The Mistrust of Science | The New Yorker

1 N!s DeskThe Mistrust of ScienceBy Atul GawandeJune 10, 2016 IThe following was delivered as the commencement address at the CaliforniaInstitute of Technology, on Friday, June this place has done its job and I suspect it has you re allscientists now. Sorry, English and history graduates, even you are, is not a major or a career. It is a commitment to a systematicway of thinking, an allegiance to a way of building knowledge andexplaining the universe through testing and factual observation. Thething is, that isn t a normal way of thinking. It is unnatural andcounterintuitive.

2 It has to be learned. Scienti!c explanation stands incontrast to the wisdom of divinity and experience and common sense once told us that the sun moves across the sky and thatbeing out in the cold produced colds. But a scienti!c mind recognizedthat these intuitions were only hypotheses. They had to be by Erik Jacobs/The New York Times/ReduxSubscribe for $1 a week and get a tote. ShopSign in|Link your subscriptionWhen I came to college from my Ohio home town, the mostintellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of myassumptions were about how the world works whether the natural orthe human-made world.

3 I looked to my professors and fellow-studentsto supply my replacement ideas. Then I returned home with some ofthose ideas and told my parents everything they d got wrong (whichthey just loved). But, even then, I was just replacing one set of receivedbeliefs for another. It took me a long time to recognize the particularmind-set that scientists have. The great physicist Edwin Hubble,speaking at Caltech s commencement in 1938, said a scientist has ahealthy skepticism, suspended judgement, and disciplinedimagination not only about other people s ideas but also about his orher own.

4 The scientist has an experimental mind, not a litigious a student, this seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was away of being a weird way of being. You are supposed to haveskepticism and imagination, but not too much. You are supposed tosuspend judgment, yet exercise it. Ultimately, you hope to observe theworld with an open mind, gathering facts and testing your predictionsand expectations against them. Then you make up your mind and eitheraffirm or reject the ideas at hand. But you also hope to accept thatnothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probableknowledge.

5 A contradictory piece of evidence can always said it best when he said, The scientist explains the world bysuccessive approximations. The scienti!c orientation has proved immensely powerful. It hasallowed us to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, toincrease our global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of thenature of the universe. Yet scienti!c knowledge is not necessarily , that s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledgeprovided by Science is overwhelming, people often resist it sometimesoutright deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despitemassive evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism(they do not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); thatgenetically modi!

6 Ed crops are harmful (on balance, they have beenbene!cial); that climate change is not happening (it is).Vaccine fears, for example, have persisted despite decades of researchshowing them to be unfounded. Some twenty-!ve years ago, a statisticalanalysis suggested a possible association between autism and thimerosal,a preservative used in vaccines to prevent bacterial contamination. Theanalysis turned out to be #awed, but fears took hold. Scientists thencarried out hundreds of studies, and . Countries removed the preservative but experienced no reduction inautism yet fears grew.

7 A British study claimed a connection betweenthe onset of autism in eight children and the timing of theirvaccinations for measles, mumps, and rubella. That paper was retractedfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkfound no linkStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill.

8 Fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears persistedStill, fears to !ndings of fraud: the lead author had falsi!ed andmisrepresented the data on the children. Repeated efforts to con!rm the!ndings were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, vaccine rates plunged, leadingto that, last year, sickened tens ofthousands of children across the , Canada, and Europe, and resultedin are prone to resist scienti!c claims when they clash with intuitivebeliefs. They don t see measles or mumps around anymore.

9 They do seechildren with autism. And they see a mom who says, My child wasperfectly !ne until he got a vaccine and became autistic. Now, you can tell them that correlation is not causation. You can saythat children get a vaccine every two to three months for the !rst coupleyears of their life, so the onset of any illness is bound to followvaccination for many kids. You can say that the Science shows noconnection. But once an idea has got embedded and become widespread,it becomes very difficult to dig it out of people s brains especially whenthey do not trust scienti!

10 C authorities. And we are experiencing asigni!cant decline in trust in scienti!c sociologist Gordon Gauchat studied survey data from 1974 to2010 and found some . Despite increasingeducation levels, the public s trust in the scienti!c community has beendecreasing. This is particularly true among conservatives, even educatedconservatives. In 1974, conservatives with college degrees had thehighest level of trust in Science and the scienti!c community. Today,they have the , we have multiple factions putting themselves forward as whatGauchat describes as their own cultural domains, generating their ownknowledge base that is often in con#ict with the cultural authority ofthe scienti!