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Efficient central planning.
Iron laws of history.
New Soviet Man.
Sluggish Schizophrenia.
Lysenkoism.
Sparrow Extermination.
Rape Culture.
Stereotype threat.
Growth Mindset.
Structural racism.
Gender Identity.
Masks stop the spread.
The wage gap.
The science of Criminal Rehabilitation.
How long do you think we could make this list if we actually tried to be rigorous about it?
No "default level of gullibility" was lost with the advent of science. The overwhelming majority of people do not understand science and do not base their beliefs on scientific rules. Not even the overwhelming majority of scientists do this. I am skeptical that even a slim majority of scientists do this even with regard to the science they themselves personally conduct.
For at least half of these, a scientist could point to real data, but they misinterpreted or fudged the data. That’s different than believing the claims of supernatural religion, which do not require a scientific intermediary for interpretation. Why would it be gullible to believe in “growth mindset” if there are studies on it, but then later studies disproved it? The issue here is that the common person is led to believe in the findings of popular science, because schools teach that.
If I make a claim like “prayer works” or “God does miracles”, even someone with a very low IQ can tell that prayer does not work as claimed, and that miracles appear to have stopped around the same time that scientific instruments and recording came along. The issue of superstition is an enormous stumbling block that prevents tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people, from ever considering religious activity. Because they don’t like to be tricked. And trust in science similarly suffers when people realize they are tricked by science. But trust in reasoning doesn’t normally suffer.
For all of these, a human wrote symbols on a page, and then some other human read those symbols and assumed they accurately reflected ground truth. Coincidentally, I am pretty sure this is exactly how people came to believe in the phoenix. I do not see why I should consider the Phoenix as meaningfully more fantastical than the snail darter. Both are creatures that do not exist, whose salient properties are entirely fictitious.
Yes, because "studies" just reduces to "authorities said so", and who these authorities are and why they're considered authorities doesn't seem to ground out in any rigorous scientific process, now or ever. "Studies show" is an assumption of reliability, in the same way that people used to assume Plato or Aristotle or whoever were reliable. I see no evidence that it is any more rigorous that the authorities that preceded it. Sure, you can up the reliability by carving away the worst examples via arbitrary hindsight. And I can do the same for the ancients; I bet Pythagoras' math is pretty solid.
It appears to me that scientists also routinely believe the findings of popular science as well, for similar reasons. People trust authorities to be reliable, and the important word in "consensus reality" is consensus. Also, scientists remain people.
IIRC, we actually have records of first- and second-generation Christians writing about how miracles had dried up over the course of their lifetime, and the bible itself records numerous instances of fraudulent or illegitimate miracle-workers or magicians. And this about a millennia and a half before scientific instruments and recording came along. Nor is it obvious to me that "prayer does not work as claimed", in contrast to "most people do not understand how prayer is claimed to work".
But more importantly, the point is not that people used to believe in things that did not exist, that they had no good reason beyond appeals to authority and peer pressure to believe existed. The point is that people never stopped believing such things, and continue to believe them to this day.
...But notably does not prevent them from believing any variety of other superstitions, so long as those superstitions are framed as "scientific". There is no functional difference between sacred oil and patent medicine; it's a paint job, that's all.
No it doesn't. That's how they keep getting fooled; science was used to lie to them a hundred times before, but that was all isolated bad actors; this new claim is of course trustworthy, because it's science! Everyone knows that, how silly could you be to doubt it?
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