Mike McArthur, Hi from B.C.🍁 Just picked up a copy of Aristotle's Guide To Self-Persuasion, discovered you on YouTube a few weeks ago and on the bookshelves of my local library 😁..at this particular time, I could use a head shake 🪇 and l got it, Thanks.. from Aristotle & you, who would have thought 💭 I'm on Substack and have been dormant for a year or so,no particular reason, just thinking, anyway I'm about halfway and I'm enjoying the read & I'm about to get back on the 🐎"3DayWknd Book Review & Reaction" again thanks for the pursuation.. Have a Good Day📚
When I worked at Men’s Health magazine I noticed a pattern in our interviews with scientists: Whenever we pressed them for the practical application of some random rat study (they’re just like humans! Not), they’d say it would come to fruition in “three to five years.” Those were the moving goalposts of research, because three to five years never arrived. But it’s hard to criticize the researchers. We health journalists impatiently tapped our feet demanding an outcome, and they tried to provide it. The result: Nobody wins. Let ‘em work, people! Confusion is the first step on the path to understanding!
I always thought the best question to ask scientists was, "Tell us the mystery." Science reveals mysteries more than answers. During the early Eighties, I was doing stories for the Journal of Forestry (the Men's Health of, uh, forestry). There I learned a mystery: really weird things happened to forests underground--nutrition spead by fungi and defecating rodents, strange neural connections. Practical application? Sure, maybe, someday. But I was drawn to the mystery. (If only I'd thought to write a novel!)
Sorry for the tardy post here. I loved "Aristotle's Guide To Self-Persuasion" (thanks for making that available to the world!). Must disagree (as is my way) with several facets to this on science though. My degrees are in physics and economics, and while I don't practice in theoretical or applied sciences, I will always consider myself a student of science (I did do original research in quantum optics and contribute slightly to novel work on DNA->RNA->amino acid folding into proteins).
1. Science is a process for questioning and seeking to understand the universe. When it prescribes policy, that's NOT science. That's politics. When scientists venture into this area, they alienate their audience, yielding that low % trust you mention. Leave the politics to those trained in your discipline. Let scientists present data and predict the how things will change over time based on certain assumptions.
2. There are, of course, consensus opinions that form in science, but they're as likely wrong as right. Just in the recent Sep, 2025 Scientific American, in a twist on it being their 180th anniversary, they listed several things that science "knew" to be one way, only to flip a full 180 degrees to a new position after new data emerged. Not included in their list, but one of my personal favorites because many of us remember this in the news: Everyone, including across the field of medical science, "knew" that ulcers were caused by stress. Then, molecular biologist Barry Marshall and pathologist Robin Warren claimed they were caused by bacteria. They were mocked by the scientific community... at first, until the strength of their experimental data and reproduction of their results by their skeptics overcame the consensus belief and theirs became the new consensus. Moral: an open mind with humility coming from the knowledge that much of what you believe is probably wrong is the ONLY appropriate mindset to hold if you claim to be a scientist.
3. Contrarian positions being tested and failing is the way scientific theories gain strength. A theory that has not been attacked has not yet survived scrutiny and is therefore presumed weak. That's not a flaw with science. That's the scientific method. That's why peer reviewed journals are peer reviewed. The whole philosophy of science is that a hypothesis can't advance to theory until it's been battle tested by and against its skeptics. And even then, until it's been reproduced by multiple other groups, it's a weak theory and should not yet be taken seriously.
Whether a belief is held by the minority or the majority should make zero difference. It's purely a function of the data, its reproducibility, and/or (depending on the nature of the theory) its predictive accuracy.
Now, with respect to proofs, those CAN be important in theoretical physics, economics, and a few other fields of science where theories can emerge from pure mathematics. But even then, not all mathematics are reflected in the real universe. Sometimes, math is just interesting math and has no real-world manifestation. String theory is a classic example in my physics. Or maybe it is real, but we have no way to test it, in which case it's still just an interesting bit of math with no real-world application. A good scientific theory, even if emerging entirely from math, is testable, falsifiable, and has predictive merit.
E.g., Einstein's theory of General Relativity wasn't taken too seriously until Arthur Eddington was able to measure the bending of light from the sun's gravity during a solar eclipse in 1919. It bent by exactly the amount Einstein's theory predicted it would. Before that, GR was just some interesting math. This theory gained further strength when it resolved a small problem with Mercury's orbit around the sun being off by a little bit from Newton's theory of gravity. The delta was explained by gravitational time distortion, also predicted by Einstein.
So, I worry for science when we talk about mixing it with rhetoric. That may be the best way to communicate science to non-scientists, but the rules by which science becomes accepted should never be influenced (for good or bad) by the words and language. Only the data matters.
Having said that, not sure if this supports or combats my own point: to this day, we think of quantum mechanics as this strange alien realm of probabilities, superpositions, and "spooky action at a distance" (Einstein's criticism), which is largely a result of Neils Bohr's charisma. It is said that most physicists came to understand it as he did not from his papers, which are hard to read and poorly assembled, but from his verbal eloquence after sitting with him or attending one of his lectures. And this may or may not be good. The math that defines quantum mechanics can lead to several equally valid "interpretations" that help describe the math in real-world terms. Bohr's (the Copenhagen Interpretation as it's commonly known) is the most widely used, but others, including Many Worlds, Pilot-Wave, Objective Collapse, are mathematically comparable yet yield very different pictures of how things work at that very small scale. Multiverses anyone?
These differences color the way we think about the science. Is there a cat that's both dead and alive until observed? Is that just a paradoxical example of probabilities making certain facets of the world unknowable? Is there a live cat in one universe and a dead one in another, just with no way to know which universe you're in until you look? And those are just the macro questions. They get even more bizarre when talking about subatomic particles. Mathematically, all are equally valid except perhaps the one that seems most likely: "a paradoxical example of probabilities making certain facets of the world unknowable" Seems experiments have mostly ruled that out.
Naturally, this was way wordy a post. Here's it continues across the next two comments, as substack wisely blocked it as too long:
On climate change and global warming, we can reproduce in laboratory conditions to demonstrate that CO2, methane, water vapor, and other gases in our atmosphere hold heat at different levels. Of those 3, methane holds the most, CO2 the least, with water vapor in between. Elevated levels of any of those in a gas like Earth's atmosphere all trap more heat than lower levels. I don't believe that's particularly debatable (but we should always be humble, for that future theory that shows what we think we know is wrong). In fact, decades ago, before anyone talked about global warming, we understood this relationship of CO2 to warming. I remember Carl Sagan in the original Cosmos show suggesting increasing CO2 levels as a possible way to warm Mars for human habitation.
What's different about climate science is that there's very little science in it. It's mostly politics around reducing emissions and a seeming lust to demonize "corporations" for using power (hence the rejections by many on the left of geoengineering solutions to reduce warming -- orbiting shields that block some of the sun, CO2 sinks, cloud seeding to increase Earth's albedo, drilling and thickening polar ice, etc.). That's policy, at best, and maybe just a manifestation of hatred for capitalism, which seems the most common unifying theme by those on the left. Climate "science" seems more like their latest cudgel rather than a genuine curiosity to understand how the world works.
Science can contribute guidance on models, but should also acknowledge all the uncertainties in the chaotic (mathematically speaking) equations that try to predict how changes in one of a million variables (CO2) will affect the climate and feedback loops in both directions. E.g., more CO2 drives plant growth, which converts more CO2 to oxygen, removing it from the air. More CO2 also forces more dissolution into the ocean, where algal blooms convert trap it and fall to the ocean floor, but also make the water more acidic which kills off some life that does the opposite. Warming increases water vapor dissolution into the air, and that traps even more heat than CO2 per ton. But clouds form from vapor and reflect more sunlight, increasing our albedo, which cools the earth. But while it's warmer, ice melts and less sunlight that hits the ground is reflected, which warms the earth. And thousands more such effects pushing global temperatures in opposite directions to varying degrees all going on in largely unpredictable and entirely chaotic ways.
I assert that anyone who claims to know what the climate will do is no better than a weatherman claiming to predict the weather with any precision next year. Having said that, I would also state that it's reasonable to assume that if we add a heat trapping gas to the atmosphere, while we can't predict what the new equilibrium level will be due to unpredictable feedback loops, it seems more probable than not that the future temperature would be warmer. The real question is: is the amount that we're changing things (i.e., adding CO2 or methane to the atmosphere) greater than random natural fluctuations in those gasses and known natural variability in solar radiation incident on the Earth. I'm no expert, but I believe output measurements and estimates based on where our power comes from and ice core samples showing it back for thousands of years together shows that most likely we are doing that. I would trust the scientists on this, provided they do NOT speak beyond the science and acknowledge the limits of their models.
What is often missing from those is the non-environmental science: economics. If the policy solutions increase the cost of producing electricity by blocking or heavily taxing fossil fuels, that could be more deadly to humans and civilization than rising sea levels. Cheap access to electricity and refrigeration is what allowed the same limited arable land that economic science "knew" in the 1800s could never feed more than 1 billion people to do just that. In fact, in percentage terms, we have the lowest level of starvation now as at any point in human civilization. That's the result of trucks and refrigerators. Not to mention medicines that need to be kept cold to last more than a few hours. Harvesters. Internet enabling startup companies in rural parts of the third world...
Please, just keep the policy and science separated and encourage the debate. If there must be ad hominem attacks on anyone, please let them be at those who use oxymoronic terms like "settled science."
Mike McArthur, Hi from B.C.🍁 Just picked up a copy of Aristotle's Guide To Self-Persuasion, discovered you on YouTube a few weeks ago and on the bookshelves of my local library 😁..at this particular time, I could use a head shake 🪇 and l got it, Thanks.. from Aristotle & you, who would have thought 💭 I'm on Substack and have been dormant for a year or so,no particular reason, just thinking, anyway I'm about halfway and I'm enjoying the read & I'm about to get back on the 🐎"3DayWknd Book Review & Reaction" again thanks for the pursuation.. Have a Good Day📚
Love the head shake!
When I worked at Men’s Health magazine I noticed a pattern in our interviews with scientists: Whenever we pressed them for the practical application of some random rat study (they’re just like humans! Not), they’d say it would come to fruition in “three to five years.” Those were the moving goalposts of research, because three to five years never arrived. But it’s hard to criticize the researchers. We health journalists impatiently tapped our feet demanding an outcome, and they tried to provide it. The result: Nobody wins. Let ‘em work, people! Confusion is the first step on the path to understanding!
I always thought the best question to ask scientists was, "Tell us the mystery." Science reveals mysteries more than answers. During the early Eighties, I was doing stories for the Journal of Forestry (the Men's Health of, uh, forestry). There I learned a mystery: really weird things happened to forests underground--nutrition spead by fungi and defecating rodents, strange neural connections. Practical application? Sure, maybe, someday. But I was drawn to the mystery. (If only I'd thought to write a novel!)
Sorry for the tardy post here. I loved "Aristotle's Guide To Self-Persuasion" (thanks for making that available to the world!). Must disagree (as is my way) with several facets to this on science though. My degrees are in physics and economics, and while I don't practice in theoretical or applied sciences, I will always consider myself a student of science (I did do original research in quantum optics and contribute slightly to novel work on DNA->RNA->amino acid folding into proteins).
1. Science is a process for questioning and seeking to understand the universe. When it prescribes policy, that's NOT science. That's politics. When scientists venture into this area, they alienate their audience, yielding that low % trust you mention. Leave the politics to those trained in your discipline. Let scientists present data and predict the how things will change over time based on certain assumptions.
2. There are, of course, consensus opinions that form in science, but they're as likely wrong as right. Just in the recent Sep, 2025 Scientific American, in a twist on it being their 180th anniversary, they listed several things that science "knew" to be one way, only to flip a full 180 degrees to a new position after new data emerged. Not included in their list, but one of my personal favorites because many of us remember this in the news: Everyone, including across the field of medical science, "knew" that ulcers were caused by stress. Then, molecular biologist Barry Marshall and pathologist Robin Warren claimed they were caused by bacteria. They were mocked by the scientific community... at first, until the strength of their experimental data and reproduction of their results by their skeptics overcame the consensus belief and theirs became the new consensus. Moral: an open mind with humility coming from the knowledge that much of what you believe is probably wrong is the ONLY appropriate mindset to hold if you claim to be a scientist.
3. Contrarian positions being tested and failing is the way scientific theories gain strength. A theory that has not been attacked has not yet survived scrutiny and is therefore presumed weak. That's not a flaw with science. That's the scientific method. That's why peer reviewed journals are peer reviewed. The whole philosophy of science is that a hypothesis can't advance to theory until it's been battle tested by and against its skeptics. And even then, until it's been reproduced by multiple other groups, it's a weak theory and should not yet be taken seriously.
Whether a belief is held by the minority or the majority should make zero difference. It's purely a function of the data, its reproducibility, and/or (depending on the nature of the theory) its predictive accuracy.
Now, with respect to proofs, those CAN be important in theoretical physics, economics, and a few other fields of science where theories can emerge from pure mathematics. But even then, not all mathematics are reflected in the real universe. Sometimes, math is just interesting math and has no real-world manifestation. String theory is a classic example in my physics. Or maybe it is real, but we have no way to test it, in which case it's still just an interesting bit of math with no real-world application. A good scientific theory, even if emerging entirely from math, is testable, falsifiable, and has predictive merit.
E.g., Einstein's theory of General Relativity wasn't taken too seriously until Arthur Eddington was able to measure the bending of light from the sun's gravity during a solar eclipse in 1919. It bent by exactly the amount Einstein's theory predicted it would. Before that, GR was just some interesting math. This theory gained further strength when it resolved a small problem with Mercury's orbit around the sun being off by a little bit from Newton's theory of gravity. The delta was explained by gravitational time distortion, also predicted by Einstein.
So, I worry for science when we talk about mixing it with rhetoric. That may be the best way to communicate science to non-scientists, but the rules by which science becomes accepted should never be influenced (for good or bad) by the words and language. Only the data matters.
Having said that, not sure if this supports or combats my own point: to this day, we think of quantum mechanics as this strange alien realm of probabilities, superpositions, and "spooky action at a distance" (Einstein's criticism), which is largely a result of Neils Bohr's charisma. It is said that most physicists came to understand it as he did not from his papers, which are hard to read and poorly assembled, but from his verbal eloquence after sitting with him or attending one of his lectures. And this may or may not be good. The math that defines quantum mechanics can lead to several equally valid "interpretations" that help describe the math in real-world terms. Bohr's (the Copenhagen Interpretation as it's commonly known) is the most widely used, but others, including Many Worlds, Pilot-Wave, Objective Collapse, are mathematically comparable yet yield very different pictures of how things work at that very small scale. Multiverses anyone?
These differences color the way we think about the science. Is there a cat that's both dead and alive until observed? Is that just a paradoxical example of probabilities making certain facets of the world unknowable? Is there a live cat in one universe and a dead one in another, just with no way to know which universe you're in until you look? And those are just the macro questions. They get even more bizarre when talking about subatomic particles. Mathematically, all are equally valid except perhaps the one that seems most likely: "a paradoxical example of probabilities making certain facets of the world unknowable" Seems experiments have mostly ruled that out.
Naturally, this was way wordy a post. Here's it continues across the next two comments, as substack wisely blocked it as too long:
On climate change and global warming, we can reproduce in laboratory conditions to demonstrate that CO2, methane, water vapor, and other gases in our atmosphere hold heat at different levels. Of those 3, methane holds the most, CO2 the least, with water vapor in between. Elevated levels of any of those in a gas like Earth's atmosphere all trap more heat than lower levels. I don't believe that's particularly debatable (but we should always be humble, for that future theory that shows what we think we know is wrong). In fact, decades ago, before anyone talked about global warming, we understood this relationship of CO2 to warming. I remember Carl Sagan in the original Cosmos show suggesting increasing CO2 levels as a possible way to warm Mars for human habitation.
What's different about climate science is that there's very little science in it. It's mostly politics around reducing emissions and a seeming lust to demonize "corporations" for using power (hence the rejections by many on the left of geoengineering solutions to reduce warming -- orbiting shields that block some of the sun, CO2 sinks, cloud seeding to increase Earth's albedo, drilling and thickening polar ice, etc.). That's policy, at best, and maybe just a manifestation of hatred for capitalism, which seems the most common unifying theme by those on the left. Climate "science" seems more like their latest cudgel rather than a genuine curiosity to understand how the world works.
Science can contribute guidance on models, but should also acknowledge all the uncertainties in the chaotic (mathematically speaking) equations that try to predict how changes in one of a million variables (CO2) will affect the climate and feedback loops in both directions. E.g., more CO2 drives plant growth, which converts more CO2 to oxygen, removing it from the air. More CO2 also forces more dissolution into the ocean, where algal blooms convert trap it and fall to the ocean floor, but also make the water more acidic which kills off some life that does the opposite. Warming increases water vapor dissolution into the air, and that traps even more heat than CO2 per ton. But clouds form from vapor and reflect more sunlight, increasing our albedo, which cools the earth. But while it's warmer, ice melts and less sunlight that hits the ground is reflected, which warms the earth. And thousands more such effects pushing global temperatures in opposite directions to varying degrees all going on in largely unpredictable and entirely chaotic ways.
I assert that anyone who claims to know what the climate will do is no better than a weatherman claiming to predict the weather with any precision next year. Having said that, I would also state that it's reasonable to assume that if we add a heat trapping gas to the atmosphere, while we can't predict what the new equilibrium level will be due to unpredictable feedback loops, it seems more probable than not that the future temperature would be warmer. The real question is: is the amount that we're changing things (i.e., adding CO2 or methane to the atmosphere) greater than random natural fluctuations in those gasses and known natural variability in solar radiation incident on the Earth. I'm no expert, but I believe output measurements and estimates based on where our power comes from and ice core samples showing it back for thousands of years together shows that most likely we are doing that. I would trust the scientists on this, provided they do NOT speak beyond the science and acknowledge the limits of their models.
What is often missing from those is the non-environmental science: economics. If the policy solutions increase the cost of producing electricity by blocking or heavily taxing fossil fuels, that could be more deadly to humans and civilization than rising sea levels. Cheap access to electricity and refrigeration is what allowed the same limited arable land that economic science "knew" in the 1800s could never feed more than 1 billion people to do just that. In fact, in percentage terms, we have the lowest level of starvation now as at any point in human civilization. That's the result of trucks and refrigerators. Not to mention medicines that need to be kept cold to last more than a few hours. Harvesters. Internet enabling startup companies in rural parts of the third world...
Please, just keep the policy and science separated and encourage the debate. If there must be ad hominem attacks on anyone, please let them be at those who use oxymoronic terms like "settled science."
Hi Mike McArthur, B.C.🍁