TL;DR: People be dumb.
this post was submitted on 24 Jun 2024
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The article that was posted earlier today about how oil and gas firms are twisting scientists words to make “uncertainty” (which is a confidence interval, not “we’re not sure”) I’m pretty sure we need to stop using certain words. At this point, PR is a major part of scientists jobs. Just like managing communications is a major part of programmers jobs, even though there’s a huge belief that programmers can’t talk to others. I won’t hire someone who can’t work with nor communicate with others. The same should apply to scientists.
Scientists' words will always be twisted, regardless of what words they use. I agree that some words seem to sow confusion even within research fields, but I worry that attempting to change things may lead to an
A book that has really stuck with me is "Merchants of a Doubt", which looks at how often the muddying the waters comes from a handful of scientists, who are presumably getting paid a bunch to do so, but not in a way that's easy to debunk. The problem is that science is muddy by nature, so scientists learn how to wade through mud (ideally) and work around and through it. I'm of the belief that the way forward will require for science in general to become more accessible to people in general, because I think the epistemically privileged nature of science is deepening distrust i.e. we are taught to trust science(TM) and only scientists are allowed to challenge other scientists. This makes sense, but I think it fosters a sense of distrust in people who I honestly can't blame for feeling like the system doesn't care about them.
I'm feeling like maybe blind trust in institutions might just be an untenably bad situation, because I'm a scientist and I don't know whether scientific education in the model of "scientific communication happens when the Scientists(TM) come down from their ivory towers and gift the common folk with knowledge, who are not allowed to question or add to this knowledge, unless they become a member of Science(TM) (or they are a person to whom science is done to