this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
1251 points (98.5% liked)
Funny: Home of the Haha
5480 readers
1404 users here now
Welcome to /c/funny, a place for all your humorous and amusing content.
Looking for mods! Send an application to Stamets!
Our Rules:
-
Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.
-
Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
Other Communities:
-
/c/TenForward@lemmy.world - Star Trek chat, memes and shitposts
-
/c/Memes@lemmy.world - General memes
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
But that started happening a lot less once modern science and its principles gained mainstream acceptance, say 1900 or so. Yeah back when the "experts" were interpreting bible passages to determine physical laws or poking around corpses to guessing how the human body works with no verification, the experts were wrong a lot. But while things have been tweaked a lot, it's hard to find any widely accepted scientific expert conclusion occurring after 1900 or so that's been proven flat-out wrong.
Have you ever come across thalidomide? Or asbestos? Or smoking? Or a laundry list of other such, some even genuinely well intentioned interventions, that have caused a small benefit yet a great harm which was only discovered half a generation later at times. I'm not even talking about the known harms caused in the name of profit.
With this, it would be kinda silly to say we haven't been wrong at all for the past 120 years. I'm not knocking being wrong either, we can often learn much more from failures, especially failures of others if we are really smart. Science (of all kinds) has, does and always will progress in a trial and error, haphazard fashion despite all grand standing to otherwise. To deny others that same opportunity is hypocritical and ignorant.
/Ted talk
though I agree that there could be many things wrong with science today. Your examples aren't the best fit
both asbestos and smoking at first appeared to everybody to be something good. And it for sure wasn't your anti-vax neighbour who proved they were dangerous because of "toxins" and "5G mind control implants"
non-experts today are at an incredible disadvantage when it comes to science simply because science got really complicated and interconnected. I believe this is also a part of why some people are losing their trust in it, it's hard to simply trust something you can't understand yourself