[HN Gopher] Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Scie...
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Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Science Works
Author : XzetaU8
Score : 188 points
Date : 2021-03-02 12:32 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
| motohagiography wrote:
| The root of this discussion is about whether science is necessary
| or suitable for public policy, and we should probably accept that
| policy is _not_ scientific, and nor should it be. The alleged
| scientific findings used as a basis for policy justifications
| today is mostly compromised and irreproducable junk designed to
| befog, mesmerize, and browbeat average people into submission,
| while an elite for whom words have no fixed meanings struggle
| among themselves for control of bureaucracies.
|
| When policymakers say they defer to "the science" it is
| forfeiting their responsibility to act with wisdom and good
| judgment.
|
| Democracy predates science by some three millennia, and to say
| that we can or should create a scientific democracy is nonsense.
| Democracy is an ideal and a quality, it is not a system that can
| be engineered from data with scientific findings or processes.
| Further, if you engineer a society with policies based on data
| and laws that only a few initiates understand, that is the
| specific antithesis to democracy. In the west, we use democratic
| processes to produce our elite classes, but unfortunately we do
| not produce wise ones, and they're happy to dodge accountability
| by blaming scientists or the weather.
|
| Science doesn't create trust in authority either, it produces
| verification, reproducibility, and models for new tools. Science
| and data are neither sufficient, nor necessary conditions for
| wise policy that supports life and creates growth, even when it
| has made some great contributions to our well being. To say that
| science shows a given policy is good because it has a scientific
| justification is circular reasoning.
|
| When you say you believe in science, either you practice it, or
| you trust its institutional practitioners, which basically means
| you trust the systems of academic administrators to make policy.
| Again, not democratic at all. We actually don't need a public
| understanding of how science works, we just need to hold
| policymakers to a standard of accountability where they can't
| slither behind binders of gibberish when called to account for
| their decisions.
| rayiner wrote:
| This is a really important point--exemplified by COVID. You
| can't delegate _governance_ to scientific experts. That 's not
| their job and they're not qualified to do it.
|
| Don't get me wrong--public officials should base policies on
| the scientific consensus, when it exists. But a scientific
| consensus can't tell you _what to do about it._ It can 't tell
| you what trade-offs to make, or how to integrate a scientific
| truth into a social framework. Most important, politicians must
| deal with the fact that science often doesn't have clear
| answers on important matters. Something as simple as "should
| pregnant women get the COVID vaccine?" is the subject of
| dispute.
| dfilppi wrote:
| People dont trust politicians, and they are the ones selectively
| using science as a justification for increasing their power.
| trashtester wrote:
| From about the 1600s, science gained authority at the expense of
| theology due to its ability to predict and manipulate the
| physical world. Physics, chemestry and engineering allowed us to
| do things that would have been seen as magical a couple of
| centuries earlier. Those nations and individuals who rejected
| science became losers.
|
| But as the term "science" gained in authority, other institutions
| were losing influence, in particular theologians and similar
| ideologes. Many of these wanted to be seen as having authority
| similar to what scientists enjoyed.
|
| Since most people realize that "Theology" is not real science,
| new names and tactics have been invented to help camuflage
| institutions as "scientific", such as "Intelligent Design",
| "<insert identity group> studies" where the practitions care more
| about the idelogical consequences than the ability to predict
| real world outcomes.
|
| These institutions will both promote science denialism within
| their own ranks and also cause it within opposing ideologies.
| Both intelligent design advocates and gender studies advocates
| will reject findings from science (mostly biology) when they
| contradict their preferred ideology, even when the findings are
| as close to scientific facts as it is possible to come. Both do
| that by presenting bad faith arguments and also labelling non-
| believers within their ranks as what would in earlier times be
| labeled "evil heretics".
|
| When even "scientific facts" are attacked like that, other
| disciplines with varying predictive power, such as climate
| science, economics or cosmology will suffer even more effective
| assaults by ideologes.
|
| If we cannot somehow stop this developement, we are heading for
| another "Dark Age". I honestly dont know how this developement
| can be stopped at this point. At the very least, it will require
| cooperation across idelogical boundaries to do so, and this can
| only happen if the science denial of both sides are
| simultaneously purged.
| WildParser wrote:
| I'm not very optimistic about avoiding a "Dark Age".
|
| Rational thinking and the idea to look at data seems to be
| completely foreign to most people I know. Higher educated
| people seem to absorb and repeat dogmas and propaganda
| unfiltered even faster.
|
| Some patterns I have come across:
|
| Alpha-Rational: Claiming that ideas that come from authority
| (dogma) or self (narcissism) are rational - rejecting to look
| at any data.
|
| Anti-Rational: Reject the idea to look at data "life is
| uncertain", "data is garbage", "it's immoral to look at data" -
| although there is a lot of good data and drawing conclusions is
| not even difficult.
|
| Malicious rational: Know your science and cherry-pick data for
| profit to support the highest bidder.
| OliverJones wrote:
| A long time ago I studied biochem in university. It took me until
| the third time memorizing the Krebs cycle (energy metabolism) to
| start asking "how the heck did Krebs et al figure this out?" And
| I had already read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific
| Revolutions when I memorized Krebs for the SECOND time. I,
| personally, got stuck in received wisdom for too long.
|
| Science is a discipline for confronting mystery. It's about what
| we don't know. It's also big business, driven by money, prestige,
| and power (like most human endeavors).
|
| In that sense, it's a lot like religion. Religion, as practiced
| in the US, has the four pillars of the Wesleyan quadrilateral:
| * Scripture * Tradition * Reason * Experience *
|
| The Pennsylvania science-teaching guidelines notwithstanding,
| school science curricula are mostly teaching "scripture." No, I
| don't mean wakky interpretations of ancient texts. I mean
| memorizing received wisdom and getting tested on accurate
| memories. The Krebs cycle is an advanced hunk of that kind of
| scripture.
|
| Tradition comes into play when, for example, grad students fear
| to challenge the stuff discovered by the Nobel laureates who run
| their labs. It's valid to critique the way tradition controls
| inquiry.
|
| Reason and experience: Those are cognitive tools to use when
| doing the Karl Popper thing: dreaming up things that can be
| proven wrong and then trying to prove them wrong. But we need at
| least some scripture and tradition to apply reason and
| experience.
|
| Learning science is hard even when it's just "scripture" and
| "tradition". Embracing the mysteries -- the unknown -- is even
| harder. Science means accepting that "everything we know might be
| wrong." We should still try.
| carapace wrote:
| The whole point of science is that you don't need to trust
| someone's words, you can repeat the experiment for yourself.
|
| I trust physicists (in re: physics) more than I trust my mother.
|
| But if you can't repeat the experiment, if you can't make precise
| predictions _that can be invalidated_ , is what you're doing
| really science?
|
| This is crucial when it comes to fixing policy: economists,
| sociologist, psychologists and other quasi-scientific folks are
| the astrologers and numerologists of our current age. They trade
| on the successes of genuine science to garner political
| legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. But by doing that they
| tarnish the public perception of the impartiality of the proper
| scientist, diminishing their own glamour and polluting the
| public's appreciation for the value of genuine science.
|
| Science gets respect from pretty much everybody (whether they own
| it or not. Very few anti-science folks go so far as to deny
| themselves the benefits of science like electricity and aspirin.)
|
| It's the "soft sciences" that can't make predictions, that can't
| be tested, and that are used as political leverage that people
| (rightly IMO) don't trust.
|
| - - - -
|
| Let me throw out a personal example. There's a system of
| knowledge and practice called "Neurolinguistic Programming" that
| I know from personal experience works really really well, but if
| you go look at the Wikipedia page for it it's decried as pseudo-
| science. I have little respect and no trust for the "scientists"
| who can't replicate NLP stuff because I've been able to do it as
| well as tens or hundreds of thousands of other people pretty
| easily. Now that's bad enough but if these "scientists" managed
| to persuade legislators to make laws against NLP on the basis of
| their "science" I would see that as a very serious problem.
| (Although not a problem with science. Science isn't the problem
| because science is not what they are doing.)
|
| Yet I am not an anti-vaxxer nor a climate denialist.
|
| - - - -
|
| Bottom line: _Science_ has nothing to prove. Repeat the
| experiment for yourself. E = mc2 for everybody everywhere. That
| 's science.
| amelius wrote:
| I can't blame people for being sceptical about science given all
| the crap that is in our food these days, all the fake nutrition
| science, fad diets, and the inability of governments to fix it.
| GoodJokes wrote:
| Honestly, it sounds like scientists need to understand science
| better.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| This article is complaining that people are taught a rigorous
| form of science that not enough science meets, and asks that it's
| replaced by some sociology of science to determine which
| scientists to trust. It's not wrong, and maybe I'm too much of an
| idealist in believing that "science as inquiry" is the right goal
| to aspire to, and that it's feasible.
|
| In my mind, we just don't teach kids science as inquiry well.
| It's too much like the heavily complained about way we teach
| math, where it's formulas you just plug things into. Kids can
| plug a, b, and c into a quadratic formula but then can't handle a
| word problem. Likewise with science. You're taught it as a bunch
| of rote mechanical steps at the expense of teaching to do the
| "word problems."
|
| Any science education track that doesn't include a stats and
| experimental design course isn't teaching science as a tool, in
| my book. It's just teaching facts.
|
| Maybe I'm wrong and teaching kids more than memorization is too
| lofty a goal, but I think statistical illiteracy is more of a
| barrier than "science as inquiry" is.
| swayvil wrote:
| Our society is and always has been primarily authoritarian in its
| thinking. Merely "explaining how it works" isn't going to change
| that one speck.
|
| To change it you'd have to change the people in some fundamental
| way.
| neonological wrote:
| Science has political problems and social problems yes. But many
| people don't understand that from a purely logical perspective
| there is a fundamental flaw with science. Almost no one knows
| this.
|
| You cannot prove anything to be true with science. Therefore, in
| other words, you cannot prove anything to be true in reality as
| we know it.
|
| Even when your observations are 100% accurate it is fundamentally
| impossible to prove anything in science (and your observations
| can never be 100% accurate).
|
| If you understand this concept then you fundamentally understand
| science and you'll be able to see where all the debate and
| misunderstandings about science comes from. Every single claim
| made by a scientist has never ever actually been proven ever. The
| key is that you need to understand why science can't prove
| anything. There is an extremely logical explanation for why proof
| is impossible in reality. Proof is the domain of logic, not
| science.
|
| To quote Einstein: "No amount of experimentation
| can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong."
|
| Additionally there are two main axiomatic assumptions about the
| physical world that has to be made that have to be made in order
| for science to work as a logical consequence. You must assume
| logic is true (which is recursive and obvious) but you also must
| assume probability is true. Probability applying to the real
| world does not arise as a theoretical consequence of axiomatic
| logic being true. Probability itself must be assumed to be an
| axiom alongside logic, science works because we assume it works.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| The need for the public? There is a need for scientists to know
| how science works.
| pdamoc wrote:
| The University of Medicine where I got my Bachelor of Science
| in Biomedical Engineering is now teaching a course in
| Homeopathy. So, yeah.... there is also a need for "scientists"
| to know how science works.
| JuliusPullo wrote:
| Science is always inconclusive. Theories are not theorems;
| everything is open to questioning, no matter how much sense it
| seems to make. That is why science advances, to begin with. And
| yet, people are told (mostly by politicians with agendas) that
| they are supposed to "believe" science, which of course means to
| believe the latest a scientist said.
|
| No, don't teach the young that they need to believe science.
| Teach them to question it, always. And to question it in a
| formal, disciplined and rational way, even if they agree with
| what is being said. Especially on issues like anthropogenic
| climate change, where the implied solution is to surrender
| individual freedoms to a omni-powerful faceless government that
| is supposed to protect us all.
| neonological wrote:
| In a sense yes. Science cannot prove things to be true, but
| falsification is conclusive. If observations are 100% accurate
| you can definitively falsify things and conclude that something
| is false.
|
| The same cannot be said for proving something to be true.
| lavamantis wrote:
| It a way science is very similar to free speech. Its can be very
| harmful when misused, but generally the answer to bad science is
| not LESS science, but BETTER science.
|
| The proper role of the education system of any given country, and
| a good predictor of its success, is how well it teaches us to
| evaluate the difference.
| andred14 wrote:
| It is obvious now that some "doctors" and "scientists" have been
| lying constantly in 2020/2021
| noxer wrote:
| The media use "the science" not "science" to tell people what is
| "the truth". That is the problem. People are first told that
| something is "the truth" then if it later turns out to be wrong
| it eradicates trust in science. Its backwards. In science if
| something is proven wrong, it should increase trust because it
| demonstrates that mistakes if made are found and corrected. It
| demonstrates that science does accumulates more valid than
| invalid information over time because invalid stuff is removed.
|
| There is also a fear to accepting that we (humanity or science)
| dont know something yet. Its better to simply accept that we dont
| know than to choose or worse let others choose based on no
| evidence.
| neonological wrote:
| yeah that's true.
|
| Most people are searching for definitive truths. The problem is
| it doesn't exist, and science is the closest thing it.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I question the premise of this article - what evidence is there
| that the general population doesn't understand how science works?
|
| I think they know perfectly well how it works - and that like
| everything else it's been corrupted by politics and money.
| Arguably the only fields of science free from this corruption are
| physics and chemistry, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong
| about that.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| I read the headline and thought, hey, isn't this the web site
| where I've read all those articles about how the BUSINESS of
| science has been completely perverted by the weird interplay
| between universities, funding, and journals?
|
| The blinders came off when the majority of people finally saw
| that you could pay doctors and university researchers -- two of
| the most respected types of people in the post-war world -- to
| produce "studies" to show that, say, smoking was GOOD for you,
| against all data on the subject.
|
| I'm 50. I can't tell you how many headlines I've read over my
| adult life that flip-flop between eggs being good for you,
| versus that they're killing you.
|
| In my 4th-grade science textbook, I was told that we were
| entering a new mini ice age, and that we'd be completely out of
| oil by the year 2000. (Which kind of sucked, because I was
| going to be driving by then.)
|
| We all know where the climate thing is now, and I don't hear
| ANYONE making noises about "peak oil" any more.
|
| THIS is precisely why it's so hard to sell the public on the
| dangers of climate change. The BUSINESS of science has
| destroyed their credibility, and they only have themselves to
| blame.
| cygx wrote:
| _I don 't hear ANYONE making noises about "peak oil" any
| more._
|
| As far as I'm aware, _conventional_ oil production did in
| fact peak more than a decade ago. And while the Hubbert model
| failed to predict global oil production, in the absence of
| disruptions, it can work well (see eg Norway[1], or the
| lower-48 US states[2], where Hubbert 's predictions made in
| '56 held true for 4 decades).
|
| However, there's still unconventional oil[3] aplenty, hence
| the lack of panic. We should keep as much of it in the ground
| as we can.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_Hubbert.svg
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_Upper-
| Bound_Peak_...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconventional_oil
| neonological wrote:
| Most people on hacker news don't understand science.
|
| Probably you don't either. Did you know it is axiomatically
| impossible to prove anything to be true in science?
|
| Every claim made by every scientist from the beginning of
| science to eternity has never ever been proven true. In science
| you can only falsify things.
|
| If you don't know this or don't logically understand why this
| is the case then you never truly understood science.
|
| People understand science from a cultural and political
| perspective. From a logical and axiomatic perspective, in
| science you cannot actually prove anything to be true.
|
| This flaw within the actual framework of science itself is the
| origin of much of the misunderstandings and debates in the
| cultural and political arenas of science. For example no
| scientist can actually definitively prove global warming is
| real.
|
| It is literally fundamentally impossible. Hence the politics.
| leetcrew wrote:
| skepticism is good. people should be skeptical of science,
| especially by the time it reaches popular media. but skepticism
| isn't very useful unless you can evaluate roughly how skeptical
| to be about a particular finding. five sigma physics finding
| replicated by multiple studies? probably good, but there's
| always some chance of systemic error. n=10 psychology study
| never replicated and all the subjects were white male college
| students? let's take that one with a big grain of salt.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Understanding this is probably the best lesson I took away
| from my Six Sigma Black Belt training.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| How often have you heard the phrase
| "gravity/evolution/sedimentation/cosmology is _just a theory_
| ".
|
| Maybe some of the people who are using that are rhetorical, but
| as somebody who was very invested in the Evangelical Christian
| community in Arizona for the better part of a decade, there are
| a _lot_ of people who believe it genuinely, that when
| scientists use the word "theory", it should be understood to
| mean "guess".
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| But that's what "theory" means. It is, in fact, a guess; a
| guess that could be flat-out wrong the second a piece of
| contradictory evidence comes to light.
|
| But, instead of acknowledging that, for some reason a large
| group of Science Defenders have chosen this hill to die on
| where actually _theory_ means _infallible truth_ that mustn
| 't be challenged, especially not from the likes of the common
| man.
|
| There is such a drive to prove the religious wrong that we've
| thrown the baby out with the bathwater and created some kind
| of anti-religion where all skepticism is immediately put down
| and skeptics are excommunicated.
| hannasanarion wrote:
| "Theory" does not mean "guess", it means a comprehensive
| explanation that has been shown on many occasions to make
| predictions that are more accurate than any alternative
| explanations.
|
| A guess in science is called a "hypothesis", it is only
| after it is proven right that it is properly called
| "theory".
|
| There are infallible truths in science. We call them
| "observations". Any idea that follows from existing
| observations and has been used to predict new ones can be
| reasonably believed to be correct, but the truth is not the
| idea, it is the observations that inspired it.
|
| And this is exactly why the public needs a better
| understanding of how science works.
|
| If you really insist on making religious comparisons, a
| theory is neither a guess, nor an infallible truth, but a
| prophet who we trust because they make no predictions that
| cannot be verified, and because they have never been wrong
| so far, and so we will continue to believe them until the
| moment one of their predictions proves incorrect, at which
| time we will stop believing without hesitation.
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| The problem, as mentioned above, is that the public
| understands exactly how science works, and it makes the
| scientists (and the companies paying the scientists) very
| upset.
| [deleted]
| CA0DA wrote:
| This does not address a concern I have had: models are not
| science. Many models can be created, and then over time one if
| found to be correct, so we assume that one can predict the
| future. It cannot.
| guscost wrote:
| Rant about COVID and the death of (popular/political) science is
| linked in my bio. You will probably either hate it or love it.
| biffstallion wrote:
| SCIENCE! Except for gender DNA.
| peter_retief wrote:
| There are a lot of people who claim science in defence of an
| opinion. IMHO science has got to bad place and has become very
| political.
| jes wrote:
| I found this assertion, near the end of the article,
| questionable:
|
| _"Science as inquiry," with its focus on evidence and logic, can
| do no more than communicate the details of a few empirical
| studies._
|
| To my knowledge, _inquiry_ can be as broad or as narrow as one
| wishes to make it. The utility of evidence and logic is not
| limited to narrow domains, is it?
|
| I hope I'm not just cherry picking something to satisfy my own
| biases.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I don't think most folks understand the problem, although the
| essay is getting there. In general, I don't think epistemology
| _can_ be taught until pupils have enough world experience to map
| what 's being taught with the rest of the body of scientific
| literature. In general, and I am wildly stereotyping, all people
| want a quick answer and then to move on. Younger people tend to
| do this quicker. Older people tend to dwell too long on all of
| the possibilities. Epistemological understanding of how science
| actually works encourages us to accept both of these tendencies
| as being needed. That's a tough thing to get across if people are
| already predisposed to learning the quick answer and going to the
| next topic, whether that's in a blog entry, book, or secondary
| school education. I'm not sure it's possible.
|
| Quite related: I published this a couple of days ago. Been
| debating whether or not to submit it here. It's a difficult
| subject. It's extremely important, but sadly simply because it's
| important doesn't mean people will be able to accept or
| understand it.
|
| https://danielbmarkham.com/its-time-to-intellectually-grow-u...
|
| tl;dr This is a problem because it's not the kind of thing that
| people consume well. See HN reactions.
| biffstallion wrote:
| SCIENCE!!! Except for Gender DNA, Macroeconomics, Voter Fraud
| Detection, etc...
| pdamoc wrote:
| I think that there really is a need for the general public to
| know what science IS. How it came about, how it works.
|
| Unfortunately, for that to happen at the level it needs, there
| needs to be a change in how Education works everywhere.
|
| We are still using a 19th century tool designed for a very
| different context.
|
| Maria Montessori tried to bring the tool into the 20th century
| about 100 years ago but who is trying to do the same for the 21st
| century?
|
| The way I found it explained best was in an Alan Kay presentation
| where he spoke about the insight Francis Bacon got into the fact
| that the brain works in a faulty way and what to do about it.
|
| Scientific thinking is how we get around the very well documented
| [1] array of cognitive biases. Learning about those biases in
| ways that a) makes them obvious, b) provides ways to compensate
| might make a person able to detect them early and to approach
| them in the proper way.
|
| Another wonderful tool I found is Chris Argyris's Ladder of
| Inference. Trouble is that this kind of tools need to be
| inculcated at a very early age so they get used and become second
| nature to the person. Learning them later in life is a heck lot
| more difficult, especially when they conflict with fundamental
| aspects of one's identity.
|
| [1]
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...
| auganov wrote:
| > "Science as inquiry" education, at its best, teaches students
| an ideal set of methods for improving scientific knowledge. It
| suggests that our current scientific knowledge has grown, over
| the past four centuries since the scientific revolution (when
| modern science is widely held to have come about), in this ideal
| way. Even if that were true, there is an implicit dependence on
| students trusting that what they are taught in the classroom has
| been discovered and justified in this ideal way.
|
| Very much agree with the author that the social aspect of the
| industry of science should be taught more. But it's exactly
| thanks to "'science as inquiry' education" that so many embrace
| mainstream climate change theories. Many genuinely think there's
| some undeniable evidence and logic making "climate scientists"
| believe in cataclysmic runaway warming.
|
| The truth is, we don't even have good temperature measurements.
| Most "climate scientists" have no expertise in measuring
| temperatures. They're not that interested in improving temp
| monitoring tech. They're not embracing satellite temperature
| monitoring which is superior in almost every way to traditional
| surface stations. Instead, they tend to ignore it or focus on its
| (few) flaws. Why? Because satellite data shows no net warming
| since 1998 which contradicts many mainstream theories. The guy
| who pioneered satellite temp monitoring happens to be a major
| skeptic.
|
| GISS, the most widely used temperature dataset is based on simple
| old-school surface stations. Not that many of them, in fact. It's
| so bad that they're known to publish errors so blatant that they
| have been spotted (by "deniers") by checking against local
| weather websites.
|
| One has to understand negative results are inherently
| uninteresting to scientists and the broader public. It's not that
| rouge scientist conspire to dominate a field. When you conclude
| there's nothing going on or that there are fundamental epistemic
| limitations to studying a given field, you have much less of an
| incentive to participate. If you still do, your work is bound to
| be "against" [what's out there], rather than "for" something.
| Hard to make a career out of being a hater. Or to even enjoy it.
| ascar wrote:
| The thing is that the widespread believe in global warming
| doesn't just stem from temperature measurements, but a
| multitude of other observable facts that do fit in the theory
| (i.e. experiments do not invalidate the theory).
|
| But just picking up your satellite argument. A quick google
| search reveals many articles disputing that satellites show no
| increase in global temperatures. One article [1] even claims
| corrected sattelite measurements show a higher increase than
| surface measurements.
|
| [1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-
| da...
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I read Carl Sagan's, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a
| Candle in the Dark" and it really nailed home how many issues are
| caused by a fundamental lack of understanding and belief in
| science. It's a great short read.
| lettergram wrote:
| Honestly, as someone who spends a significant amount of time
| reading and attempting to replicate papers... I have very little
| faith in most papers, though the concepts themselves often appear
| okay.
|
| My friends and family also doing research have added to my
| questioning most papers. It's probably healthy to have a lot of
| skepticism, the paper itself should convince through the research
| methods and sample size.
|
| Unfortunately, the incentives align more with skirting the truth
| than being honest. That's why each paper, in my opinion, requires
| a healthy dose of skepticism.
|
| As an example, in January 2021 the PCR protocol to identify
| covid-19 was finally updated and a warning sent out that there
| were possible issues. Specifically, issues that would lead to
| higher false positives. My wife who does PCRs regularly
| immediately identified the issue in AUGUST 2021. This means it
| had to have been known prior to that date, yet wasn't discussed
| for political reasons
| webmaven wrote:
| _> My wife who does PCRs regularly immediately identified the
| issue in AUGUST 2021._
|
| Well, heck, predicting the future and pointing out other
| people's mistakes is dead easy when you have access to a time-
| machine, isn't it?
| lettergram wrote:
| The point I'm making is they knew months prior to announcing
| it that there was an issue. If we were worried about the
| "science" it would have been announced right away, instead it
| was the day after inauguration.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| I was having this exact discussion with a philosophy of science
| major a few days ago. We were both bothered by the current
| fetishization of science. It's troubling that otherwise well-
| educated, logical people have come to elevate science as this
| god-like authority, and scientific consensus as the source of all
| truths.
|
| The discussion came to Kuhn and the often touted belief in
| popular culture that science is not always completely right but
| in essence it's one big model of nature that keeps getting better
| and so we should trust it implicitly, while ignoring the concept
| of paradigm shift that arises specifically from people outside
| the consensus. Coupled with the fact that dissent gets blurred
| with denialism, and that the absence of evidence has come to mean
| "evidence of absence" on the news, it's become really tricky to
| discuss things critically without being openly mocked.
|
| I wish I had time to read more philosophy, even as a scientist
| you learn a whole bunch about science, it's really enlightening.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| >It's troubling that otherwise well-educated, logical people
| have come to elevate science as this god-like authority, and
| scientific consensus as the source of all truths.
|
| Who or where precisely have you ever seen that actually done?
| Are you perhaps confusing people who are asserting/suggesting
| that science is our _best_ tool to understand truth, and
| assuming they believe it is always true, or that it can /has
| uncovered all truths?
|
| From my point of view science isn't fetishized nearly enough.
| People reject vaccines for crazy reasons, think the Earth is
| flat, think the moon landing never happened, basically have no
| idea how anything works at all.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Anywhere people say, "trust the science." Science isn't one
| thing, so you can't trust it _per se_. For a simple
| discombobulating example, we have the question, "which
| science?" There is economics and epidemiology, and those
| often conflict. Who do we listen to?
|
| The only answer is that you have to form an understanding of
| both sciences in order to synthesize a way that they form a
| single coherent picture.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| Science is like violence? If it's not working, the answer
| is more of it? Sounds like a plan to me..
| creaturemachine wrote:
| The sea of sciences is vast, and the ones vying for our
| attention on a daily basis is overwhelming. What you're
| saying sounds easy for the well-read individuals on HN, but
| the masses need a trustworthy authority to do the work for
| them, and knowing what we do of Governments I wouldn't
| trust them either.
| ironmagma wrote:
| An authority telling people what to think? That sounds an
| awful lot like religion. I think we need to make up our
| mind which we want: education to make actually sure
| people understand science, or to go back to the ways of
| religion. It's clear that the middle ground is not
| working.
| neonological wrote:
| It can be paired down to one thing: the scientific method.
|
| When you exclude all human variables, including politics
| and errors and mistakes, the question is do you trust the
| scientific method?
|
| Most people don't understand that even with all these
| variables removed there is a flaw in the scientific method
| that is the origin of most of these misunderstandings in
| science.
|
| In science and therefore in reality as we know it, we
| cannot prove anything to be true. No claim made by any
| scientist has actually been proven.
|
| Scientists can only attempt to falsify things. At best,
| after many attempts at falsifying something we can say that
| a theory might be true, we can never prove it to be true.
| ironmagma wrote:
| Yes, and add on to that the complication that not all
| science derives from the scientific method. You have
| evolutionary biology and theoretical physics, which are
| essentially retrofitting theories to existing data.
| frockington1 wrote:
| > Coupled with the fact that dissent gets blurred with
| denialism
|
| This is what gives me the biggest headache. When discussing any
| politically motivated topic you can't ask questions that even
| remotely disagree with the popular Science opinion of the day.
| I had a professor scold me for asking if there were any natural
| phenomenon that may also be contributing to rising CO2 levels
| jfengel wrote:
| The professor has without doubt heard the question thousands
| of times, by those with dishonest intent.
|
| Because the answer is always no. There are no natural
| phenomena that coincide precisely with the industrial
| revolution. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere tracks
| exactly the amount of fossil fuels being dug out of the
| ground. CO2 levels had been stable for millennia before that,
| and then they changed sharply. Nothing natural has gone on to
| change that.
|
| If the question were intended honestly, you wouldn't call it
| "disagreement". You'd be asking for information and would
| make your decision after you had it.
|
| If your description is correct, that's why your professor
| scolded you. The name for disagreeing without knowledge is
| "denial". The name for asking questions that you don't really
| intend to listen to the answers is "sea lioning", which is a
| tactic for wasting time and frustrating people. It's
| dishonest and rude.
|
| If the situation was as I understood it from your
| description, I'm not surprised that they spoke sharply to
| you.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| While you may have a valid point, when you reinterpret the
| GP comment from:
|
| > _if there were any natural phenomenon that may also be
| contributing to rising CO2 levels_
|
| to answering a very different question with:
|
| > _There are no natural phenomena that coincide precisely
| with the industrial revolution._
|
| You're rephrasing the question in your head, assuming
| intent, moving directly into ad hominem attacks and
| scolding, and then excusing the same bad behavior from the
| professor.
| zepto wrote:
| Nothing about the GP's description sounds like 'Sea-
| Lioning' to me.
|
| 'Disagreement' was the word the GP used to describe how it
| seemed the _professor_ was interpreting the question.
|
| Your explanation that the professor had experienced a bunch
| of sea-lioning before is likely correct.
|
| But it seems likely that it was the professor who was wrong
| and behaved inappropriately, because their past bad
| experiences have led them to be distrustful and categorize
| some honest people as dishonest.
|
| All the professor had to say was this:
|
| > There are no natural phenomena that coincide precisely
| with the industrial revolution.
|
| Which is a concise encapsulation of what an honest
| interlocutor would need to hear to answer the question.
|
| Sea-lioning is a real phenomenon, and so is misuse of
| authority.
| jfengel wrote:
| The GP said "questions that even remotely disagree with
| the popular Science opinion". Sincere questions don't
| agree or disagree; they request information. Phrased that
| way it sounds very much like they were pre-supposing an
| answer.
|
| So does their use of "popular" (as if this is merely
| people agreeing with each other for fun, rather than
| their best judgment based on expertise) and "opinion" (as
| if this were merely a guess or an aesthetic preference".
| Even the capitalization of "Science" seems strange in
| this context.
|
| Plus, there's the way they went from "this professor
| acted inappropriately" to " _any_ politically motivated
| topic you can 't ask questions that _even remotely_
| disagree " [emphasis mine]. It was intended as an
| example, but it's a big jump to make, and it just
| happened to be on a topic where people consistently
| engage in sea-lioning behavior.
|
| That's why I suggested that it sounded like sea-lioning
| to me. I may be wrong: as I said, I'm basing that
| judgment solely on what I read in that very short
| description. But there were a lot of red flags in that
| short description.
| zepto wrote:
| > "questions that even remotely disagree with the popular
| Science opinion"
|
| Yes, but we don't know when they formed that view. Did
| they hold it before or after the professor scolded them?
|
| We accept that the professor scolded them, and that _now_
| they hold the view they are asserting.
|
| I think it's just as likely that the professor caused
| their current view as the other way around.
|
| It's very easy to go from being unfairly scolded by a
| professor who wrongly views you as dishonest, to _then_
| being influenced by the popular idea that "any
| politically motivated topic you can't ask questions that
| even remotely disagree".
|
| If they didn't think that before, the professor's
| behavior would be a great way to make them think it now,
| and we simply don't know how they thought about it before
| the professor's action.
|
| Even _if_ the poster was sea-lioning, which frankly you
| cannot know, the professor _definitely_ acted
| inappropriately in such a way as to engender further
| distrust, thus failing in their role as a science
| educator and betraying the authority of their position.
|
| Even _if_ the poster worded the question the way it seems
| - "with red flags", it is a bad faith act to assume they
| have ill intent. It's perfectly possible for someone to
| be using language they have picked up from popular
| culture that they haven't refined, _without_ themselves
| having bad faith.
|
| Plus I don't accept your position "questions that
| disagree", are always bad faith. It's possible to ask a
| question that is based on a premise that differs from the
| assumptions of the person you are questioning. This would
| imply disagreement in view, but it doesn't _imply_ bad
| faith.
|
| E.g. "Are there any other sources of carbon emissions
| other than human industry?"
|
| Is there disagreement here? From your view, the answer
| would be 'yes', because the implication is that this is
| relevant to climate change, which you think it is not.
|
| The professor could have simply used the question as an
| opportunity to teach about scientific thinking.
|
| E.g. "It's a valid question from a geological point of
| view, but it isn't relevant to the issue of climate
| change because _there are no natural phenomena that
| coincide precisely with the industrial revolution._ "
| specialist wrote:
| Of course it was sea-lioning. Don't apologize.
|
| University isn't day care. Even if the prof was in the
| wrong, learning to handle asshole professors is part of
| growing up.
| fatsdomino001 wrote:
| The answer actually isn't no in this case, because the
| question was whether any natural phenomemon may also be
| CONTRIBUTING to CO2 levels, which of course there are
| countless natural contributors to CO2 levels. So, just be
| careful because you just fell into the same trap the
| professor did.
| jfengel wrote:
| They asked if it was contributing to RISING carbon
| dioxide levels. To that, the answer is "no". The natural
| carbon sources and natural carbon sinks have not changed.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I disagree so strongly with you that it upsets me to see
| this. You're assuming such bad faith here. It's especially
| bad when the issue being complained about amounts to
| "people are so quick to assume bad faith from the most
| minor things."
| jfengel wrote:
| I am not assuming bad faith. I am explaining why it was
| perceived as bad faith, based on its similarities to
| other people who have also acted in bad faith. (I go into
| more detail at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26317788.)
|
| The fact that there are so many people who act in bad
| faith means that you will need to be aware of that and
| take it into account. It has been used as a time-wasting
| tactic, and people are going to take shortcuts. That is a
| reality, and the OP must live with it.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Humans are subject to time constraints in life, and
| sometimes, assuming bad faith is warranted.
| ianmcgowan wrote:
| The trick is distinguishing naive open-minded curiosity
| from the trolling. It doesn't hurt "science" in the
| abstract to have a bunch of people asking bad faith
| questions, but it must be pretty annoying/distracting to
| scientists.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > we should trust it implicitly, while ignoring the concept of
| paradigm shift that arises specifically from people outside the
| consensus
|
| There's a difference in trusting "the scientific process"
| versus scientists; We can trust scientists so far as they are
| following that process, which isn't guaranteed.
|
| Also, the two things are not mutually exclusive; While peer
| review is important in science, it is _not_ strictly the same
| as consensus; The paradigm shift of the outsider is enabled by
| this fact. What we really have to fear is that peer review
| degrades into the consensus-base of typical power structures.
| ironmagma wrote:
| It's not fetishization, it's religion. Everyone has a need for
| something supernatural and supreme to believe in. For some it's
| functional programming, for others it's science, for others,
| it's conspiracy, and for an increasing minority, it's actual
| religion. We need to figure out what to do (read: better things
| to do) to replace the fact that people have lost actual
| religion and have this deep-seated desire for something
| ultimate to believe in.
| [deleted]
| quasirandom wrote:
| Feynman's lectures on the character of physical law should be
| something _everyone_ sees in school. In
| general we look for a new law by the following process: first
| we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess...
| and then we compare those computation results to experiment.
| If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple
| statement is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference
| how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how
| smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it
| disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it.
| Notice however that we never prove it right... In the future
| there could be a wider range of experiments, or you could
| compute a wider range of consequences, and you may discover
| then that the thing is wrong. That's why laws like Newton's
| laws for the motions of planets last such a long time... It
| took several hundred years before the slight error in the
| motion of Mercury was developed.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw
| SkyBelow wrote:
| I find this is too simple, because it assumes the experiment
| is correct. Experiments can have errors and being able to
| doubt experiments, especially when you have disagreements
| between experiments, is a very important step in science.
|
| This isn't to say that one should hold to a belief without
| any evidence to back it, only that we consider the
| possibilities that experiments themselves are flawed and take
| that into account, such as by designing seemingly unrelated
| experiments to test a single guess.
|
| To give another Feynman quote.
|
| >We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle
| some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan
| measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with
| falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to
| be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the
| incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to
| look at the history of measurements of the charge of an
| electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of
| time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than
| Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that,
| and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until
| finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
|
| >Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right
| away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of--this
| history--because it's apparent that people did things like
| this: When they got a number that was too high above
| Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong--and they
| would look for and find a reason why something might be
| wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they
| didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that
| were too far off, and did other things like that ...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's.
| ..
| neonological wrote:
| The key to the quote above is that nothing is proven right.
|
| That is the fundamental flaw with science, if you understand
| this, you understand science.
|
| In science and therefore reality as we know it, nothing can
| ever be proven true. It is fundamentally impossible. Every
| single claim made by every single scientist since the
| beginning of science has never ever been proven true.
|
| This "flaw" is what drives most of the debate and
| misunderstandings about science in the cultural and political
| arena. For example... No scientist can ever prove global
| warming to be true... it is fundamentally impossible. Hence
| the debate rages on endlessly.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Except science _can_ set error bounds. No, global warming
| can never be "true" from the perspective of 100% accurate
| with no room for error. Science is able to set error bounds
| though. The latest particle physics results come with "this
| theory is correct to within 99.99% of the theoretical
| model". That means that even if the theory is wrong, it can
| account for 99.99% of all observations you make. That is
| the power. Obviously climate change models aren't like
| particle physics so we don't expect such accurate error
| bounds (too many sources for error). However, the question
| you must ask is "are the error bars sufficient for the
| decision I have to make?".
|
| My conclusion thus is that unlike dietary science or pop
| psychology, the evidence here is very likely real, despite
| any doubts that may persist. I could of course be wrong.
| That's a fundamental truth one has to admit to oneself &
| other peers who understand how science works. That's not a
| political truth that would make sense to admit because
| saying "I can never know but I'm pretty sure" has been
| weaponized into "you don't know anything & you're wrong".
| Same reason when speaking among science-literate friends I
| say "global warming" but am careful to say "climate change"
| to everyone else because the warming aspect got corrupted
| into "you said it's global warming but winter was
| especially cold this year".
|
| Maybe there has been a massive social pressure within the
| scientific community into confirmation bias. Certainly the
| community does self-police & ridicule anyone who doesn't
| ascribe to it. Why do I think the theory is reliable & it's
| not a massive conspiracy (intentional or otherwise)? I
| trust that there's lots of very bright people who have
| studied the math, from within & without the field &
| validated the models don't have any fundamental issues of
| any kind (conceptual, numerical issues, computer sims are
| solid, etc). I trust that people outside of the field who
| have related degrees have validated huge swaths of it. I
| trust that technological advances have provided us with
| exponentially better sensors & monitoring and that has fed
| back into exponentially better simulations to validate
| models. And with all of that development, over the course
| of 20 years, the results haven't changed, no new hypothesis
| have borne out. The scientific community is both small &
| large. It's large in that there will always be some amount
| of bad behavior somewhere, bad or unethical science, wrong
| results, mistaken theories that take hold for a time, etc.
| It's small though in the sense that when there's a very
| real problem, it can be brought to light & it's really hard
| to suppress that knowledge. That's why the chorus about
| global warming has been increasing. Oil companies knew
| about this as a problem & suppressed their own voices to
| the debate because it would hurt their bottom lines. In
| fact, they often fund the opposition. This isn't a
| conspiracy theory. There are court documents showing this.
| A well-informed person can use all of this knowledge to
| make a guess about who to listen to. A less-informed person
| will let themselves be swayed by the opinion they want to
| hear & or as a "fuck you" to the scientific community for
| ruining their career choice.
| neonological wrote:
| No. This is incorrect. You're talking about model
| accuracy and observation accuracy.
|
| I am talking about something far more fundamental. Using
| axiomatic logic and probability, you cannot prove
| anything in science. Even with observations that are 100%
| accurate with 100% precision. This literally has
| fundamental consequences on our interpretation of reality
| as we know it and has affected out perception of reality
| and our science as well.
|
| This occurs because at any point in time a new
| observation can be made that falsifies a theory. Let's
| say you have a hypothesis that all zebras have stripes.
| You can observe 500 zebras with 100% accuracy and see
| that all of those zebras have stripes. But at any point
| in time in the future you can happen upon a hidden island
| that has 2 million zebras on it that has spots instead.
| 500 observations is minuscule in the face of 2 million
| and it literally renders your initial hypothesis
| ludicrous. Zebras are creatures that are more likely to
| have spots then stripes is the complete U-turn conclusion
| based off of new observations.
|
| Keep in mind the new conclusion occurred regardless of
| how methodological and accurate your initial observations
| were. The accuracy of the observation is Completely and
| utterly irrelevant. Because at any point in time I can
| encounter another new island with 1 billion zebras that
| has stripes rendering my second conclusion completely
| wrong, again.
|
| This is the fundamental flaw of science. It is far more
| fundamental then limited accuracy in observational
| measurements.
|
| For example take newtons laws of motion. There is no 99%
| right or wrong on that model. Assuming that our
| observations are accurate, Newtons laws of motion are
| 100% percent wrong.
|
| Yes they may be accurate numerically to a certain extent
| but the theory has ultimately been falsified and we now
| know relativity is a more accurate description. However,
| keep in mind that even relativity is not "proven" it can
| Never be proven and it will always be open for a complete
| reversal the same way Newtonian motion was.
|
| In fact Newtons laws of motion is the perfect example. It
| was the ultimate example of scientific verification. All
| experiments pointed to the theory being completely
| accurate, to disbelieve the science was to disbelieve
| reality. It was at the time equivalent to disbelieving
| evolution.
|
| This is the fundamental flaw with science. Nothing can
| ever truly be proven. And everything even the fundamental
| pillars of reality we rely on today from Newtons laws to
| evolution can never actually be proven to be true, and is
| always open for a complete rewrite.
|
| This is the exact reason as to why people can pick and
| choose the reality they believe in, whether it be
| Christianity or evolution. Neither can in actuality be
| proven, nothing has and nothing ever will.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| You seem to be very strong down the nihilism philosophy.
| I have a view point that nihilism isn't a useful
| philosophy & doesn't yield any particularly meaningful
| insights that help you find success in this world. It's
| very much, at least to me, of the same vein as the
| Omphalos hypothesis (also known as Last Thursdayism by
| atheists such as myself) which says "Sure sure. You've
| got all these fancy theories. But how do you *know* the
| universe wasn't created in its current state Last
| Thursday & so all your measurements are meaningless?".
|
| Worrying about an epistemological definition of "truth"
| that is different from the scientifically one is equally
| unhelpful. Scientific philosophy & the inquiry stemming
| from that actually yields results in any field you look
| into & just building on that. Worrying about a higher
| order definition of truth and certainty that only exists
| in your own mind (since no two people will agree) is
| irrelevant & unhelpful. Medicine has come a very long way
| from where it was & our understanding of it is
| drastically better than it was. Is it perfect? No. Is it
| infallible? No. Does it matter? Not really because at the
| end of the day it's infinitely better than where we
| started & continuing along this path will continue to
| yield results over time.
|
| > In fact Newtons laws of motion is the perfect example.
| It was the ultimate example of scientific verification.
| All experiments pointed to the theory being completely
| accurate, to disbelieve the science was to disbelieve
| reality. It was at the time equivalent to disbelieving
| evolution.
|
| I'm always fascinated by people who claim that Einstein's
| theory of relativity somehow undermines the bedrock of
| scientific inquiry when it's 100% the thing that supports
| it. Newton's theories weren't wrong. They were 100%
| correct for the environments we were testing them in.
| Like the all the equations behind the theory of
| relativity, if you turn down the speed & mass variables
| to every day human values, they literally turn into the
| same classical Newtonian mechanics equations. The *only*
| instance that you should be questioning the scientific
| validity of a field is when there's competing theories &
| the experiments themselves don't really help make
| decisions. Like dietary science. That's a field that
| constantly produces contradicting results. There's
| definitely some good advice but it's mostly hokum except
| for the parts that actually intersect with medical
| research or have really wide studies done because of the
| problems of limited observations. Same with pop
| psychology & other human-centered inquiries that don't
| have external sensors against which to measure results &
| large sample sizes to deal with the variation. Non-
| physical inquiries suffer very few of these problems &
| are easier to experiment with.
|
| If it helps you, the scientific method of inquiry of in
| some ways is directly supported as a fundamental tenet of
| mathematics (via the fields of probability/calculus). If
| you sample an underlying distribution enough times with a
| random enough sample (no bias that's causing you to
| overlook things), the more the samples match your
| estimate of the distribution, the less likely it is that
| your estimate and reality diverge. That resolves, at
| least for me, the philosophical conundrum of "what is
| truth" and "have you really done enough measurements".
| For religious arguments, your form of argument is "the
| God of the gaps" or "God of the cracks". If you just
| focus on a crack, all you can see is all that empty space
| & not the bridge that the crack is a non-critical part
| of. Even science's philosophy is underpinned by a
| mathematical truth & our challenges sticking to it are
| our own failures, not those of science. I recognize this
| sounds like religion, but the difference is: *
| Falsifiability. Good scientists will very quickly
| discourage any attempt at scientific inquiry of anything
| that can't be disproven through experimentation. * Free
| sharing of knowledge. We're not as great here because of
| the economic realities of our society, but certainly
| better than religion organizations that tend to have more
| of their documentation in private vaults. That being
| said, this is the most fair point of criticism against
| scientific inquiry for me & the one where today's
| scientific industry gets closest to religion. *
| Consistency of conclusions. It doesn't matter if a
| discovery fails to take hold. Over time the same thing
| gets rediscovered eventually. Like Calculus being
| simultaneously invented by Newton & Leibniz. Good ideas
| just have their time & inevitability comes from a build
| up of knowledge. Religions don't really share this
| property. Neither does philosophy which just has a bunch
| of models & no way to model/investigate them. Philosophy
| is useful as a hypothesis generation machine or maybe as
| a way to examine how humans can improve the scientific
| field. That's about it & we need to be quick to discard
| it when science starts providing answers. * Belief or
| lack of it doesn't matter. Science is about making
| predictions. If the predictions are based on faulty
| science, they'll not hold up over time. If the
| predictions do hold up, then they're more likely to be
| right. Probability is where this gets tricky, especially
| so when polling human sentiments. That is walking a
| razor's edge.
|
| Still, science is the only philosophy that's actually
| yielded tangible results consistently over any period of
| time. Religion & other philosophies have not.
| neonological wrote:
| > You seem to be very strong down the nihilism
| philosophy. I have a view point that nihilism isn't a
| useful philosophy & doesn't yield any particularly
| meaningful insights that help you find success in this
| world. It's very much, at least to me, of the same vein
| as the Omphalos hypothesis (also known as Last
| Thursdayism by atheists such as myself) which says "Sure
| sure. You've got all these fancy theories. But how do you
| _know_ the universe wasn 't created in its current state
| Last Thursday & so all your measurements are
| meaningless?".
|
| What I'm talking about isn't a philosophy. This is the
| fundamental tenet as illustrated by academia. I'm not
| pulling this out of my ass. This is what educated
| scientists understand about science. If you don't know
| this you literally don't know what you're talking about.
| I am not arguing my opinion here, I am arguing the
| academic definition of science.
|
| To prove it to you I'll literally quote Einstein:
| "No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a
| single experiment can prove me wrong."
|
| If you don't understand why he said the above quote. You
| don't understand science in the same way a physicist or a
| scientist understands science. In fact the above was said
| in reference to Einsteins and newtons theories.
|
| What einstien is basically saying is this. Science can
| never prove anything to be correct. It can ONLY falsify
| things.
|
| >I'm always fascinated by people who claim that
| Einstein's theory of relativity somehow undermines the
| bedrock of scientific inquiry when it's 100% the thing
| that supports it. Newton's theories weren't wrong. They
| were 100% correct for the environments we were testing
| them in.
|
| Your fascinated at the entire academic definition of
| science being different from your own personal
| definition? You're misunderstanding of science is the
| real enigma here.
|
| Nothing is undermined. I'm not against science I am
| simply elucidating what science is to you in the sense
| that science can never prove anything to be true. Science
| can ONLY falsify things. It is a very limited tool, but
| it is also the only tool we have.
|
| I'm an atheist like you, I get where your coming from.
| But you have not explored science deep enough. Look
| deeper into this as you are not understanding what is
| going on here. I am not arguing for religion or
| creationism or any of that BS as "valid" I am simply
| stating a fundamental well known flaw with science that
| is known by all people who know the technical definition
| of science.
|
| Additionally, Newtons theory is 100% wrong in every
| environment. It only appears to be correct given limited
| accuracy of tooling. When you increase the accuracy of
| the observation the environment is irrelevant, it is
| always wrong.
|
| >If it helps you, the scientific method of inquiry of in
| some ways is directly supported as a fundamental tenet of
| mathematics via calculus.
|
| This is highly highly misguided. Logic and Science are
| completely separate. This is well known among people who
| understand the concept.
|
| Logic is a game with rules axioms and a well understood
| domain. We create the rules and universe and therefore
| we're able to prove things within that universe.
|
| Science is not the same. It is not an axiomatic game
| created by us. Science is the consequence of applying
| certain assumptions to a universe we did not create but
| only participate in.
|
| We assume two things that are true in science. We assume
| logic is true. We assume rules like induction will always
| work even though we have no means of verifying it will
| work. We also assume probability works. We assume rolling
| a six sided dice will produce a certain outcome based off
| of probability and we again currently have no way of
| verify why or how this occurs. We just assume it.
|
| Based off of these two assumptions we can create the
| scientific method. But this method is limited as it can
| only axiomatically falsify things. We can never prove
| anything to be true with science. This occurs, again
| because the domain of the real world is not limited like
| it is in our logical games of math. At any point in time
| the domain can change, shift and we can encounter a new
| unexpected observation that can change the entire arena.
|
| Again, this isn't some BS I'm pulling out of my ass. This
| is science as Feynman and Einstein understood it. You
| lack understanding and I suggest you read up on the
| notion of what "proof" and science is.
|
| Proof is only relevant in maths and logic, it is
| irrelevant in science and therefore reality as we know
| it. Science is the best tool we have but it is highly
| highly limited in the sense that it can never actually
| prove anything.
|
| What ends up happening is science at best produces
| conclusions in the form of "We think this is true because
| our repeated attempts to falsify this hypothesis have
| failed." It can never produce anything definitive.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> In science and therefore reality as we know it, nothing
| can ever be proven true.
|
| In engineering we take the science and use it to _predict_
| how a design will work. When things work as intended it is
| a confirmation that the science is useful, if not
| "correct".
|
| To me that is what science does. It allows us to make
| useful predictions that can inform decisions.
| neonological wrote:
| No that is not science.
|
| Science is a process of falsification. You have a
| hypothesis and you attempt to falsify the hypothesis.
|
| What you're describing is a model that has stood the test
| of falsification. Someone comes up with a mathematical
| model that can predict the future. They test that model
| under science to see if they can falsify the model.
|
| If they fail to falsify the model then at best they say
| this model might as well be true because we couldn't
| determine otherwise.
|
| That is science.
|
| When you use the model to predict how something will
| happen in the real world for some real world application.
| That is more called "engineering."
|
| Engineering is application, science is best attempt
| verification.
| phkahler wrote:
| I think you're splitting hairs, but ok. You describe the
| process of science and how it produces models. I
| described how we use those models in engineering - not
| the science I suppose, but the output (useful models)
| from it. In a sense, engineering is hoping their efforts
| confirm the model not falsify it :-)
|
| I think there is some important stuff in this, so maybe
| splitting hairs to explain accurately is important.
| neonological wrote:
| I'm not splitting hairs.
|
| There are people who are called "scientists" who test
| models with scientific experiment. Then there are people
| are "engineers" who use the models. If our social
| structure splits the difference by occupation how am I
| splitting hairs?
|
| Literally if you didn't run an experiment with a
| hypothesis you aren't doing science, and people in
| society therefore won't refer to you as a scientist.
| phkahler wrote:
| Every engineer tests a hypothesis by designing things
| based on that hypothesis and then testing that they work
| as intended. We tend to use the hypothesis' that have
| already been elevated to the status of theory though.
|
| I've done some Greenfield science as an engineer, and
| plenty of scientists do some engineering. Titles dont
| really mean that much to me. It's all sort of a continuum
| and our place on it isn't strictly defined.
| neonological wrote:
| Ok let's be real. You're the one splitting hairs now.
| There is a clear difference between what either
| occupation does but of course sometimes a scientist needs
| to do carpentry or machinist work to build the tools for
| his experiment. Does this make machining and carpentry
| the same thing as science? No.
| taylodl wrote:
| And denialists exploit the fact science a isn't process of
| proving things true. Scientific American recently had an
| essay on the Denialist Playbook that I found interesting -
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-denialist-
| pla...
| retrac wrote:
| I have seen so many people interpret the standard
| cautious phrase "there is no evidence for..." to somehow
| mean "there is evidence against..."
| neonological wrote:
| For sure. If someone can come up with a way to prove
| anything to be definitively true, most of these arguments
| would be over.
|
| It is this flaw in science that is the origin of all
| these controversial debates that surround science,
| religion, global warming and other controversial topics.
|
| Nothing can be proven and therefore reality will always
| be open to interpretation.
| taylodl wrote:
| Just to clarify, things can be proven _false_ , they just
| can't be proven _true._ That 's why we speak of a good
| scientific theory being _falsifiable_ - there must be a
| way to show it 's not true.
|
| The Scientific Method then becomes a process of
| _incremental refinement._ Newton 's theory of gravity
| didn't become "wrong" just because Einstein's theory was
| more accurate - heck we still teach, and use, Newton's
| theory to this day in both high school and college. It's
| useful. We just know that all bets are off when
| velocities approaching the speed of light are involved.
| Turns out that's not usually the case in everyday
| situations. We suspect that Einstein's theory may not be
| the last word on gravity either - but the cases where the
| theory breaks down are getting more and more extreme.
| It's not like apples are going to start falling up from
| trees because we changed our theory!
| neonological wrote:
| Yeah I'm already aware of this. Almost no one else is
| though.
|
| Keep in mind though, Incremental refinement is not a
| given. There is still no way to know if each new theory
| is actually closer to the truth. In fact it may even be a
| step backwards.
|
| Additionally limited accuracy in observation tools
| actually make it impossible to falsify anything either.
| Can you trust that the critical observation was 100%
| accurate? But tbh this is just splitting hairs.
| taylodl wrote:
| > Incremental refinement is not a given
|
| I was wondering if you were going to call me out on that!
|
| > Additionally limited accuracy in observation tools
| actually make it impossible to falsify anything either
|
| That's a problem with GR too - it's true only within our
| current ability and accuracy to test that it's true.
| Better measurement may suddenly reveal something to not
| be true that we currently believe to be true.
|
| _c 'est la vie!_
| pdonis wrote:
| _> No scientist can ever prove global warming to be true_
|
| Or to be false. Focusing on "true" vs. "false" leads
| nowhere except, as you note, to endless debate.
|
| The real question is, do we have models that can make
| reasonably accurate predictions? That is the right question
| for ordinary citizens, concerned about what, if any,
| political policies they should support or oppose, to be
| asking about any scientific claims.
|
| In the case of global warming, the answer to that question
| is no; we have models, and they make predictions, but the
| predictions aren't very good, and they haven't gotten any
| better over the last few decades despite a lot of effort.
| That means we should be very careful putting much
| confidence in those models.
| neonological wrote:
| Falsification in science is possible.
|
| If I hypothesize that all zebras have stripes then
| observing one zebra with spots falsifies the entire
| hypothesis. This is definitive.
|
| However, no amount of zebras that I observe with stripes
| can ever prove my hypothesis correct. I can observe 500
| zebras all with stripes and at any point in time the
| 501st zebra can have spots. I can observe 1 billion
| zebras with stripes and the possibility still remains
| open that the next zebra I see has spots.
|
| Science is not symmetric. Falsification is possible,
| proof is not.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Falsification in science is possible._
|
| Falsification of really, really simple hypotheses (like
| "all zebras have stripes", or the classic "all ravens are
| black") is possible, yes.
|
| But no hypothesis of any real significance in science is
| that simple. In any scientific model of any significance,
| there are always ways to patch the model to account for
| new observations. In a model that is destined to be
| supplanted, the patching gets more and more cumbersome
| and less and less plausible over time; but there is no
| hard and fast breaking point at which there is too much
| patching, that's always a judgment call about which
| different scientists can disagree. Also, unless and until
| there is some new model available that can account for
| all the same observations, including the new ones, in a
| simpler and more intuitively plausible way, preferably
| also with more accurate predictions, scientists will
| continue to try to use the old patched model because
| there is no alternative.
| swayvil wrote:
| Treating the words of authority like scripture is what got us
| into this mess.
| leothecool wrote:
| I think you are missing the point.
|
| Pop culture thinks science means space, chemicals, and
| electronics. We aren't even hearing the words of authority
| in this case. A scientist describing what science is
| doesn't sound like indoctrination or blind faith to me.
| ccsnags wrote:
| Science is a method for understanding the world, not an
| ideology.
|
| I do give most non scientific people the benefit of the
| doubt. They are at least trying. What is really disturbing
| is that this is a real problem within sections of the
| scientific community and especially within the public
| relations of the scientific community. "Science
| Communicator" is almost synonymous with this trap. I think
| it stems from oversimplification and a need to generate
| funding for research.
| zepto wrote:
| Agreed, let's not!
|
| What part of what Feynman said do you disagree with?
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| It boggles the mind to see this quote by Feynman when the
| entire premise of the article is that this is already how
| we teach science and it leads to a whole host of
| problems.
| zepto wrote:
| Asking if people read the post is against HN guidelines:
|
| 'Please don't comment on whether someone read an article.
| "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be
| shortened to "The article mentions that."'
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| I read the article and disagree with its conclusions
| about science education. I think science education isn't
| actually taught the way the article says it is. At least
| that's not how I was taught it in good public schools
| until college, at which point it was taught the way
| Feynman says. If it actually was taught that way at
| earlier points, I think we'd be in a better place.
|
| We teach a bizarro world version of feynman's quote,
| where it's more like the way we teach the formulas in
| math. It's the right formula that they're teaching, but
| the way it's taught is encouraging its use as a black
| box.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Better, for sure, I agree, but is it enough as the OP
| argues it's not?
| zepto wrote:
| I read the article. It seems to be an argument that the
| problems with trust in science come from teaching a kind
| of logical empiricism, itself a straw man, and not what
| you'd come away with from listening to Feynman.
|
| There is nothing in the article that supports this claim
| about the cause of the 'problem' or even a really usable
| understanding of what the problem is, other than that
| cigarette companies have been able to make people doubt
| things they shouldn't have doubted, and that climate
| deniers and other kinds of 'deniers' are doing the same
| building on the work of the PR firms used by the
| cigarette companies.
|
| The best I can read as what the problem is, is that we
| think that teaching people differently could make them
| immune to propaganda, and so the problem is that we
| aren't teaching them differently. I think this is highly
| questionable.
|
| It argues that we should instead teach science based on a
| feminist critique.
|
| As far as I'm concerned the article is complete bullshit.
| It sets up a straw man, and then argues to a completely
| unsupported conclusion. It's terrible.
|
| Having said that here's what it touches on that is
| useful:
|
| Teaching scientific method alone as 'science' is
| outdated. Science is part of public discourse and so it
| _is_ important for students to understand how science
| works as social, sociological, and political processes,
| as much as it is an epistemological method.
|
| From this point of view, I respect the various ideas that
| they are advancing as valid for study. However 'valid to
| study' is very different from attempting to claim that
| science education should be _based_ on this ideology, and
| is an obvious political land-grab which must be rejected.
|
| The article makes a bunch of naked assertions as if they
| are simply facts about reality, when in fact they are
| very much the subject of social science itself.
|
| Consider these statements:
|
| > Believing based on trust is a pervasive human practice,
| not confined to scientific inquiry.
|
| Seems true enough, right?
|
| > It starts in infancy, when children learn language,
| everyday facts, and even religious beliefs from their
| caregivers.
|
| Does it? This is definitely not settled science.
| Obviously children learn from caregivers, but what they
| _trust_ is a deeper question, and a subject of study.
| Also, then sources are far wider than 'care givers'.
|
| This seems like an attempt to anchor the conversation in
| a blank slate kind of conception of the emergence of
| belief. This is discredited in social science, but is
| popular in the humanities.
|
| > Trust is only as reliable as the source of the
| knowledge; when that source is unreliable, we sometimes
| regard beliefs based on trust as the product of
| indoctrination.
|
| 'Sometimes' being the operative word.
|
| > Trust can be eroded when there is evidence of the
| unreliability of the source.
|
| Yes, but research has shown that it can be strengthened
| when there is evidence of the unreliability of the
| source, too. It depends on other factors, such as who is
| providing the evidence. Again this statement is simply
| not objective or reflective of current social science.
|
| > Reflective knowledge should therefore include some
| account of the reliability of the source of knowledge.
|
| If you delete all of the preceding elements, and just
| say:
|
| Reflective knowledge should include some account of the
| reliability of the source of knowledge.
|
| We are left with a reasonable proposal.
|
| Weirdly, one which is already common amongst science
| students, who _don't_ ignore the reliability of the
| results on which they base their work.
| SyzygistSix wrote:
| I feel like authorities betraying public trust is a large
| part of what got us into this mess. I trust the scientific
| process. I don't trust the people involved in the process
| and in charge of making and following policy based on
| scientific and technological process.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| One thing that allows for this is the oft neglected
| "method of discovery".
|
| The usual "scientific process" concerns itself with how
| to keep an experiment correct/truthful - but how do we
| decide _what_ experiments to conduct in the first place?
| Scientific funding can be biased towards the successes of
| the past, and so future funding can be guided by
| political agendas.
| nitrogen wrote:
| I once thought that by leaving my old religion I was
| leaving dogma behind. But it appears that in the absence of
| one dogma/doctrine, people will create another.
| irrational wrote:
| People are people. Take away any differences in
| appearances, beliefs, communities, etc. and people will
| still find reasons to divide up and seek to destroy the
| outsiders.
| trashtester wrote:
| Then there is the Asimov quote : "John, when people thought
| the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the
| earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that
| thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking
| the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of
| them put together."
|
| https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht.
| ..
|
| A good scientific model is less wrong than the one preceeding
| it.
| guerrilla wrote:
| It seems to me this is exactly the "science as inquiry" model
| that the OP is arguing against.
| webmaven wrote:
| > In general we look for a new law by the following process:
| first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the
| guess... and then we compare those computation results to
| experiment. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In
| that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make
| a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a
| difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his
| name is. If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's
| all there is to it.
|
| That elides a _lot_ of complexity, mostly around the validity
| of the experiment design and execution. Confounding factors,
| confirmation bias, selection bias, p-hacking, etc. can all
| skew the results in ways both overt and subtle.
|
| The following quote from the movie 'Thank you for smoking'
| may illustrate:
|
| _" This is where I work, the Academy of Tobacco Studies. It
| was established by seven gentlemen you may recognize from
| C-Span. These guys realized quick if they were gonna claim
| cigarettes were not addictive they better have proof. This is
| the man they rely on, Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found
| him in Germany. I won't go into the details. He's been
| testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty
| years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a
| genius, he could disprove gravity."_
|
| So no, 'if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong' is a
| gross oversimplification.
|
| Not to mention that there may be very good reasons that an
| experiment can't (or shouldn't) be done, or that various
| 'natural experiments' must be relied upon.
| [deleted]
| revax wrote:
| I like it but in every theory, there is always some edge case
| where the theory doesn't work. In a sense, every models in
| natural science are wrong but some are more right than other.
| jules wrote:
| It's not even just the trust in scientific consensus, but also
| the trust in particular scientific papers and studies in e.g.
| pop science articles. Scientists themselves are usually
| cautious about what conclusions to draw from a single study
| that has not been replicated in a variety of experimental
| conditions.
|
| Unfortunately, the popular idea of Kuhnian paradigm shifts is
| even more wrong than the popular idea that it's one big model
| of nature that keeps getting better. Paradigm shifts often
| don't invalidate earlier results; they refine them. Take the
| prototypical example: classical vs quantum mechanics. The
| statement "quantum mechanics is a more refined model of the
| world than classical mechanics" is far more accurate than
| "quantum mechanics proved that classical mechanics is wrong".
| Classical mechanics is still taught in universities (in the
| physics departement not in the history departement), and those
| courses spend a lot of time showing how classical mechanics
| arises as a particular limit of quantum mechanics, and how the
| two relate, and in which range of conditions the two theories
| give the same answers.
| abernard1 wrote:
| > Paradigm shifts often don't invalidate earlier results;
| they refine them
|
| While I agree with your quantum/relativistic vs classical, I
| think they're the exception rather than the rule.
|
| Like, phlogiston was remarkably wrong. Aether as well.
| Alchemical vs chemical. And the all-time classic of
| geocentric vs heliocentric: how can that be reconciled as a
| "refinement?"
|
| One of the problems Science has in pedagogy. There's a need
| to teach the material in a reasonable period of time.
| Teachers don't want to be spending a lot of time talking
| about things not true in the current paradigm, so there's a
| huge selection bias on providing a linear history. This has
| the effect of whitewashing Science to show definite
| "progress", as opposed to the more realistic twists and turns
| of wrongness.
| cgriswald wrote:
| Heliocentric is a refinement of geocentric. Geocentric
| isn't "wrong." It's not even inaccurate. You can make it as
| arbitrarily accurate as you like. It's just more complex so
| choosing the simpler model makes more sense. But they're
| both just models.
|
| Heliocentric isn't "the way it actually is" either. Both
| objects actually orbit the barycenter ( _i.e._ , center of
| mass). (In our model, not necessarily in reality!) That
| idea itself is a simplification of our model of how mass,
| forces, and space time work. And we usually ignore many
| factors when making these calculations.
| abernard1 wrote:
| > Heliocentric is a refinement of geocentric.
|
| This is very much stretching it in my opinion. The cycles
| and epicycles didn't need to be adjusted--the epicycles
| were the adjustment--they needed to be completely thrown
| out.
|
| There aren't any teachers who are like: "Well, we used to
| think that the Sun was this smallish thing orbiting the
| Earth, but actually it's only _slightly_ different. The
| Sun is 3*10^5 times the mass of the Earth, and actually
| the Earth revolves around it. No big deal! Please turn to
| Chapter 2 of your astro book, where we will be exploring
| slight deviations from how the cosmos orbits the Earth. "
| cgriswald wrote:
| If it wasn't a big deal it wouldn't have been a paradigm
| shift. However, it was just a refinement. You're adding
| things (relative masses) that weren't part of this shift,
| they were later refinements.
|
| The reasons this was a big deal were entirely human. It
| wasn't religion: If you can accept the universe as a
| miracle it doesn't much matter _how_ God did it; God is
| just as glorious. It was power: the Church claimed the
| simpler model was The Truth and saw the new model as
| revealing a mistake and threatening their power; rather
| than seeing it as just a model.
| abernard1 wrote:
| And I maintain this was not a refinement of a model.
|
| As a challenge: name one piece of geocentric math that
| can still be modified by today's practicioners to provide
| a sensible astrophysical answer.
|
| Static mass is still a useful fact in a world of
| relativistic physics. But we have not tabulated any facts
| from geocentric concepts in the last few centuries. No
| one would even know where to begin or what words to use
| to even describe them. That material produced from
| Kuhnian "normal science" under geocentrism had to be
| thrown out, as there was no way of fitting them in with
| the new paradigm.
| cgriswald wrote:
| You're shifting the goalposts something crazy. I'd like
| to point out the original poster talked about refinement
| in the _output_ of the models, not the models themselves.
| However, having said that, the heliocentric model is
| _still_ a refinement (and further refinements, which came
| later) of the geocentric model. We didn 't jump right
| from geocentrism to Kepler's three laws of planetary
| motion. The Copernican model still had heavenly spheres
| as a concept: a concept we don't use today. What you're
| thinking of as heliocentrism is a refinement of previous
| heliocentrism which itself was a refinement of
| geocentrism.
| ampdepolymerase wrote:
| The issue is that the language of science is mathematics, and
| mathematics is a cruel mistress. Conventional ethical boards
| also makes exploration of these decisions impossible. If a
| government official makes a decision on an event that lie at
| the end of two gaussians, the black swan happens and a bunch of
| people died, who is to blame? The people for not realizing the
| law of large numbers? Statistical software and Monte-Carlo
| modeling for claiming things have low probabilities? The
| government official for deferring to scientific reasoning?
|
| You see this everyday right now during the pandemic. Policy
| making is very different from say, civil engineering, where
| failure scenarios can be quantified within tightly defined
| bounds. At the nation state level every decision may affect
| everybody. Nobody wants to be told their specific circumstances
| are the "statistical outliers". But science rarely gives good
| answers. The only time science has been reliable is when a
| large amount of resources is dedicated to figuring out answers
| in a single, specific problem. Unfortunately the life sciences
| don't have the luxury of physics and the formal sciences. There
| is no concerted level of effort to cure cancer that is
| comparable to the Apollo program. The military prefers to buy
| ten more hellfires than to redo life science ethics. If you
| quantify the ultimate utilitarian value, the damage ten
| missiles can do to humanity may be the same as a FDA that focus
| more on progress than covering their own ass. Yet the former is
| more acceptable than the latter. Science has failed because it
| no longer gives useful answers. When somebody's grandmother is
| lying sick in the hospital, they want a cure that is
| immediately accessible, not yet another feel-good post on
| Reddit or Facebook about "Scientists claim experimental cure
| for cancer found! Appearing in your friendly neighborhood
| pharmacy in ten years".
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > elevate science as this god-like authority, and scientific
| consensus as the source of all truths.
|
| Science is simply the process of using of data to come to
| conclusions. Is there a better method for building a model of
| the world?
|
| Therefore, it doesn't make any sense to talk about "science" as
| an authority. There are people and organizations that claim
| they used the scientific process to come to this or that
| conclusion. Maybe they used proper data and the right math.
| Maybe they didn't. But their errors in the scientific process
| doesn't say anything about the validity of the scientific
| process, for which there does not seem to be an alternative.
| SkyBelow wrote:
| >Science is simply the process of using of data to come to
| conclusions. Is there a better method for building a model of
| the world?
|
| If we go with such a case, then yes, there is a better model.
| Using data to come to a guess that have yet to be disproven.
|
| The difference is that a conclusion is more final that a
| guess not yet proven wrong. A scientists steeped in research
| may read conclusion and automatically conceptualize a notion
| much closer to guess not yet proven wrong, and maybe include
| the current winner among countless other guesses that have
| been proven wrong. They have enough experience to recognize
| that what we know may be wrong. It may be a little wrong due
| to some experimental error, it may be complete wrong (but
| relatively accurate as an approximation in the systems
| already applied), or some other option.
|
| A layman wouldn't have the same take away. When they see
| conclusion, they would think it is a settled matter when it
| isn't. The difference between trusting science because it is
| best we currently have and trusting science because it is
| right. One is a trust tempered with caution while the other
| risks becoming blind faith.
|
| The system could also further be improved by better expanding
| upon how disagreements to existing guesses are not always
| equal. A disagreement backed by data is better than one that
| is not, and a disagreement that fits the current data, though
| with no unique data supporting it over the existing guess, is
| better than one that contradicts existing data. Recognizing
| the possibility that data may be bad, and it is reasonable to
| be willing to refresh the data from time to time. A tolerance
| of letting people explore the wrong paths to see what data
| they may find. Lastly including the issue that all data is
| done by humans and thus subject to our biases (which is why
| things like double blind data is better than single blind
| data which is better than data without any layers of
| blindness). But that ends up being hard to fit into a few
| sentence explanation.
| wwww4all wrote:
| Science is politicized by the establishment elites to further
| their narratives. It doesn't matter what the science says or
| is even true or not.
|
| Science is just euphemism to hide their agenda and further
| their goals.
| castlecrasher2 wrote:
| Exactly. Same as religion has been.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Everything is politicized by everyone to further their
| narratives. It's not a meaningful statement.
|
| Science is not just euphemism. Science is the reason we
| have gotten as far as we have. Science is the reason why
| infant mortality is almost in much of the world, and food
| is plentiful.
|
| Some people may use it inappropriately, and try to corrupt
| it, but it doesn't change the fact that making conclusions
| based on data and repeating experiments to verify and
| adjusting the model as the data indicates is the best way
| we have to model our world.
| wwww4all wrote:
| Which people are using it inappropriately and corrupting
| it?
|
| Why are they doing it? Why are they using silly phrases
| like, trust the science? Which is basically the same
| thing religious people do, when they say have faith.
|
| Also, science, the classical definition, has no meaning
| on its own. It's simply way to describe reality. It's
| usually up to engineers and people to put into practice.
|
| The science may describe gravity, although they still
| can't answer why the gravitational constant is a
| constant.
|
| But, engineers and people can test effects of gravity
| everyday, and act accordingly.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Which people are using it inappropriately and corrupting
| it?
|
| Journalists who misrepresent the results of a study to
| get clicks. Companies that purposely design erroneous
| experiments to get the results they want (a la the
| tobacco example elsewhere in this thread). Individual
| scientists who corrupt their own studies or falsify data
| to advance their own careers.
|
| >Also, science, the classical definition, has no meaning
| on its own. It's simply way to describe reality. It's
| usually up to engineers and people to put into practice.
|
| This makes no sense. Science is the process of refining
| the model of the world by testing hypotheses by
| performing experiments and then revising the model as new
| data is collected. This is in contrast to something like
| religion, where the model is not to be altered regardless
| of the data.
| wwww4all wrote:
| Science is about describing reality. You may be
| describing scientism, or some other psuedo scientific
| charade, which conflates actual science with hand waving
| mumbo jumbo, like people try to conflate astro physics
| with astrology.
|
| Gold has always existed, as far as we know. People have
| known about gold and it's properties, long before classic
| science described gold. There's no model or testing
| hypothesis for gold needed. Gold exists because people
| use them regularly.
|
| Science just described gold and other elements, because
| they exist in reality.
|
| Engineers and people didnt need science to describe gold
| to use gold. Science is convenient way to describe
| reality for what it is.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| It's not an enditement of science to accept that it is
| fallible. It's precisely the point of the article that
| "science as inquiry" as it is taught has led people to
| acquire a mystical infallible view of the scientific method
| which holds that people who come to different conclusions
| than the current consensus are biased. When in fact
| scientific consensus and scientific authority are social
| agreements based on trust.
| mannykannot wrote:
| As far as I can tell, it is not the point of this article
| that science teaching has led people to acquire a mystical
| infallible view of the scientific method which holds that
| people who come to different conclusions than the current
| consensus are biased; rather, it takes it as a premise.
|
| In the final section, "Scientific Dissent versus Science
| Denialism", the article takes the position that this
| posited reverence for science makes it difficult to see the
| flaws in climate-change denial: "And without a social
| epistemological critique of the claims of climate change
| deniers, it is difficult to recognize that they are not
| doing credible science."
|
| Ironically, the article itself does not present, or even
| mention, any empirical evidence for this being an important
| factor in people failing to recognize the above (maybe the
| evidence is in one of the references, but if the author
| can't be bothered to say so, I'm not going off on a wild-
| goose chase. The author here prefers to try deducing the
| alleged cause of this state of affairs from the position of
| another philosopher.)
|
| I'm all for people gaining a better understanding of how
| science works, but I am doubtful that this particular issue
| is central to denialism not being recognized for what it
| is.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Well stated!
| paganel wrote:
| > Is there a better method for building a model of the world?
|
| One of the questions should be: Why should we build a model
| for the world? Is that really possible/doable? And if the
| real answer is "no", why should we apply that failed model to
| the real world, affecting (potentially in a negative way) the
| lives of millions of people?
| zajio1am wrote:
| There is no alternative to building models of the world.
| There are only badly built models (based on individual
| experience, without opposition or falsification attempts)
| or better built models (like from scientific process).
|
| You can avoid having models of some domain if you can avoid
| to make decisions in that domain.
| parksy wrote:
| > One of the questions should be: Why should we build a
| model for the world?
|
| The decision not to build a model, is a model.
|
| > Is that really possible/doable?
|
| Models are just data-driven predictions based on
| understanding. The better the data, the better the
| understanding, the better the model.
|
| If a model for the world is impossible, then either the
| data is impossible to gather or process, or the
| understanding is impossible to achieve.
|
| Data is just facts based on observed events, so I refuse to
| believe that a model for the world is impossible based on
| ability to track data.
|
| Understanding is the wildcard - humans are complex beings.
| But each tiny step forward increases global understanding.
| Years ago, autism was considered "cold mother syndrome".
| Now through decades of careful and detailed analysis it's
| understood as a neurological disorder. Depression and
| anxiety were thought to be issues of the soul, demonic
| possession, laziness, etc. Now there is an ever expanding
| array of diagnostic tools to help sufferers.
|
| So I refuse to believe that understanding is impossible.
|
| tl;dr: Yes, a model for the world is possible.
|
| > And if the real answer is "no",
|
| That's a big if.
|
| > why should we apply that failed model to the real world
|
| "failed model" what failed model?
|
| Also recall doing nothing is also a model. Bring on the
| dark ages!
|
| > affecting (potentially in a negative way) the lives of
| millions of people?
|
| In my world view, doing nothing and praying to higher
| powers, or allowing chaotic despots to rampage the lands
| has already caused immeasurable premature death and
| suffering.
|
| Why would anyone vouch for a return to the dark ages, just
| because progress feels like effort?
| paganel wrote:
| The decision of not doing math is not math, unless we go
| on obscure neo-platonic paths and equate negation with
| presence.
|
| Recent history is full of failed models, eugenics itself
| came out of scientists' books that some German former
| corporal later enabled. Eugenics was based on a (failed)
| model of the world.
|
| Chaotic despots have rampaged the lands with the help of
| technology and science just fine, people wouldn't have
| reached Magadan against their own will without railways.
| Give me "dark ages" every day against millions of people
| in the Gulag. Also, the trans/Atlantic slave trade
| wouldn't have been possible without navigation-related
| advances, many of them scientific in nature.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's obvious that useful models are doable.
|
| You have picked the most expansive meaning of "of the
| world", which isn't really an interesting thing to talk
| about.
| [deleted]
| perfmode wrote:
| science is limiting...
|
| precisely because it merely builds models.
| dionian wrote:
| Not all scientists are limited by the models. Fortunately
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Everyone is limited by models, and scientists certainly
| are too. If you've ever taken a physics class and drawn a
| free body diagram, you've made a model. It's a good first
| order approximation, and an excellent pedagogical tool,
| but it's also a model that is limited in many ways. Is it
| too limited? Depends on what you want to do with it.
| yndoendo wrote:
| Reproducibility of observed reality. The most simplistic
| summary I can come up with. Manufacturing to baking to
| software to economic models all strive to be reproducible
| but with the so many variables there is no way to have a
| true constant.
|
| People like constants, cookies always taste the same, video
| game does not have glitches, car manufacturer always
| produces a fully fictional vehicle right from the plant.
| Yet some cars a lemons, cookies burn, quality of
| ingredients change with the seasons, software crashes.
|
| Science is complex while most people just want to have a
| reduced cognitive load. Spend no time actually thinking
| about the complexity but accepting a more simplistic story.
| Since science can in no way offer a true yes or no people
| look else where, even when the simplistic reasoning is
| wrong.
|
| A chief can say baking is easy but knowing which
| ingredients, when to mix, and how to use the tools is even
| too complex for a lot of people. Walk into a grocery store
| of how many different types of microwavable meals exist
| because it is easier to place something in to a rectangular
| enclosure for 10 minutes and press 5 buttons.
|
| Only thing I've come to is to remind others is our world is
| complex and requires complex understanding, aka specialist,
| but often simplified where doing is easier. You might work
| on a manufacturing line, bake, or even play games but does
| not mean you know the science behind those processes. You
| may think there is no science behind baking until you ask
| questions, such as how does one build an electric oven?
| That is all I've come to, reminding people that everything
| is more complex than what it appears to be.
| perfmode wrote:
| making the possibilities a reality
|
| predicting the future of things we all know
| neonological wrote:
| No. You misunderstand what science is. Science is the
| process of attempting to falsify a model that is already
| built.
|
| Modeling in itself is not science. It is the verification
| of the accuracy of that model that is science and there is
| even a huge flaw in this science.
|
| The keyword is falsify. Nothing in science and therefore in
| reality as we know it can be proven to be true.
|
| When a scientist engages in the scientific method, no
| scientist has ever proved any claim ever made by humanity
| to be true. They are simply attempting to falsify a claim.
| Truth remains forever dubious for eternity.
|
| We can only say that a theory is probably true because all
| our attempts to falsify the theory have failed.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I don't know what that means. Everyone is merely building
| models.
| perfmode wrote:
| can't you see...
|
| who looks through your eyes?
|
| are you a model?
|
| or the real deal?
| zepto wrote:
| Is this a copy pasted GPT-3 response?
| perfmode wrote:
| a high compliment
|
| =)
| dionian wrote:
| He's (or she's) talking about Scientism, which is a reliance
| in the outcomes and institutions of science, rather than the
| process of science itself.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> I was having this exact discussion with a philosophy of
| science major a few days ago. We were both bothered by the
| current fetishization of science. It's troubling that otherwise
| well-educated, logical people have come to elevate science as
| this god-like authority, and scientific consensus as the source
| of all truths.
|
| I live in a neighborhood in the shadow of a big university,
| where you can't spit without hitting a scientist. I work for a
| science oriented business. My parents, my siblings, and our
| spouses, are all scientists.
|
| I don't know a single scientist who treats science as a god-
| like authority. In fact I believe this is a popular straw man,
| or a _tu quoque_ fallacy trying to pin the characteristics of
| religion on science.
| nerdponx wrote:
| I think you're saying the same thing (and I agree with it).
|
| People who actually _do_ science rarely (not never, but
| rarely) fall into this fallacy. The fallacy takes hold of
| generally-educated people who lack specific scientific
| training.
| guerrilla wrote:
| I may be mistaken but they didn't say scientists did but
| other educated people, right? And that's what I see anyway.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Yes. I think this is especially problematic when a legitimate
| policy idea is defended _only_ with "It's science based".
| That's not enough. Good policy is agreeable to a majority of
| people (both in benefit and cost and is therefore usually a
| tradeoff for all parties). Being grounded in truth, as much as
| science can provide, is not enough.
|
| You can use truth and facts to form an opinion and propose a
| policy, but it cannot be made to sound like the only option, or
| else we end up embittering those who would be put out by the
| policy, to the point that they have no recourse _but_ to attack
| the science and facts. You _have_ to be willing to tradeoff and
| find an imperfect compromise.
|
| Add to that the fact that scientific discoveries and
| understandings are especially easy to attack _because_ they are
| evolving.
| laurent92 wrote:
| Here is one part where the problem comes from:
|
| - Traditionalism: Driving society according to the word of the
| elders,
|
| - Modernity: Driving society using science.
|
| Leaders understood that. So there are extremely high stakes in
| fabricating or twisting science, because once you have science
| on your side, all modern societies will help you.
|
| Example with feminism: It is literally illegal in some
| countries (ex: France, law for true equality 2014, followed by
| multiple decrees since Macron) to communicate information that
| unflatters women (it's considered demeaning), so even though
| some figures are extremely false (girls aren't better at math,
| it's only when we put a female name on exams that the sheet has
| 6% higher mark, this science is considered demeaning towards
| women therefore illegal to publish - same goes for the wage
| gap, women work less and less intensively per hour worked, but
| it is illegal to point it out), everyone still believes wrong
| things.
|
| And just like this, laws pass. Same goes for immigration or all
| other science-backed laws where one side is forbidden to speak.
|
| Science works... assuming equal analysis of both sides of each
| hypothesis. That's why it only works in democratic cultures,
| but that assumes the media is balanced.
| throwaway894345 wrote:
| In particular, I suspect science only "works" to the extent
| that a certain amount of heterodoxy is tolerated. If "science"
| as an institution becomes very conformist, then you'll only get
| science that reinforces the biases of the prevailing ideology.
| The quality of the output that the institution produces depends
| on the health of the institution, where "health" means
| something like "ideological diversity" as it does with natural
| ecosystems.
|
| A lot of pro-conformists make the argue that tolerating
| ideological diversity means regarding creationism and evolution
| as equally valid; of course this is untrue--science can (and
| indeed _did_ ) find that evolution is the more valid idea
| without explicitly persecuting creationists. In other words,
| normal heterodox science would already prefer evolution to
| creationism--not only is there no need to (for example) write
| open letters demanding various creationists'
| resignation/termination/excommunication/etc, but that sort of
| persecution actually harms the health (heterodoxy) of science
| (not because science needs creationists, but because science
| needs heterodoxy to be able to decide that creationism is the
| invalid idea in the first place).
| 13415 wrote:
| Creationism has nothing to do with science, neither has
| ideology any place in science, and you've really got to draw
| the limit somewhere more reasonable. I don't want my taxes to
| pay "research" in creationism, morphogenetic fields,
| astrology, or divining rods.
|
| There is plenty of heterodoxy in science as is - or do you
| really believe everyone agrees about almost everything in
| almost every discipline? Pretty much the opposite is the
| case. Pick any discipline you like and there will be plenty
| of disagreement about the respective issues in the forefront
| of scientific research.
| tgv wrote:
| > Moreover, scientific agreement among experts --typically
| interpreted by logical empiricists as the result of univocal
| scientific method and as an indicator of truth-- should be seen
| more critically for what it is: social agreement.
|
| Isn't the whole point of science that you can get out of that by
| trying? Apply your theories in practice, and see if they work. It
| doesn't matter whether the theory goes with or against general
| consensus.
|
| That unfortunately doesn't hold for theories that describe only
| minute, very restricted domains. And that not only includes
| fields like dark matter, where experimentation is nearly
| impossible, but also 99.9% of the social sciences, where
| consensus is the only yard stick for theories that by far outsize
| the data on which they are based. Fortunately for the discussion,
| the author kept that thorny problem far away by focusing on the
| safe area of natural sciences.
|
| Now back to the article: "science education ... should normalize
| scientific disagreement (distinguishing it from science
| denialism) and include discussion of the social epistemological
| institutions and processes by which scientific inquiry proceeds.
| These include the education of future researchers as graduate
| students and postdoctoral fellows, the peer review process for
| grants and publications, the discursive interactions of
| researchers in laboratory meetings and conferences, diversity and
| inclusion issues, and the norms of scientific integrity."
|
| While social aspects of practicing science may throw some light
| on why one theory gets more traction than another, it seems to me
| putting the cart before the horse. It will not make students
| appreciate the difference between the competing theories, but
| will make science education a dull exercise in processes and
| factoids, to be listed in a test, where you'll get a passing
| grade if you can keep "epistemological" and "inquiry" apart.
|
| And in the worst case, it will undermine the last bit of trust in
| science, because it's just an attempt at a centralizing power
| grab. Who proves that which ideas about these issues are right? I
| doubt the author has even got the tiniest bit of data to
| underline her argument.
| specialist wrote:
| Quoting the OC:
|
| > _Believing based on trust is a pervasive human practice, not
| confined to scientific inquiry._
|
| Rationalists ignore the role of identity in beliefs.
|
| My socially awkward brother transmuted from becoming the next
| Jacques Cousteau to full throated Young Earth Creationist. He had
| the best schooling. He assisted with biological and sociological
| research.
|
| Why did my brother flip?
|
| I've been pondering this for decades. In a nutshell, my theory is
| he traded his beliefs for acceptance. He adopted a completely new
| identity in order to belong to a group.
|
| The evidence for the centrality of identity as basis of our
| beliefs, what some LessWrong pundits called Belief As Attire, is
| slowly accumulating.
|
| No amount of scientific literacy, media literacy, critical
| thinking, logic will successfully inoculate people from cults.
|
| There's some new research that shows early exposure helps. Such
| as teaching kids about pseudosciences like cryptozoology.
|
| Similarly, there's some evidence that empathy and community
| engagement and socialization help protect people from falling
| prey to cults.
| pjettter wrote:
| the problem is that in schools, kids learn not science, but
| examples of science, without understanding what science is. They
| don't learn biology, but examples of biology, without
| understanding any context, history, aims. They don't learn about
| languages, but just an example of a language, and only small
| parts of it. There is no context, and especially, there is not
| even an attempt to connect one thing to another, or to provide
| any context or relation. Sadly, schools don't even teach learning
| anymore. They just teach succeeding by imitation. So yes, we're
| in big trouble. Or they, if you're old enough.
| jp555 wrote:
| People should be more aware... of the collapse of science
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
| throwaway3699 wrote:
| Science is also more accessible now. There are more academics
| and universities pumping out papers than ever before, whereas
| in the past only the best were able to get into academia.
| analog31 wrote:
| The replication crisis is serious, but it's not the collapse of
| science. Maxwell's equations still stand, for example. You can
| still identify chemical elements from their spectra. And so
| forth.
|
| That is not to diminish the problem. Over-reliance in purely
| statistical methods has gotten us in trouble -- in some fields
| more than others. Probably the main issue is that the fields
| affected are ones that happen to the biggest right now, with
| potential impact on quality of life and public policy.
|
| Fields that are doing a better job of weathering the storm,
| such as physics, have tended to have a larger tool belt, and
| the use of statistics is kept in check by other methods such as
| the development of theory, and the ability to study problems
| from multiple vantage points. Also, physicists can choose our
| battles, and only look at problems where more robust statistics
| can be used.
| jrumbut wrote:
| Even in the fields most affected, I'm not aware of any
| knowledge generation efforts outside of science that are
| going better.
|
| It might just be that the social sciences and medicine are
| really hard, and our best efforts fail often.
|
| Edit: I mean the best effort we could reasonably make as a
| society, naturally there have been individuals and groups who
| have been doing things they knew or should have known were
| wrong for their own reasons.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > It might just be that the social sciences and medicine
| are really hard
|
| As one field often builds upon another, the so-called
| soft/social sciences could also be called Higher/high-order
| sciences; and the complexity progression might not be
| linear, since at the high-level these topics tend to merge
| such that they are no longer _layers_ but rather _aspects_
| of the same societal mega-graph e.g. economics is the study
| societal economy, political science is the study societal
| politics etc, all of which are part of the same system, and
| hence inter-react, in the same way a study of volcanic
| activity, the tides, the magnetic field, the atmosphere,
| weather and the terrestrial water table /system are all
| inter-related topics of the same planetary model (I expect
| all these things to become distinct topics of study too, at
| a greater scale if they aren't already).
|
| Another consideration; Natural versus "human" sciences -
| any system that involves humans (any study of an aspect of
| human society) differs from the study of natural processes.
|
| 1) the scientists, or scientific institution is a part of
| society,
|
| 2) humans can react to scientific investigation and inquiry
| - a natural process doesn't do PR, no matter how strange
| the quantum is.
|
| 3) humans culture and behaviour is both complex, and
| changes over time in a way e.g. chemistry, does not.
| a_conservative wrote:
| This comment really made me think, thank you for that. I
| agree with everything you said.
|
| I think the danger comes from people using results that
| aren't (can't?) be replicated and treating them as if they
| were fact.
|
| "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble.
| It's what you know for sure that just ain't so."
| jrumbut wrote:
| Well I'm extremely gratified that you even thought about
| it, I've been trying to express something like this in
| different forms with little success.
|
| And you're certainly right that we need to take into
| consideration how sure we can be about a result before
| relying on it, while recognizing that sometimes decisions
| have to be made based on the imperfect information
| available at the time.
| analog31 wrote:
| In my view the issue with the social and medical sciences
| is that they are being pulled from two opposite sides. On
| the one side is the motive of profit, professional
| advancement, etc. On the other side is the fact that
| science might be slow but _people are suffering right now_
| and can 't wait for care. There's a similar problem with
| using scientific knowledge to guide public policy.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That's not a collapse of science, or the scientific method.
| It's simply demonstrating how hard it is to do perform the
| science method given our boundary conditions and other
| incentives in life.
| ajarmst wrote:
| I'd settle for a rough familiarity amongst science journalists
| and their editors, but I like the aspiration. Couple of
| questions, though: do we mean how science should work, or how it
| actually works in practice (and no, not just Kuhn: his
| conclusions were only surprising to other non-scientists, and
| primarily seem to have been valuable for Sociologists nursing a
| discipline-wide inferiority complex and 'scientists' like Andrew
| Wakefield who want to blame the establishment and not their own
| sociopathy.) We're coming up on two decades since Ionnidis, and
| Psychology still seems to be primarily a collection of
| unconfirmed small population studies of undergraduate psych
| students. Medical doctors can't explain or apply freshman
| statistics. Research directions (and, too often, results) are
| chosen by investors and donors. The modern west has more taboos
| about what assumptions and received truths it is permissible to
| question and investigate than the most repressive theocracies.
| Much of theoretical physics seems to be aimed at exploring
| untestable hypotheses and frameworks. And, my personal favourite:
| _the phrase 'scientific consensus' is now used so often and
| without critique and introspection that it's actually become
| trite._
| avsteele wrote:
| As a working physicist I think the authors suggestions are not
| likely to improve education.
|
| Discussions of Kuhn are just not appropriate for secondary school
| science education. These classes are for teaching the bare basic
| of bio, chem, and physics to see if the kids enjoy them. As it
| stands they can barely do this. They aren't there to teach 'how
| science works' except in the most rudimentary sense, and its hard
| for me to think science education would be improved by removing
| core material in favor of a discussion of the peer review
| process!
|
| The author's suggestion might be appropriate for social studies,
| or a a special, AP level class where logical positivism, Karl
| popper, and Kuhn might be discussed.
|
| I refer the interested reader here to:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2975230-scientific-metho...
| mhh__ wrote:
| On the subject of enjoying science and mathematics, I know that
| if I had gone the usual route through school there is
| absolutely no way I would be studying anything remotely
| scientific a few years down the line. I took a liking to
| physics over a summer, almost purely by chance. That's it. The
| way (this is UK specific) we teach science and mathematics is
| so detached from anything you'd see at university I'm genuinely
| amazed the Universities haven't started trying to strangle the
| exam boards.
|
| Brace Yourself: The UK Physics A-level does _not_ require any
| calculus at all. None - no scientific method, no discussion of
| any quantum mechanics etc. etc.
| jonathanstrange wrote:
| As a working philosopher, I agree. More specifically, the
| following passage in the article seems inconclusive to me and
| based on a common misrepresentation of Kuhn's work (I've heard
| things like that many times):
|
| > _At least since Kuhn 's "Structure of Scientific
| Revolutions", historians and philosophers of science have been
| aware that the traditional methods of science--as described in
| "science as inquiry"--do not give a complete picture of how
| scientists develop, test, refine, and replace scientific
| theories. That ideologies, peer pressure, confirmation bias,
| and a host of other "biasing factors" play an ineliminable role
| in the process of doing science is now widely acknowledged. Yet
| "science as inquiry" has not adjusted to these findings. It
| continues to regard any bias as bad for science and to insist
| on the overall neutrality, "logicality," and objectivity of
| science. As a result, there is much about the history of
| science, as well as about contemporary science, that "science
| as inquiry" misrepresents._
|
| The problem is that from the fact that various biases cannot be
| avoided in science it is concluded that it is somehow desirable
| to "adjust to these findings" and stop regarding bias as bad.
| Instead of continuing to strive for elimination of bias and
| lessen the impact of biasing factors, the author instead
| insinuates at various places that biases should somehow be
| embraced, even emphasized in historical examples. But it
| doesn't follow from the fact that there will always be bias in
| one form or another that it's not methodologically advisable to
| attempt to eliminate it as much as possible.
|
| "When scientific disagreement arises, it is interpreted as
| likely showing that one or more scientists have bias."
|
| That is rarely claimed. Isn't it way more more likely that the
| experiments are not decisive enough or the theories not yet
| developed well enough, that more data has to be collected or
| more theoretical advances have to be made?
|
| Other points in the article are fine. Of course, consensus is
| not the point of science. But I have to say I've become rather
| dismissive about articles who build up "logical empiricism" as
| a straw man and then come with Kuhn. There have never been such
| trivial logical positivists. The Vienna Circle had quite
| elaborate and diverse views, and, as one may add, logical
| positivism was a large reductionist philosophical programme
| that failed for a vast variety of reasons that have nothing to
| do with Kuhn's theses and how work in science is actually
| conducted. Those reasons were, for example, that there was no
| logical way to generalize from 1st person to 3rd statements,
| the inadequacy of crude verificationism, the lack of a logic of
| theory discovery, Quine's work on analyticity and ontological
| relativity, problems with counterfactual reasoning and
| theoretical notions, problems with making reductionism credible
| in light of apparently emergent properties, and the failure of
| operationalism.
| zepto wrote:
| This is an awesome comment.
|
| Is there any book you'd recommend that covers the general
| topics you just touched on (I mean dismantling the straw-man
| of logical empiricism), or is this only visible after reading
| widely on philosophy?
| svara wrote:
| I think there's an issue that sometimes the dynamics of
| scientific progress that Kuhn described are misinterpreted as
| basically meaning that, oh look, scientists are just human
| like the rest of us, so scientific thought isn't somehow
| privileged over any other point of view.
|
| However, Kuhn's dynamics are ultimately a consequence of
| reasoning in the face of uncertainty. Simply applying logic
| to experimental results is not what scientists actually do,
| instead, they have to develop a sort of _taste_ in reasoning,
| in order to apply appropriate prior beliefs in the Bayesian
| sense and in order to apply appropriate weights when new
| evidence becomes available.
|
| This can lead to scientific thinking getting stuck in local
| optima of sorts, until evidence comes along (at the right
| time, potentially) that shakes people up sufficiently to
| force a new approach.
|
| Still, that isn't equally true for every subfield; some
| subfields will have proven their worth to greater degrees
| than others by consistently making good predictions or
| consistently offering elegant explanations for phenomena.
|
| I guess the difficulty in science communication comes to a
| large degree from the difficulty in communicating that last
| point, particularly since scientists themselves may disagree
| about how mature a given subfield really is.
| krona wrote:
| I know half a dozen or so PhD's in microbiology at one of the
| leading research institutions. They don't understand the
| philosophy of science beyond what I was taught aged 10-11.
|
| I don't think the basics of Karl Popper and Kuhn are beyond the
| grasp of a secondary school student, considering their
| importance not just in science but in the world we now live in.
| ta988 wrote:
| Thats because many PhD are just glorified technicians (same
| technicians we purged out of our labs doing one of the worst
| mistake of the last decades I believe). So we get all those
| PhD learning 3d printing, microcontrollers, programming for
| creating new devices, tools and whatever else. Where for
| technicians it would have been a much shorter turnaround. Of
| course the individuals learn new (basic level) skills. But it
| also impedes discovery and leaves a whole category of people
| out of the door. In PhD I was once told I couldn't put the
| technician on the authors list because he was paid to do his
| job...
| konjin wrote:
| I got half way through a physics phd and the only time anyone
| quoted Khun was as what happens when you read science books
| without understanding mathematics.
| watwut wrote:
| Philosophy of science and doing science are two much
| different things.
| kinghtown wrote:
| I think society could use an extra hour of school, at least
| twice a week. This sort of thing would be a great class which
| has no homework or exam pressure. You get credits for being
| there and participating in discussions.
| zepto wrote:
| A lot of private schools pride themselves on having this kind
| of thing.
| Nav_Panel wrote:
| At my high school we had a small "science research" program,
| where students would read lots of papers and write a review,
| and also try to get a part time position at a local lab.
|
| I'm thankful for that program even though I don't work in
| Science currently. Many of my peers are terrified of reading
| journal articles, but I'll dive right in.
|
| In terms of philosophy, a big portion of the
| Kantian/Enlightenment project was about grounding or justifying
| Science as epistemological practice. But that's not really what
| the Public needs, because "Science" now is not "Natural
| Philosophy" reaching for the things-in-themselves, but an
| institution with norms, financial and political incentives,
| etc. Better to read Lyotard ("Postmodern Condition") than early
| Wittgenstein for this kind of thing.
| SamBam wrote:
| Hard disagree. The nature of "science" should be woven into all
| of these courses. That will be what all students can take away
| from the science classes, not just the students who decide to
| stick with them after seeing if they "enjoy" them. (And do we
| teach English or history simply to see if kids will "enjoy"
| them later?)
|
| Most good schools actually already do this as part of their
| standards-based curriculum. The Next Generation Science
| Standards [1] has "Practices" as one of its three key strands,
| which focuses on how to ask questions like a scientist, what
| evidence is, how you design an experiment, etc. The nature of
| "inquiry" is applicable to all future understanding of what
| scientists do, more so than memorizing whether mitochondria are
| the powerhouses of the cell.
|
| 1. https://www.nextgenscience.org/
| konjin wrote:
| We need more science literacy, not humanities trying to stay
| relevant by dragging science down.
|
| Teaching students sentential and first order logic would be a
| much better start since they would at least know what they
| are trying to prove, then some probability so they know what
| a 5% chance actually means and casual inference if you're
| feeling overly ambitious to realize why correlation might (or
| might not) be correlation.
| mrpf1ster wrote:
| What a very closed minded comment. Humanities and science
| are deeply intertwined, especially philosophy. Not to
| mention disregarding an entire category of human expression
| and experience as "dragging science down". Humanities is
| just as relevant as science, and so often influence each
| other that it almost makes no sense to distinguish them.
|
| I highly doubt that by teaching children logic and
| probability we will solve science denialism. Cramming more
| science facts or abstract math equations into student's
| brains doesn't do much for their critical thinking and
| reasoning skills. Encouraging children to ask questions,
| reason based off of evidence, and inspiring a love for
| figuring out how our world works should be the main goal of
| any science class.
| Balgair wrote:
| > These classes are for teaching the bare basic of bio, chem,
| and physics to see if the kids enjoy them. As it stands they
| can barely do this.
|
| My SO was a HS science teacher, so I have some second-hand
| experience, whatever that is worth.
|
| This very much tracks with my SO's experience in both _very_
| poor schools and in 'good' schools. It would be amazing to
| have the time, money, and resources to teach kiddos about the
| philosophy of science. But just getting through the facts is
| hard enough. I'll save you the belly-aching about home
| environments, intra-classroom management, funding, pay, snow-
| days, etc. Even if/when we get back to all in-person teaching
| and then get the kids back up to grade level, adding in the
| philosophy of science to uninterested teenagers isn't likely to
| produce any measurable results.
|
| My iota of advice: Just vote to increase any school funding you
| possibly can (bonds, liens, mill-levies, etc). As many parents
| found out this last year, teachers don't get paid nearly enough
| for this. The rest will get sorted on it's own.
| isolli wrote:
| Simplifying a bit, I believe it's important to distinguish
| between hard, experimental science (physics), not fully
| experimental science (climate, medicine) and social science
| (economics). For instance, medicine is not fully experimental in
| the sense that you cannot take the same person and subject it
| repeatedly to the same, or a slightly different, experiment.
|
| Hard science has a) better tools at its disposal (repeatable
| experiments) and b) is not subject to the influence of financial
| interests. Companies don't care about this or that theory, all
| they care about are results that work and provide useful
| technology.
|
| Some companies do, however, have a strong interest in the
| outcomes of research in climate change, medicine, and economics,
| so they will exercise influence on research precisely in those
| domains that are less founded in experimentation and more
| uncertain.
| aww_dang wrote:
| Governments have a stake in these fields as well.
| bartimus wrote:
| The whole concept of "scientific consensus" is unscientific. It's
| always politically loaded. It also screws up the concept of
| checks and balances when the reason of existence for certain
| scientific jobs (and titles) is dependent on the existence of
| (and payed for by) a certain political issue.
| rmrfrmrf wrote:
| No mention of funding of scientific studies and the ongoing
| replication crisis?
| calebm wrote:
| After things like the food pyramid, it's hard to imagine why
| people would ever question what scientists say. /s
| kertoip_1 wrote:
| Are you referencing some specific event? Never heard of
| controversies linked to food pyramid
| rmah wrote:
| Given that scientists had essentially zero say in the food
| pyramid, I fail to see how it's relevant here.
| frockington1 wrote:
| The government advertised the food pyramid as a scientific
| fact. About a year ago the government advertised the general
| population should not wear masks as a scientific fact as well
| afandian wrote:
| Any developers who want to help with the scholarly infrastructure
| that underpins scholarly publishing workflows (DOIs, scholarly
| metadata and related things), Crossref have a job opening.
| Speaking personally, it's one of those rare jobs that feels
| embedded in an important mission.
|
| https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-dev...
|
| (but only open for a couple more days!)
| trey-jones wrote:
| I think it's natural for an expert in any field to be frustrated
| by the general public's lack of expertise. Indeed, as true
| expertise seems to become less and less common, I don't think
| it's unusual for this frustration to increase. I think this is
| the reason for the absurd notion that "everybody should learn to
| code" that was fairly pervasive on Hacker News a few years back.
| Thankfully that seems to have died down...
|
| As far as trusting the actual experts to make good decisions and
| tell the truth, that's tough. It seems to me that so many people
| are just out to get a quick buck. Often that means exaggerating
| and/or twisting the truth to suit a particular narrative. I'm not
| anti-capitalist, but there is clearly room for improvement to the
| system.
| Tycho wrote:
| Maybe some billionaire could set up an institution to keep
| scientists honest. Like it wouldn't try to do any original
| research, it would be purely dedicated to finding whether
| published research replicates, verifying the statistical analyses
| on which published research rests, and busting academic fraud
| (eg. citation rings). Over time legitimate scientists would crave
| its stamp of approval and make their research easier to verify
| (eg. publish the source code). It would be a good training ground
| and employment scheme too.
| wegs wrote:
| This was not what I expected. I expected the standard line about
| how the general public should trust scientists, and a fight for a
| greater role of scientists in decision-making.
|
| It was a good read.
|
| I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of the
| flaws of scientific processes:
|
| * Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes
|
| * Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines
|
| * Impact over integrity in hiring
|
| * Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the
| pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone)
|
| ... and so on.
|
| As well as a clearer understanding of how we go from hypothesis
| to fact. In many policy discussions, I see individual scientific
| papers cited which is a nonsense way to use science. One can find
| a paper which says anything and most results are false. That's
| still part of the process. Once a result has been poked at from
| enough directions, it becomes a theory and then an fact.
| Connecting the hypothetical process to empirical process would be
| awesome to see in schools.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of
| the flaws of scientific processes:
|
| >* Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes
|
| >* Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines
|
| >* Impact over integrity in hiring
|
| >* Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally,
| the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-
| telephone)
|
| None of these are part of the scientific process.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
| thereddaikon wrote:
| They didn't at any point say the scientific method. And I'm
| pretty sure that's intentional because there is nothing
| inherently wrong with the scientific method. The problem is
| with the processes we have built around modern academia which
| leads to a system that does not give an ideal or intended
| outcome.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Yes, but I guess I wouldn't label them as scientific
| processes, which I would assume be in line with the
| scientific method.
|
| These listed problems are all people and people's
| incentives problems, and have nothing to do with science.
| They exist just as much in non scientific endeavors, and so
| attaching the word science to them seems meaningless, and
| at worst muddies people's understanding of science.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Scientific processes =/= scientific method
|
| The problem is with the business of science.
|
| Processes are very much a business concept that most
| adults can understand. We develop new processes every day
|
| Furthermore it was used plural so it can't possibly be
| the scientific method because not only is that a proper
| noun but there is only one scientific method while there
| are many scientific processes.
|
| And yes they can be specific to science. The process of
| getting published in a peer reviewed journal is unique to
| academia.
|
| Or what about the process of getting grant funding for
| research?
|
| I know, you will say but that isn't science.
|
| But nobody is arguing against the validity of the
| scientific method. At least nobody worth listening to.
| When people say there are flaws with science that must be
| addressed they are saying they are flaws with the
| business of science. And the scientific community is not
| doing a great job of fixing them.
| neonological wrote:
| These are political flaws and flaws with human systems.
|
| You are missing the logical flaw buried within the scientific
| method itself.
|
| Nothing in science and therefore reality can be proven to be
| true. We can only falsify things in science.
|
| What this means is every claim ever made by anyone or any
| scientist from now to eternity can never be proven to be true.
|
| We can only make repeated attempts at falsifying things. After
| we fail to falsify a thing enough times we can say, hey this
| theory is maybe true. That is the best science can do and that
| is what nobody, including most of the people on hacker news do
| NOT understand.
|
| There is literally no such thing as an actual "fact" in science
| and therefore in reality as we know it.
|
| This flaw is the origin of most of the distrust in science it
| is also the reason why blind trust of the scientific method
| itself is wrong. No claim made by a scientist has actually ever
| been proven.
| kbelder wrote:
| Why do you see it as a flaw? Constantly shedding false
| beliefs equates to constant improvement.
|
| We all want to get closer to the truth; science is one
| technique for doing so, and since there's no direct line to
| God, it's the most efficient one. It has the best corrective
| feedback loops.
| neonological wrote:
| I see it as a flaw because in logic and math, it is very
| possible to prove your theorems to be true. It is just not
| possible to do so in reality. Logic is a game with a
| limited domain. Reality has an unknown domain, hence the
| inability to prove anything.
|
| Because this feature doesn't exist in science it is
| therefore a flaw.
|
| Additionally it doesn't align with human intuition. Humans
| assume by default that things can be proven and that facts
| exist. The truth is that nothing can be proven and facts
| don't actually exist. This is counter intuitive and
| therefore although science is the best tool we have, the
| counterintuitive qualities science possesses justifies
| calling these things flaws.
|
| This relatively unknown "flaw" is what drives most of the
| debate in the political arena. No scientist can ever prove
| global warming to be true. It is fundamentally impossible.
| The debate would be over long ago if there was some way for
| science to prove global warming to be real.
| nvahalik wrote:
| Science is seeing full-well the problem that many religions (at
| least, those with Scriptures) have been having for centuries.
| (s/hypothesis/belief/ and s/fact/creed/).
|
| * I see individual scripture references cited (out of context).
| (Called "proof texting"... "See, here's the proof!")
|
| * One can find a verse which says anything (if you ignore the
| context).
|
| * Once an idea has been poked at from enough directions, it
| becomes a belief and then a creed (or a part of one).
|
| Science, like religion also has a method: exegesis vs. the
| scientific method. A source: scripture vs. creation. Etc. etc.
|
| Sadly, this is not a problem which can be "fixed". You can have
| your die-hard zealots on either side. The evidence can be
| placed before them. You can show them that their error (heresy)
| has been denounced for a thousand years. But yet erroneous
| beliefs are still rampant.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| I have a somewhat less charitable take on the whole "context
| incorporation"/exegesis process. It's simply a process of
| reconciling an ancient, mostly irrelevant religious text to
| the modern-day economic, social and political realities. What
| do you need the Bible to do for you, dear leader/dear
| society? A la carte options available with a little exegesis.
|
| - Need the Bible to justify slavery? With a little judicious
| exegesis, here you go! Oh, society realized slavery is an
| abhorrent crime? Time to dust off your trusty exegesis
| experts.
|
| - Is homosexuality a horrible sin punishable by death, or is
| that now an anachronistic view which is making us bleed
| subscribers... scratch, the faithful? Religion Has A Method
| to correct this!
|
| - etc., etc.
| thereddaikon wrote:
| Science has also been used to justify some pretty terrible
| things.
|
| And that is their point, humans are the corrupting force
| here. Taking a framework and then using it to justify
| whatever they want. The scientific method is not uniquely
| immune to people cherry picking quotes from studies to
| justify their agendas. And in many ways it is very much the
| same thing as someone cherry picking scripture to justify
| the same.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| Sure, humanity is flawed and all that good stuff. But the
| central point is that _of course_ there 's a huge
| difference between religion (corruptable by humans) and
| science (corruptable by humans) - the scientific method
| is not _in itself_ based on evidence-free magical
| thinking, and is rooted in verifiable /falsifiable
| reality. So while the two can be compared at this
| superficial oh-but-what-about-flawed-humanity level, at
| their root/essence they are fundamentally, categorically
| different.
| nvahalik wrote:
| > the scientific method is not in itself based on
| evidence-free magical thinking
|
| However, the scientific method is, in many ways, based on
| faith. In science, you can only measure what you can
| observe. We cannot "observe" what occurred in the past.
| We can guess but it is a lie that we know without a doubt
| what happened before recorded history began: Nobody
| actually observed it.
|
| Each religion makes its own claim about its
| epistemological systems. It different for each, but each
| system ought to be internal consistent for it to make
| sense. Some systems are far more consistent than others.
| Based on the internal consistency, one can make an
| objective assessment as to the validity of said belief
| system. You can test it based on what it produces and how
| it judges itself.
|
| At the end of the day, science and religion do not stand
| on equal footing--but religion has to make sense first
| because our scientific method was built upon Bacon's own
| religious beliefs:
|
| "Bacon's entire understanding of what we call "science,"
| and what he called "natural philosophy," was fashioned
| around the basic tenets of his belief system."
|
| This belief system was Christianity--the idea that a
| creator created a system that can be known and studied
| and has order rather than chaos.
| gspr wrote:
| I'll bite: examples, please.
| nvahalik wrote:
| Sure. There are several that I've personally had to deal
| with: baptism (by creed? by birth?), the nature of
| hell/eternal fate of the wicked, nature of Christ, even the
| support of slavery, etc.
|
| The one that I see that's really in play right now actually
| has to do with the nature of hell/fate of the wicked.
|
| You've probably heard the fate of the wicked is that
| whoever does not believe will go to hell: a place of
| eternal conscious torment (ECT). Proponents of this
| position will lean heavily on various scriptures:
|
| * "It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with
| one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, 'where
| their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.'"
| Mark 9:47-48 * "..lake of burning sulfur, where the beast
| and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be
| tormented day and night for ever and ever." (Rev 20:10).
|
| There are a couple of examples. And they are used. A lot.
| However, the last couple of hundred years (at least, that
| we know of, perhaps further back, though it wasn't
| discussed as much) is the idea of annihilationism: That the
| fate of the wicked is _not_ ECT but rather is simply to
| finally die again forever.
|
| The doctrine of final judgement (for our purposes here is
| clearly defined in Matthew 25:31-46) declares that all of
| the dead will be raised and will be judged. So, if you were
| dead, you will be raised and then the final judgement will
| be made and the two sides (the left and the right) will go
| to their inheritance: either Christ's kingdom or eternal
| fire.
|
| But the idea that eternal fire _means_ eternal conscious
| torment for the wicked makes some specific assumptions that
| many people assume but are not supported:
|
| * Why is it assumed that all who are raised are now
| immortal? * Why does the nature of the fire (i.e. that it
| is eternal) mean that it must _burn_ eternally rather than
| simply describe its provenance and its effectiveness.
|
| For me (and for many others), we do not find the "evidence"
| of ECT compelling and can actually point to a number of
| other areas where ECT makes no sense. The biggest example
| is everyone's favorite verse: John 3:16 (For God so loved
| the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever
| believes in him shall not PERISH but have ETERNAL LIFE).
| EMPHASIS MINE. In what world does "Perish" mean "be alive
| but tortured forever"?
|
| Anyway, the point is that many people start with the end in
| mind. They start with ECT and work their way backwards.
| Scripture has the advantage over the natural sciences in
| that (at least for protestants) we believe the canon is
| closed and therefore no new information can be made
| available. We have what we have to work with.
| gspr wrote:
| That sure is a lot of religious gibberish. Your original
| claim was about science. Where is the connection?
| nvahalik wrote:
| The point is that both science and religion can "start
| with the end" in mind and back-fill to make their
| position seem solid.
|
| This has been done with global-warming/climate-change.
| Being done with COVID measures. Each side has their own
| set of data that they want to use but the wholistic set
| of data may or may not ultimately support an individual
| position.
| gspr wrote:
| You're not explaining anything. You're asserting your
| opinion. Again: examples (of scientists doing that),
| please?
| brightball wrote:
| If you ever take the time to read the studies being cited, they
| also rarely say what people think they say when citing them.
| frockington1 wrote:
| This article classifies differing opinions into 2 categories,
| those I like (disagreement) and those I don't like (deniers). The
| strategies outlined here will further decrease the publics faith
| in science.
| breck wrote:
| No mention of git. If it's not on the global information tracker,
| it ain't science. There's no excuse anymore.
|
| Let me repeat because this is important. If you aren't putting
| your research in Git, and publishing the repo, and are instead
| doing things like PDFs and Docs and private datasets, please
| don't call yourself scientist (exception: "bench" folks who are
| grinding out the data and not too involved in the
| analysis/publishing process). That was acceptable 50 years ago,
| but the environment has changed. That is not acceptable anymore.
| I don't care if that's not how academia does it. It's so
| obviously the right thing to do.
| vngzs wrote:
| You have the right idea, but an unhelpful perspective.
| Certainly not everyone who isn't a software developer is a
| "phony scientist!"
|
| If you'd like to convince scientists to come around to your
| line of thinking, explain the problems with current research
| papers. Tell them about the problems with publishing papers
| only, how others struggle to reproduce their research, and how
| it leaves much bad research that would be invalidated far
| sooner except that the information to recreate their trial was
| absent.
|
| Then explain how sharing the code and data with Git (or
| similar) can solve this problem. You'll find that you are much
| more persuasive.
| breck wrote:
| I agree with you that this isn't a persuasive approach. But
| I'm cutting to the chase.
|
| If anyone is working on this--helping onboard academics and
| non-programmers to git--this is an idea I'm looking to
| support (as an investor, donor, or whatever).
| a_conservative wrote:
| Isn't git an implementation detail here? Git repos don't
| have to be publicly available. They also don't have to
| contain history or multiple versions at all.
|
| I'm guessing what you really want is:
|
| 1) open formats for data
|
| 2) plain text instead of proprietary blobs
|
| 3) the ability to replicate calculations easily
|
| 4) the ability to see some sort of evolution or mistake-
| fixing in the project's history.
| webmaven wrote:
| _> 4) the ability to see some sort of evolution or
| mistake-fixing in the project 's history._
|
| Rather than 'mistake fixing', what I want out of a
| project's history is evidence that the author hasn't done
| some form of p-hacking. But that purpose can be served
| just as well by preregistration.
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preregistration_(science)
| breck wrote:
| Git is an implementation detail in the way x86 in the
| 2000's was an implementation detail. Of course in theory
| what I'm talking about doesn't have to be git, it could
| be another extremely well engineered, capable, reliable,
| trustworthy, auditable, fast, ubiquitous version control
| system. But in practice that means Git and there is
| _nothing_ on my forecasts that will come close to
| dethroning it in the next 10 years.
|
| I have seen 50 startups that have pitched building a
| shittier version of git for academics because they can't
| be bothered to spend time reading the internals of git
| and have no idea how well done it is.
| a_conservative wrote:
| > I have seen 50 startups that have pitched building a
| shittier version of git for academics because they can't
| be bothered to spend time reading the internals of git
| and have no idea how well done it is.
|
| I suspect git would make a fine back end for a more
| polished product for scientists. A github for scientists
| sounds very interesting.
| the_snooze wrote:
| The reality is much more nuanced than that, especially when
| you're dealing with sensitive human-subjects data.
| Confidentiality and consent are important factors to consider.
| Let's say you're doing work on how abusive romantic partners
| use technology to keep tabs on their victims [1]. Would it be
| reasonable to expect the raw recordings, transcripts, and
| recruitment process be made publicly available?
|
| [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3173574.3174241
| breck wrote:
| Synthetic data. Very easy.
|
| This example is a little clunky, bc was ~2 years ago, but for
| a GWAS study we did on Early-Onset Preeclampsia where we had
| clinical and genomic data for 109 pregnant woman in Hawai'i,
| we put everything on GitHub.
|
| [1] We created a grammar for the schema, which not only
| allowed us to double check the type safety of our data but
| then also synthesize a CSV [2] with one click and stick that
| in the repo so that reviewers/researchers could `git clone`
| the repo and reproduce everything without any permissions
| bottlenecks (obviously the results are gibberish with the
| synth data, and you have to contact us to get the real data,
| but this way you can get the code working and then it's just
| a simple file move to reproduce the full results). This is
| the way.
|
| [1] https://github.com/breckuh/eopegwas/blob/master/eopClinic
| alS...
|
| [2] https://github.com/breckuh/eopegwas/blob/master/mockData/
| cli...
| [deleted]
| Chris2048 wrote:
| The word "science" is the hard end of what should be a gradient.
|
| Sometimes just "truth-seeking", evidence-based, quantitative or
| numerate are good enough without having to invoke the spectre of
| "science".
|
| Maybe we need a general term (rational?) for describing
| appropriate terms, of which "science" is only appropriate to some
| fields.
| johndoe42377 wrote:
| Lol, it won't fly. First of all, science is just a methodology of
| establishing truth about some aspects of what we call reality.
| Everything which cannot be verified by a reproducible experiment
| is not a science. All theories, therefore, are mere theories.
| Analogue of religious sects.
|
| It also automatically disqualifies all humanities, and especially
| socially constructed bullshit like race theories, etc.
|
| That, in turn, will strip high social status of academics and
| "people doing science" from way too many people (which is
| absolutely good, so it will never happen).
|
| Science as a social construction took (along with big government)
| place of religion as prestigious occupation and the way to have a
| high social status.
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