zcvxzcxv wrote:
http://theconversation.com/we-cant-trust-common-sense-but-we-can-trust-science-53042
An article in which the author presents arguments designed to appeal to your rationality, with the goal of getting you to question your ability to be rational.
And then presents the following argument for why science doesn't fall pray to the same problems of implicit bias;
"It is not that individual scientists are immune from the cognitive biases and tendencies to fool themselves that we are all subject to. It is rather that the process of science produces the checks and balances that prevent these individual flaws from flourishing as they do in some other areas of human activity. In science, the highest unit of cognition is not the individual, it is the community of scientific enquiry."
In other words, science is no longer about evidence, but consensus.
If your common sense tells you that predictions based on complex computer models (with many factors whose relation to the real world is still not fully understood) is not as reliable as the science that describes the laws of chemistry or physics that can be repeatedly demonstrated through experimentation, then your common sense is called into question. But will we consider the biases and peer pressure that could be at work in the field of climate science? Absolutely not. After all, they are scientists. They don't need evidence, they have consensus.