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Asked by ollymursforever to Christine, Edd, Jess, Nicolas, Zara on 13 Jun 2011.
Question: what do you feel about poeople who are against science/ what you do?
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Zara Gladman answered on 13 Jun 2011:
Well… everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It’s just that my opinion is always the right one! 😆
Nah, I’m joking. But seriously, I think if you’re going to have an opinion then you should have some well thought out reasons to back it up. I love a good debate and I’m always happy to chat with people who have very different views from me.
My strategy for dealing with people who disagree with science is to find out how much they actually know about the subject. Quite often, people believe something because they’ve read it in a newspaper or online, instead of a reliable source. The media can be really bad for scaremongering and starting rumours – you shouldn’t believe everything you read! If a tabloid paper printed the headline ‘All dolphins listen to Lady Gaga in their spare time’, would you believe it? Of course not, you’d ask for proof! All science is based on ‘proving it’ – if you can’t prove that something is true, then you can’t publish your work. I would always trust a scientific journal over a tabloid newspaper or a random blog on the internet.
After I’ve figured out how much or how little the person knows about science, I do my best to educate them and explain what I do. Then it’s up to that person to decide if they want to change their opinion (and sometimes they do!). I think if people were better educated about science and how important it is in today’s society, they wouldn’t be so against it, or scared of it!
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Nicolas Biber answered on 13 Jun 2011:
This is a really good question, I have actually only started thinking about it a few years ago. Before that I did not realise that people could be against science. Some people are against science, because scientists do thing that are against what they believe in. This can be animal welfare for instance when scientists use animals for tests, and perhaps these animals suffer pain from the tests. This is very understandable, because we naturally see fellow living being in animals, and it is normal that we want to protect them. As scientists we may do these things because of what we believe in, the greater good. We sacrifice a small number of animals, but through our findings we can save their whole population or even more, or we find a cure for a disease. Scientists do not like harming animals either, and perhaps if we scientists express this compassion people will be more understanding of what we have to do. Some people are against science because science keeps discovering things that do not fit in with what they believe, for instance evolution. The only thing we can do is to make science more exciting for everyone. If science is brought closer to everyone people will be much more accepting of it. And finally there are people who are against science, because science keeps discovering things that works against their profit. The scientific evidence for man-made climate change becomes stronger and stronger, and industries that depend on procedures that cause this climate change will experience a loss if people do something against climate change. These industries do therefore not want anyone to know about climate change. While I can accept the first two arguments people have against science, I can simply not accept the last one. It is wrong to put money above knowledge, and it is even more wrong to put money above making a better world for everyone.
I don’t think that science is everything, but I think that science is true and it is better for everyone to accept something that is true even if sometimes it’s not what they like. -
Christine Switzer answered on 13 Jun 2011:
This is a great question. Because I work in environmental science & engineering, I have run into this attitude before. There is no easy answer. Some people can talk about science openly. Maybe their views change and maybe they do not. Others are very closed-minded and just want to make their point as strongly or loudly as possible. It is not always easy to spot the difference right away and sometimes, even if you do, you have to talk to the closed-minded people. You have to learn which arguments to have and which arguments to let go.
At a conference last year, I had someone approach me about my work at a poster session. She told me my work was useless because it produced carbon dioxide (CO2) and CO2 is the worst possible pollutant because of global warning. Yes, even as adults, people are not always very nice. She really did use the word “useless”. I tried to talk with her and got the same reply over and over. I asked her if preventing someone from dying now because of dirty water was worth a little bit of CO2 release. She said absolutely not and repeated the same thing about CO2 being the worst possible contaminant because of global warming.
This was an argument that I chose to let go. Sometimes, people who are really set in their perception of something just need time and experience to open their minds. I could have replied with something rude, but that might risk success later.
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Edward Codling answered on 13 Jun 2011:
Science is very much ‘evidence based’. What this means is that people won’t believe what you are saying unless you can provide something to back up your argument or point of view. I don’t think I would have much patience with someone who didn’t want to consider evidence as part of a discussion / argument.
However, evidence-based science can’t answer all questions – we know that some things we’ll never be able to gather evidence about (e.g. from the other side of the universe). Hence, this is why we would develop a theory – but we would still need evidence for the basic elements in the theory.
This reminds me of a funny story (well it is funny for mathematicians but it makes my point!):
An astronomer, a physicist and a mathematician are on a train in Scotland. The astronomer looks out of the window, sees a black sheep standing in a field, and remarks, “How odd. Scottish sheep are black.” “No, no, no!” says the physicist. “Only some Scottish sheep are black.” The mathematician rolls his eyes at his companions’ muddled thinking and says, “In Scotland, there is at least one sheep, at least one side of which appears to be black from here.”
The point is that quite often we don’t actually have as much evidence as we think – sometimes we have to ‘extrapolate’ (guess). For example, if you see one side of a sheep is black it would be a sensible guess to assume that the other side is black as well – but we don’t know this for certain until we check. But sometimes we guess too much – just because we see one black sheep doesn’t mean all sheep are black!
Aside from the evidence argument, there are some big issues with science nowadays about how it is applied – for example nuclear weapons. Some very clever people (Einstein and others) did great science to show how nuclear physics worked – is it their fault that other people then used this knowledge to make nuclear weapons?
In this sense science is usually neutral – we find things out but we don’t necessarily decide what to do with the information we have. We would usually leave this to decision makers like politicians to decide how best to use the information. However, the ‘ethics’ of science is becoming much more important now and scientists do think about these types of problem when they do their work.
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Jessica Chu answered on 13 Jun 2011:
That is a really good question!
I think the other scientists have already given very good answers!
For me, I will have to put myself in their shoes and see why they hold their opinions and see if they have misunderstood certain parts of the science which is why they are against it!
I feel they have a right to think what they want but I hope that with better communication – people might not be against it as much or can change their mind (depending on the topic!)
Also sometimes the religious groups, media and politics can make some science research look a certain way so people will have that certain reaction towards science and I feel that this is not fair.But I will just try my best to talk about it in a different angle that they are seeing it from and see if it helps!
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