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Comment by enkid | Hacker News Reader

You should trust the epistemological methods developed by science, not the scientist who use them. That means you understand why scientists believe in their discoveries instead of taking their word on it. But you still can trust someone's credentials are better than your own and that they are giving you a better judgement than your own.

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> But you still can trust someone's credentials are better than your own and that they are giving you a better judgement than your own.

You should also understand that scientists are human and subject to all of human foibles like racism, sexism, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piltdown_Man

Not to mention politics, such as when "jewish science/math/etc" rejected.

You should trust the replicable experiments, not the scientists. Especially so when "science" and politics gets intermixed.

When a "scientist" says "trust me" or when a politician says "trust the scientist I say to trust", that's when you should be the most distrusting.

But that isn't what the article is about.

Most (many) people have no (basic but proper) understanding of the scientific method and statistics.

When I hear "trusting since" it's most times not "trust the scientific method but be wary about interpretations of results yielded by it" but instead "fully non-questioning trust a specific interpretation of some scientific results" worse often a biased speculative interpretation based on some other speculations based on the scientific results.

As such "trusting science" because "it's science" is in many peoples vocabulary something I can't say is good. Especially if politicians use the terms.

Agreed, the term "trust science" is not what we need, at least as commonly used. It should be understand the scientific method, which helps put claims into perspective in terms of confidence in claims.

I don’t really even trust the method used by scientists. What I trust is the method used by engineers. When I get on an airplane I’m not trusting science, I’m trusting over a century of rigorous engineering that took planes from being death traps to being almost absurdly safe.

Not trusting the methods used by scientists is pretty natural if you get to see(experience) how the sausage is made.

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