Publication: the "anti-science" trope is culturally polarizing and makes people distrust scientists

I've previously remarked that

One of the biggest ways by which scientists and science-minded people fail to communicate with laypeople, I think, is with the phrase “there’s no scientific evidence for X”.

Suppose that a layperson comes to a scientist and explains excitedly that he just heard of a new way to [raise children/lose weight/cure illnesses] that works great, and everyone should adopt that method at once!

The scientist replies that she has heard of that method too, but so far there’s no scientific evidence for it.

By that, the scientist means something roughly like “Well, there might be something to it, but the successes that you mention could very well just be coincidence, and it’s really really hard to figure out whether that thing actually works, even if we do lots of careful experiments. So although the thing that you mention could be worth looking into, we really don’t know whether it works yet, and most things like that actually turn out not to work when you do the experiments, so for now we should assume that it won’t work.”

What the layperson actually hears is “I’m going to be all stuck up and holier-than-thou and insist that we do this time-consuming and expensive examination so that the thing could first pass my utterly unrealistic burden of proof, all the while the evidence of it working is right before our eyes and we could finally [raise children/lose weight/cure illnesses] right if we just acted on it.”

And then the layperson thinks, if only you came out of your ivory tower, you would realize that in the real world you do things when you see that they work, not when you’ve wasted years addressing the one in a million chance that they might somehow not work after all.

And then both of them end up marching angrily away and thinking that the other person is a complete idiot.

It doesn't help that the "scientists" in the OP were in fact acting like priests, i.e., using appeals to the authority of an abstract concept and accusing their opponents of heresy rather than presenting arguments.

True. I think hardly anyone on either side would use the term "anti-science". The terms aren't important, but rather the article is referring to the "us-vs-them" mentality.

Also, I like the term "competitor priesthood."

I know this feels obvious on paper, but when I look at people arguing for evolution or vaccines, it doesn't look that way. I want to stress again that most people don't go outright and insult people. Rather, arguments from the pro-vaccine, pro-evolution, etc. camps often have a subtle context of, "this is obvious, why are we even still talking about this?" When summed up across countless conversations, though, it constructs a trope of "people who don't believe in evolution are ignorant savages." It's then really hard to keep that subtext out of your conversations.

Calling anti-vaccination people "anti-science" is a transparently bad persuasion tactic. Leave a social line of retreat.

Also, it probably isn't even true that they're anti-science.

Agreed.

It's more likely their stances on science are inconsistent, trusting it to varying degrees in different situations depending on the political and social implications of declaring belief.

Science isn't a package you have to accept as one huge clump. There is nothing inconsistent about affirming some scientific claims and denying others, especially if you also believe that some sciences are more reliable at arriving at the truth than others (which very few scientists themselves would deny).

Years and years ago, when I was trolling creationist discussion boards (not for lulz, but to deconvert), I tried to make mild claims that were nonetheless adequate to send the more extreme elements into frothy rages.

Those were more effective at deconversion than the actual valid arguments that provoked them.

Rationality could be defeated by one powerful enemy (e.g. religion), but also by a concentrated attack of many diverse enemies. These days I would be more worried by the latter.

Rationality is a common enemy of many beliefs. If you refuse one specific truth, you must also refuse other specific truths this one is connected with, then you must refuse the general rules of reasoning, and the whole meta-level. And this is where it becomes dangerous: people with different false beliefs can be opponents at the object level, but allies at the meta-level; they may all agree that all this talking about "evidence" is bullshit... some of them because it offends their religious beliefs; others because it leads to politically unacceptable conclusions; yet others because it can be used to support sexism or racism; etc. Each of them wants to remove some specific conclusion; all of them want to stop the same algorithms for reasoning.

I don't think it's so likely that the science in the west could be destroyed these days by religion alone. But it could be destroyed by systematic attacks from all sides: religious people who hate hearing about evolution, paranoid people who hate hearing about vaccination, libertarians who hate hearing about global warming, social justice warriors who hate hearing about differences between people, even the average Joe who hates being told he is wrong about anything... all of them can together agree (and vote, democratically) that scientists should just shut up when their results are inconvenient. And if this becomes a social norm, then scientists are pretty much only allowed to agree with the public opinion, and invent some new harmless gadgets.

Predicting future trends is hard but before we do we should ask what we mean with losing science or scientific literacy.

I think a straightforward definition of scientific literacy in a case like global warming would to see whether or not an individual read at least part of the IPCC report. Global warming is an important topic, so it makes sense to inform yourself by reading what the most authoritative source has to say on the issue. I think a lot of scientists fail that test but that they instead get an impression of what the IPCC report says from secondary sources.

If you ask me we don't live in a time where the average person has a lot of scientific literacy. A few people do read meta-studies on a regular basis to increase their understanding of reality but the average person doesn't.

It also important to keep in mind that our present idea of science with placebo-controlled trials is difference from the idea of science that existed 100 hears ago. We progressed. LW rationality of doing what increases chances of winning is different than rationality that existed 100 years ago.

We are not at the pinnacle of human knowledge and the kind of scientific literacy that will exist in 100 years is going to be different from the kind that exists at the moment. It's hard to say how it will be different. I doubt most people 100 years ago would have thought that placebo controlled trials became as central to our idea of science as they did become.

Instead of trying to defend scientific literacy as it is, it's better to focus on developing it and making it richer. That means having a culture where more people read primary literature. It also means things like Ben Goldacre's crusade for the opening of clinical trial data. Putting more energy into reproducible scientific results.

I think those fights are much more central for the future of science then the fight against anti-science folks.

Is there any risk that we (as a society) may lose science (or rather scientific literacy) in the medium run to religous or other anti-science factions?

This has been a background worry for me ever since I saw C.S. Lewis bring up the possibility.

Science is essentially a moral enterprise-- scientists (and those who fund them and those who use scientific results) need to engage with the difficult real world rather than just seek status and convenience.

I'm more concerned about science just deteriorating to the point where it isn't useful (we see a fair amount of that in medical research already) rather than it being taken down by active opposition.

Historical scientists had the disadvantages of flammable libraries, centralized knowledge and centralized political power.

I believe Eliezer has accidentally already created a path forward for that eventuality: We instantiate the Bayesian Conspiracy and show off how much better our miracles are than anyone else's. Brennan's World, here we come.