Isn't this more a distinction between science and science reporting. Coffee is complex and interacts in ways that can be described as good and bad. The press reporting blows by the wind of the press release that day. Hence the Daily Mail and others reporting lots of common things both causing and protecting us against cancer.
One 'fact' I remember was men are more likely to physically harm their spouse, women are more likely to kill their spouse. [used as an example, may not be correct] If it's true that means domestic violence is biased in both directions. In other works Men are not more, less, or just as violent as women. Instead violence is a insufficiently complex model for the behaviors being discussed.
The hardest part of science is our desire to simplify past the point of accuracy. Consider, cities albino alter their local climate in more ways than just temperature. However, temperature is easy to model and complex interactions with various layers of the atmosphere and wind patterns is so guess what's ignored about this interaction. You don't teach middle school students about chimera when they study DNA, but it's a very real thing that actually happens.
This seems to extend in every direction. Do we want trade policy for today, next year, our children's future?
>Isn't this more a distinction between science and science reporting
In a way yes, but if we include the summaries of findings that scientists deliver to the public/governments/etc as "science reporting", then science reporting is 100% of science as we know it (unless we happen to practice it).
Consider dietary advice that has since found to be BS, that was passed in the 70s and 80s as "scientific fact", not just by the press, but by scientific advisory boards (to governments etc) comprised by actual scientists.
Right but wasn't that advice basically the state of the field at the time? That we know different now doesn't mean the scientists then should have acted on information unavailable to them.
Maybe this is why facts don't change our minds. Given exact evidence that it was wrong, which we all accept, and then turn around and say, oh yeah, we got it right this time. We're all trying to feed into our biases, not change our minds. I'm not trying to point out what you're beliefs in low-fat vs low-sugar diets have changed, I'm trying to point out the fact that you see evidence that science was wrong, and you still believe in it.
I'm not a luddite, I think everyone should believe in what is most likely true, I mean what else can we fucking do right? What I'm saying is don't turn "science facts" into a religion and believe it blindly. I think actual scientists do a good job at this, because they're actually testing it.
We fail when we convert science reports into articles and then into policy so quickly simply because it feeds into the biases of the people in charge at the time.
>Right but wasn't that advice basically the state of the field at the time?
Then perhaps it wasn't a field that should feel confident enough to give public policy/health suggestions?
>That we know different now doesn't mean the scientists then should have acted on information unavailable to them.
Most of the issue was because BS studies, referenced but not replicated papers, assumptions and the like. Not because they lacked some more precise instruments or such.
It's not like Einstein's theories, which complete Newtons, giving more accurate predictions at edge cases, while Newton's are still accurate enough for everyday calculations (e.g. ballistics).
It's like claiming X (e.g. on fat) and finding out that it's actually -X, or that X is irrelevant.
Sometimes the state of the field at the time was inherently biased. See "How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat" [0] for example. Science is not always a progressive quest for the truth.
Right? Might as well be critical of public schools not teaching object oriented programming in the 1950's. And that's why my parents can't program, because schools were inferior...
Well, how about refraining from teaching BS state of the art?
Newton's theory wasn't proven wrong -- just inefficient at larger units / speeds, and was superseded by a more accurate theory that still gives the same results (more or less) for regular everyday observations.
Contrast with the kind of dietary advise of the 70s/80s which has been totally reversed. It wasn't "correct, but not entirely accurate", it was irrelevant, or worse, opposite, of what actually holds (according to what science says today).
Newton's theory was proven wrong: astronomers have observed movement patterns of celestial bodies which Newton's theory did not predict. But that doesn't change the fact that the first-order description of the planets' movements that Newton's theory produced is correct. And it doesn't change the fact that Newton's theory describes very accurately all types of motion across which we come in our daily life.
Facts always are true or false forever. If something can be considered true one day and false the next one, it never was a fact. It's just a theory.
