[HN Gopher] Bad science as genre fiction
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Bad science as genre fiction
Author : nabla9
Score : 14 points
Date : 2024-11-08 15:44 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| vundercind wrote:
| I was going to write that this comparison makes me think of
| largely-wrong "surprising truths!" airport non-fic books, but I
| see on further reading that the author is way ahead of me and
| this analysis includes those in its scope.
|
| To the formulaic-ness of it, there's the recurring ha-ha-only-
| serious quip from the If Books Could Kill podcasters that the
| more bad self-help, political hack, and trendy "science" books
| they read, the more sure they are that they're all actually the
| same book.
| Handprint4469 wrote:
| 100%
|
| I used to be a sucker for this type of books: non-fiction,
| "science-based", feel-good, insight-porn pamphlets inflated to
| 300 pages with shoehorned anecdotes and a very distinct flavour
| of extrapolative slop.
|
| They are usually written by journalists, TED-addicted
| researchers and, more recently, Youtube and Twitter
| influencers.
|
| The depressing thing is: For me, the realization that 99% of
| them are shit only came after reading hundreds of them. My
| guess is that my brain needed enough samples in order to start
| accurately classifying them.
|
| It's like one develops taste only after being exposed to a lot
| of terrible art, since then the actual great art stands out
| like a beacon.
| vundercind wrote:
| In Adler's ( _How to Read a Book_ ) terms, I think lots of
| folks don't naturally learn to do his "third reading"[1]
| simultaneously with the first two readings (or maybe at
| all?), and tend to read a book only once, or to read it more
| than once but doing the "same" reading each time. That plus
| some assumptions that the social proof of a book getting
| recommended by, say, Bill Gates and being a bestseller means
| it must not just be a whole bunch of lazy crap that sometimes
| contradicts its own citations, can explain a lot of things
| slipping by a person that, viewed with hindsight, were pretty
| sketchy.
|
| Certain social science or liberal arts programs are pretty
| good at, if nothing else, pushing students to get better at
| that "third reading" and developing a heuristic, automatic
| sense for when a piece is behaving in a maybe-dodgy way, but
| I think a lot of other programs aren't, so even educated
| people, at least those who don't just naturally pick the
| skill up young, may take a rougher road to it, if they ever
| pick it up. (Yes, I'm aware that my calling out some social
| science training as a good way to hone that skill is funny,
| given how much junk science, pop and otherwise, centers
| around the social sciences)
|
| [1] Adler's three readings are: 1) coming to terms--that is,
| seeking an understanding of the basic assumptions,
| definitions, context, et c, the author is operating under,
| and the basic thrust or topic or goal of the work; 2)
| Understanding the author's argument, message, points and so
| forth; 3) critical reading--is the message any good? Does it
| hold together? Are the definitions and premises well-
| considered, useful, and applied consistently? Does that
| passage there look a bit _iffy_ , is perhaps worded like the
| author's trying to get away with something, and maybe needs a
| closer look? If such-and-such part crumbles on closer
| examination or consultation of other sources, what of the
| rest is salvageable, if any?
| csours wrote:
| Yeah, lately I've begun asking myself "How much work would you
| actually need to do to know this or prove this, and what would
| that work look like"
| csours wrote:
| I believe that we process facts in a narrative. If you look at a
| bare fact, your mind automatically creates a narrative.
|
| Murder rate 1%
|
| 22 Angstrom
|
| Purple Burglar Alarm
|
| That narrative takes place in a framing story.
|
| 'Science', among other things, is a very detailed framing story
| that modern society uses to evaluate facts.
|
| An individual's framing story includes all of their history and
| biases and motivated reasoning and incentives and all the rest of
| the fallacies.
|
| So yes, bad science is fiction, but even good science is
| narrative. If this feels wrong, go re-read a paper. Look at a
| figure or a sentence in the abstract. Your mind constructs a
| narrative.
| aithrowawaycomm wrote:
| Andrew addressed this in the comments:
| Regarding storytelling: Thomas Basboll and I have argued that
| stories are important not just for communicating science to
| others but also in doing good science. My perspective
| here is: 1. Fictional stories are an informal sort
| of predictive model checking, in which the process of working
| out a story is a way of understanding the implications of a
| scenario. 2. Nonfiction stories are a sort of prior
| predictive check, where the unexpected twist that makes the
| story so satisfying represents a revelation of some aspect of
| reality that confounds our expectations, that is, does not fit
| with our implicit or explicit model of the world.
|
| That second point is a bit murky but this is a comment on a
| blog :) Here is the much more detailed paper he co-wrote with
| Basboll:
| http://stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/research/published/storytel...
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