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Comment by dstyrb | Hacker News Reader

The media is basically to blame for the pervasive myth that there exists some magic science box you just crank long enough to pop out "correct universal truths."

Scientists very rarely use the end-all-be-all language of the news reports. I still hear people saying that the accelerating universe (a nobel prize discovery) is 'quite probable' not 'didn't you know, we solved that, stop thinking about it.'

There are whole branches devoted to disproving big bang cosmology. Are they right? Probably not, but their presence and arguments are extremely valuable. Disagreement is the founding, basic principle of science! It's what separates scientific faith from religious faith. Seeing scientists argue and debate each other in a public forum is the best possible evidence that the process is in fact working properly.

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Media might be part of it, but I think it's a little deeper than that, it's an issue with society and norms. I've learned as a scientist a bit more about giving presentations than I thought I ever would, and something I've been told time and time again is that you act with confidence; the smallest hint you might doubt what you're presenting can be damaging to how people will receive your message in the first place. This is a bit general in society, people often equate confidence with truth and accuracy, which is not necessarily a good correlation.

Because of that, scientists are under pressure when presenting to the public to downplay their doubts or not mention particular points they are unsure of. That's why issues in science don't get airplay even though most scientists are aware of issues in their own field.

The reality is that reality is complicated, and people's perception of reality is even more complicated, so it's no surprise that science is a very hairy thing with a tinge of uncertainty at times. However, the outsider's reaction to that is to respond to it with binary reasoning, saying that, "this means they're wrong because it isn't 100% true" instead of how scientists really see is, as "85% true, so,almost right."

That's interesting. To me an overconfident presentation / paper is a huge red flag and I start to look even more carefully for things that are elided or brushed under the rug. In the PhD we would have rip sessions, where we take new publications from big names and just rip the analysis to shreds (with some post doc help)-- it was an important lesson on "no experiment is anywhere near perfect."

I vastly prefer presentations and articles where both sides of an argument are presented. "We are in agreement with camp A, however camp B using procedure 2 find ... in the future experiment X will help solve this discrepancy"

My impression of scientific presentations to the community is that it's mostly about _funding_. So they are want to make as bold a statement as possible then -- but then "these stars may have actually come from another galaxy!" turns into "Scientists find alien stars visiting the Milky Way from Andromeda!" I actually remember a group issuing a counter press release to their own press release when some reporter completely misinterpreted something and all of a sudden bbc news was reporting that the sun was from the Sagittarius galaxy.

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