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Originally Posted by Peter_Spaeth
It's a shame that the science gets lost in the agendas. I don't know what to make of the linked study, on the surface it reads like prior positive studies I have seen whose rigorousness have been questioned but it may be more definitive or at least less flawed or subject to doubt who knows. I suspect we'll never get a clean answer which sucks because it's so important to know. It never ceases to amaze me how on some topics there is so much apparent inconsistency in the data. A skeptic like John Ioannidis would say that's because most studies prove what they set out to prove, but I don't know that that explains all of it.
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I think it's mostly that skepticism. People always find what they want to find or are incentivized to find. A religious fundamentalist who studies faith will determine his religion is, indeed, the correct belief. A climate scientist whose funding and reputation relies on him producing a study that finds we have just 10 years until calamity will find that we have just 10 years before calamity strikes. People find what they believe, or what they are incentivized to find. Which is why we find the science of the last generation is kooky and wrong, every generation like clockwork. I love actual science and the method, but it is a rare thing. It doesn't take a conspiracy for the experts to determine that their instinct or incentivized outcome was correct, just human nature. Oftentimes this bias is done in the service of a thing that is actually true, but when the pre-determined outcome, though rarely formally and conspiratorially pre-determined, is something false it produces a mess. And when it's done in the service of fueling the power of the state to dictate small details of the daily life of its citizens via force and coercion, it will always produce a backlash determined to prove the exact opposite, falling into the same exact trap of softly pre-determined outcomes regardless of objective truth.
The damage from the last couple years to science the institution being conflated with science the actual thing is unfortunate. It seems to me that people on both sides tend to like actual science when it agrees with their world views and find it wrong or offensive when it doesn't, like everything else.