• AccountMaker@slrpnk.net
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    2 months ago

    I did stop to think whether to use that term or not. I still chose to because (at least in my experience) the way such people explain away the consensus is by giving political/economical motives to the scientists that uphold it. ‘Global warming isn’t man-made, they are just paid to say that’, ‘Vaccines don’t work, they just say that to sell more of them’, ‘Scientists have to fit the woke agenda’ etc.

    For that reasoning to work you would need a huge connected network of researchers all hiding the actual truth and spreading lies for nefarious gains, and that’s a conspiracy if I ever heard one. Ofc there are people who just think they’re smarter than all of the scientists combined, but I mostly encountered the former type.

    Thus I’d like to coin the term, negligible science.

    Paul Hoyningen-Huene calls it facsimile science in the paper I mentioned and gives an overview of their characteristics, it’s quite a nice read.