People have no idea which sciences are robust • Hacker News Board

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#21

Post by jbapple » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 4:56 PM UTC

Some sciences are not robust because they are hard to make robust. In contrast, forensic science, the example given in this article as perceived by the public as robust, seems to be set up by the government's criminal justice apparatus to ensure that the state imprisons and executes as many people as possible. Examples of impossible and absurd forensic science include the results of James Grigson, Pamela Fish, Annie Dookhan, Michael West, Steven Hayne, John Preston, and FBI hair analysis.

For example, Steven Hayne claimed that he could tell from a bullet wound that more than one person was holding the gun. John Preston claimed his dog could track a human scent on a street after a hurricane. Annie Dookhan and Pamela Fish falsified drug and DNA tests.

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#22

Post by xaa » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 5:01 PM UTC

jfarlow wrote: post #7

analog31 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also harder to do things to plants and mice, much less humans, without knocking them so far out of balance that it ceases to be a meaningful experiment.

That's a strong statement. I'd say it 'ceases to be trivially interpretable'. And I think this is part of where the 'the published paper said ___ so it must be true!' disparity between scientists and public becomes more apparent. In biology when you design a good experiment, run it, come up with a model that fits your experiment, no scientist would ever pretend that their articulated model was how things actually wor…

> just to come up with the most simplistic model

Yeap. Bioinformatician here. Not only are most published models overly simplistic -- which everyone acknowledges -- but I think our bigger problem is we don't even have a reasonable "meta-model" of biology.

What I mean by that is, imagine experiments were instantaneous and free. How would we then incorporate the results into a mathematical/computational/predictive framework that describes biological reality in a way analogous to physics? AFAIK, we haven't the foggiest clue.

Biology is pretty theory-light and empiricism-heavy, probably because we have good results with things like "I dunno what this mold is secreting, but it seems to be killing the bacteria!"

So our experimental results are pretty precise (although arguably not "robust" between strains/conditions/etc), when people bother to use n>3, but the models and theory are anything but.

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#23

Post by skylan_q » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 5:03 PM UTC

alganet wrote: post #16

saycheese wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, what is science?

I like the definition that Carl Sagan presented on Cosmos: > It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be criti…

Scientists agree. The science is settled.

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#24

Post by nickpinkston » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 5:04 PM UTC

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #18

IMO the "March for Science" movement and these kinds of "People who don't vote the same as me do so because they're not as smart as me" kinds of things are starting to really annoy me. Science is a tool/process. Not an agenda. Everyone in their own heads will choose whether or not to believe something regardless of how much SCIENCE they shout. The same people who yell SCIENCE on the internet could be the same people…

Sure the SCIENCE crowd can be a bit much, but science has an "agenda" of finding the truth and making that knowledge useful for people.

That has clear political ramifications: climate change, pollution, GMO foods, heliocentric solar system, etc. Science may not have an agenda (ish?), but it does support/detract from others agendas.

Humanism is likely the agenda of the marchers, and their aesthetics/ethics are informed by "science".

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#25

Post by xaa » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 5:12 PM UTC

NikolaeVarius wrote: post #18

IMO the "March for Science" movement and these kinds of "People who don't vote the same as me do so because they're not as smart as me" kinds of things are starting to really annoy me. Science is a tool/process. Not an agenda. Everyone in their own heads will choose whether or not to believe something regardless of how much SCIENCE they shout. The same people who yell SCIENCE on the internet could be the same people…

Is this somehow related to the article? The implicit assumption behind the linked study is that not all sciences are equally precise and robust.

Therefore "we should always trust science" and "we should never trust science" are simplistic; rather, we should trust a field to the degree it has reliable methods and robust and reproducible results. So far, so good. But the main finding in OP is that people's perceptions of a field's accuracy relative to other fields is not always correctly calibrated.

My institute sent me an invite to the "March for Science". I don't plan to participate because I don't think scientists should get political in their professional capacity. But to the extent that the March is trying to send the message: "you don't get to cherrypick which scientific results you like and defund the rest", I support it.

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#26

Post by ealloc » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 5:13 PM UTC

0x445442 wrote: post #8

msandford wrote: post #2

Physics and chemistry are pretty robust, everything else is far squishier. It's pretty easy to get identical atoms or molecules or subatomic particles. It's much harder to grow a field of identical plants or raise hundreds of identical mice.

Agreed, from a Physicist's perspective, Darwin's Theory is extremely "squishy".

My impression is that physicists who say this usually don't know much about the theory and evidence for evolution. (I am trained in physics, I now do biophysics).

What about the beautiful and often very precise linear relationship between radioactive dating of the fossil record, and genetic dating using the molecular clock?

What about the beatiful correspondence often found between the principle components of genetic variation and geographical position (isolation by distance)?

What about all the biochemical discoveries related to DNA function (including the existence of DNA itself), how mutations occur, about heritability?

What about everything we've discovered about genome composition and how it changes over time? (duplicate genes, pseudogenes, transposons, hotspots of various kinds).

Is a DNA sequence less precise than a spectral line?

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#27

Post by pdkl95 » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 5:14 PM UTC

(I've posted this before, but it's very relevant to this topic)

Learning to filter guesswork and scams from robust claims is easily the most important skill that the general pubic needs to learn. It's hard to progress in any other topic if you don't understand the basic methods for filtering good information from the many mistakes, misinterpretations, scams and other bad data.

Democracy and modern civilization itself requires at least some understanding of the scientific method. Sagan's warning in "The Demon-Haunted World"[1] was frighteningly prescient:

    I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time --
    when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all
    the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome
    technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing
    the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the
    ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority;
    when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our
    critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good
    and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition
    and darkness...

Until the public "baloney detection kit"[2] (and uses it regularly), trying to teach other topics is probably a waste of time, especially when you aren't even speaking the same language[3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World

[2] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-k...

[3] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#28

Post by xaa » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 5:17 PM UTC

ealloc wrote: post #26

0x445442 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, from a Physicist's perspective, Darwin's Theory is extremely "squishy".

My impression is that physicists who say this usually don't know much about the theory and evidence for evolution. (I am trained in physics, I now do biophysics). What about the beautiful and often very precise linear relationship between radioactive dating of the fossil record, and genetic dating using the molecular clock? What about the beatiful correspondence often found between the principle components of genetic…

(Bioinformatics) I wonder if he means not that evolution is false/unfalsifiable/irreproducible, but that it is not really a very predictive theory. I agree there is a lot of evidence that it happened and continues to happen, but predicting how it will happen, i.e., how an organism will evolve, what genes will mutate etc, in a certain environment, is very difficult and really basically impossible.

> What about the beatiful correspondence often found between the principle components of genetic variation and geographical position (isolation by distance)?

Funny you mention this. There is a student I work with trying to observe this with metagenomics data with much less success than you might imagine.

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#29

Post by d-sc » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 5:25 PM UTC

It's interesting how there is likely more people reading this from hackernews than the 217 people surveyed in the study.

Re: People have no idea which sciences are robust

#30

Post by magicalist » Sun, Mar 05, 2017, 5:38 PM UTC

xaa wrote: post #28

ealloc wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My impression is that physicists who say this usually don't know much about the theory and evidence for evolution. (I am trained in physics, I now do biophysics). What about the beautiful and often very precise linear relationship between radioactive dating of the fossil record, and genetic dating using the molecular clock? What about the beatiful correspondence often found between the principle components of genetic…

(Bioinformatics) I wonder if he means not that evolution is false/unfalsifiable/irreproducible, but that it is not really a very predictive theory. I agree there is a lot of evidence that it happened and continues to happen, but predicting how it will happen, i.e., how an organism will evolve, what genes will mutate etc, in a certain environment, is very difficult and really basically impossible. > What about the bea…

> but predicting how it will happen, i.e., how an organism will evolve, what genes will mutate etc, in a certain environment, is very difficult and really basically impossible.

By that measure physics isn't predictive either. Any moderately complex system and the best we can do is statistical models, often with little to no predictive power.