Psychology of science denial | Gale Sinatra | Reason with science | Antivaxx | Climate change denier

This is a conversation with Gale Sinatra, Professor of Psychology and the Stephen H. Crocker Professor of Education at Rossier. Her areas of expertise include climate science education, evolution education, learning theory, knowledge construction, conceptual change learning, literacy acquisition, assessment, and the public understanding of science.
She and Barbara Hofer have written a book "Psychology of science denial".
In this conversation we talk about role of algorithms in knowledge transfer, role of culture and religion in science denial, why it is important to be skeptic and action plan to rectify science denial.
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Timeline:
00:00 Introduction
01:03 What is science and why is it true?
02:54 Difference between a skeptic and a science denier
06:10 Role of algorithms in science denial
08:14 Confirmation bias in accessing information
09:35 Content awareness or policy making
13:33 How students perceive evidence
16:34 Understanding data
19:00 Who is an expert?
22:24 Role of simplification of science
25:04 Evidence for visualization for science communication
26:40 Learning from scratch or with preconceive notions
29:08 Are humans rational?
30:55 What are system1 and system2?
32:12 Cultural implication on science
36:05 Role of religion in science denial
38:20 Science or religion?
42:13 Faith and science
43:20 Emotional biases and science
45:15 Role of politics in science denial
46:45 Movable middle for science
49:13 Personal opinions and science
52:15 Educating children or completing knowledge deficit
54:14 How to keep up with the progress of science in the education system?
56:21 No central institution for science
58:09 Action plan to deal with science denial
1:02:45 Scientists as politicians
1:04:47 Future work
1:05:30 Workshops on science denial
1:06:21 Further reading
1:06:54 Thank you!

Listen to more of Gale and Barbara's talks:

#reasonwithscience #psychology #antivaxx

[arthurcnoll]

I'm reminded with this video, that Thomas Kuhn wrote about science denial by scientists, in his book, "The Structure of Scientific Revolution", regarding the problems of changing basic beliefs in science, of accepting new paradigms. He observed that such changes always come with a crisis where old paradigms are no longer working with new evidence, and this tends to brings new ideas about how to best solve the problem, and one of these new ideas generally gets accepted as the best fit, but it takes time and older scientists in particular, generally have to die out before consensus is reached.
Something I noticed after reading "Limits to Growth", in 1979, written by a team of scientists and published in 1972, was that people were arguing that this book could safely be ignored because we had found ways around limits in the past, so we would do it again as needed. An economist named Julian Simon wrote about this. I felt that this was not a logical argument, though, as the things we are looking for are imaginary until they have been found, and looking for imaginary things doesn't cause you to find them. They have to actually exist before you can find them, but you don't know they exist until you find them. Scientists, I felt, should not be planning on the existence of imaginary things, it was little different from the religious planning on unseen mystical beings helping them at need. It is blind faith. Science is supposed to work on evidence, not on imagination. Imagination can certainly be valuable, and one cannot say with complete confidence that needed things won't be found, but to me this bet this was taking things way too far. Who would bet their life that a population of unicorns could be found? This was basically what we were doing. Again, I felt it was wisdom to find things before you bet so much on them.

If people do a similar thing with accounting, it would be fraud, a crime. If you list imaginary assets as real, in order to use real assets, this would be seen as criminal everywhere. But doing this as a society is apparently ok?

And thinking of accounting, the whole thing gets worse, because money market systems of value, say that abundant needed things are cheap, don't require conservation, and people reproduce freely on cheap food and shelter, and one can include things like prevention of disease and other threats to human life with shelter. And with using things at unsustainable rates over generations, you either do find ways to keep it all going, otherwise you make needed things scarce and expensive, and the population makes itself abundant and cheap... And it returns to whatever the long term carrying capacity is, though extinction is also possible.
I've felt we need to live with scientific measures of value, that we are a social species, live by teamwork, and everyone has the naked body to experiment with on the subject of their independence of a social group if they had doubts about this. We need to get returns on the food energy we use, to get more food energy of good quality, has enough protein, vitamins and minerals and clean water, in addition to energy, get shelter of all kinds as needed, and to reproduce enough to offset the death rate, and do all of this without using resources faster than they can regrow-replace.
Well, I've found endless denial on all this. It hasn't mattered whether people were scientists or not. But I'd say the evidence is *not* showing that we have the ability to find whatever we need when we need it...

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross observed, and it has generally been accepted in psychology, that people faced with great loss, tend to react with denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. She was seeing this with people given a diagnoses of death. But it can happen with other problems as well. Addicts can do all of that as well, for example. Of course, it doesn't always go in such a neat progression, and the emotional states before acceptance can make the problem worse, or kill, before acceptance is reached.