Arguing with a scientist and other pointless pursuits

As an intelligent human being with a first class degree (to prove it) I like to think I can gauge fact from fiction, cause from correlation, and whether or not I’m in the right or in the wrong – although in many cases, which is which can be a very grey area. Not so with the omniscient power of the scientist who is always right – until, of course, they are proved wrong. Over the past few weeks I got into some embarrassing public spats with scientists, notably on Twitter about the Large Hadron Collider (don’t know why, but opening a portal to another universe seems a bit of a silly idea to me) and about science sceptics, of which I believe normal people have a complete and utter right to be.

As a non-scientist, I am capable of completely holding my hands up and saying that I don’t know enough about something to be accurate all the time. But as a generalist, I can have a fairly good guess. Not so the scientist, who believes that because they have all the facts (and I would argue that in itself is an impossibility), normal people’s opinions about complicated matters too large for their tiny plebeian minds can simply be dispensed with.

I have talked openly about my issues with doctors (who rarely have all the facts) and my feeling that short sighted prescriptions have cause long term harm. It’s a sentiment echoed by many “normal” people, who see scientists make about-faces all the time, whether it’s about diet and nutrition, such as when fat was found to be healthy and grains less so than previously thought, or the fact the vitamins are now found to cause and not prevent cancer as previously thought.

And scientists wonder why normal people can sometimes have a problem with science. Anti-vaxers, for example have become the scourge of the scientific community. But as a mother of a child on the autism spectrum, herself concerned by the fact I gave my son his second MMR job very early, but an ex health journo who studied the effects of overstated reporting of the Wakefield study into MMR  and autism,  I can completely sympathise with both camps. The problem with scientists is that very often they cannot. 

The fact is ordinary people are going to use their own experiences to sort facts from fiction, and if their own experiences do not correlate with what scientists are telling them, then they are bound to be sceptical. Now that’s called cause and effect, scientists, and I’m sure you know all about that. So, all I would say is, the very fact people are sceptical suggests that scientists don’t always get it right, ergo, one might argue, it’s probably best to be a bit of a sceptic.

Science may shine a light, but it’s important to remember that it too is short-sighted. I would argue that only nature, evolved over billions of years, is a perfect system, and that tinkering with it will always end up with us shooting ourselves in the foot. For science that believes, it can outpace nature, (and like the tortoise and the hare, I don’t doubt it can in the short term,) is a know-it-all with whom you can’t argue until it proves itself wrong, and herein lies the problem for ordinary people. We are simply not all evolved to be able to cope with the multiplicity of new information it turns up every day. So we have to make assumptions, jump to conclusions, read the headlines and take our best guess. It is what it is to be human. Which, of course, if you are a scientist, you will probably already know.

The point being, that as a scientist, you need to be prepared for the very fact of human nature to be sceptical, especially if our own experiences do not correlate to your findings, and whatever your evidence based conclusions might be, they might not be true in every circumstance, for everyone, all of the time. And that’s a fact.