You know that thing you’re arguing about until you’re blue in the face and your hands are sore from typing in a furious rage? Well, here’s the thing—you’re not qualified to argue about it. I’m not qualified either. In fact, if it involves science in any way, shape, or form, virtually none of us are. Not the vast majority of our politicians, not the vast majority of the talking heads with podcasts, shows, or other platforms on TV, radio, or the internet, not the vast majority of celebrities, and absolutely without question not the vast majority of the general public.
Science especially does not give a damn about who’s louder. Science only cares about the best explanation for a particular phenomenon. To some laypeople, gravity is “just a theory”, evolution is “just a theory”, and climate change is “just a theory”, but to the experts in those fields the theories are the best possible explanations based on the evidence. Those theories have achieved scientific consensus, a state earned through rigorous experimentation and peer review.
The greatest failure in today’s discourse is the ardent belief that our opinions are of equal (or greater!) value to someone else’s expertise. “But my opinion is informed!” they scream. Good, it should be. Opinions pulled out of thin air shouldn’t be given any consideration whatsoever. But what does it mean to have an informed opinion?
Informed opinions are based on the expertise of others. Think of it as a pile of bricks where each qualified person that helps inform your opinion represents a single brick.
Take an opinion on anything and look at whose expertise you used to help form that opinion. Then, look at the opposing argument and look at the expertise used to form it. If your pile is only a few bricks and the other side has several dozen then you need to get more bricks on your side and at least make it close before you can even begin the debate let alone claim victory.
If we take some popular (and in some cases contentious) claims and an approximation of the number of bricks, it becomes a straightforward exercise to see which ones deserve discussion amongst laypeople and which ones are settled.
Claim | Bricks | Outcome |
Climate Change is Real | 96 | Settled |
Climate Change is Not Real | 4 | |
Vaccines Cause Do Not Autism | 99 ½ | Settled |
Vaccines Cause Autism | ½ | |
The Earth is Round
(Oblate spheroid to be more accurate) |
100 | Settled |
The Earth is Flat | 0 | |
Pineapple Belongs on Pizza | 50 | Discuss |
Pineapple Does Not Belong on Pizza | 50 |
Despite this, amateur hour armchair scientists insist not just on being heard but insist on being the loudest voice in the room. To reiterate, science doesn’t give a damn about who is louder. The evidence is clear. The people who have made it their job in life to know more about the subject than anyone else have spoken. Yet John Doe from Topeka insists they are right and everyone else is wrong. Why is that?
The people with only a few bricks, or even half of one, bolt them down. Their argument is that since the bricks of scientific consensus aren’t bolted down, they must be fallible, and fallibility equates to erroneousness and erroneousness equates to incorrectness. Their bricks are permanently fixed to the ground so they must be right, right?
Wrong.
There’s a popular quote making the rounds from Mohamad Safa, a permanent Representative to the United Nations: “Science is not truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didn’t lie to you. It learned more.” Therein lies the rub. Science evolves. It starts as an amorphous blob that aimlessly oozes around until someone pokes it with a stick to see what will happen. They poke, the blob responds. Now they have more information. So, they perform other experiments on it, until the thing starts to take shape. They’re onto something. It’s starting to look like a brick.
Other scientists take the same amorphous blob and repeat the experiment and get the same results. More bricks. On and on it goes until there are enough bricks to build something. It’s not permanent, immovable, and unchanging, but it is solid. You can alter the configuration of the bricks, change the colour, and add other materials like wood and metal, but the underlying composition of the structure remains the same. If you want to make any of those changes you must prove it, same as if someone wants to assert a completely opposite claim. The only difference being in that case they need as much proof or more than what they’re trying to refute.
The late, great Carl Sagan had a great quote for this: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” The problem we have today is there are too many laypeople bolting their bricks to the ground, putting their fingers in their ears, and screaming at the tops of their lungs. It’s a same-day delivery order of confirmation bias in a pretty package wrapped in Dunning-Kruger graph paper.
So, what’s to be done about it? Agree to disagree? No. All that does is lend support to the notion that the two sides are on equal footing. Continue the debate, throwing every scientifically proven fact at them hoping one will stick? No. The absolute worst thing you can do in that situation is to engage. There is no ground to gain by debating someone who believes their bricks are immovable.
This is the principal reason I was never on board with the whole “Young Earth Creationist” Ken Ham and Bill Nye “The Science Guy” debate from 2014. Nye came prepared with an abundance of evidence collected over decades by thousands of scientists. Ham showed up with a Bible. The crucial moment of the event came when each man was asked what it would take to change their minds. Nye response boiled down to evidence. With enough evidence to support a different claim, he would happily change his mind. Ham reply, however, was a resounding, “Nothing.” There you have it. Ham was never arguing in good faith and if you can’t do that you don’t deserve to be part of the discussion in the first place.
The only play is to walk away and not give them any more attention. Like that mystery rash on your elbow ignore it and it will eventually go away.
In conclusion, don’t argue with anyone who’s a few bricks shy of a load.
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