On June 10, 2016 The New Yorker published a nice article on (mis)trust in science authored by Atul Gawande, a surgeon and public-health researcher. Dr Gawande' s central point is that mistrust in science is increasing and it is probably destined to increase. Why people mistrust science, he asks?
The first answer is straightforward: because they trust pseudoscience. The endless controversy on vaccine, vaccination and autism offers to Atul Gawande a good opportunity to reflect. Why do people believe against any evidence that vaccines may cause autism? Why is debunking that difficult? Why is misinformation that obstinate? Because there is a “backfire effect”, he argues. For instance, those who debunk false information tend to repeat too many times the legend, with the unexpected and paradoxical effect to reinforce it. They also providetoo many arguments instead of a few clear cut reasons. People are better convinced by silver bullets, while they have a natural tendency to suspect of long speeches. Ultimately – argues Dr Gawande – scientists tend to miscalculate the importance of world-views. True scientific theories are unnatural and counterintuitive. They challenge trivial experience and common sense. They demand intellectual honesty and efforts because they oblige the individual to re-frame his cognitive horizon, an operation that is always painful and demanding. So, people naturally tend to persist into their customary opinions.
There is, however, a second answer about the reason why people mistrust science. One could easily verify – argues Atul Gawande – that the more one is educated, the more is skeptical. The point is that education exposes people to science, but also leads "people to be more individualistic and ideological". In other words, by teaching people science, one often teaches them universal skepticism, and ultimately science itself becomes victim of such a skepticism.
In conclusion, Dr Gawande's argument is that people would naturally resist "scientific claims when they clash with intuitive beliefs", because abandoning conventional world-views is demanding and little rewarding. When, and if, they finally change their perspective, there is the inherent risk that they do not espouse a more scientific world-view, rather that they just become cynic. Teaching people scientific theories is thus worse than useless, is dangerous, if one does not teach them in the while also a new way of thinking. Science is "curiosity, inquisitiveness, openness, and discipline" and people can overcome mistrust in science only if they learn this basic lesson.
This lesson would be also a great conclusion for this post, if Dr Gawande did not partly disregard it. Unfortunately he did.
The New Yorker' s article starts with a reference to the heliocentric theory, taken as a clear example of counterintuitive scientific truth, which stands "in contrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense". Dr Gawande takes as granted that the heliocentric theory marked the dawn of a new era of progress and liberation from ignorance.
All those who know the history of science know that both geocentric and the heliocentric theories date back to ancient Greeks. The choice between one of them was due neither to common sense, nor to experience or religious beliefs.The main reason for opting for one of the two relied in their respective effectiveness in predicting stars' positions, planets' movement, and eclipses. In fact, none of them was more commonsensical or experience-based than the other. The geocentric theory had little to do with the trivial experience that the sun moves across the sky. In fact, the mature geocentric theory assumed that the sun orbited around two virtual points, called the eccentrics, and along two virtual spheres, the deferent and the epicycle. This very complex – and definitely counterintuitive - system allowed predicting stars' positions, planets' movement, and eclipses better than any other system, but it was rather cumbersome. The heliocentric system offered a greater ease of calculation, although it was less accurate and precise (and we know that Galileo had to trick his calculation in order to demonstrate his hypothesis, which is a great lesson for those who are still mesmerized by evidence-based science). In fact, scholars know that the scientific challenge was not whether either the sun or the earth was in the centre of the planetary system (actually, none of them is), but the principle of inertia and, consequently, the notion of movement.
A similar argument could be also developed about religious conflicts. Galileo was involved in a wider war to achieve cultural hegemony in Europe. Science and religion were marginally at stake. Heliocentric theories were just a pretext to fight a cultural battle between Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
In conclusion, Dr Gawande is certainly true when he describes the reason why people mistrust science - and there is a lot to learn from his article - yet scientists would be more credible if they avoided the most trivial commonplaces. Science is chiefly esprit de géométrie, but without a bit of esprit de finesse it could hardly survive.
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