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Comment by CivBase | Hacker News Reader

Why do so many people think science is some neat and clean process adhered to by altruistic seekers of knowledge in lab coats?

Science is chuck full of competition, posturing, and political shenanigans - especially for popular subjects where there is fame and fortune on the line. Scientists are human beings. They, just like the rest of us, want to be right and to be rewarded for it. We humans are often not graceful about being challenged or proven wrong.

Worse yet, this messy process is filtered and spun by politicians and political media before being presented to the public.

Really, it's remarkable that things have worked out as well as they have. We have at least three viable vaccines being widely distributed and only a tiny uptick in mortality in the mean time. Things could have been much better, but they also could have been much worse.

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Because they're treating it like a religion.

I saw a news clip of a woman getting vaccinated saying she trusts the vaccine because she "likes science." The vaccines appear to be mostly safe, but because you "like science" isn't a reason to trust them. What she means is she likes Mythbusters and thinks that's science.

Mythbusters is (or was, I haven't watched it in a decade) following scientific principles. To quote Adam Savage, "Remember, kids: The only difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.".

Science is a process, and it doesn't need the trappings of pristine lab coats and expensive labs. Those things help, but it's about the core principle.

The core principle of science is trying to prove your belief incorrect. Mythbusters was basically trying to see if some story was plausible, and can we make the test interesting. Unfortunately this is very common even among scientists, but I using that basic principle it’s almost accidental when they learned something was different than they expected.

A great example of this is their sword breaking setup. Take two swords and whack them together seems like a natural test. Unfortunately, the issue isn’t the strength of the sword when new it’s a question of metal fatigue and defects in craftsmanship. But, rather than run the test for say 2 weeks they just increased the swing strength because that looks cool.

> Things could have been much better, but they also could have been much worse.

The question now is what can we learn from how things were handled by the government in power at the time that half-a-million people died of Covid-19 in the US? As relates to the article of discussion the question is: Was there gas-lightning going on that made things worse?

Of course everybody makes mistakes and we should and can learn from them. But, "gas-lightning" is not a mistake. It is intentional.

The article wasn't talking about the government gaslighting scientists. It talked about scientists gaslighting each other.

This is nothing new. Science isn't clean. Just like anything run by humans, it's full of politics and nonsense. We just don't normally pay so much attention to it.

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