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 pra...
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fake
Replica Theory
Replica Theory is a tiny model I use that makes a lot of accurate predictions about society:
When people are in a situation where they're as rewarded for doing an easier, fake version of something as they are for doing the real, valuable version, you'll usually find that most of the activity is fake.
There are two types of "fake" activity in the way I'm using the word:
(1) Activity that doesn't achieve anything useful at all.
Example: a treatment that claims to cure a disease bu...
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