this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2025
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You could jump to conclusions, or you could ask whether or not there is evidence that scientists' work in their own field is affected by irrelevant unscientific beliefs that they hold. In my experience, people are very good at compartmentalizing their beliefs.
That’s why it’s important to have peer review and replicable results
Science is a process for learning knowledge, not a set of known facts (or theories/conjectures/hypotheses/etc.).
Phlogiston theory was science. But ultimately it fell apart when the observations made it untenable.
A belief in luminiferous aether was also science. It was disproved over time, and it took decades from the Michelson-Morley experiment to design robust enough studies and experiments to prove that the speed of light was the same regardless of Earth's relative velocity.
Plate tectonics wasn't widely accepted until we had the tools to measure continental drift.
So merely believing in something not provable doesn't make something not science. No, science has a bunch of unknowns at any given time, and testing different ideas can be difficult to actually do.
Hell, there are a lot of mathematical conjectures that are believed to be true but not proven. Might never be proven, either. But mathematics is still a rational, scientific discipline.
Weird you'd call ideas that long predate rationalism and the scientific method science
Predate rationalism? Modern rationalism and the scientific method came up in the 16th and 17th centuries, and was built on ancient foundations.
Phlogiston theory was developed in the 17th century, and took about 100 years to gather the evidence to make it infeasible, after the discovery of oxygen.
Luminiferous aether was disproved beginning in the late 19th century and the nail in the coffin happened by the early 20th, when Einstein's theories really started taking off.
Plate tectonics was entirely a 20th century theory, and became accepted in the second half of the 20th century, by people who might still be alive today.
And sometimes they're not. Apothecaries believing in homeopathy e.g.
How about this?
Psi research is a fascinating field, responsible for lots of improvements in study design, metastudy statistics and criteria, whatnot.
Like, it is hard to control your experiment so that you don't accidentally measure side channels as telepathy or whatnot. Or subjects having hit rates because they have the same cognitive bias as experimenters selecting cards "at random". The list is endless.
Sceptic: "Your study has these and these flaws". Psi researcher: "We're using state of the art experimental design, accepted in every other field, and are open to suggestions". Sceptic "...damnit". I guess at least half of Psi researchers are consciously trolling for the heck of it, the bulk of the rest is dabblers, full-on crackpots are actually a rarity. Crackpots don't tend to have the wherewithal to get their stuff into a form that's even remotely publishable.