Thread by @SteB777

A common misconception amongst those with no background at all in science, is that they can understand science with common sense reasoning alone, and without understanding anything about science. This is profoundly mistaken as science does not operate on common sense.

https://twitter.com/IsabelOakeshott/status/1316107806404210689

It's not me saying this. This is what Professor Lewis Wolpert, the biologist explained in 1992 - "SCIENTIFIC laws run contrary to common sense."

Read the article.
independent.co.uk/life-style/boo…

Our modern societies are in a complete mess, with us facing an existential threat to our civilization from the climate and ecological crisis, and the irrational response of our governments, to the COVID-19 pandemic. Caused by non-scientist politicians pontificating about science.

This is the tweet from the political journalist with a degree in history which started the misinformed discussion.

https://twitter.com/IsabelOakeshott/status/1316098885639704577

Unfortunately, as is only too common in our modern societies, people with no background whatsoever in science, bizarrely believe that they have a better understanding of science, than trained scientists do. Whilst knowing nothing at all about science.

This is the classic Dunning-Kruger effect in action, where someone knows so little about a subject, that they are unable to self-critique their complete lack of knowledge about the subject.

https://twitter.com/IsabelOakeshott/status/1316098885639704577

At university, the professor in our department said he was always being told by politicians, economists and sociologists that scientists needed to understand politics, economics and sociology. But as he pointed out, most of them had studied no science at all.

Those who have never studied science have got no respect at all for it. Most people never study any science in their academic careers, because it is difficult and hard, and can't be understood through common sense or opinion.

From Ancient Greece, to the Enlightenment, very little progress was made in increasing our knowledge about the physical world in which we lived. Primarily because the constant recourse in academia, was to "great thinkers" who tried to understand the world with their common sense.

This is what completely blocked progress in what we now call science, but was then called natural philosophy. And this was trying to understand the world through common sense reasoning.

The key concept which triggered the Enlightenment, was the recourse to authority and common sense, and to only look at evidence. This is summed up in the motto of the @royalsociety Nullius in Verba.
royalsociety.org/about-us/histo…

Whilst science went in one direction and made incredible rapid progress in understanding the physical world in which we lived, a very large proportion of clever people just completely ignored this and carried on thinking they could understand it all with their common sense.

The complete failure of our modern societies in failing to respond rationally to the climate and ecological crisis, and COVID-19, is the belief of a large proportion of influential people, that they know better than the scientists, in fields the scientists are expert in.

Science is not perfect. Individual scientists can be wrong, but it is a self-correcting field of knowledge in which erroneous ideas are corrected. Quite unlike the field of common sense intuition, in which so many powerful and influential people still wallow.

I am not saying scientists are superior. What I am saying, is that to be rational you have to acknowledge the success of science and scientific knowledge. Ignoring it is dangerously irrational. You don't have to be a scientist to acknowledge this, but you do to dispute it.

@GeorgeMonbiot @Johnrashton47 @richardhorton1 @GretaThunberg @ClimateHuman @NafeezAhmed