One of the problems with some religious types is that they expect absolute truth, the type sold by religions, from science as well.
There is a whole scientific/enlightened narrative implicit here. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
Good tentative answers are better than unprovable/unfalsifiable final answers. See Asimov on The Relativity of Wrong -----sapere aude
Which leads us to TBG's point about inconsistency. What? Scientists can't even agree among themselves? Then which scientist am I supposed to listen to?
You've got a whole world of educational failure right there.
Paradoxically it's the illusion of certainty that makes science seem alienating, and scientists seem inhuman.
I think people have very little idea that there's a lot of frustration and guessing and uncertainty involved. The idea seems to be that every so often a genius appears out of nowhere with The Answer and so the story grinds on.
It's the certainty and predictability that make science look like magic. If you take those away and combine with them with participation, you'll get less of the surly 'You people never agree anyway so why should I listen to you?' and more of the 'So what other evidence is there?'
They want science to say you MUST take this vitamin and you will NEVER get cancer if you do so. Elsewhere on the thread it mentions how results come out prematurely or even where the paper itself may only talk in terms of likelihood and not absolute certainty, it gets report as being the authority and telling people that this is the whole truth and nothing but... and then next week someone else will have a new truth.
People don't understand that the whole process very often is 'experiment, experiment, experiment and oh ok what's going on here...? It probably isn't this or that, but it's likely to be that. Give the same dataset to someone else, and their answer can be different.'
Migeru is right, you want certainty, go to a priest. Science isn't religion, it's exploration, there's infinite possibilities to surf on, all sorts of amazing things jump out and throw you off and then you sit there and think until your brain hurts and try to work it out again.
It is magic! And it's foolish to think we can provide all the answers. If the public could be more realistic about that, perhaps we'd all seem to be a bit more human to the non-science bods. Then perhaps they'd find the quest for answers more interesting too.
Research wouldn't be called research if you knew all the answers. (I can't remember where that quote comes from) Ad astra per aspera
People don't understand that the whole process very often is 'experiment, experiment, experiment and oh ok what's going on here...?
I think if there's one thing that I'd like people to get from science education that they don't seem to at the moment, it's this.
And an understanding of how to parse statistics. So when someone says 'Twice as likely to get cancer because...' they can say 'But the difference between odds of 15 million to one and 30 million to one is insignificant.'
