Is it a bad idea to broadly tell people to just “trust the science”? I think so.
The reason stems from my thinking that all of the following are important and true (and too often overlooked) regarding science:
1) A lot of science is real AND valuable to society.
2) A lot of “science” is actually fake – see, for instance, a decent percentage of papers in psychology 15 years ago.
3) “Science” (as an approach to knowledge discovery) is one of humanity’s greatest inventions – but in practice, it is reasonably often misapplied, or the process is distorted due to bad incentives or poor training. Unfortunately, not all fields of science have done a good job of being self-correcting either, so sometimes, fields go in bad directions for quite a while and need reform. There are different kinds of bad science:
(i) Sometimes, science is “bad” because it uses unsound methods for figuring out the truth (such as when p-hacking is rampant).
(ii) Sometimes it is “bad” because it overclaims (e.g., “Importance Hacking” where scientists claim they found something important/valuable when they didn’t actually demonstrate what they claim in their study. Or cases where science is used to “prove” questions that can’t be proven by science – such as which policy is better in a particular context when it’s actually a tradeoff between different values).
(iii) Other times science is bad because it is biased (e.g., when people are only willing to run or publish studies that show X but not that show the opposite of X).
(iv) And sometimes science is bad because it’s simply fraudulent.
4) Promoting broad “trust the science” is misguided (and actually harmful) because a bunch of science is fake. If you tell people to always just “trust the science,” then you are going to cause them to be tricked by a bunch of bad science, or you are going to contribute to their disillusionment and loss of trust when they discover (correctly) that some of the science you’re saying is good is actually garbage.
5) The “distrust all science” view is probably an even worse take than “trust the science.” If you distrust all science, you are likely to miss out on incredible things (such as highly effective treatments), and you set yourself up to fall for tons of things that don’t work (e.g., widely used unscientific treatments). Those who tell people to always just “trust the science” sometimes accidentally push people into the “distrust all science” view when those people realize that some of what they are being told to trust is crap.
6) So, hard as it is, rather than promoting either “trust all science” or “distrust all science,” the course of action I believe in with regard to science education is to teach people that “Science” (as a method) is an incredibly powerful and useful invention, but that “science” (as actually practiced) is much like every other field: some of it is good, some of it is crap. There are good hairdressers and bad hairdressers, and there is good science and bad science (and unfortunately, some bad science ends up in the very top journals – while journals and peer review absolutely do block some bad science, they unfortunately still let through quite a lot of it).
Since some science is well done, and some of it is poorly done, it’s very valuable to learn to tell the difference to make the best use of scientific results – both with regard to applying it in your own life and using it to form your beliefs about the world.
If we pretend science is all good or all bad, we do a lot of harm. We need nuance to see through the bad stuff while maintaining the tremendous benefits.
This piece was first written on November 20, 2024, and first appeared on my website on January 14, 2025.
Science has become a word that is applied to a lot of writings that are strictly not really science at all. To be true science we need to apply the criterion know as Occam’s Razor to what it claims. This idea was more recently better described by Professor Einstein, as being most successful science when it is expressed in the most simple and concise way that is possible.
We should also be aware that the way any particular science develops is as follows:
1. Observe a new phenomenon and define it.
2. Describe the phenomenon and provide a possible hypotheses or theory to explain it.
3. Design an experiment that will confirm or deny this explanation.
4. If the hypothesis is unsatisfactory, repeat this process from 2.
5. If the hypothesis is satisfactory it is acceptable to call it a new science.
In view of this we can determine when a proposed idea really becomes a true science and when it is simply a bright idea that may lead the way to either true or pseudo-science.