Photo of an Antique Quack Medical Device by Katheryn Laible
Please...
You know…I’m never going to say that scientists aren’t prone to dogmatism or corruption, nor that money doesn’t direct a lot of focus and strong will. Certainly, there are plenty of non-scientists frequently willing to pass stuff off as scientifically verified that is just not…or who take some grain of discovered knowledge and just…run wild…
However, there is a huge difference between that and scientific consensus based on careful application of the empirical method and honest assessment of lots of carefully gathered data.
The Word "Science" Means Something
Scientists know they are funny subjective humans by nature and that objective reality is a tough thing to grasp, even without that. The whole point for folks who are truly scientists is to give it their best to overcome those biases, think really hard about how we might actually know what we know, and then carefully catalogue and analyze that, while repeatedly double checking each other and themselves.
A lot of folks aren’t diregarded as quacks because no one wants to look at their truth, but because they’ve examined it carefully and what they see is hogwash.
They may not not know precisely what is, but they’re qualified to give the best guess we’ve got and can often tell for sure when something doesn’t prove what someone else is claiming it does.
Please Honor Expertise.
If we’re willing to actually sit there and listen (keeping in mind that these folks have studied their fields and methodology in general for years and it can be a little hard to follow sometimes), they might even be willing to try and explain how they’ve come to these carefully derived conclusions, and the chances they think this or that may be so.
Grateful when folks actually care about that. It makes a big difference.
