“Why science is so hard to believe”

“Even when we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions — what researchers call our naive beliefs. A study by Andrew Shtulman of Occidental College showed that even students with an advanced science education had a hitch in their mental gait when asked to affirm or deny that humans are descended from sea animals and that the Earth goes around the sun. Both truths are counterintuitive. The students, even those who correctly marked “true,” were slower to answer those questions than questions about whether humans are descended from tree-dwelling creatures (also true but easier to grasp) and whether the moon goes around the Earth (also true but intuitive)… Even for scientists, the scientific method is a hard discipline. They, too, are vulnerable to confirmation bias — the tendency to look for and see only evidence that confirms what they already believe. But unlike the rest of us, they submit their ideas to formal peer review before publishing them. Once the results are published, if they’re important enough, other scientists will try to reproduce them — and, being congenitally skeptical and competitive, will be very happy to announce that they don’t hold up. Scientific results are always provisional, susceptible to being overturned by some future experiment or observation. Scientists rarely proclaim an absolute truth or an absolute certainty. Uncertainty is inevitable at the frontiers of knowledge.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-science-is-so-hard-to-believe/2015/02/12/2ff8f064-b0a0-11e4-886b-c22184f27c35_story.html

(this article is a little longer than it needs to be, so just stop reading when it stops being interesting to you).

This is really important and it’s discussions like this that I want more of. I am so, so sick of articles that just scream and blame and mock and denigrate people who don’t believe whatever scientific thing, and it’s so elitist and classist and it so doesn’t solve any problem at all. This, recognizing that intuition is important and that communication about new non-intuitive truths have to recognize this, and also that even us vaunted scientists are skeptical of things that are proven rationally to be true, this is a step in the correct direction for determining how to address problematic scientific skepticism.

Also, banning CNN just all the time maybe. Or like, at least when it wants to talk about ebola.