A baby formula doesn’t have the mother’s antibodies which are made and adapted as new microbes appear in the environment. So, you are saying the mother’s milk is superior, right?
Yet breast milk isn’t always better is it? I for one would advise against a mother with TB(or any other transferable disease/cancer) to breastfeed her child.
Most of the time breast feeding is better for the child, but science shows us that absolutes are usually bad.
Sometimes, people just get better. Your mood affects your heart rate, your blood sugar, your mobility even. Thinking you are getting better helps you get better. This isn’t controversial, the placebo effect has long been understood and accounted for in experimental design.
What I don’t understand then is why we don’t try to take advantage of this effect more often. If I have a small chance of making people feel better with a sugar pill, why not give out sugar pills and claim they have miracle effects all the time?
We do, I remember my friends mom had pills labeled placebo, and she said they where making her feel better, me and my friend looked at eachother and said nothing in front of her mom. When we where alone together we laughed a little and agreed that we shouldn’t say anything since her mom was doing better.
Because we’ve decided it’s nonethical for healthcare professionals. Any doctor knowingly prescribing placebo and lying about it could get in some major trouble. Like a couple decades ago I heard a psychiatrist mourn the loss of disulfiram (antabuse) implants from their treatment arsenal; it worked very well as a placebo but research didn’t show a clear improvement over placebo, so they could no longer use it.
I am kind of glad that non-license-needing wellness consultants can still use the placebo effect for good, even if it is sometimes predatory and sometimes outright dangerous.
Science should be questioned by people who understand the science, not by random people who don’t understand the research. Which a lot of people who know nothing about the science or the maths/data or whatever try to question it
“There’s no law against it” is a laughably stupid reason to do something. They’re free to do it but everyone else is free to acknowledge that their uneducated/misinformed skepticism is harmful to society and that their opinions are meaningless to those who aren’t dumb. Leave the contemporary science denial to those who actually somewhat know what they’re talking about.
Let’s touch grass together to measure how much photosynthesis grass can do? Please, it will be fun. But I’m open to another scientific experiment if you have anything in mind
Yes, and people that challenge the science who then become scientists actually research/experiment thenselves. They don’t go and claim science is false until they have actual reason/evidence to believe so. One can question science all they want when they do their own science on the matter and it isn’t handily disproved beyond reasonable doubt by existing evidence.
Most science deniers do not do that. Making anti-science claims without obtaining solid, consistent evidence is not science.
This is like the second or third post I have seen in the past week talking about “belief” in science. Science isn’t about belief, it’s about understanding. Maybe this post should be, “What facts are you questioning because you don’t understand the underlying data?”
Do you not know what a metaphysic is? A metaphysic is something that affects the world without actually existing. Information is metaphysics. Law is metaphysics. Gender is definitely metaphysics. Science is too.
Y’all downvoting me because you’re taking offense to a word you can’t bother looking up the definition of. Peak stupidity and tribalism right here. You make up your identity(which is also a metaphysic) based on imagery and social appeal and sling shit just like chimps.
Everything is based in philosophy. Science is based in philosophy. Click the first blue link in every Wikipedia page that isn’t the pronunciation and you’ll go straight to philosophy after a few pages!
What it is, is an extremely powerful tool for reducing uncertainty about the world. Not eliminate, reduce. What it is not is a tool for “proving” “facts”. Claiming a “proven fact” is belief, not empirical science. An extremely consistent and useful theory, of course! But not a proven fact.
That might have been a better title but it would get less responses and also the title never mentions “belief in science” as you put it, the explicit title is something Scientific that you DON’T believe in.
A lot of people not wanting to disassociate the term believe from relgion here. I believe the sun will rise tomorrow. I also believe the sun doesn’t rise. Neither have to do with a religious belief system for me.
The top comment is a proper debate about leading scientific theories, and the most downvoted comment is somebody who thinks the moon landing is faked, both of which have healthy and honest debate with goodwill from both sides.
This entire post is about Skepticism, which is an integral part of Science. To shut down the conversation would be Anti-Science.
There are people in the comments denying literal, established, concrete facts. That’s not questioning anything,; that’s ignorance at best and malevolence at worst.
You decide what’s fact. Everything you ever thought you knew is stuff someone told you and you believed it based on their presentation. You’ve never seen evidence. You’ve seen them telling you there’s evidence.
I agree with you that science publishing can be of variable quality. One solution for the reader IS to never trust one paper alone, scientific knowledge is established when many papers are published about the same topic and give the same conclusions.
Journal Impact Factor (JIF), is a very important part of establishing credibility.
Reputable journals are very selective about what they publish. They’re worried about their JIF.
If you get published in a journal with a high JIF, you can be as close to possible as establishing a foundation of fact, as their articles have a high chance of being both reproducible and accurate.
If there was a casino that took bets for which scientific discoveries would be true ten years from now, I would make money all decade long by betting on high ranking JIF articles.
What if you’re doing the research real-time? What if you, yourself, have done the experiments which logically are evidence? There are a lot of things you can scientifically prove yourself. And there are a lot of phenomena you can mathematically prove without even doing the experiments, although you have to try to mitigate or account for chaos / the specific environment you’re working with.
Conspiracy bullshit like “you haven’t seen the scientific evidence so it might just all be made up by so-called scientists” is garbage. You are a nut if you think that. It is on the same level as flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers.
Oh yeah, I’m not against the idea of science. Doing it yourself from the ground up is pretty solid. All of your own experiences are at the very least valid as you experienced them.
If you can believe the scale of vote fraud Trump pulled off, you can believe that textbooks are often written with an interest in influencing our young. I’m mostly against history as it’s taught. It’s written by the victors and so much of it comes off as fables and allegories to keep people in line.
All of your own experiences are at the very least valid as you experienced them.
Scientific rigor states otherwise. You must be able to prove or repeat your experiences for them to be accounted as valid within the context of experimentation.
‘Doing your own research’ isn’t the silver bullet you may think that it is. Most laypeople don’t know what effective research actually looks like; let alone understand how to actually do it or the covariates that may truly be impacting their observations or research. Further still, some may not even care to know as they may already have established biases. More often than not, it simply leads to further conspiratorial thinking.
A study showed Dementia brainscans heavily correlating with a form of Plaque. For decades people believed it, but then it was debunked. Someone expressing disbelief in it before the debunking would not have been “flying in the face of everything we know about logic.” They would have been right.
A researcher made a study where Aspartame used to sweeten Gatorade correlated with fast developing terminal cancer in mice. The researcher who developed Aspartame shot back by saying they fed the mice daily with the equivalent to 400+ Gatorades. Of course, a French study later showed at large scales people who consumed aspartame were slightly more likely to develop cancer in the following decades, but the outcome was still preferred to the consumption of sugar. This is an example that is much more clearcut in the favor of science, but I think there is still room for skeptics to express doubts.
I think talking about these things in a welcoming environment can both alleviate certain less scientific beliefs while also giving a great idea of how the general public views certain topics. Also it’s fun. There is a guy in here who thinks maybe a dude can fight a bear, not that they should.
Yeah to be fair a few of the responses were that. I just don’t know a way to keep away the oxygen consuming idiot opinions like the woman so proud of doubting the moon landing.
Basically if you’ve got a logical explanation I can get on board with your idea as a hypothesis, but some of these replies are not that and are insane.
This reminds me of the research on saccharine that involved massive doses of it in mice. The belief that pumping huge amounts into a mouse can substitute for lower levels over long times always struck me as odd. Most systems, especially biological ones, have a critical level where systems fail. An example is the body’s ability to process toxins like alcohol in the liver. If you overwhelm the enzymes in the liver you get far different results than if you gave low levels over long periods.
Of course, a French study later showed at large scales people who consumed aspartame were slightly more likely to develop cancer in the following decades
If we’re gonna be correct about this, the study showed that there’s potentially an increased risk of developing cancer but there is a lot of data that still needs to be analyzed, so it’s a bit early to draw conclusions.
I never found anything he did appealing enough to even try to separate the art from the artist. He was always a dipshit. He used to call comedians like eddie murphy and told them that their act would shine a really bad light on black people.
That probably should have been more obvious to me then it was. I’m really sick and taking lots of cold medicine. Should probably stop commenting on anything for a while.
Surprised I didn’t see it here, but this is the big one. I was raised in a very religious household and, while I no longer subscribe to that or any other religion as the absolute truth, I still don’t believe in evolution. I don’t think capital-G God made Adam and Eve, but I believe in the possibility that a powerful extra dimensional being organized things and set them in motion so that life as we know it exists.
We humans just do a bad job explaining evolution to the general public, be it at schools, by science communicators, etc. Most laypeople want to believe in evolution so in the end they just kinda think it works like magic or that it’s guided by some kind of intelligence (whatever that means for them: divinity, we live in a simulation, an invisible natural algorithm that governs everything, the Universe itself as a sleeping deity, etc).
When I was explained evolution as a kid (granted, around the year 2000) they made it seem evolution was an intelligent mechanism that somehow chose the best traits for the survival of a species based on its environment, as if this invisible mechanism had somehow the ability to analyze its environment, reason creatively and predict future scenarios. It was only on my mid 20s when I happened to read an article out of curiosity that I got a bit of a more clear picture. There’s gotta be a better way to explain it to laypeople: maybe that it’s more of a massive, long, non-directed trial-and-error process where there’s not an actual intention or intelligence, it just happens. Individuals with critically bad traits die because of those traits and the ones with better or non-harmful traits live and get to have descendants. But there’s not an intelligence guiding this, it just looks like an intelligence to some of us because we humans tend to apply personification to everything.
In my experience, nobody who understands evolution disbelieves evolution for scientific reasons. Ergo the creationist movement is inherently religious which would explain why you don’t see it much outside the religious bubble you were born within.
The evidence for it is overwhelming. We can watch it happen with bacteria. We can make it happen with food and fruit flies. We have fossil records of it happening with pretty much every species.
The only way you disbelieve it is you are taught a strawman version of it that Jesus can easily knock over.
Yeah basically there was a comparison in some book that we have ton more evidence for evolution than we have for the Holocaust. So if denying Holocaust is ridiculous, how damn dumb is it to deny the evolution theory?
The rules for life actually appearing and remaining viable may as well have been created by something, no one can confirm or deny it scientifically with today’s information, but what evolution describes is how those rules lead life to take the forms that it takes and how it continues to change as centuries go by. It describes observable facts about life on our planet and nothing else. I would say it doesn’t actually disprove creation completely, just the so called intelligent design of individual species, including humans.
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