Yes, and that is exactly why science needs to evolve.

Right now, it uses the same language to describe things in all these categories – thus the minute a group of scientists come to a consensus on something, it is just as “well-established” as something that has been proven through hundreds of years of practical application – but just because the scientific community uses language that suggests a thing is proven beyond dispute doesn’t mean it is, and it doesn’t mean they’ll accept responsibility when their “proven beyond dispute” factoid turns out to be responsible for lots of bad things happening.

She may have had bad or incomplete social science, but I think she’s on to something that pointing out flaws in this specific methodology can’t erase.

Either science needs to evolve or we do.

I’d say “we” need to get a better handle on ‘degrees of confidence’. Some things are well-established, some things are probable, some are tentative. Accurately distinguishing between those is the trick.

Next up on TED: Babies most powerful people in the world. They bend all to their wills. Resistance? Futile.

Either science needs to evolve or we do.

Right now, science is on its way to becoming meaningless, because fact is being freely confused with opinion, values, beliefs, and desires.

Hardly anyone realizes that studies are invariably “conditional” – that is, they give us information, but that information is only meaningful if it is understood within a strict context. Too many people don’t know how to defend themselves against people who, out of ignorance or malice, reduce scientifically gathered observations into unsupported partisan assertions – either X is clearly, obviously, self-evidently true (don’t read the fine print), or the study that gives us X is clearly, obviously, self-evidently crooked (because if you read the fine print you find that there are caveats and limitations – therefore, we are told, the whole study should be disqualified, because otherwise people might take it as representing “truth”).