How I lost trust in scientists

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Scientific thinking is what we should trust. That’s why it needs to be explicitly taught in schools.

The best thing about science and those that practice it: You are NOT SUPPOSED to 'believe' or 'trust'! You hypothesize, predict, and CHECK, TEST, and CHECK AGAIN. A Scientist's worst enemy will eventually be (if honest) his (and everyone's) best friend.

I am a professor in one of the social sciences. You wouldn't believe the fraud committed by some to get prestige and grant money. I am disgusted.

"If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it." — Richard Feynman

In the lab they always used to say "please please please, don't tell us about your credentials. Only bring your data."

You should not blindly trust science. That's the point of science.

As a scientist, I see my colleagues regularly producing results and spinning data to please their funding body and continue the funding through to the next project. It is clear conflict of interest that underpins the funding model. The model is broken.

The distinction between trusting scientists and trusting science is significant.

I love how Sabine thinks out loud sometimes. She worried that some people may take her distrust to scientists as an reinforcement for their beliefs and she just says that, I feel like it's often missing in communication

When I entered a PhD program and saw how obsessed most of my professors were with their h-index score and “prestige” I decided to leave. I wanted to help people, not be famous

Agreed. I find it astounding that scientists trained when I was were not required to take even an introductory course on the philosophy of science, the course meant to address this very subject.

You aren't supposed to "trust" science. Trust isn't part of the equation. Science should be questioned, if you can't then it's not science it's dogma.

Exaggerating the relevance of one's research is REQUIRED to get funding. It's insane and probably why I'm failing in academia.

I have made enemies reviewing tenure track applications and poining out pseudoscience papers in the candidate's CV. But I am not sorry. Doing that was my duty.

We knew this in the 1970s. As an undergrad, I worked with a sociologist who modeled the spread of new information in particle physics research. He found that the diffusion and acceptance of new ideas was more influenced by department / program / school reputation and who knew whom, rather than the impact of the new idea. I should have stayed in sociology and studied information diffusion rather than going into chemistry (and then computing). Maybe I would have found some solution to this. Meanwhile, research into knowledge diffusion has devolved into how to create a better engagement algorithm in order to get you to buy more stuff. Blech.

A college botany textbook I had back in 1963 said in the introduction that it is not the place of science to prove or disprove anything. Science gathers information, does research, does testing and makes conclusions but it's up to us to determine for ourselves if those conclusions are accurate.

Questioning science, IS science.

I worked as an equipment technician at University for 11 years. The driving force behind every researcher I met was 1) seek Tenure and 2) get Published. The research they were conducting wasn't as important as holding onto their Jobs. It was appalling to see Profs pretend to have expertise in just about every field just because they were considered an expert in one narrowly defined area.

When you can't question 'it', regardless of what 'it' is, without being persecuted, 'it's' a cult.