There actually have been people and movements that were more broadly antiscience than today’s this-or-that skeptics: what we used to call “new age” types, e.g., members of religious cults and believers in the occult. In his oft-cited 1993 book Science and Anti-Science, Gerald Holton mentions “interest in astrology” as indicative of antiscience beliefs, as least as “conventionally” understood (his word).

So the author defines antiscience as the rejection of mainstream scientific views and their replacement with unproven or deliberately misleading theories. What does that even mean? Science is a process that moves forward by questioning received wisdom. Does “rejection” encompass doubt or criticism? At what point would a theory be considered “proven”? . And why all the ad hominen verbiage (“deliberating misleading”, “nefarious”)? Can’t people just disagree without being accused of bad faith?

The inspiration for this post came from reading a bunch of articles on how to combat “antiscience”. Each one cautioned against trying to reason or debate scientific issues with people who hold antiscience views. Rather, one should try to relate to their emotions and social needs, e.g., be warm, tell stories, find common ground, establish a connection. Above all, don’t acknowledge their ideas have any merit.

And I thought: don’t any of these authors know about the “persuasive backfire effect”? Here’s a brief review…

“Antiscience is a set of attitudes that involve a rejection of science and the scientific method. People holding antiscientific views do not accept science as an objective method that can generate universal knowledge...Lack of trust in science has been linked to the promotion of political extremism and distrust in medical treatments…for some, rejecting scientific consensus or public health guidance serves as an expression of political allegiance or skepticism towards perceived authority figures.” Wikipedia

Hmm… 

“Science is broadly understood as collecting, analyzing, publishing, reanalyzing, critiquing, and reusing data.” Wikipedia,

In other words, science is a process. More specifically, science is a self-correcting process for deepening our understanding of the world. It is a process that comes with safeguards to minimize error. Data is the direct outcome of that process.

What would you consider the “science” in these scenarios? What science would you trust? What leads you to trust one science claim and not another? If the credibility of the source, how do you determine the credibility of a source? …

“It is an increasingly familiar experience. A request for help to a large language model such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT is promptly met by a response that is confident, coherent and just plain wrong. In an AI model, such tendencies are usually described as hallucinations. A more informal word exists, however: these are the qualities of a great bullshitter… The fundamental problem is that language models are probabilistic, while truth is not.” - AI models make stuff up. How can hallucinations be controlled? The Economist February 28, 2024

“If a Buddhist Newton had been sitting under that tree, he would have seen the apple falling and, reaching for Enlightenment, experienced each moment of its descent as a thing pure in itself. Only a restless Western Newton would say, “Now, what story can tell us best what connects those apple-moments from branch to ground? Sprites? Magnets? The mysterious force of the mass of the earth beneath it? What made the damn thing fall?” That’s a story we tell, not a moment we experience.” - Adam Gopnik, What Meditation Can Do for Us, and What It Can’t: Examining the science and supernaturalism of Buddhism.