Scientific literacy and scientism

Do any of ye studying or working in science ever feel like pre-reformation priests in central Europe who can exert their intellectual supremacy when discussing how the world works just by quoting a bunch of incomprehensible Latin at the common folk?

Most laypeople, even those interested in science, believe that scientists generally know what they're talking about but it all seems to be faith based. A simple question like "how do we know atoms exist?" is going to draw a lot of blank expressions.
There's an important distinction in that our miracles actually work but plenty of people in the 1700s believed their religious leaders could perform small miracles.
Am I wrong to feel uncomfortable that the sort of lay people who "worship" science are probably using the same parts of their brain that Christians worshiping Jesus in the 1700s would have used? Do you think if kids weren't evangelised and taught science in such a dogmatic way, would there be less climate change deniers, anti-vaccers and people believing in pseudoscience/mysticism?
Would the effort be worth it? Would teaching critical thinking and believing ideas based on knowledge of experiments be too much of an investment for the basic education any human should get?

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i dont know, i think that stems from the religions. But never really encountered this other than with my uncle from another country.

In short, no.
There's a reason why we have teachers and not scientists teaching people when they are young.

>Would teaching critical thinking and believing ideas based on knowledge of experiments be too much of an investment for the basic education any human should get?
That's basically what education is now.

i am 21 and i went to school. I tell you, the teachers who studied their field were much more capable teachers than the ones sstudying only to be a teacher.

of you have a true degree of something, youre more qualified as a teacher. its just the way it is. I dont understand why you need all the pedagogics nonsence, if no teacher whatsoever applyes working methods of it.

No, that's not what's happening at all. People by necessity delegate certain thinking and information gathering processes to other individuals. This isn't "worship". The "I love science" crowd doesn't "worsbip" science either, they're just in love with sci-fi.

"Scientism" is a buzzword used by people who are butthurt that empirical observation does not support their beliefs.

As a layman of science, I describe science as an ever-changing field. For example, the idea of what an atom is or whether atoms exist continually changes as we discover new evidence from careful experiments. Science is fundamentally non-dogmatic, and is built upon empirical evidence.

That's still different to actually being a scientist.

>how do we know atoms exist?

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but scientists should be even more qualified.

Only if they are qualified in teaching.

Maybe it is in your country, but I was 13 before I was ever taught via experiments and 15 before it was ever done in a meaningful way. Before that, we were usually just presented with facts with little justification as to why they were true.
We had to opt into science subjects at this more fundamental level and our options were limited as to what we could take. As a result I've only got a really cursory understanding of biology and I've very little grap on how and why we know proteins work. I take it on faith that biochemists are doing good work but I've only got as far as one college semesters worth of inorganic chemistry and a general belief in the scientific method and community to convince me of that.
The bedrock of the field, the important experiments and practices are completely hidden to me as much as Young's slits would be to someone who's never studied physics.
This is true but it's more like a nicer way of framing the issue. We put faith in things we know nothing about because it's necessary. That's always gonna be true to an extent. You can't teach every 14 year old exactly how quantum mechanics works. Hell, we don't even get told how electrons work in chemistry till we're 15 and even then you've get taught a really hand wavey explaination where they'll use the phrase "electron cloud" but they're tereified to get into the meat of what that means.
I just feel like the tools to learn that material on your own isn't really given to you until you're in college studying science. You could read whatever pop crap Michio Kaku has put out but again, it's all just hand waving. You learn the buzzwords and can recall the pretty pictures, but you don't get a fundamental understanding of where they come from.
You can only get that from textbooks, papers and the cannon of experiments they teach to college students. All of which is fairly inaccessible to the public.

This is all true, but it's a very top level philosophical look at how science views ideas in general.
The more important question is, do you know why atoms exist? If no, then it might not be dogma, but it was taught to you in a dogmatic way.
Haha, ok fair. This may be an answer that most people could give, but it's more like people saying the engines are the reason we understand the mechanisms behind combustion.
Yeah, they both required an understanding of those fundamentals to develop to the level sophistication we have and one can infer the existence of that knoweldge based on the technology, but it's not the same as knowing where all that physics and chemistry comes from.

>why do electrons exist
>why is physics real
>why does anything exist

not explainable, only empirical.

When I say "why", I'm refering to what evidence we have collected why that has lead us to the conclusions that they have.
Read what I wrote again there user. I'm not trying to extract a "how many angels on the head of a pin?" Question here. I'm talking about the standard of scientific literacy in the public.

yeah and youre right with that. Even i couldnt answer your question, but i thought of it and i will answer like this:

chemists use materials and found out that they can get chemical reactions between them, and that there are basic constituents of matter, called elements, throught the study of these reactions. In these, the element does not get modified, but can interact with other elements. throught the understanding of electromagnetism, we now know that electron configurations are what is changed during these reactions. The rutherford experiment leads to the conclusion that matter consists of basic units we call atoms(undividable), with a core and a shell. physical reasoning leads to quantum mechs and we can describe atomic configurations with quantum numbers. with these models we can make predictions about the behavior of matter such as the emission of radiation, which means that the physical theory behind atoms is so accurate that it predics reality in a correct form and quantity. The asumption that atoms are undividable was shown to be incorrect.

I found it a little humorous that both of those posts you replied to are written by me. The nuke one is a cheap shot, but I bet it's the answer a lot of USA citizens might use.

On the first post: I recognize that the basics of science are taught willy-nilly; however, the highest functioning members of our scientific community will be like children to our descendants in terms of comparable knowledge. We're living in possibly the most surreal century ever—almost like a lucid dream. The basics of anything are taught in the plainest methods, and often leaves out a lot of the truth. Mankind must learn to crawl before he can walk. I know I'm keeping this at a very top level philosophical perspective because I'm trying to be fully detached from the subject matter.

No, I can't explain every single mathematical reason how atoms and their constituents exist—I doubt any single person can. The definition of atoms and their constituents is often changing—as I said in my first post.

>every single mathematical reason how atoms and their constituents exist
you cant have a reason why it exsists, it just does. inb4 why does the universe exist.
inb4 why does math exist.


>The definition of atoms and their constituents is often changing
wut? Name one Time of that happening. Atoms are made up of protons and electrons in a bound state. Thats the definition, it doesnt change. for a brief history see my earlier post.

You're a lot further than most people are at if you're aware of Rutherford's experiments. A quarter of the people I went to school with were exposed to the information that those early experiments by Thompson, Rutherford, Millikan, etc. exist and less than a quarter of them probably remember them. It was all crammed into 2 weeks and seen as a history lesson that could be asked in an exam rather than really important experiments that underlie all of our understanding of chemistry. There's a lot of cargo cult thinking in how science is taught to second level students. Someone was clearly thinking about telling kids how things work from first principles, but in practice that's not how it was taught to me and I'd be surprised to hear if many young people did get taught chemistry or physics like that.

yeah im a student at uni. i doubt people not studying physics could give a rundown like i did.

Very good, I agree with you. Let's please not bring up nihilism. It's a waste of time. The why needs to go away.

There was a time before people knew about protons and neutrons, but used the term atom. There was a time when people used the word atom and didn't know about quarks. Maybe there are more fundamental pieces. I don't know.

I was taught about Rutherford's experiments in 10th grade though, I thought everyone was.

I just think the standard could be better. It's unreasonable to try equipping people to be able to understand quantum chromodynamics, but I think if more effort was put into teaching science to kids we could teach enough geology and meteorology that everyone could understand the basics of climate science or enough about statistical significance and double blind studies to understand what makes an experiment valid or enough physics/chemistry that I can walk up to someone on the street and most people can answer the question "why do we think atoms exist?"
In every question one could worm their way down assumptions and rabbit holes that would quickly turn the "full" answer to a question into something one couldn't fully explain in 10 lifetimes but most of that time would be spent getting your answer from 98% complete to 100% complete. You can explain like 80-85% of the evidence for the existence of atoms in an hour long lecture and in a reasonably simple manner too. The experiments I mention in aren't too horrible. You could explain them to a reasonably intelligent child even with the crappy level of science education they've received.
In recent years the definition hasn't changed but I imagine that user is talking about say, when we used to say that atoms were indivisible in the definition. As >you cant have a reason why it exsists, it just does. inb4 why does the universe exist.
>inb4 why does math exist.
In any case, I think you've also misunderstood what I'm getting at. As I said I'm not starting a philosophical debate about whether this shit is correct. I'm saying that the majority of people simply accept that it's correct because of all the technology that scientific discoveries has yielded. I'm bothered that to most people scientists just look like an extremely reliable cabal of witches and wizards with esoteric knowledge beyond mortal comprehension.

I was taught it at my country's equivalent to that but I had to opt into chemistry and physics to get the full explanation. If I had any talent in art or any patience for business, I wouldn't have heard of them.

Yes. We are the 21st Century Altar Boys

Looks like a terrible fire raid with incendiary bombs

7th grade for me

If bombers armed with incendiary bombs were this thorough, most of Europe would be a pile of ashes rn.

Scientism is da wey brudda
Just because people do it wrong doesn't mean it's wrong in principle

How do we do it right user?
How does effective science communication become something that reaches more than just other scientists and fringe weirdos?

Precautionary principle and heeding science above all else

Fuck that. It sounds like religion. We're supposed to be better than that. What the fuck am I studying science for if we're not better than that? It'd probably easier to get a job as a priest and my family would still love me.

I don't think you really can, to be honest. Humans are very good at specializing, and 99% of people have chosen specializations that don't require knowing how evolution works or how we know atoms exist or whatever. If it doesn't matter to their daily life, they don't care and never will.

>whether atoms exist continually changes as we discover new evidence
Except it doesnt and hasnt in the entire modern period.

Most of europe was a literal pile of rubble and ashes from the extended bombing campaigns of ww2, incendiary bombings can be ridiculously effective if the whether conditions are favourable for it, principally wind speed and direction. Additionally available fuel sources and their ease of combustion plays a huge role evidenced by the Tokyo fire bombing.

Explain

When can I call myself a scientist?

Holy shit I didn't realise how bad the Tokyo bombings were.
Only 50 buildings were left standing in a 1.6 km radius of the Hiroshima bomb which probably amounts to more concentrated destruction than any one area you'd see in a Tokyo or Dresden but holy fuck, the total area destroyed in that raid was fucking insane.

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There's a difference between blind trust and earned trust.

wrong

lolwut

not right

Yes, it is. Blind trust is trusting someone without good reason. Earned trust is seeing previous behavior, seeing that previous behavior was trustworthy, and affording some amount of trust that future behavior will be trustworthy. Entirely different things. Are you trolling me here?

no difference blind trust is always a silly thing no matter how you try and rationalize it

And you're an idiot.

no i'm not an idiot, you can TRUST me ;)

>science are probably using the same parts of their brain that Christians worshiping Jesus in the 1700s would have used?

This is a really big issue that I don't think is being addressed seriously. The areas of the brain associated with religious belief are evolved (most likely for adaptive interactions in groups) religion is the cultural substructure placed atop these fundamental brain structures remove that you don't get rid of religiosity because the brain structures that mediate religious style belief are still there people just form secular religions.

what those priests taught couldn't be proven at all , everything they said was opinion. granted everything ever said or published is opinion, scientists have some sort of empirical data to support their arguments and theories. that isn't really "faith based" like the priests but more of a logic based way of thinking. i feel like saying "faith based" is implying we blindly follow science and obey everything scientists say. if we did that there wouldn't be science, we all know that when scientists discover a "concrete" thing they immediately search for a way to prove it wrong or find a loop hole, that isn't even close to what the priests did.