On both sides
Trump made a particularly absurd claim in his interview with the Associated Press on Tuesday.
He added: “I have a natural instinct for science…”
No. No no no. Oh no, not at all.
He has the opposite of that. Without even delving into details of his ignorance, we can say with great confidence that he has no such thing, for the simple reason that he constantly claims to know things that he can’t possibly know. That’s a dead giveaway. No one with “a natural instinct for science” does that. People with a natural instinct for science know how limited human knowledge is, how provisional most of it is, how necessary caution is, and so on.
Ironically, he made that claim in aid of invoking scientific doubt in the form of pseudo-skepticism. Climate change: oh, nobody knows, it’s all a toss-up, there’s no more evidence one way than another.
Trump again cast doubt on climate change, suggesting, incorrectly, that the scientific community was evenly split on the existence of climate change and its causes. There are “scientists on both sides of the issue,” Trump said.
“But what I’m not willing to do is sacrifice the economic well-being of our country for something that nobody really knows,” Trump said.
He added: “I have a natural instinct for science, and I will say that you have scientists on both sides of the picture.”
In the sense of three on one side and several million on the other, yes. In the sense of evenly split, no.
My view on him saying that is more:
Science isn’t magic. It isn’t some innate sense that people are born with that is “science” – it isn’t natural and it isn’t instinctual. It requires quite rigorous training to get good at it.
And a lot of it is all about taking the shit you think you know, the stuff you think is just “common sense” and testing it.
Scientists don’t get stuff right by applying their gut-feels to it, part of the training they undergo is learning not to apply gut feels to things, to actually come at the evidence in as unbiased a manner as possible because their brains will screw with their perceptions.
This is why you get research into stuff that seems obvious – because what is obvious isn’t always what is right.
And you know what? Even with all the training they undergo, even with how hard they work to do it, even the best scientists in the world do not have an instinct for science.
Isaac Einstein couldn’t accept quantum mechanics, Linus Pauling sparked the vitamin craze, Isaac Newton was a whackjob alchemist.
Great physicists will wax lyrically wrong about biology, and great biologists will wax lyrically wrong about physics, both sets are scientists and even with lifetimes worth of training their abilities are often limited to their fields.
That is why there is peer review, why science has to work collectively and not individually, why the replication crisis is a crisis.
Even with peer review you still get issues with the biases of the reviewers, science takes a long, long time to figure stuff out precisely because it is not instinctual.
To even suggest you have an instinct for science is to fundamentally not get it.
[…] a comment by Bruce Gorton on On both […]
Idiot.
Probably thinks there are no non-inertial frames. Everything just moves or doesn’t. What’s acceleration? What’s gravity?
Beavis and Butthead are Nobel Laureates compared to orange orangutan.
He does love that both sides statement, doesn’t he? He’s probably had it covered in fake gold, he’s so fond of it. Probably his idea of being reasonable?
Half a century of consistent, lazy, ‘both sideism’ from all major media. This is exactly what that produces.
@#1 Albert not Isaac.