I agree. I love the bitcoin community, but at large It’s a community built on narratives. It is always actively trying to find the next conspiracy after the fiat one turned out to map to reality. You can find conspiracies everywhere if you look in all the wrong places or follow all the wrong influencers.

Yet science is exactly like Bitcoin: a decentralized trustless protcole.

I completely agree with everything you said. And I am certainly not arguing against skepticism in general.

But similarly to how no bitcoiner would be lectured to by a no coiner about how “Bitcoin won’t work”, I don’t get my information about science from a bitcoiner. Science can only be disproven by new data. It cannot be disproven by fantastic narratives.

I don’t trust science communicators, as they can have agendas, or even follow logical extensions of fiat fuckery, as you suggested - lies built on lies. But I do trust science, until it’s disproven by better science - the same way I trust Bitcoins transparent ledger. It’s observable and repeatedly demonstrable. I also distrust people who pedal narratives disguised as science, chiropractors with nutrition channels, and the like.

If you don’t have your skeptic hat on, you will get stuck in normie land, but science allows us to not have to “question everything” because there is already people who have done the proof of work. So conversely, if you don’t bullshit guard up you will spend your days trying to work out if the earth is flat, when people have clearly solved that mystery a long time ago.

I’m not talking about made up data, which is not real science, and I’m not talking about science communicators distributing the data disguised as a narrative. I also agree that mainstream media presents nonsense. However, equally so does DIY alternative media on the other side of the scale. I’m also not saying that people should blindly follow what they’re told by mainstream media. Studies are fabricated, or bought out. I’m saying that good studies are done every day by good scientists in search of good evidence and good scientists can tell the difference and non scientists can’t. That’s not an appeal to authority, that is just true. If you learn something well, you can distinguish truths and falsehoods in that field better than people who haven’t. Anything else is dunning Krueger fuelled, unfounded arrogance. One also notices that good scientists never speak in absolutes like social media influencers. They suggest “the data leans toward these set of conclusions, which could be disproven given more evidence”

You can “do the work” and become an expert in a given field and verify these things for yourself. This is obviously a huge undertaking, so obviously one must outsource this. You can find trustworthy communicators that only use good data and research as evidence and explain why. You can also question everything and find influencers who will craft any narrative with hodgepodge studies with the information you are searching for and provide zero real verifiable evidence and that seems like science. This can be something that is presented as mainstream media sometimes.

This is why I trust that because very few immunologists and biologists are kicking off about vaccines, and a very large subsection of influencers are, that there is a mismatch in the ability to interpret the data.

Knowledge is power. Just because a mainstream narrative is untrue doesn’t mean the converse counter narrative is true. The world is nuanced, good data exists and it can suggest certain things are evident.

This is why I won’t buy the antivax argument until someone can present me with anything that isn’t just an anecdote or a weaponised narrative masked as science, because being a skeptic means remaining skeptical, even of scepticism.

Reading a modern university textbook is not how you become experienced in any given field of interest. Becoming a scientist is a lifelong interest in a field. What you are describing is exactly what I’m railing against, a narrative crafted as science with all these science looking data points. DIY alternative media is equally as at fault with doing this same crafting of narratives as textbooks, or Wikipedia. And that certainly isn’t the scientific method. What I’m saying is that people unqualified to notice the difference are asserting things on both sides and muddying the public sphere of information. However, scientists, and people of experience in a field, can certainly tell the difference between a narrative and proper data and influencers who poke their head to mess around in a given area cannot in any credible way, yet they talk with authority like they can.

Yes, it absolutely is. Shabby data is not science though. Distinguishing the difference between real science and not is hard and requires work. It’s much easier to say “trusting the science is bullshit because I found a few outliers by grifters” - sometimes those outlier grifters are presented as “mainstream scientists” .

And I agree with everything you just said, because if you are unqualified to interpret the data, a narrative can be crafted specifically for you and you can’t prove it right or wrong either way.

My point is questioning everything is tiresome, and so people accept a DIY alternative media counter narrative to a mainstream untruth as it seems logical on face value Without doing the work to assess whether it is true or not.