A Guerra contra a Ciência

A revista National Geographic deste mês, Março de 2015, é dedicada aos argumentos daqueles que estão contra a ciência (enquanto a utilizam diariamente).

Não costumo comprar revistas, mas esta não me vai fugir.

Curiosamente, juntamente com as idiotices da conspiração lunar ou da evolução nunca ter acontecido, a revista coloca as idiotices de quem está contra as vacinas.
Nomeadamente, existe uma crítica feroz às imbecilidades publicitadas por Jenny McCarthy baseadas na fraude de Andrew Wakefield:

“Doubting science also has consequences. The people who believe vaccines cause autism — often well educated and affluent, by the way — are undermining “herd immunity” to such diseases as whooping cough and measles. The anti-vaccine movement has been going strong since the prestigious British medical journal the Lancet published a study in 1998 linking a common vaccine to autism. The journal later retracted the study, which was thoroughly discredited. But the notion of a vaccine-autism connection has been endorsed by celebrities and reinforced through the usual Internet filters. (Anti-vaccine activist and actress Jenny McCarthy famously said on the Oprah Winfrey Show, “The University of Google is where I got my degree from.”)”

Traduzido: a Jenny McCarthy diz que o conhecimento dela vem da “Universidade do Google”…

Este “conhecimento” que a faz duvidar da ciência (mesmo quando dá entrevistas na televisão, que é feita de ciência) tem graves consequências.

Outra curiosidade: no Médio Oriente, existiu uma censura parcial a esta revista, sendo que a revista “perdeu” a crítica aos argumentos imbecis contra a Teoria da Evolução.

O artigo de Joel Achenback, como “cover story”, intitulado “Why Do So Many Reasonable People Doubt Science?” (Porque tanta gente duvida da ciência?), merece ser lido! Leiam aqui.

Alguns excertos:

“Our lives are permeated by science and technology as never before.”
– as nossas vidas estão cheias de ciência e de tecnologia.

“We live in an age when all manner of scientific knowledge — from the safety of fluoride and vaccines to the reality of climate change — faces organized and often furious opposition. Empowered by their own sources of information and their own interpretations of research, doubters have declared war on the consensus of experts. There are so many of these controversies these days, you’d think a diabolical agency had put something in the water to make people argumentative.”
– o conhecimento científico está a ser alvo de uma feroz oposição, por quem faz as suas próprias interpretações para declarar guerra ao consenso dos especialistas.

“The world crackles with real and imaginary hazards, and distinguishing the former from the latter isn’t easy. Should we be afraid that the Ebola virus, which is spread only by direct contact with bodily fluids, will mutate into an airborne superplague? The scientific consensus says that’s extremely unlikely: No virus has ever been observed to completely change its mode of transmission in humans, and there’s zero evidence that the latest strain of Ebola is any different. But type “airborne Ebola” into an Internet search engine, and you’ll enter a dystopia where this virus has almost supernatural powers, including the power to kill us all.”
– na internet, existem imensas páginas dedicadas ao vírus Ébola ser transmitido pelo ar, quando isso é mentira.

“The trouble goes way back, of course. The scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow. In the early 17th century, when Galileo claimed that the Earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun, he wasn’t just rejecting church doctrine. He was asking people to believe something that defied common sense—because it sure looks like the sun’s going around the Earth, and you can’t feel the Earth spinning. Galileo was put on trial and forced to recant. Two centuries later Charles Darwin escaped that fate. But his idea that all life on Earth evolved from a primordial ancestor and that we humans are distant cousins of apes, whales, and even deep-sea mollusks is still a big ask for a lot of people. So is another 19th-century notion: that carbon dioxide, an invisible gas that we all exhale all the time and that makes up less than a tenth of one percent of the atmosphere, could be affecting Earth’s climate”.
– já não é de agora que as pessoas têm problemas em aceitar conhecimento que coloca em causa o senso comum e os nossos sentidos.

“Even when we intellectually accept these precepts of science, we subconsciously cling to our intuitions — what researchers call our naive beliefs.”
– as pessoas tendem a abraçar apertadamente as suas crenças inocentes.

“Most of us do that by relying on personal experience and anecdotes, on stories rather than statistics. We might get a prostate-specific antigen test, even though it’s no longer generally recommended, because it caught a close friend’s cancer — and we pay less attention to statistical evidence, painstakingly compiled through multiple studies, showing that the test rarely saves lives but triggers many unnecessary surgeries.”
– as pessoas preferem acreditar em histórias pessoais e subjetivas do que em evidências objetivas.

“Science warns us, however, that we can deceive ourselves.”
– a ciência alerta para o facto de tendermos a enganar-nos a nós próprios.

“When science conflicts with a person’s core beliefs, it usually loses.”
– quando a ciência entra em conflito com as crenças das pessoas, normalmente a ciência perde.

“The news media give abundant attention to such mavericks, naysayers, professional controversialists, and table thumpers. The media would also have you believe that science is full of shocking discoveries made by lone geniuses. Not so. The (boring) truth is that it usually advances incrementally, through the steady accretion of data and insights gathered by many people over many years.”
– a comunicação social tende a dar maior relevância a quem nega as coisas e que esteja contra o consenso geral. A comunicação social também dá a entender que a ciência evolui através de descobertas fantásticas de génios que trabalham sozinhos. Isto não é verdade. A verdade é que o conhecimento científico evolui de forma chata, ao longo dos anos, através da contribuição de muitas pessoas que vão compilando dados de experiências.

“The “science communication problem,” (…) how people decide what to believe — and why they so often don’t accept the scientific consensus. It’s not that they can’t grasp it, according to Dan Kahan of Yale University. (…) He found that higher literacy was associated with stronger views — at both ends of the spectrum. Science literacy promoted polarization on climate, not consensus. According to Kahan, that’s because people tend to use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped by their worldview.”
– as pessoas usam o conhecimento científico para reforçar as suas próprias ideologias.

“Science appeals to our rational brain, but our beliefs are motivated largely by emotion, and the biggest motivation is remaining tight with our peers. “We’re all in high school. We’ve never left high school,” says Marcia McNutt. “People still have a need to fit in, and that need to fit in is so strong that local values and local opinions are always trumping science. And they will continue to trump science, especially when there is no clear downside to ignoring science”.”
– quando existe conflito entre os dados objetivos e o que as pessoas pensam, as pessoas preferem sentir-se inseridas no grupo, ignorando a ciência.

“Meanwhile the Internet makes it easier than ever for climate skeptics and doubters of all kinds to find their own information and experts. Gone are the days when a small number of powerful institutions — elite universities, encyclopedias, major news organizations, even National Geographic — served as gatekeepers of scientific information.”
– longe vão os tempos em que a informação credível era nos dada por aqueles que tinham mais conhecimento. A Internet abriu as portas para que todos os imbecis possam influenciar outros.

“It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app. It’s the way science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else—but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.”
– para os cientistas, a verdade é mais importante do que pertencer a um grupo. Os dados objetivos são mais importantes. O dogmatismo científico não existe, já que em face de novas investigações e novas evidências, o conhecimento científico evolui. A verdade é-nos ditada dogmaticamente pela natureza. A ciência estuda a natureza autoritária. É irrelevante o que as pessoas (mesmo cientistas) acreditam.

“Scientific thinking has to be taught, and sometimes it’s not taught well, McNutt says. Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method. Shtulman’s research has shown that even many college students don’t really understand what evidence is.”
– o pensamento científico tem que ser ensinado. E não tem estado a ser ensinado de forma correta. Os alunos ficam a pensar que a ciência é um conjunto de factos, e não percebem que é um método. Os alunos não entendem o poder das evidências.