Re: Public Perception of Science

From what I have observed most public debate regarding science revolves around two issues:

1) Climate Change due to human influence on the environment
2) Evolution of life on Earth due to long term natural selection

How do you determine what to believe (or not) regarding these theories?
What kind of evidence would convince you to change your mind?
Why do you place trust (or not) in the consensus of the experts in these fields?
Given infinite resources, how would you determine the "truth"?

No idea if anybody thought of this before, but how about just apply the scientific-method ? Essentially what im suggesting here, is to do opposite of what unscientific "career-scientists" such as Richard Dawkins is doing.

This> You try to prove wrong whatever you tried to believe. = science
Not this> You try to prove whatever you believe to be right. = religion

You could, but it may be time consuming and expensive. Lets take a simple example, convince yourself (or at least design experiments you can plausibly do at home) that gravity has anything to do with mass without any circular logic. Its actually a good exercise for realizing the confusing web of theory, data, and logic that scientists rely on in reality. There are hidden assumptions everywhere. Usually they are recognized by the original proponents, then moved to footnotes by later authors, and finally forgotten altogether leading to "laws".

Also there are many who argue that much of what is commonly taken as "science" is actually not due to the fact that scientists often try to "disprove" strawman null hypotheses rather than disprove (or even make any) predictions.

I really like that post . . That is awesome ..