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!
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".
... 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?
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".
Is the "scientific community" saying "you have to skeptical about everything ... except science"?
Not at all, which is why gravity and evolution which are both understood well enough to be labeled accepted facts (especially evolution) are still called "theories". Religion is inherently based on faith, not observation, testing, and proof which supports its tenets or claims -- a key distinction.
On the dot. I was trying to point out that the original research seemed to come from the point that being skeptical about the absolute power of scientific method is not ok. The authors were "shocked to find" .. blah blah.
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".
... 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?
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".