demonstrated an interesting correlation with a
single marker (and often later studies are talking about correlations to
something else entirely) that may or may not actually be causative, and either
the media is spinning it into "a story" or some public health bureau is
playing a numbers game that leads to the behavior "if it has any effect at all
we should recommend it".

But, what the public sees is: "scientists say X" followed by "scientists say
Y, previous scientists were somehow wrong", followed by "scientists claim that
second scientists were wrong and they were right the whole time". We are
actively training the public so that when we hear "scientist say X" the
response is "engh: they're probably wrong". Hell, this article and my reading
it is an interesting example: it's chock full of references to published
journal papers and actual psychologists, but I honestly don't even care
anymore as every time I've gone and pulled the research articles like this are
based on I've come up with tenuous conclusions based on flawed experiments
that are being trumpeted as the new truth.

Worse, much of the "science" being cited isn't really science at all: a cohort
study, for example, has no controlled experiment and can't really be used to
show anything definitive; it is, at best, a way to come up with interesting
hypotheses on which to later run actual experiments. However, a good number of
the "scientists say X" that people hear are from health research, where
controlled experiments in humans are sufficiently rare and tied up in ethical
conundrums that many of the statements being made (and almost all of the ones
involving diets) come from new cohort studies or meta-analyses of previous
cohort studies. It is no wonder, then, that every three years we hear
something different. ;P

Now, with that in mind, imagine the average person hearing "scientists claim
evolution is true". They often respond with things like "it's just a theory:
one of many". I will contend that they do that because to them "scientists
claim evolution is true" only has as much evidence behind it as "scientists
claim red meat is bad for you" or "scientists now claim salt may not be bad
for you after all" (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4069613>) and the
result is now that they don't trust us: we can tell them anything we want, but
they have no reason to believe us anymore, as we were continually wrong to
them every time it mattered to them before.

I will then claim that if we want to be credible, we need to stop reporting
every paper that comes out to the public as "scientists say X" and even
further be careful about what we call "science" in the first place. It should
be that when we claim that something is true, it is because we have
sufficiently strong theoretical models and experimental evidence that can
really claim "this is knowledge that may be imprecise, but is not inaccurate"
in the way that newtonian mechanics is a little imprecise (it doesn't take
into account relativistic or quantum effects), but isn't so wildly inaccurate
that we should ever expect to see a newspaper headline "scientists report we
were wrong all along: objects of greater mass actually repel each other".

~~~
huma
Let me summarize this:
<http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd051809s.gif> :)

------
einhverfr
One of the key things that gets lost in this that the piece tends to assume
that unscientific beliefs are somehow bad and we'd be better off without them.
I am not convinced that's the case.

There are two reasons I think so. The first is that, as P. W. Anderson pointed
out in his essay "More is Different" (published in Science magazine in 1972)
reductionism doesn't work. With added complexity comes fundamentally new
patterns. Just as chemistry is not just applied physics and biology is not
just applied chemistry, I don't think life is just applied science and the
real epistemological limits to what science can tell us are very real
barriers. Heisenberg does a great job of mapping out these problems in his
look at the history of scientific thought ("Physics and Philosophy").

When you look at verbomotor cultures and how they look a the world, their
ideas of magic and religion aren't really filling the same roles as science
today (see Ong, Walter "Orality and Literacy" and Eliade, Mircea, "Myth and
Reality" See also Turner, Victor. "The Ritual Process" and Grimes ed., Ronald
"Readings in Ritual Studies"). Instead, in a culture based on spoken discourse
instead of writing, everything is based on re-usable patterns that can be
flexibly applied. This is something greatly missing in religious thought
today. The mystery of a story is not whether it happened in the past but
rather how it happens today. From this perspective a story like the Fall from
Eden isn't so much about the origins of sin as it is the model of leaving
one's parents' house, getting married, having kids, and becoming an adult.

I think these sorts of patterns are likely deeply ingrained in us and it's
better for us to accept and use it than fight it in the quest to conform to
science. For example, in the article, you have the idea that people naturally
think of heat as a substance. This works fine for many applications. One can
think of heat exchangers as not being fundamentally different than the system
of oxygen exchange in the body or vice versa. They do work the same way on a
metaphorical level and these metaphors as Heisenberg shows (again "Physics and
Philosophy") are also at the core of the formation of scientific theories. I
therefore wonder if we'd have any scientific progress if our scientists had no
unscientific beliefs.

Additionally you have issues with the quest to be more scientific often eating
the tail of, well, science. For example, it is worth noting that countries in
Western Europe who use midwives as the routine primary care for childbirth
have better outcomes than Western European countries that do not. Yet there is
a fear that by doing this in, say, the US, we will be backing away from our
commitment to science. Why is following emperical data seen this way though?
Is it that we really worship technology in the guise of science?

------
moocow01
Preface: I'm an Atheist

The problem that I see is the way we frame these discussions. Does the
question "do you believe God created humans in their present form within the
last 10,000 years" preclude you from believing in science on any level?? In
these discussions we throw everyone into one bin or another - you either
believe in evolution or you believe God waves his/her magical hand for
everything.

I'd bet if you asked those same people the question "Do you believe God cooked
your pop tarts this morning or do you believe the toaster cooked your pop tart
through principles of electricity and heat" you'd get a much more interesting
set of answers. (No doubt that you'd still get many that answer the former.)

The problem with these questions is that what you are really asking people of
faith is "Are you completely faithful to a religion that guides your daily
life?" Most people use and come to religion to guide their day to day human
interactions rather than using it as a tool to explore the principles of the
universe. If we as humans want to make progress we have to stop pushing on the
evolution lever - it just causes divisions. What we should be doing is
approaching the topic of science for people of faith from a more artificial
level meaning "if X causes Y then Z" sort of stuff. In other words we can
approach and teach scientific principles without going down the rabbit hole.
Some people will say this isn't possible but I just don't think thats true.

~~~
ricardobeat
I don't see how "do you believe god created humans 10k years ago" can be
answered affirmatively while simultaneously believing in evolution, unless
you're thinking of a God unlike any of the generally known concepts. A _yes_
carries the weight of rejecting enormous amounts of empirical evidence for
evolution of the species and historical accounts.

~~~
rdtsc
I have learned never to underestimate the human ability for rationalization.
Usually the smarter and more intelligent the person, the crazier and more
convoluted the self rationalization goes. So believing god created humans and
believing in evolution is, I think, quite common.

"God guided the evolution". "God used the evolution to build the physical form
then imbued the bodies with human souls". I could go on, but you get the gist.

People are very irrational, and quite easily believe contradictory things.

~~~
tedunangst
I'm not inclined to argue too hard in favor of God guided evolution, but I
don't think you've demonstrated that such a belief is "very irrational". At
worst, it's not provable, but it's not disprovable.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> At worst, it's not provable, but it's not disprovable.

And the next step is to realize that things that are neither provable nor
disprovable do not have any effect on the universe we live in, and thus can
safely be ignored and forgotten.

------
benjohnson
Full disclosure: I firmly believe in evolution and have faith that God created
our souls.

How could I answer this survey with those ridiculous answers that either
pigon-hole me a as scientific illiterate, or someone who thinks that the
entire universe is deterministic.

There's a middle ground that I feel is wise: Trust the evidence you see, but
remain hopeful that there's more to this world than a fleeting life, death,
and permeant non-existance.

~~~
Xcelerate
Your view is the same as mine. Chemical engineer here with an interest in
quantum physics. A lot of people take the view that God directly created
"stuff", as in He literally created the earth or literally put together the
universe. My view is a little different -- I think he created the _laws_ of
physics (and math itself essentially) in such a way to form everything exactly
the way it is now.

It's a much deeper level of creation than most people consider, partly because
the laws of physics are generally taken for granted as simply existing on
their own.

~~~
rmckayfleming
God as a Chaos Theorist is a nice thought.

~~~
Xcelerate
See, that's what makes it intriguing. Simple systems can become incredibly
complicated over a few iterations very quickly. It is one area that humans are
(currently) horrible at predicting -- thus it's barely science if you can only
barely predict it.

God, almost by definition, would know the results for any chaotic system and
can set up the defining parameters to produce a particular output. (Note that
this is different than a fine-tuned universe as I am referring to fine-tuned
laws rather than natural constants).

------
polemic
This is not about "is there a God or not". It's about the question of why
rational beliefs are so easily overridden by 'common sense' or religion.

As a counter-point: why does _America_ , a liberal western democracy, still
believe in God so fervently?

Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Europe have all experience a significant
decline in religion over the last 100 years. Why not in the US?

~~~
cschwarm
> Why not in the US?

There are many reasons but the most important one, IIRC, is existential
insecurity. The more one fears for one's wealth, health, and life, the
stronger and widespread religious beliefs. The thesis goes back to Gregory S.
Paul [1] and has been confirmed by others; for instance, by Inglehart and
Norris (2004) [2].

See also the summery by Thomas Rees. [3]

[1] <http://www.gspaulscienceofreligion.com/> [2]
[http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Books/Sacred_and_secul...](http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/pnorris/Books/Sacred_and_secular.htm)
[3] [http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/07/why-some-
countri...](http://epiphenom.fieldofscience.com/2009/07/why-some-countries-
are-more-religious.html)

------
zhoutong
I'm agnostic, and I'm interested in Physics.

I believe in science, and the belief itself is nothing different from the
beliefs in god for some people. Science theories are all about proving older
theories wrong, and humans naturally regard those older theories as
"intuition".

I don't think it has anything to do with being naive or not. Aristotle thought
that bigger object falls faster, force is required to maintain motion, and air
is made with one element. These are all great discoveries that hold for over
one thousand years. They are science. And I don't think they are naive at all.
Aristotle is one of the most intelligent people at his time, and so is Issac
Newton, Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking. Yet today we regard the views of
the elites as "truths" and all the rest as "naive intuition".

These scientists all did the same thing: prove something wrong by discovering
something that explains more things more accurately in more circumstances. The
fundamental way they achieved this is empirical observations, which are simply
endless. Therefore, there's nothing stopping us from proving Newton's laws or
Relativity wrong.

The way we come up with scientific conclusions has very similar
characteristics with the way we know God. In school, we can reach conclusions
by drawing a graph with 7 data points and observing some linear relationship
with an imaginary straight line that somehow connects them. Boom! A conclusion
of "truth". One major difference of scientific discoveries is that they
involve mathematics, which is a priori by nature, and this makes "science"
consistent and stable.

It's perfectly understandable that not many people believe in evolution. It's
a fact that evolution theories have more evidence than creationist beliefs,
but it's never a human nature to chase the "more evidence". We make irrational
and hence suboptimal decisions everyday, yet we humans as a whole are not
necessarily disadvantaged by irrationalities. "More evidence" doesn't mean
it's right and "less evidence" doesn't mean it's wrong. "More probable"
doesn't mean it will happen, and "less probable" doesn't mean it won't happen.
You get the idea.

Or is it true that elites (minority of people) have more tenancy to believe in
theories with more evidence, accept explanation that covers more circumstances
and do things that have more probabilities of success? And everyone else is
stuck with emotions, "naive intuition" and irrationalities?

------
jayzee
I wonder why people hate on believing that the sun revolves around the earth.
It would make for more complicated equations of motion, but is not
unscientific or wrong to believe that to be the case. It just turns out that
the math is easier when you believe that the sun is at the center.

~~~
codebaobab
I heard once that the circles-on-circles construction of the motion of the
bodies of solar system when Earth is taken as its center is merely the Fourier
transform of the ellipses that describe the solar system with the Sun as its
center.

Unfortunately, I never saw the actual derivation, so that idea is basically
hearsay.

~~~
Locke1689
I think you misheard. The epicycle system is, in essence, an n-termed complex
Fourier _series_ (not transform). The point that the person who told you this
was trying to make was that any path can be represented using enough terms in
a complex Fourier series, so it's a fairly bad system for deriving physical
laws.

------
10dpd
I've always been interested in the definition of 'science'. What makes one
belief 'scientific' as opposed to non-scientific.

In order to approach science, we must assume that nature is lawful,
deterministic and understandable. Of course, we all know that there are
certain 'laws' of nature that exist and have been proven beyond doubt, but the
majority of science consists of findings that result from studies that rely on
an arbitrary probability of 95%+.

~~~
DividesByZero
Science is not a belief system, it is a knowledge system and the distinction
is quite precise and necessary. Science is a method for developing predictive
models based on material observation and nothing else.

~~~
10dpd
I wouldn't limit the goal of science to developing predictive models, to
completely understand a behaviour we must also be able to describe, explain
and control the behaviour.

~~~
DividesByZero
I would suggest that describing and explaining a behavior is the same as
constructing a predictive model of that behavior, and that controlling it is
in the realm of engineering, not science.

------
DanielBMarkham
_[in regards to the Big Bang] Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe
in?_

I hate to wade into Intelligent Design but I'm feeling grumpy tonight so what
the hell.

First, I do not believe in some mythical deity who created the world 7
thousand years ago. Or even last week. I'm agnostic. Those things I do not
know about, I do not know about. It is not logical to waste energy either
believing or disbelieving in them.

Having said that, we had a great piece on HN a year or two ago from a
mathematician showing that we are most likely living in a simulated universe.
I don't have the academic chops to comment on it, but I know that it's
entirely possible that all of our sensory inputs are being manipulated in ways
that mimic the universe we think we live in. When you think of billions of
years of intelligence evolving all over the place, we're fairly simple
creatures. Just like we could fool an ant into thinking his queen lives
somewhere else, I don't think it'd be very difficult at all for some external
entity to control us. Maybe as a game. Who knows.

The point is: the idea that our sensory perceptions are fabricated and false
in some way is a perfectly self-consistent and logical thing to believe in. Of
course, it's a really stupid thing to believe in if you're a scientist,
because if you can't trust empirical evidence, science kind of goes out the
window. So yes, scientists can't believe that and have any kind of career at
all, but there's nothing wrong with Joe SixPack believing it.

I bring that up because of something good the author mentions: _This means
that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories.
Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts_

This is true. Much like pilots have to learn not to trust their inner ear when
flying, students _of science_ have to unlearn many things they may consider
"common sense".

But you end up coming full circle. Even accepting science as the only light
mankind has in the darkness, eventually you end back up wondering if the
models we have are not just more fancy versions of the Ptolemy's Celestial
Spheres[1]. You can take models that don't fit and do all sorts of magic with
them to make them work. For a long time.

I am concerned that we are "diagnosing" people as somehow in need of re-
education, medication, or intervention simply because they think in a
different manner from the rest of us. If my neighbor wants to believe he's
living in a Matrix, more power to him. He's not going to be a rocket scientist
any time soon. And even if he is, plenty of people manage to have deeply
trans-rational beliefs about the way things work and they function just fine
in the world in all sorts of intricate, complicated scientific endeavors. We
are drawing distinctions where none may be needed.

Science is provisional. In my opinion we should always approach it with
humility. What I am seeing more and more is people who somehow feel elevated
by science to be better than their peers. That's pretty cool when you're 20
and figure out how awesome it is that calculus and physics go together, but
it's a really screwed up way to live your life or influence public policy.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_spheres>

~~~
tikhonj
I was thinking about this a bit recently. Now, as a disclaimer, I am not
particularly well-versed in philosophy or anything, so chances are I'm either
categorically mistaken or echoing a well-known idea.

My thought was this: something that is fundamentally unknowable is also
fundamentally irrelevant. Particularly, something only matters if it has some
effect. This leads to two cases: it either has an effect, and is therefore
measurable, or it does not have an effect and therefore does not matter.

Now, this only applies to problems that are _fundamentally_ undecidable--if
it's just practical limitations (say technological shortcomings) then they
could have an effect that we just can't reasonably trace.

But the idea of living in a perfect simulation that behaves _just like the
universe_? From our perspective, that is not different from the just living in
the universe _at all_. Now, if we could measure a difference, it could be
important, but lets take the premise that we can't: now thinking about the
universe as is or as a simulation of the universe as is is equivalent. So in
_either_ case the simpler model--no simulation--is, in essence, correct.

The same applies to a religious straw man--the god who does not affect the
world at all. If the god just makes the world behave exactly the way it
behaves, it may as well be taken out of the picture, mathematically cancelled
(in a sense).

Anyhow, just a thought.

~~~
kalid
I think we'd need to distinguish "scientifically irrelevant" from "humanly
irrelevant".

Scientifically, discovering that a god created the universe and let it be (the
disinterested watchmaker) has no bearing on any future experiments.

Psychologically/sociologically, discovering that some god exists would change
humanity forever. Even if the god couldn't be interacted with, the level of
religious fervor would rise to unimaginable heights.

Discovering we are simulations living in a matrix [every neutrino has a serial
number on it!] might drive people to drastically different behavior (suicide,
risk taking, etc.) even there may not be a measurable difference in the
simulated and virtual reality.

Basically,

human society with irrelevant knowledge of universe != human society sans
knowledge

~~~
tikhonj
But if we _could_ discover that we live in the matrix or at the whim of some
deity, it would mean that that fact had _some_ effect on the world. Even a
tiny non-zero effect could be amplified, like you explained, to have gigantic
repercussions.

However, I was only really thinking of fundamentally unknowable things. That
is, my argument is basically (in mathy notation) `∀x: ¬disoverable(x) →
¬matters(x)`. That is, if you _can_ know x, I've said nothing about it. All
I'm saying is that if you _cannot_ discover something to be true, it cannot
have any effect on you.

The contrapositive is also very important: `∀x: matters(x) → disoverable(x)`.
That is, if something _could_ have an effect (like your examples) then it _has
to be_ discoverable.

Since your main premise is that disoverable(x) is true--e.g. we _can_ somehow
find this out--my statement does not apply (or, rather, thanks to the way
implication works, it's true regardless of what effect x does or does not
have).

Now, if we fundamentally can't prove whether we're living in a simulation or
not, somebody could still convince the human population that we _are_ and
cause the same effects you're mentioning. However, the beautiful thing here is
that this could happen _regardless_ of whether we actually are in a simulation
or not (since the premise is that we can't tell), so the truth of the fact
doesn't actually matter.

------
zenogais
The findings here seem fairly spurious. Intuitively true things are given more
immediate access in the brain because the neural pathways are strong for them.
Non-intuitive things take longer because the pathways are weaker. Equating
this with instincts seems unreliable at best. Really the problem is people
have a hard time grasping the unintuitive so long as it is not brought into
alignment with more intuitive concepts. This is much more fundamental than
"bad instincts" - it's really more that the vast majority of learning takes
place outside of conscious perception and is not conceptual in nature.

------
keiferski
Sad to see no mention of Hume (in the article or comments). He figured out the
limitations of science 300-ish years ago.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Hume.27s_.22Science_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume#Hume.27s_.22Science_of_man.22)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction>

~~~
evincarofautumn
I find the problem of induction interesting. I’ve long had this strange doubt
whether, for example, the natural numbers actually correspond to a natural
phenomenon—or whether classical logic is anything more than an approximate
model of whatever logic actually underlies the universe.

Humans mostly understand counting intuitively, logic perhaps less so. But how
can we make inductive statements about natural numbers if they’re merely a by-
product of how our brains work? How could we use the “pure” language of
mathematics to communicate with extraterrestrials if our understanding of
mathematics is based on entirely different principles?

As a pragmatist, I mostly just keep my head down and say “numbers and Booleans
may not _be_ anything, but we can use them to do things, and that’s good
enough”.

------
sopooneo
I found myself wincing at "pressure produces heat". For the purpose and
context of this article, that is probably close enough. Because the subtlety
of energy spent _increasing_ pressure being converted to thermal energy is too
finicky. But it's also more correct.

And this relates to a problem I've run into whenever you try to talk to an
expert about something. People come up to me with fanciful ideas about physics
and you have to stop them every five seconds to clear up what they mean by
"power" or "energy". Or (as a favor) just listen all the way through and see
if you can get a notion of what they mean so you can discuss their idea.

Same thing happens when I try to ask lawyers about something. I'm always
getting asked, "Do you mean a law, or a _statute_?" or having things like
"well, that's a legal term-of-art" given back to me.

The point being that it's hard to jump into thinking about anything that
others have spent a long time considering and carefully defining.

------
scotty79
I don't believe I would have to suppress theory that Sun revolves around Earth
because I never had such theory because when I became curious why this bright
dot on the sky appears on different places it was explained to me what
revolves around what and how it is possible.

I think I might have more trouble with the question "does the sun move across
the sky" because when I look up I don't see any movement.

It's not about the intuitiveness of a belief. It's about whether the right or
wrong theory got to the child first. You internalize first good enough theory
you hear not the one that's most intuitive or the one that explains all the
data best.

~~~
wvenable
I don't think it's that simple. Look at our language: the sun _rises_ in the
east and _sets_ in the west. Noon is when the sun is straight above us. All
this basic language implies the sun is moving and the earth is stationary.
Language is incredibly important to how we form thoughts.

~~~
scotty79
"Sun rises" implicates only movement. Sun apparently moving does not imply
that I'm stationary. It's easy to tell that the sun moves same way as trees
move seen through a window of a train.

You could explain it to a 4 year old. But for that you have to know and
believe that it's the Earth that actually moves. Otherwise you'll plant false
idea and intuition into member of next generation.

~~~
wvenable
That point wasn't whether or not you could explain it or believe it; obviously
everyone knows the earth revolves around the sun. The point is that somewhere
deep in our brains the sun moving around the earth is fundamental. The fact
that our language implicates movement of the sun might just be the cause.

~~~
scotty79
I don't think our brains have built in even the concept of the Earth having
any around for the Sun to move.

Many religions have concept of sun being born at dawn, travel through the sky
and die at dusk and stay dead through the night.

Our brains surely have the idea that Earth is flat built in. But I don't think
that anyone has to suppress that ingrained theory when answering "is the Earth
round or flat?"

This is because we all as children, when we were for the first time curious
what shape the world has, were told that it's round and were shown pictures.
That's first sensible theory we got and that's the one we internalized.

~~~
wvenable
> But I don't think that anyone has to suppress that ingrained theory when
> answering "is the Earth round or flat?"

That's an unfounded assumption; perhaps we pause at that question as much as
we pause about questions about the movement of the sun. Certainly the
character of the question is the same.

------
minegames
This:

"In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a
statistically insignificant difference from 2012."

Incorrect use of the term "statistically insignificant" and other stat terms
needs to stop.

~~~
SometimesAlex
For real. I stopped reading the article once the author used "Begging the
question" incorrectly. Not sure how I'm supposed to take any journalism
seriously if the reporter can't even use simple English phrases correctly.

~~~
andreasvc
That's a very pervasive mistake, to the point where one could question if it
may be simply snobbery to insist on it being a mistake (although I am strongly
in favor of correct usage, the nature of language is such that people use
terms which they believe others will interpret as they do, and the people who
associate the "wrong" meaning already appear in the majority). On another
note, I think it's generally nothing to be proud of when you "stop reading
something", and I wish people would stop announcing it in this complaining
manner--if you didn't read the article, there's not much to discuss so you
might as well not make this known at all. There are lots of other informative
points to be gleaned from the article if you look past these rather
superficial errors.

------
scotty79
> What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when
> these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?

It's not human thing. It's USA thing:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Views_on_Evolution.svg>

If you don't know Tim Minchin you might enjoy his take on this:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9uIMR8yCPg>

------
shirro
There are plenty of people outside the US, religious or not, who have no
problems with science. Religion only seems to be anti-science in the USA and
amongst a tiny minority in the Islamic world.

I wonder if religion is really the issue. Is there some political imperative
that is served by keeping the voting population ignorant about science?
Perhaps business, politics and media have worked to create a society turned
away from science and then those people turn to religion to fill the gaps.

~~~
molmalo
> Is there some political imperative that is served by keeping the voting
> population ignorant about science?

Certainly there is. Maybe not in an evil way like "hey! let's keep all the
people ignorant so we can control the world", but mainly to keep the status
quo.

Consider this: Science teaches to question everything, so you can understand
the rationale about how and why something happens the way it does.

But... having a bunch of people questioning everything, even the very fabric
of our society, is usually not something very amusing to the ones that happen
to be the current rulers. That's why, from the ancient world to this days, the
higher studies where reserved to the elites... the less likely part of the
population that would turn against the current structure of society. For
example, during the Dark Ages, the church saw science as the works of the
devil (and sadly, some of them still do [ _1]).... or more specifically,
something that would make people question about their doings, their position
it society, and so on...

And usually, things doesn't go so nice to the people in power, when more and
more people starts questioning their world. Look at what happened to Luis XVI,
Nicholas II, or more recently in the Middle East. Or looking even closer...
the anti-globalist movements and the environmental movements, as (not-so-
extreme) examples of people questioning the status quo.

Finally, in some countries it's very public that some politicians think and
say that is much easier to handle an ignorant population, than a well educated
one.

[Edit: Added] [_1] A few years ago, when I asked a very religious fellow
student about the existence of fossils, his answer was that some where the
remains of the animals that lived before the great flood, and the older ones
where there just to "test our faith".

------
roc
> _"Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in?"_

Because some scientific ideas are constantly derided and publicly ridiculed by
moral, cultural and political leaders and institutions. If the church and half
the country (still) held that heliocentricity were preposterous, it may still
be as 'hard to believe in' as evolution is, decades after science considered
it 'settled'.

~~~
10dpd
See my comment below - is there such a thing as a scientific 'idea'?

~~~
roc
Yes. An idea formed on a basis of scientific study. "Idea" is just shorthand
to cover what we colloquially know as theories, natural laws, hypotheses that
haven't yet been directly tested, etc.

------
huma
> At the present rate, the Darwinian revolution, at least in America, will
> take just as long.

I would say that it's exclusively an American problem :) I get rather annoyed
stumbling on the creationist articles. It's like reading on flat earth in
2012. What's even more entertaining is that people try to explain it in A.C.C.
and D.L.P.F.C. terms. Just "get your shit together", folks :)

------
bithive123
Daniel Kahneman gave a good informal talk about these different reasoning
systems and why both are useful:
[http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/daniel-
kahneman...](http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/25/daniel-kahneman-on-
the-trap-of-thinking-that-we-know/)

------
confluence
Why?

Because humans reason inductively and not deductively. We use short cuts,
quick heuristics, analogies and similes. We anthropomorphize, we look for
direct causes and effects over linear time scales. That's just the tip of the
ice berg.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases> \- That's a pretty
comprehensive list. Memorize and comprehend all of those, and even then you
won't get a handle around how badly humans reason - because you are human
yourself!

It's also why humans find programming difficult (logic is very unnatural to a
inductive reasoner). All swans are white programmers will quickly smash into
the error caused by unpredictbale black swans coming into the system. Hence
that's why you need exceptions, conditionals and containers to deal with the
most absurd inputs ([http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-
the-ch...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-chaos-
monkey.html)).

Humans are animals, with a bunch of neurons in their heads that look for and
extract statistically significant patterns from correlated data over short
term linear time scales. We mistake correlation for causation thanks to all
the mental shortcuts that were used to keep us alive in a less complex world.

Why don't we believe in science? The same reason we eat food, drink water and
socialize with our peers - to stay alive. Science is deduction from first
principles (backed by evidence of course). And that is very, very unnatural.

Note: Proud reductionist here!

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction>

------
waterhouse
I am irritated by the use of the word "we" in the title, "Why We Don't Believe
in Science".

The article begins with three paragraphs discussing the widespread belief in
creationism. It appears to the reader (that is to say, me--I clarify just whom
I'm speaking for, unlike the author) that this is intended at least as a
prominent example of "us not believing in science". In fact, this appears to
be the focus of the article.

However, the author talks as though he sees creationism as obviously false,
calling the 46% statistic "a stark blow to high-school science teachers
everywhere", and asking, "What makes the human mind so resistant to [...]
facts [...] buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?" Furthermore, the author
does not provide any arguments against creationism, instead proceeding as
though it were obviously false to his audience as well.

Well, if neither the author nor his intended audience is a creationist (when
evolutionary alternatives to creationism appear to be the "Science" that "We
Don't Believe In"), then just who is "we"? The word seems quite inappropriate.

All the article manages to establish about "we" is that, when we're processing
and reasoning about physical systems, if they don't map well to visceral
intuition, then we use an extra part of our brains; and that this appears to
cost some kind of effort and slow us down. I expect even that last effect
could be mitigated with practice or by developing a certain mindset; but
ignoring that, all it would establish is "We Think More Slowly About [Certain
Kinds of] Science", not "We Don't Believe In [Certain Kinds of] Science". Just
learn to think slowly and carefully in certain situations; I think I, for one,
have that reflex built into my bones. Anyway, it being difficult to think
about something is clearly insufficient explanation by itself--how many people
"don't believe in integral calculus"?

If you actually want to know why the people who believe in creationism believe
in creationism, then you should probably investigate them. Let's see. We have
idea A (creationism--really this refers to a category of many specific
beliefs), and competing idea B (human evolutionary theory). Both ideas are
sufficiently complex and detailed that it is unlikely that many of the people
we're interested in came up with it on their own. So let's see when and how
they're exposed to both ideas, and how they reason about the ideas on their
own after exposure.

At this point, for a journalistic article worth publishing, you would probably
want to present some research. Find some creationists, ask them some questions
about their background, figure out some patterns, do some large-scale sampling
to see if you've found all the common patterns, and do detailed interviews of
a few representative people from each pattern.

(Probably the biggest pattern is "grows up in a religious, creationist family;
is exposed to human evolutionary theory either not at all, or just a little in
high school, and is told by parents and priests or other authorities that it's
all bunk, and accepts this; takes a career path that doesn't involve studying
human genetics or biology in detail; and doesn't find a need to seriously
question creationism at any point in the rest of their life."

If evolution were easier to reason about, it might increase the rate at which
people decided on their own--after having been exposed to evolutionary theory
--that humans evolved. But... I find evolution easy to understand and reason
about--at least in simple cases of obvious improvements to an organism; the
evolution of behaviors that are useful only in a group or in a family with
certain structure is much more difficult, because it's hard to know what
hominid societies were like; but most of the obvious changes between humans
and more primitive mammals--getting taller and more dexterous and brainy--are
easy to at least decide to be plausible. I think it really just doesn't come
up often in these people's lives, except as something like "Another godless
rant from a misguided intellectual", which is easily dismissed. I conclude
that the scientific content of this article--the studies involving observing
how people and their brains respond to "nonintuitive" physical situations--is
probably in fact irrelevant to the stuff about creationists.)

Once you've learned why creationists are the way they are, then you might
learn what might be good ideas for how to change them. But! Any moral
principle that justifies you using any means to try to change _them_ can
justify them using the same means to try to change _you_. Anyone who advocates
compulsory, tax-funded public schooling, and then complains about the fact
that they're being forced to send their kids to be taught anti-science and to
pay for the same disservice to be done to _other_ kids--I consider you to have
brought your problems upon yourself and I have no sympathy for you. (Nor do I
sympathize with creationists in favor of compulsory public education. A plague
on all your houses, dammit!) If you feel the need, then put your efforts into
civil, reasoned argument, hopefully in a not-annoying way.

This result about people apparently having to "push back against their
instincts" is an interesting thing. I'd be interested to hear more detailed
and careful investigation on the subject: can you establish exactly what
things are hard to reason about? does it vary from person to person? can you
improve by thinking about such situations more, and would this make it hard to
do repeated measurements with the same people? etc. This would have been good
as a standalone science article. Unfortunately, it was cast as an article
about evolution vs creationism, with an annoyingly incorrect (and possibly
condescending) title and a probably misleading conclusion.

On the other hand, it'll probably attract a lot of traffic. If that is the
author's job, he's probably done it well. I want to go live in a private
little world now...

Well, I don't know. Maybe backlash from people like me can have _some_ effect.
There's probably a reason they don't put up even more linkbait-y stuff. Some
people would decide to read other stuff. Even those who eat up the linkbait,
they're probably not discriminating, and they could easily switch to another
linkbait source that might happen to give them better content once, or be more
convenient once. I guess maybe I can hope for competition and a race to the
bottom to wipe out stuff like this. (Come to think of it, that is happening.
But this newspaper probably has some highbrow content as well, neh? Hmm...
It's possible that an editor (with detailed observation of readers), or the
author, might figure out that linkbait eventually loses readers and
reputation, and eliminate the column from the paper, or the technique from his
writing repertoire. Possible. For now, I'm still going to my private little
world.)

------
jfoutz
Maybe the numbers are stable because people who reject the theory of evolution
have lots of kids that they homeschool.

