Comment by MengerSponge
2 days ago
> It's determined by whether the models make accurate predictions.
And it's experts who speak the language well enough to understand what is being said. Fortunately, it's not a priesthood that is linked to your family or a caste or some wildly selective process. All you have to do is spend a few years studying (2-6 depending on the particularities). You can learn the language and basically that makes you an expert too.
What society do you live in where scientists' expertise is taken on face value and acted on without substantial pushback and criticism? I'd like to live there, maybe.
> means everyone has to suddenly turn their entire lives upside down
This happened. Starting over a century ago, and continuing ever since with increasing loudness, urgency, and accuracy. And yet. The US is making it harder to build solar and wind power.
> it's experts who speak the language well enough to understand what is being said.
What's so hard to understand about "does your smartphone show you where you are accurately"?
> What society do you live in where scientists' expertise is taken on face value and acted on without substantial pushback and criticism?
Um, planet Earth? What you describe is exactly what happened during Covid, for example.
> This happened. Starting over a century ago, and continuing ever since with increasing loudness, urgency, and accuracy.
What are you talking about?
If you're talking about the discovery of relativity and quantum mechanics, those didn't turn people's lives upside down. Various technologies based on QM eventually did affect people's lives significantly, though I wouldn't say they've turned them upside down, but in any case that had nothing to do with scientists making predictions about them. GPS is the first technology based on relativity that has significantly affected people's lives, but again I wouldn't say it's turned lives upside down.
What has turned people's lives upside down is, for example, the scientific pronouncements about Covid that led to governments imposing lockdowns that did nothing to stop the spread of Covid, but took away countless people's livelihoods.
Some answers are more subtle than a smartphone map.
My man, what on earth are you talking about w.r.t. Covid? There was substantial pushback. From early days. People ate horse paste. Entire states tried their best to let it rip. Even now wearing a mask has become political signaling, and vaccines are being targeted by the US executive.
I was talking about the link between carbon emissions and climate. I thought I'd do you the courtesy of a direct example that does ask people to fundamentally change their lives.
And I fear you've built a sizeable and unfortunate filter bubble for yourself. America had mild inconveniences, but we never had lockdowns. Nobody was ticketed for walking outside of their house. We closed schools (a good idea, because kids get sick and spread disease), and tried to stop people from gathering indoors unnecessarily (also unsuccessfully, mind you).
The US also fared terribly as a result of our ineffective and largely unsuccessful policies. It should be still another source of ongoing national shame. We did worse than Sweden, which is humiliating.
Evidently we don't live on the same planet, so we can't have a useful discussion.