11–20 of 22 posts
"There are No Panaceas" meme: panacea for "[X] is No Panacea" headlines?
World Cup no panacea for SAFrica's economic woes
Yuan Revalue Is No Panacea for US
Return to Pebble Beach no panacea for Woods
And a few others I'm too lazy to copy-paste.
On the other hand, "Your search - "is panacea" - did not match any documents."
Summary: Imperfect system is imperfect. 'Ya gotta love a tautology adorned as journalism. Are there any reasonable alternatives for privately funded research? No. There will always be the urge to game data to fit the hypothesis and honest people will still make mistakes. This forever shall remain a challenge for science. I'm struggling with the urge to flag, but recognize the applicability to HN.
I fail to see your point. The core claim that there are people who put far too much stock in the words-treated-as-magic "peer review" is definitely true; I encounter them all the time, to the point that I've also come to recognize it as a pattern. The fact that this is not true is, as you say, tautological. But some people need this fact brought to their attention, as it is clearly not generally understood. I've come…
For me, there are two caveats to this: 1) the mere possibility that a discipline of science might be wrong does not mean it is wrong, and unfortunately the possibility of wrongness is often used as an argument where it shouldn't be; 2) the various sciences tend to be wrong in a very specific way, and for some reason this often gets ignored in discussions like this.
The last time I can think of the popularly-accepted science of a discipline being "wrong" in exactly the opposite way from what later came to be accepted as "right" was the gradual shift from a terra-centric view of astronomy to a relativistic one. It turned out that not only was the Earth not the center of the universe, but the universe doesn't even have a center.
Since then, science -- and mathematics -- have been wrong in the sense that they are continually being revised, not reversed. Relativity represents a revision of Newton's laws, not a reversal, etc.
I think that there is less and less -- though not non-zero -- opportunity for any discipline of science to discover that its foundations are completely incorrect.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I fail to see your point. The core claim that there are people who put far too much stock in the words-treated-as-magic "peer review" is definitely true; I encounter them all the time, to the point that I've also come to recognize it as a pattern. The fact that this is not true is, as you say, tautological. But some people need this fact brought to their attention, as it is clearly not generally understood. I've come…
I also think a big part is how forthright a scientist is. Most scientists claim way more than can be supported by their evidence, and it's not always clear what assumptions are being made. There's a great talk, I can try to find it if there is interest, that discuss the hubris that most climate scientists have. Observing a system for a tiny portion of a cycle can in no way tell you the entire cycle. If you then admit…
Ironically, you've made a claim here which is unsupported by any evidence at all. ;-)
Seriously though, the thing about this is that research and experimental scientists are working in environments that you and I know very little about. Their claims are an extension of their experience in that environment; they spend a great deal of time for example designing experiments or attempting to reconcile large volumes of data, and when they've spent months -- or, more likely, years -- doing that, they might publish a paper.
Then the public occasionally gets ahold of this brief summary of the scientist's work over that period, and they object that the claims are specious or sparse or incomplete.
This is not to say that a scientist's claims should be trusted just because they're a scientist, but rather that the only acceptable challenge to a shortcoming in a scientific presentation is ... more science, not argument or conjecture.
To put it another way: it is extremely unlikely that a layman will find a consequential error in a peer-reviewed scientific paper published in a reasonable journal, especially without any domain knowledge in that particular field.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also think a big part is how forthright a scientist is. Most scientists claim way more than can be supported by their evidence, and it's not always clear what assumptions are being made. There's a great talk, I can try to find it if there is interest, that discuss the hubris that most climate scientists have. Observing a system for a tiny portion of a cycle can in no way tell you the entire cycle. If you then admit…
> Most scientists claim way more than can be supported by their evidence... Ironically, you've made a claim here which is unsupported by any evidence at all. ;-) Seriously though, the thing about this is that research and experimental scientists are working in environments that you and I know very little about. Their claims are an extension of their experience in that environment; they spend a great deal of time for…
I just want people to bend over backwards to tell me the ways in which they might be wrong, this is useful because it helps you understand the limits of understanding and can allow people to make informed decisions.
Summary: Imperfect system is imperfect. 'Ya gotta love a tautology adorned as journalism. Are there any reasonable alternatives for privately funded research? No. There will always be the urge to game data to fit the hypothesis and honest people will still make mistakes. This forever shall remain a challenge for science. I'm struggling with the urge to flag, but recognize the applicability to HN.
I fail to see your point. The core claim that there are people who put far too much stock in the words-treated-as-magic "peer review" is definitely true; I encounter them all the time, to the point that I've also come to recognize it as a pattern. The fact that this is not true is, as you say, tautological. But some people need this fact brought to their attention, as it is clearly not generally understood. I've come…
I'd make that statement even stronger: the consensus is almost certainly wrong. The variables are just in what manner it's wrong, and to what degree.
It's not all a revolutionary shift to a Copernican cosmos. Most things we know pretty well today, but ought to fully expect to have tweaked tomorrow. The cliche example is of Newtonian dynamics being improved by Einstein, which is still being refined through quantum mechanics, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Most scientists claim way more than can be supported by their evidence... Ironically, you've made a claim here which is unsupported by any evidence at all. ;-) Seriously though, the thing about this is that research and experimental scientists are working in environments that you and I know very little about. Their claims are an extension of their experience in that environment; they spend a great deal of time for…
Errors in science are well known and are part of the process, I didn't think I needed to provide evidence of that. Unfortunately science that deals with complex systems is much more difficult than those that don't. For instance, just look at nutrition research, look at the history of the food pyramid and you see poorly understood science having a substantial impact on those who are not experts because the nutrition e…
What you're grappling with here is basically the "I don't know what I don't know" problem. Other people on HN have talked about this before, but basically, there's the knowledge you know, the knowledge you know you don't know, and the knowledge that you don't know you don't know. How can you possibly begin to challenge an assertion in a scientific paper if you don't even know where the mistakes might be?
(I'm going through something similar right now in a criminal case. I have no background in law. I do not trust the attorneys involved. It's maddening.)
I agree that it would be nice if as a matter of habit there were a brief statement in papers and presentations outlining incomplete areas of the research or areas justifying further study. However, I would not want that to evolve into an onus on the part of the working scientists to educate every layman with a passing interest in their research.
If you really want to challenge something in a specific field, the best thing you can do is immerse yourself in that field for as long as it takes to develop an understanding of the basic principles. Demanding much else is merely intellectual laziness.
Summary: Imperfect system is imperfect. 'Ya gotta love a tautology adorned as journalism. Are there any reasonable alternatives for privately funded research? No. There will always be the urge to game data to fit the hypothesis and honest people will still make mistakes. This forever shall remain a challenge for science. I'm struggling with the urge to flag, but recognize the applicability to HN.
I fail to see your point. The core claim that there are people who put far too much stock in the words-treated-as-magic "peer review" is definitely true; I encounter them all the time, to the point that I've also come to recognize it as a pattern. The fact that this is not true is, as you say, tautological. But some people need this fact brought to their attention, as it is clearly not generally understood. I've come…
So is Thomas Kuhn's The Road Since Structure, which collects many of his papers on, mostly, the philosophy and history of science, which are more interesting than I would've thought.
Summary: Imperfect system is imperfect. 'Ya gotta love a tautology adorned as journalism. Are there any reasonable alternatives for privately funded research? No. There will always be the urge to game data to fit the hypothesis and honest people will still make mistakes. This forever shall remain a challenge for science. I'm struggling with the urge to flag, but recognize the applicability to HN.
The problem is that some people, especially those outside academia/research, have a different idea of what "passed peer review" means and a different idea of how the machinery of science works. Passing peer review doesn't mean that something has been proven as fact, it merely means (one hopes) that the authors did their due dilligence and put together research that seems solid. Put another way, it means that the reviewers don't think that the paper is obviously BS.
Peer review is just a spam filter.
The danger comes when people elevate passing through the spam filter with scientific proof.
Peer review is the start of the debate, not the end of it.
I would Love it if referee reports were published with papers. Why waste all of the unpaid time and research of the referees by compressing their opinions into a yes/no/revise decision? This would improve the quality of the reports, and make the process of reading papers much easier. One of the most difficult parts of reading a paper is trying to decide for yourself if the methods or conclusions of the paper are flaw…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Errors in science are well known and are part of the process, I didn't think I needed to provide evidence of that. Unfortunately science that deals with complex systems is much more difficult than those that don't. For instance, just look at nutrition research, look at the history of the food pyramid and you see poorly understood science having a substantial impact on those who are not experts because the nutrition e…
I wasn't being hostile (this time), I was just having a little fun. What you're grappling with here is basically the "I don't know what I don't know" problem. Other people on HN have talked about this before, but basically, there's the knowledge you know, the knowledge you know you don't know, and the knowledge that you don't know you don't know. How can you possibly begin to challenge an assertion in a scientific pa…
There are many incentives to overstate the validness of ones claims and unfortunately it weakens the overall strength of the field. I'm not asking that they make it understandable to the layman, but perhaps on any recommendation they could put confidence intervals on predictions.
Here's a presentation by Carl Wunsch, and here are the slides: http://web.mit.edu/esi/symposia/symposium-2009/2009-symposiu...
http://cdn.static.viddler.com/flash/simple_publisher.swf?key...
He's one of the worlds experts on the ocean, and is saying the same thing i am.
Here's a feynman quote on it:
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi. I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you are maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen. -- Richard Feynman, CARGO CULT SCIENCE
Also to be clear, I'm optimistic and hope we can solve all sorts of problems and discover how the world works -- but I think to we need to have integrity and maintain to foster and maintain that trust. The medical field is ripe with wild extrapolation from small studies, it's a sign of exhuberance -- "Hey, here's the answer to the problem you having!" When it should be, "It seems that in some situations this may help, we still have to do more studies and don't know why it works but it seems to." It's more honest and when things go wrong, which they almost always do the person understood that it wasn't well understood.
I encourage you to watch the video - it's by an expert saying that we don't have enough information to be sure about anything and he proposes the following advice:
In the meantime, study the system; study the control options; but----take precautions (mitigation), prepare for adaptation, and do nothing that is even possibly irreversible (which may be almost anything, including of course, the ongoing injection of greenhouse gases).
Also his example of gravity waves, I think is extremely enlightening.