Yeah well you can prove anything with science

If I want to persuade someone of a different point of view, my viewpoint is essential. Instead of adopting a debating view, A teaching view is more effective. Not a condescending view, a real teaching view.<p>Then I have to find out their real motivation for holding that view. If their views on sexuality are tied to their religion, I need to proffer a religious based explanation for changing that viewpoint.<p>Most people don't put a great deal of logical thought into their views, and they are amenable to being "converted" given an understanding of their reasons, which they themselves may not be clear on.

I wonder what kinds of answers you'd get from the same study group if you asked the question "what is science?". Heck, I wonder what answers that'll get on Hacker News!<p>If you read "science" as "survival of the fittest for theories", then there is indeed room for people to have all sorts of biases. There are always folks who watch out for these biases. The big pool of those biases evolves towards some consensus about "reality" through argument and evidence collection. Over time, the most persistent of these ideas become "intuition".<p>... but that's probably a gross simplification of affairs. If it can take science 20 years to confirm some simple causal relation such as "smoking causes cancer", it is not at all surprising that people might doubt the power of the scientific method. If skepticism is healthy, isn't it also healthy to be skeptical about the completeness of science? Is the "scientific community" saying "you have to skeptical about everything ... except science"? Isn't that a religion then?<p>Psychology and medicine probably have the hardest time here. It seems particularly easy to read "lack of evidence for X" as "evidence for absence of X".

To do real science you need a hypothesis, a control and an experiment. Finding correlations in historical datasets after the fact is not really science. It's good for formulating hypothesis but it's not science, at least as described by Francis Bacon or Karl Popper. Good science provides falsifiable predictions, more dubious things that are called "science" merely provide scientific sounding explanations for natural phenomenon.

This article has an odd futility about it--it cites scientific studies on why people aren't persuaded by scientific studies, and intends them to be persuasive.<p>Seriously, I can imagine a scenario where, in an argument, someone presents scientific evidence. Their opponent responds in the usual dismissive way, and then the first person presents this very argument.

Classic case of cognitive dissonance [<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance</a>]. I assume the people in the study changed the belief that was less personal / emotional: that science was useful.

<i>When presented with unwelcome scientific evidence, it seems, in a desperate bid to retain some consistency in their world view, people would rather conclude that science in general is broken</i><p>That's not all that surprising if the sample group didn't feel very knowledgeable or comfortable about how science works to start with. For example, I'd wager a group of non-computer literate people would hold more favorable or less favorable views about the merits of computers if results for some computer experience gave them a very positive or negative experience. I mentally walked myself through that study, and presented myself with the "scientific results" that contradicted my existing view. My reaction was simply "are you sure?" I'd likely be skeptical of the testing/measurement methods, but not the merits of science itself.

"Proofs" in Science is a misnomer, though, isn't it? You don't "prove" something with science, you simply construct a theory that matches closest to reality based on experimental data. Science doesn't prove, it provides a framework for inquiry.

For most people, the statement "Yeah well you can prove anything with science" is true. In the same way that a car mechanic can convince me of anything he wants, since I know so little about cars (and he knows so much). Just like I can convince most people anything I want about computers, since I know a lot more than them.<p>Given that, people's strategy of ignoring scientific studies is smart. There are usually studies that "prove" both sides of the issue, and people have no way of telling which is more accurate.

you can try to squint at the world so you only see evidence supporting your beliefs. Or you can continually refine your beliefs as you look at the world with eyes wide open.<p>Both are a lot of work, but only one is a joy. One makes you stand on your own two feet, while the other makes you want to stand on the feet of others.

I'm a bit of a contrarian, as some of you may know. When the crowd goes one way, I look to see what the other way looks like.<p>I find articles like this -- where the underlying premise seems to be "people are stupid, science is not" to be deeply flawed. People use the word "science" to cover all sorts of things. In this example, it was used to cover the results of a study. Guys? Studies are inherently non-conclusive -- for lots of reasons, including the correlation and causation problem. I can show you studies that will show correlations between about any two things you would like. What's the old saying? "If you torture the data enough, you can get it to confess to anything". The stats on medical studies, in particular, are very concerning. The proper response to being presented with <i>any</i> study is to say something like "That's interesting. What other pieces of data do we have?"<p>It's not to change your world-view. If your world-view is so flimsy that you'll change it on a dime, you're not exactly being a critical consumer of information.<p>Secondly <i>scientists are people too, just like the ones studied.</i>. Everybody seems to overlook this fact. We all have these wonderful gems of how people act irrationally, self-reinforce in groups, are slow to change opinions, etc., and nobody asks "wonder how all of that affects the study of science?"<p>Why? Because the purpose of such self-congratulatory bullshit like this is to tell ourselves "I am a creature of reason and science. These other people are primitive non-thinking dweebs"<p>It's all just so much intellectual self-stimulation.<p>I'm all for studies in human irrationality to continue. This is a very interesting and fruitful area of research. But the picking it apart and trying to make social or political observations out of it? Not so much.