Bah, don't bother with opinions at all, everyone's got an asshole and some opinions, but at least assholes serve to eliminate waste plus possible... alternative uses... they're generally best kept to yourself all the same.
It's still argument from authority when you use quotations, you know, but I actually don't think Feynman was right about this one -- or rather, I think the context in which he made those remarks is sufficiently different from our own to warrant pause in taking them wholly to heart, as we have effectively done in outreach for many years. We've been so careful to note our uncertainty that we've forgotten to explain how limited our uncertainty is and by extension how confident we really are, and I think that's helped to erode confidence in our institution -- or at least made it easier for the anti-science movement to muddy the waters.
There's a story I like to tell about this involving a guy who, one morning on the bus I was taking to my grad school lab, attempted to convince me that π is exactly equal to 3, as implied by the Bible (1 Kings 7:23). I pointed out that π is demonstrably not exactly equal to 3, and his response has stuck with me: "Scientists have wasted billions of our tax dollars trying to find π, and millions of digits later they still don't have an exact number, just a lot of blather about how it's infinite or whatever. So how can you tell me it's not 3 when you don't know what it is?"
That was an extreme example (and wrong in every particular), but the basic pattern holds from climate change denialism through "citizen science" tomfoolery on into crystal healing woo: we do an absolutely execrable job of explaining how uncertainty actually works for us. We say we can never be absolutely sure about anything and people hear that we have no idea regardless of our actual margins of error; we're so careful to express humility and not sound overconfident that we forget to mention how much we actually know, and that's how the woo-peddlers and Republicans get a chance to spread their nonsense. We've overcorrected relative to 1974, I think.
Yeah... I know being able to tell a case like that from quackery like climate denialism is beyond plenty of people, and I hate mentalities that reject science wholesale. But that doesn't make it wrong to take a deeper look yourself and form your own opinion when expert consensus looks too convenient for the interests of industry or state.
Not sure climate science suffers from a problem of excessively forthright presentation of uncertainty. I mean, nobody bothers to even mention a consensus on plate tectonics, general relativity, solar plasma physics, thermodynamics, or the more exciting branches of chemistry where stuff like flourine gets to come out and play when people aren't tossing around words with far too many wurtzitaneizene sounding syllables. It's important to identify and compare things like majority and minority positions when working towards a political consensus, but it will never cease to baffle me that anybody thinks it has any sort of relevance when doing science. You don't determine experimental results by committee, you get them by running experiments--indeed, this is a case where quantity matters: more experiments is
generally going to mean more understanding--and a single experimental result can outweigh any number of scientists arguing against it
until they do their own experiments and find the prior results flawed or otherwise inaccurate.The political easy-button for funding in various fields where you might struggle to convince a board to fund shit like... I dunno. THE GODDAMN JWST... but you find a way to hook it into climate something or other, pow! You're set to start pulling in grad students and ordering gear to test your brains out with.
Being skeptical of science though, that shit is straight up ridiculous, it's a verb. Are you skeptical of juggling, or weaving, or driving?
I doubt your walk and remain suspicious of swim!
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