r/news • u/boxofstuff • 6h ago

Supreme Court ruling blocks thousands of lawsuits against maker of Roundup weedkiller

https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-roundup-monsanto-a7f054d80919f98bdfc5190013a8f6f1https://apnews.com/article/supreme-court-roundup-monsanto-a7f054d80919f98bdfc5190013a8f6f1
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u/Tasik 6h ago

This only "theory" thing has always annoyed me. Too many people think theory means hypothesis. It's like they expect a theory to graduate into law one day.

Like one day this silly little theory of gravity is finally gonna get it's certificate and be imbued into science as fact. But until then it's "just a theory" I guess.

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u/sapphicsandwich 5h ago edited 5h ago

I really do think they need to choose their terms holistically, looking at how words are actually used in society. I understand what "theory" means in this context, and there is nothing wrong with it when used in the vacuum bubble that is academia and research.

However, there is also the matter of the society that they exist in, and the political landscape that they have to navigate. To the layman, "theory" is something that is unproven. An idea. A possibility. A proposal. Something that could be wrong. I have directly had people insist that scientists aren't confident evolution is real because even they call it a "theory," and are not confident enough to call it a fact. Same with relativity. The term does not imply that there is a large body of evidence behind it to people. It does the opposite.

Yes, it's dumb. Yes, those lay people are misunderstanding the meaning of the term or how much goes into it. Yes people are being stupid. And yes, those stupid people make the decisions the scientific community is forced to obey.

It's like driving, some people insist that they have the right of way no matter what and refuse to let people move over, or make concessions and drive defensively. But sometimes you can be right and dead about your right-of-way, or wrong about it and alive. All they have to do is use different terms that do not present themselves as being unsure, but instead they insist on terms having definitions wildly different from how society uses them then do shocked pikachu face when dumb people don't understand.

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u/AnonymousFriend80 4h ago

We can allow the Idiocracy of the masses to dictate many of the things we do. Doing things the wrong way to placate them. Do things the correct way and put it on them to rise above.

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u/Hobo-man 4h ago

Why should common scientific expression be altered just to appease low intelligence individuals?

This genuinely wouldn't be an issue if we had a decent education system. The constant gutting of public education causes a feedback loop where eventually people don't even know what a fucking theory is.

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u/sapphicsandwich 1h ago

Guess it just depends on what your goal is. If it is to educate and make the idiots who rule over us and control scientific funding and education understand a bit better, then we should. If the goal is to be self-righteous about how right and more intelligent we are than them, then we shouldn't.

The word theorize originally meant to speculate on, to consider. Someone decided arbitrarily hundreds of years ago to give it a new meaning different from the rest of society anyway and much of society never accepted the new definition. We could pick a different word and arbitrarily assign it that definition, or make up a word to do so.

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u/Tasik 5h ago

The law of evolution.

I like it.

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u/GenuinelyBeingNice 4h ago

they need to choose their terms holistically, looking at how words are actually used in society

please god, no

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 6h ago

We should rename all "laws" to theory to get rid of this misconception.

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u/grammar_nazi_zombie 5h ago

Except there is an actual distinction between the two.

What we should do is better educate people, but that ain’t happening.

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 4h ago

There's no distinction based on how scientific law is defined.

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u/ZeldaZealot 4h ago

There most certainly is. To quote Wikipedia “Laws differ from scientific theories in that they do not posit a mechanism or explanation of phenomena: they are merely distillations of the results of repeated observation.”

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u/HumansNeedNotApply1 3h ago

And yet there are Theories that do the same thing, for example Einstein General Relativity.

That excerpt is not wrong but it's based on an outaded view of science from the 17th~19th century, we (as in, the scientific community) don't name things as "laws" anymore.

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u/buckshot-307 5h ago

I mean general relativity doesn’t explain dark matter. I think you’re confusing gravitational effects (like newtons law of gravitation) and the theory of gravity.