Trusting Science

Kinda hard question for me, as a scientist, if I trust science or trust experts. Few who ask are honestly curious – they’ve got an agenda. I generally trust Science and Experts. *But* I also know that Science and Experts aren’t always right. They are generally right with the information they had available at the time, the measuring tools they had available at the time, etc. It’s surprisingly easy to do nothing wrong and still manage to arrive at the wrong conclusion. There are some things that have remained consistent over enough time and testing that they’re generally accepted as true (scientific theories). But even that name … scientists aren’t out there claiming it’s the complete, never changing truth. It’s the current theory.

What I don’t trust second-hand accounts of science or experts. There is generally a peer-reviewed publication that makes a cumbersome read. With a lot of details you don’t really need. But! It’s also exactly what was studied, how it was studied, what conclusions the researchers drew, how statistically significant the findings were, and other factors that should be included in future studies. A newspaper article claiming researchers say XYZ? I’ll use my internet search engine of choice to find the actual article if I’m interested in the claim. It’s a newspaper’s summary of a PR guy’s summary of the abstract written by an expert to explain something that requires domain knowledge to understand well.

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