The Science of Science - Is There a Future for Us?

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Sceptic magazine U f o provides tools of how to think about fringe claims that scientists mostly don't have the time to deal with. It uses principles like egree principle and principal proportionality from hume, so you apportion your confidence in the belief to the evidence for it. So if aliens come here, presumably they could deconstruct newtonian mechanics and ninstenian relativity, but would they reinvent or get something out of art or shakespeare? Or would they reconstruct something like a biblical world view of religion that to me feels more made up or constructed, rather than discovered? That's such an interesting question, and i don't think anyone's going to ask me except

Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pile-ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent additions to our daily vocabulary appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multi-front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.

In episode 190, Michael Shermer speaks with Jonathan Rauch as he reaches back to the parallel eighteenth-century developments of liberal democracy and science to explain what he calls the “Constitution of Knowledge” — our social system for turning disagreement into truth. His book is a sweeping and readable description of how every American can help defend objective truth and free inquiry from threats as far away as Russia and as close as the cellphone.