This comes back to my point about how impoverished K-12 and university education is about the *social* epistemology of science. We teach students it's about the labs, but the strength of modern science is about the social/institutional processes that happen after the lab. https://twitter.com/CaulfieldTim/status/1293227521253576704

Students spend years on null hypotheses and different error types and record keeping, yet very little time is spent on the way that these research results are folded into processes of the scientific community, like peer review, conferences, meta-analyses, expert panels.

And ultimately it's those things -- the processes scientific communities have to disseminate, discuss, debate, aggregate, expand, review, apply, and build eventual consensus that makes modern science work. The lab work is just the beginning.

It reminds me of a point that Brotherton made in Suspicious Minds (I can't remember if he was quoting someone). People talk about our current turn to conspiracism as the "Death of the Enlightenment" but what if it's the opposite?

What if the real problem is that the conspiracy adopters hold *very* Enlightment ideas about science as individual self-verification of truth, rather than social epistemologies? And what if that individualistic epistemology is toxic when applied to the complexities of our time?

It ties so much of what people get wrong together -- the focus on individual scientists rather than processes, individual results rather than the knowledge base of a field, individual experiments vs. the wealth of other activities that makes science work.

As I've said to @roschkekj, we live in a world where most students graduate years of science classes with absolutely no idea what the NSF is, what the CDC is, how science gets funded, reviewed, published, and turned into recommendations, how much even informal discourse powers it