I find scientists I encounter here to be exemplary in their openness to critical challenge. Medical doctors vary in how open they are to including patients in their own treatment. But I don’t regard scientists or doctors as a priesthood. Heck I don’t even regard those with advanced theological degrees as a priesthood. 
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Some scientists here more than others
Of course, I rather doubt that Hitler studied the matter and after careful consideration based on findings from the scientific community, decided that genocidal measures where indicated. I think it more likely that the mindset came first, then he found some scientists to support his presuppositions, as several have discussed here and on other posts. Morton’s demon at work.
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but you would still agree the lay person should have disagreed with tge nazi scientific experts on the jewish question, right?
anyways there are lots of examples like this in the history of science to give one pause ascribing too much aithority to experts
i don’t believe this is controversial
The point is, the scientific experts were not the reason they held those positions. You can always find an random scientist here and there with bizarre beliefs that make no sense to agree with your position. We see that all the time today, not only in the creation realm, but in virtually every aspect of life, be it global warming, snakebite treatment, or duct tape adhesion.
You do make a good point that sometimes wrong ideas become mainstream. Science has been far better at correcting those things than other areas of life.
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32 posts were split to a new topic: What is the relationship between the theory of evolution and racism?
Interesting! You challenged them on brain surgery or Covid? The latter is not unexpected. 
Some people have reached prior conclusions, and like drug seekers looking for a indulgent doctor, are looking for an expert to validate them. Where there is a demand, there is always a supply.
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Neurology. They were too smart for their own good : )
That negative trend is coupled to a blind acceptance of whatever conforms to their pre-existing political views.
Racism and eugenics has nothing to do with science. Who should or shouldn’t have children is a matter of politics and ethics, not science.
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The problem is that much of what science has to counter isn’t skepticism. What they face is misinformation, dogmatic denial, and politically/religiously motivated propaganda. This movement to cast doubt on science itself is pushed by people who use terms like “scientists are not the new priesthood” and try to paint science with the brush of eugenics and racism. Anything to distract and misinform.
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And who do you think collected that data? A bunch of non-experts?
How about some empty rhetoric. Exactly how do you propose to put science “back into the hands of the people”? Silliness on steroids.
Here’s what I see: A guy who can’t accept the mainstream, well-accepted science of evolution and thinks he can overturn the whole of biology armed solely with his laptop climbs on the nearest soapbox to warn everyone that we can’t always trust the science. Forgive me if I’m not impressed.
You and your friends at the DI are part of the problem, not the solution. Too many churchgoers have been fed a steady diet of anti-science propaganda for too long. Now that we need them to listen to the scientists in order to save lives, it’s too late. They’ve acquired herd immunity to the truth.
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I could not agree more.
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Yes. Why does Ben Stein of ID claim that science leads to killing people? Not just evolutionary science, just science?
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The issue here is scientific communication. And we are rubbish at it as a community in my view. We need to ensure that the best experts are also taught how to SPEAK. And how to WRITE in a way that is not just shorthand that helps their fellow experts understand but will help the non experts understand. It is a real problem that we do not always think about how to summarise our data and make it make sense to everyone. Take RCTs for example on which I think I have a really fairly good level of knowledge. The number of times you pick up a publication of an RCT and they are not clear. I get that we may need to include sections in our papers that explain the detail to other colleagues. But the abstract and the introduction, the results section as it begins and the discussion and conclusions need to be written with the understanding that ANYONE can read them. So for example I have had to explain to many blood cancer patients that there is a bit of an assumption that can lead to a major error in the case series that are being published at the moment for people with blood cancer who catch Covid. You see if you catch covid19 and tell your blood Cacner doctor you have it, well it turns out you have a 30-40% chance of DYING. Yes that is right DYING. And the rate is pretty consistent in something like five different case series. But NOT ONE of those case series made the crucial point (which I am sure all the experts writing them KNEW and ASSUMED) which is that some people even with blood cancer may get covid19 assymptompatically or with mild symptoms and so do not think to tell their blood cancer doctors… This would mean that whilst you could argue that the CASE mortality is probably 30-40% the INFECTION mortality must be lower than that even for this group of patients (who are probably the highest risk of all, and yours truly is in that group!) So yes, I am shielding carefully and using masks etc. But we shouldn’t assume that our risk of dying is 30% if our partner gets COVID19 (since not only might we be able to prevent ourselves catching it from them, even if we do our weird immune system might somehow find a way of fighting it off anyway… I have explained all this in the following post which may be of some interest to you and is an example of what I hope is a good way where someone like me who has some level of expertise can read the real experts and “translate” them for regular folks. Those of us that can speak medical jargon need to find ways of doing this for our friends. And maybe we need to build up our own white coats and develop some of our own experts and put them out there on the internet and even try to get them onto the news to be listened to by people out there but make sure they can actually explain stuff as well as understand it! High risk for Blood Cancer patients with COVID19 - Blood Cancer Uncensored Right I really MUST go to sleep now!
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I’m of two minds on this topic. Scientists can’t be experts in everything, and it should be enough to be good at science. Communicating ideas to the lay public is a different talent than doing the science, and not all scientists have it. Also, many are foreign born and aren’t comfortable with English.
A potential asset for the scientific community is a strong roster of journalists that specialize in science reporting. There are people who may not have the research chops, but they do have the writing chops and an ability to communicate to the public. Sadly, a not so small portion of science reporting is awful and it seems geared more towards getting clicks and views.
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Agreed. Accurate communication takes time, and few good scientists have a lot of it to spare. I’ve just spent most of the last day and a half talking to a reporter, talking about talking to the reporter, editing a press summary, and talking to someone else who’e going to talk to the reporter. I didn’t get a lot of science done in there.
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Honestly most journalists have NO CLUE about science. I recently saw an article about the Covid BACTERIA in a British newspaper! And it wasn’t even one of the low brow ones either. Maybe some of us need to take up the mantle.
They haven’t proven very good at math either. I’ve seen people fail to multiply by 100 when converting a decimal to a percent and say things like “20% of negative test results were false negatives and 10% of positive test results were false positives, therefore 30% of tests give wrong results.”
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