There’s a lot of information out there, and no possible way to tell if it’s right or not. Whom do you trust?

It’s not really an easy question to answer, because there are so many willing to deceive us and it’s not that hard to do. Lately there’s been a lot of grumblings about how we can no longer trust science and scientists (not that the two are interchangeable). The real problem, I contend, is not that the trustworthiness of science or scientists has changed — we are no more or less trustworthy today that we were yesterday, or last month, or last century. The process is sound, even if the self-correction takes time. But someone not (or insufficiently) schooled in science might not be willing to accept this.

You probably shouldn’t trust anyone, period. The problem is that from a practical standpoint you have no choice in the matter. You can trust things for which you have a baseline of empirical evidence (i.e. experience), and you will not generally trust sources that contradict this experience, and will lend credence to those that do. But if you do not have the requisite experience, that’s not an option. People will trust sources that have given them good information in the past, but this can be a problem — they could be setting you up (a con game of sorts), or you could be trusting them over too wide of a range of topics: the source may be trustworthy on one issue, but have no expertise on another. And ultimately we really can’t trust ourselves, because we often see what we want to see. Our eyes can be fooled. We have a tendency to lend more credence to sources with whom we agree or who give us the answer we want, and less to those with whom we disagree or give us the answer that doesn’t confirm our bias. We deceive ourselves too easily.

Let me show you how easy it is to cast doubt on science, by playing to ignorance of science terminology and methods. Even without bringing quantum mechanics into the discussion.

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The Large Hadron Collider has been in the news, and scientists for years have been doing similar experiments to “prove” the existence of all of these particles they claim make up the standard model. (Ha, the “standard” model. Like they’d allow anyone to discover something new.) If you look carefully, you’ll find that a whole bunch of these experiments are a sham. The experiments that supposedly show that these particles exist were set up to detect coincidences. And the scientists freely admit this, and even point it out in their discussions! Yet they pretend that this means something significant.

There’s a device in your car — easily accessible to the driver or even a passenger — that will cause the car to accelerate, even if you don’t push down on the gas pedal. The designers know this, and yet they don’t consider it to be a flaw. Despite the fact that misuse has caused countless accidents, they say it’s necessary for the operation of the car for this dangerous “feature” to exist.

Also, did you know that touching the brakes in the right way can cause your car to accelerate? (Even if it’s not a Toyota)

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I really hope the two examples above are transparent, because if you read a physics blog you probably know enough physics to be familiar with its terminology quirks. But there are people out there who exploit this — anyone who denigrates an element of science as “just a theory,” for example, because the lay definition and science definition are different. Or gets all mock-outraged at a scientist using a “trick” (the chain rule and integration by parts are tricks, too. Nothing insidious or conspiratorial about that, other than being part of calculus)

I don’t have any magic bullet to solve this problem. People will lie to advance their personal agendas and ideologies, if lying can happen without serious repercussions. And that’s precisely what I see in political discussions these days – there seems to be no negative repercussion for just making shit up, and this seems to have spilled over into the popular press when dealing with science (Why is the news media comfortable with lying about science?), and even more so on the op-ed pages. But at least in science, you have a few things working in your favor: a basic competence in science, scientific literacy and critical thought helps keep the charlatans at bay, and the process of science itself does not lend itself to misrepresentation in the long run. There are other scientists out there who are going to try and reproduce or apply any interesting result, and if they can’t because you made up your data, kiss your career goodbye. (If they can’t because they are an incompetent hack with an agenda, well, that’s another story). So while you may not trust an individual scientist, at least the system is set up to be self-correcting, as opposed to other avenues of information.