'Science people'

Two of the most annoying kinds of ‘science people’ I’ve come across on social media of late:

• Those who perform rationalism – These people seem to know a small subset of things well and the rest on faith, and claim to know that “science can explain everything” without being able to explain it themselves. Champions of science’s right to explanation, typically to the exclusion of social and cultural influences and to the rejection of faith/religion. Often woke-types found explaining “science” they read in some paper and more often than not (and inadvertently) advancing scientistic positions.

• Vocational practitioners of science – These people seem to know a small subset of things well but are unable to apply the fundamentals of what they’ve learnt to other topics, typically to the effect that we have well-educated people openly suspecting if vaccines cause disease or that China created the virus. Often engineers of some sort, probably because of the environments of entitlement in which they’re trained and subsequently employed, and frequently centrists.

Of course, a trait that partly defines these two groups is also a strong confounding factor: these are often the loudest people on the social media – so they get noticed more, while the quieter but likely more sensible people are noticed less, leading to inchoate observations like this one. However, these two groups of people remain the most annoying.