To the left is a screenshot of a typical anti-science post from the Internet. Ironically, this post was made to a science discussion group intended for people who are interested in science.
I've blurred out the name to protect his identity. Let's call him "John" and use him as a stand-in for others expressing similar sentiments on the Internet. Goodness knows there are a lot of them.
This particular conspiracy theory is very telling. Every anti-science movement from anti-vaccine to creationism to flat Earth belief to climate denialism to chemtrails to alternative medicine must ultimately posit a conspiracy theory like this to explain why the majority of experts think they (anti-science nuts like John) are wrong. If they truly were experts, wouldn't they know who they are? After all, John is a guy on the Internet. Those silly scientists wasted a lot of time getting advanced degrees and actually reading the published research papers in reputable journals, but John read a blog on the Internet or watched FOX News or read something written by an angry mother in a Facebook group, so John's understanding of this issue is clearly superior.
There must be an explanation for why those so-called experts think John is wrong. It must be a conspiracy. Obviously, someone is paying those scientists to think that John might be wrong about something. There's no other reasonable explanation for why all those scientists would think that they are right and John is wrong.
Use of this conspiracy theory or anything like it is evidence that you are dealing with a member of an anti-science movement who has zero understanding of how science works.
The Scientific Method
Had John graduated from elementary school, he would have learned about something called the Scientific Method.
You see, the whole point of science is to provide a mechanism by which anyone can prove the experts wrong. This is what the Scientific Method is. Every single scientist you read about in a history book became famous by either overturning an existing consensus or creating a new one, and the Scientific Method is how they did it. The goal of literally every scientist is to do this because that is how you become famous, get your name in the history books, win awards, and get cushy job offers.
Let's go back to how John thinks conclusions become accepted in science.
Far too many people think citring an popular hypothesis is citing proof.
Far too many people using circular logic.
John thinks scientists simply declare things to be true, and their pronouncements are accepted without, you know, the scientific method. Let's review what the Scientific Method is. From the link above:
Asking a question about something you observe
Doing background research to learn what is already known about the topic
Constructing a Hypothesis
Experimenting to test the hypothesis
Analyzing the data from the experiment and drawing conclusions
Communicating the results to others
The above is intended for schoolchildren preparing science fair projects. For actual scientists, step 6 is the beginning of the process of peer review. It starts by getting your paper published in a reputable journal.
A lot of people think simply getting published is the end of the peer review process, and that you can immediately take anything published as fact. Getting published isn't the end of the peer-review process, but the beginning. Anything that gets published might take years or even decades to either be accepted or debunked.
Contrary to a famous essay about medical research, a majority of published science does not turn out to be false, but the number is not zero. According to this, for example, the number is closer to 8% to 17% rather than over 50%. Regardless of which number is correct, it is not zero. We know this and can attach a number to it because science is one big mechanism for finding out which ones are wrong.
Scientists Are Just Paid to Say That!
Again, from John's rant:
This is putting scientists in the position of defending unproven assumptions or losing their funding.
Putting aside that John clearly does not understand how conclusions become accepted in science, there are "science mercenaries" who are paid to produce certain conclusions. After all, pharmaceutical companies have an obvious financial motive to lie about the efficacy of their products.
But again, the whole point of science is to find errors. This is why new conclusions have to go through a long process to become accepted, and why conclusions can be overturned after acceptance based on future evidence or experiments. Scientists know damn well when to be extra suspicious of a conclusion because of funding. For this very reason, research funded by corporations is analyzed far more carefully and the conclusions are regarded with far more suspicion.
People like John ironically point to the fact that conclusions are often overturned as evidence that scientific conclusions are not to be trusted, but the fact that conclusions change is evidence that the error-correction built into science works, and that conclusions in science do not work the way John thinks.
Aside About What A Scientific Consensus Is
When scientists talk about a "scientific consensus," they mean the consensus of the evidence, not the consensus of the experts, yet I've been talking about the consensus of the experts. Technically, this is indeed an appeal to authority.
There are no authorities in science. Put another way, the evidence is the only authority in science.
If I felt that the experts were wrong about something, I could teach myself their discipline, then conduct research proving that they are wrong or that they overlooked an important detail. Plenty of people without formal education in a given discipline became famous in science by doing exactly that. A surprising number of scientists get formal training in one discipline, then engage in self-study to switch to a different discipline. Einstein was a mathematician but is most famous for his contributions to physics.
Here's the thing, though. I am not an expert in any field of science. Even if I was, I would be an expert in one, or maybe a handful of scientific disciplines. No one has the time nor ability to learn enough to become experts in every scientific discipline. So when speaking about scientific disciplines in which we are not experts (and for me, that is every discipline), we have no choice but to accept the opinion of the majority of the experts in the relevant field. Only those declaring a consensus wrong need to go through self-study to become experts in their own right.
The Profit Motive Works the Other Way
As previously mentioned, even if the vast majority of scientists were lying to protect their funding, all it would take is one scientist with dreams of getting their name in the history books to bring the whole conspiracy down. And if the evidence were against the consensus, then this means that it would be really easy to prove the consensus wrong.
Simply suggesting this conspiracy requires a deep ignorance about how science works. If you made it this far and still don't understand why scientists have a career motive to prove all the other scientists wrong, ask a fifth-grade child to explain it to you.
If you think the majority of experts are wrong and you use the scientific method to prove it, you get your name in the history books. If you think the majority of experts are wrong and you don't use the scientific method to prove it, then you are making a science claim without having done, you know, the science part.
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