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Comment by lst | Hacker News Reader

One major question would be: how much can we trust current science? If I had a nickel for all the times I heard that carcinogen argument...

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As opposed to what, our gut?

If I got a nickel every time someone died of cancer, I'd be rich. And probably have a massive guilt complex.

Science changes opinion quite often (this is an observed fact).

If someone dies because of cancer, you're never sure about the real reason. If used wrong, quite everything may provoke cancer... we all are continuously exposed to so many dangerous things.

There isn't even a simple answer to what cancer really is -- it's more the description of a symptom, and not the real cause...

Scientific method serves to develop progressively more accurate theories by testing hypotheses and discarding those that do not stand up to scrutiny. It "changes opinion" because while scientific understanding is influenced by intellectual trends, cultural dogma, political pressure to manufacture evidence, etc., its fundamental emphasis on testing works as a corrective force in the long run. (As Kuhn noted in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, if the old generation refuses to let go of old models a generation may pass before new ideas are really accepted, but such change can be measured in years rather than millennia.)

Only few scientists are sincere to themselves -- most are following some ideology, and so they are highly biased...

Sometimes true, but science has self-correcting measures that compensate for this eventually.

In contrast, religion could (in these terms) be characterized as a process in which someone has a revelation and tries to pass it on, it gradually becomes distorted through transmission, and there are recurring attempts to return to the original vision.

> Sometimes true, but science has self-correcting measures that compensate for this eventually.

I completely agree: but sometimes you have to wait centuries for this to happen...

But it actually happens, which is pretty remarkable in light of the rest of human history.

It's rare for Science to form an opinion let alone for it to change it's opinion. You often hear single study's saying something, but Science only cares about what has been independently verified by several studies. The media presents controversy even with tiny fraction's of the community so that you listen. A classic case in point is "String Theory" which people compare to the "Standard Model" but it's still just an area of research that does not have the acceptance of the community of large.

A far more important case is the effects of low levels of radiation on cancer. It's been assumed my some people that there is a linear relationship between the risk of cancer and total radiation but there is still a lot of debate on the topic.

In both cased their are competing ideas, but the entrenched idea is just older and unlike evolution or the general theory of relativity it's far from accepted as correct.

Science is all done by scientists, and (most/all/?) scientists are humans (so far).

For the last 4 centuries, we have seen a continuous increase of science to form peoples' opinion.

But science is only science (no joke -- it's the current opinion of most scientists).

So, peoples' opinion and science are deeply related.

Yeah, what's science ever done for us?

Nothing of really important: nothing to be happier or more in peace...

Medicine.

What kind of medicine: the modern/european/american/... one, or the antique/chinese/naturalistic/... one?

One of them seems to be real science, the other is more similar to religion than to real science.

The most important fact is: only the scientific one is full of adverse effects...

The one that discovered insulin and penicillin.

The one that has doubled the world average life expectancy over the last century.

the world average life expectancy [has doubled] over the last century.

Are you referring to the life expectancy for 20-year-olds?

[Edit: I found some data here: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/lifexpec.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_09.pdf 20-year-olds do seem to have benefited quite a bit in the first half of the 20th century. I had assumed that life-expectancy was virtually unchanged across the century, except for that of infants and other under-five-year-olds.]

> The one that has doubled the world average life expectancy over the last century.

Life expectancy has been more or less like nowadays in past, and this for a long time.

Then came the Industrial Revolution (a product of modern science), and it went down to half. Then came modern medicine, and tried to bring it back to where it had already been for a long, long time...

Please cite. Everything I know about the history of public health and epidemiology tells me you're wrong. I know you want to argue from a position that science is a pox on humanity and religion alone improves life, but you should probably back that up with something.

Maybe you concentrate too much on Europe, America, and the 'modern world'.

If you look at other people, you see that there have been periods where people lived 100 years and more, and this many many centuries back.

Regarding science and religion: don't you know that the european scientists in past have all been christians? So, science and religion are not opposed to each other, as many modern people think: this is only a recent invention.

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