I get where this meme is coming from, but I think it’s a bad idea to remove a person’s credibility if they believe in a thing that I consider supernatural/bullshit/pseudoscience/charlatanesque.
Firstly: a supernatural phenomenon today could be a scientific field tomorrow. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Secondly: They could simply be ill-informed about the state of knowledge about that subject, or they had a very bizarre experience that they don’t know how to explain otherwise, or they never thought too much about it.
They do lose credibility to me when I present facts and arguments as to why I believe it to be false, and they fail to show they can have a rational debate to explain why they think I should change my mind or understand that they could be in the wrong and acknowledge it.
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
You could jump to conclusions, or you could ask whether or not there is evidence that scientists’ work in their own field is affected by irrelevant unscientific beliefs that they hold. In my experience, people are very good at compartmentalizing their beliefs.
Squorlple@lemmy.world 1 day ago
That’s why it’s important to have peer review and replicable results
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Science is a process for learning knowledge, not a set of known facts (or theories/conjectures/hypotheses/etc.).
Phlogiston theory was science. But ultimately it fell apart when the observations made it untenable.
A belief in luminiferous aether was also science. It was disproved over time, and it took decades from the Michelson-Morley experiment to design robust enough studies and experiments to prove that the speed of light was the same regardless of Earth’s relative velocity.
Plate tectonics wasn’t widely accepted until we had the tools to measure continental drift.
So merely believing in something not provable doesn’t make something not science. No, science has a bunch of unknowns at any given time, and testing different ideas can be difficult to actually do.
Hell, there are a lot of mathematical conjectures that are believed to be true but not proven. Might never be proven, either. But mathematics is still a rational, scientific discipline.
PatrickYaa@feddit.org 1 day ago
And sometimes they’re not. Apothecaries believing in homeopathy e.g.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
How about this?
barsoap@lemm.ee 8 hours ago
Psi research is a fascinating field, responsible for lots of improvements in study design, metastudy statistics and criteria, whatnot.
Like, it is hard to control your experiment so that you don’t accidentally measure side channels as telepathy or whatnot. Or subjects having hit rates because they have the same cognitive bias as experimenters selecting cards “at random”. The list is endless.
Sceptic: “Your study has these and these flaws”. Psi researcher: “We’re using state of the art experimental design, accepted in every other field, and are open to suggestions”. Sceptic “…damnit”. I guess at least half of Psi researchers are consciously trolling for the heck of it, the bulk of the rest is dabblers, full-on crackpots are actually a rarity. Crackpots don’t tend to have the wherewithal to get their stuff into a form that’s even remotely publishable.