Science works hugely better than random crackpottery, but is also very far from optimal.
If you can’t trust yourself to update on evidence, then go with science. If you can (you’re here, aren’t you?) then updating will leave you better off.
You can always limit yourself to updating in all but the most obvious cases that science misses, and doing marginally better.
You can always limit yourself to updating in all but the most obvious cases that science misses, and doing marginally better.
No doubt that this is what many scientists do - ‘this is what I really think, but I’ll admit it’s not generally accepted’. But I’d put the emphasis on updating only in the obvious cases and otherwise trusting in science, because how many areas of science can one really know well enough to do better than the subject-area consensus?
This looks like the “Science vs Bayes” distinction to me.
Science works hugely better than random crackpottery, but is also very far from optimal.
If you can’t trust yourself to update on evidence, then go with science. If you can (you’re here, aren’t you?) then updating will leave you better off.
You can always limit yourself to updating in all but the most obvious cases that science misses, and doing marginally better.
No doubt that this is what many scientists do - ‘this is what I really think, but I’ll admit it’s not generally accepted’. But I’d put the emphasis on updating only in the obvious cases and otherwise trusting in science, because how many areas of science can one really know well enough to do better than the subject-area consensus?