Ask Dr. Science!

 I've spent most of my life around scientists. Both of my parents were PhD scientists (albeit not until I was in high school) and I've been married to a PhD scientist for nearly 40 years (we've been married for nearly 45 years, but she was a graduate student for the first five).

Additionally, I was trained by PhD scientists in college, grad school and as a postdoc, and my colleagues in the department are either PhD or MD scientists.

I've learned that even scientists get it wrong. Another grad student in the lab when I was in grad school insisted that water can never exist at a temperature below 0°C. When I pointed out that this violated the second law of thermodynamics, he just said that the 2nd law didn't apply. Finally, I grabbed a beaker of water and a thermometer and put them in a -20°C freezer. The next day, the thermometer, now imbedded in ice, read (unsurprisingly) -20°C.

My graduate school mentor says that if the speaker has a British accent, s/he only has to show half as much data, and if s/he has an Italian accent, s/he has to show twice as much data.

"Think your bullshit sensor is pretty reliable? Well, you may want to think again, because new research has shown that most of us are susceptible to the "Einstein Effect", whereby we’re more likely to accept complete nonsense as fact if it comes from a credible source like a scientist.

Writing in the journal Nature Human Behaviour, the study authors describe how they used a New Age Bullshit Generator to create “obscure, meaningless statements” that sound esoteric and profound. They then asked 10,195 people from 24 different countries to rate the credibility of these “gobbledegook” phrases.

Despite all statements being complete and utter nonsense, 76 percent of participants rated them at or above the midpoint of the credibility scale when they were attributed to a fictional particle physicist named Edward K. Leal. In contrast, only 55 percent deemed the gibberish to be credible when told that it came from a New Age “spiritual authority” called Saul J. Adrian."

Real scientists rely on arguments from evidence, not arguments from authority. https://www.iflscience.com/editors-blog/the-einstein-effect-youre-more-likely-to-believe-bs-if-you-think-a-scientist-said-it/?fbclid=IwAR1bsLGMcQMNgBMbd2H2LiS5Zq36J0v745f8DQFF8veU3s9TB7ZGSM-tsQk