Can we trust modern science?

[Rosuav]

Originally posted by Maelgrim
Hi ad hominem, nice to meet you! How are you today? Me? Oh, I'm fine, just a little disappointed to see such peurile personal attacks in a thread which started out so relatively openly.

So you take an ad hominem argument and treat it as if it's a person (aka anthropomorphize it). Does that make it an ad hominem ad hominem?[/facetious]

Back on topic.

Can 'science' be trusted? Yes. for precisely the reason Dalaena underlined below.

And, for precisely that same reason, new scientific discoveries CANNOT be trusted. "Science" as a concept may be trustworthy, but something that was only published yesterday hasn't had much peer review yet, so it shouldn't be afforded the same consideration that, to use the canonical example, the Law of Gravity is.

It is the marketing which is the problem.

I think we can all agree on that.

I think we can. Well, not just Marketing (they're the problem with a lot of things), but also sensation-loving journalists, agenda-pushing politicians, and a score of other people/groups who will take a hard fact, republish it out of context, and use it to their own benefit. But that's nothing unusual. Mike Muuss invents a Ping program to diagnose network failures, and other people use it to find vulnerable systems to attack. Does that mean that you can't trust network applications writing? You can't mistrust something just because it can be twisted away from its original purpose... in fact, probably *everything* can be twisted like that.

Science, by its nature as a self-correcting and peer-reviewed "entity", is trustworthy in the same way that Wikipedia is trustworthy. In fact, a Wiki is probably the most appropriate representation of collective scientific knowledge (with the slight difference that it takes some effort to publish in a respected journal, whereas a wiki tends to be more anarchic) - someone publishes, someone else corrects or adds detail, the corrections are themselves peer-reviewed, etcetera. "Current scientific knowledge", if there were a single book in which it could all be found, would be as reliable as the current state of any wiki, except for the vandalism.