The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back • Hacker News Board

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#281

Post by chiefalchemist » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:59 AM UTC

mjevans wrote: post #176

balabaster wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like hearing that science says that fat is bad... and then eggs are bad for you... and alcohol is bad... and then another study says that a glass of wine a day is good for your heart... and salt is bad... then sugar is bad... then carbohydrates are bad... and now fat is good as long as you don't overdo carbohydrates... and eggs have good cholesterol and are really good for you... and salt is necessary to balance…

Oversimplification for sound bytes (and headlines/click-bait) is the primary cause for this. News outlets are eager to 'report first' and don't bother correctly framing the science in a proper context of one study //which suggests more research and confirmation is necessary//. Publish or perish, along with the lack of replication rather than trying to find something exciting to publish, or even enshrining the effort…

Most of the time the news outlets / pulishers don't understand the difference between correlation and causation. Frankly, I'm not even sure if many scientists understand the difference.

Get some data. Beat it up until you get something attention grabbing. Publish. Get paid. Worry about any fallout later.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#282

Post by everdev » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:00 AM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #228

everdev wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody really knows what they're talking about, paradigms shift, and further study is required People so often miss this. Science is a slow, evolving and never ending process. The day a new study comes out, people want to use it as evidence that something is 'settled science'. Even things as fundamental to our knowledge of the universe like gravity have evolved over time and are still being understood at deeper and…

> People so often miss this. Science is a slow, evolving and never ending process. The day a new study comes out, people want to use it as evidence that something is 'settled science'. Unless it is AGW. That's settled science and 99.9% of scientists agree with Al Gore even though in 1970s we were heading for Global Cooling and that was settled science. That's the fundamental problem: how difficult is it to say "Based…

> Unless it is AGW

That's the catch is that even things that have overwhelming scientific consensus are not "settled science".

There's always more data to collect and more theories to test.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't believe the data or act on the conclusions, far from it. I just don't agree with using the absolute term "settled science". It's not like there's an equation everyone agrees on or a reproducible experiment we can run.

We're still learning as we go and revising projections frequently. But there's no shame in making personal or political decisions based on our best scientific understanding of the day, we do it all the time and it would be just as big of a mistake to act like we know nothing about climate change as acting like we already know everything.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#283

Post by XorNot » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:05 AM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #228

everdev wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody really knows what they're talking about, paradigms shift, and further study is required People so often miss this. Science is a slow, evolving and never ending process. The day a new study comes out, people want to use it as evidence that something is 'settled science'. Even things as fundamental to our knowledge of the universe like gravity have evolved over time and are still being understood at deeper and…

> People so often miss this. Science is a slow, evolving and never ending process. The day a new study comes out, people want to use it as evidence that something is 'settled science'. Unless it is AGW. That's settled science and 99.9% of scientists agree with Al Gore even though in 1970s we were heading for Global Cooling and that was settled science. That's the fundamental problem: how difficult is it to say "Based…

No one discovering something new about gravity tomorrow is going to make general relativity or even Newtonian dynamics less applicable today in their domains.

Similarly all climate science today does in fact have to explain how global cooling observations in the 1970s were found.

No one denying AGW though has ever shown any interest in explaining the data.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#284

Post by pdonis » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:27 AM UTC

aeternus wrote: post #258

pdonis wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see this too. Unfortunately, at present I don't know if we even have an institution that everyone would trust to provide this information in an impartial way. Also, there are still judgments involved even with this task as you describe it. How is it decided which experiments support or refute a given theory/hypothesis? How widely do we cast our net for what theories/hypotheses get included? Do we impo…

If I were designing it, I'd have the experimenters determine support / refute. In order to be included, they would have to have a clear write-up of the experimental setup, detailed results, etc. All theories could be included, the better the theory, the more confirming experiments it should have.

> I'd have the experimenters determine support / refute.

Wouldn't that be a conflict of interest?

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#285

Post by matthewdgreen » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:27 AM UTC

weberc2 wrote: post #209

matthewdgreen wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think those signs indicate blind, unquestioning support for “scientific truths” as practiced by some mythical scientific priesthood. They are a response to a troubling political tendency that has made the evaluation of certain scientific findings into a question of political and tribal beliefs rather than one that involves proper skepticism, education and scientific investigation. If the situation was that th…

> The situation is instead that a vast number of scientists are producing findings that contradict certain political preferences, and the response has not been a deeper investigation made in good faith — but rather an outright political rejection of the findings. How does a layperson make a deeper investigation on their own? The research is typically paywalled, the jargon is inaccessible, the experiments are prohibit…

1. You use sci-hub. Or write the researchers. Scientists don’t want to keep their work secret nor do they want a “priestly caste”, they want it out there and read. They work like dogs so people on HN can read and actually understand their work and not write about their political feelings instead.

2. Even if you’re not qualified to do the science yourself, you try to reject implausible ideas like the notion that there’s some grand scientific conspiracy against your preferred ideas. If you’re inclined to believe in some scientific result that is also the result that would be vastly preferred by industry and the richest people on earth, then you should be pretty confident that scientists who are willing to consider that outcome are getting resources to investigate it, and if those resources were producing credible results they’d be making waves in the scientific community. And if the scientific community was somehow censoring those credible results, we’d be hearing all about it.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#286

Post by arduanika » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:34 AM UTC

chiefalchemist wrote: post #278

balabaster wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is a public perception problem. The reason that a troubling number of people no longer believe in science isn't that scientific method is flawed or that people don't believe in scientific method. The bigger concern is the way that scientific studies are mounted, paid for by interested parties that have conflicts of interest to produce results favourable to a desired outcome and then they're presented a…

> "I believe this is a public perception problem." I see it differently. The problem isn't the public. The public has actually done a commendable job sensing what's been going on. It's not fair - however unintentional - to tie the public to the problem. It's bad enough Science keep denouncing the public, when it's Science who has mucked up it's own reputation. The pubic is a mirror. Science, much like journalism, has…

I think you and GP are pretty close to agreement on this point. The whole thing has a Will Rogers twang to it -- "We've got a public perception problem. To be specific, the public is too perceptive." (Not an actual quote, just the sort of thing he might have said).

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#287

Post by eanzenberg » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:38 AM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #228

everdev wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nobody really knows what they're talking about, paradigms shift, and further study is required People so often miss this. Science is a slow, evolving and never ending process. The day a new study comes out, people want to use it as evidence that something is 'settled science'. Even things as fundamental to our knowledge of the universe like gravity have evolved over time and are still being understood at deeper and…

> People so often miss this. Science is a slow, evolving and never ending process. The day a new study comes out, people want to use it as evidence that something is 'settled science'. Unless it is AGW. That's settled science and 99.9% of scientists agree with Al Gore even though in 1970s we were heading for Global Cooling and that was settled science. That's the fundamental problem: how difficult is it to say "Based…

"Settled science." The 2100 predictions have varied so widely. Most current simulations predict 1-4ft increase in sealevel by 2100. The predicted effects have varied widely and will probably continue to.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#288

Post by throwawayjava » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 1:54 AM UTC

tabtab wrote: post #127

A bigger problem is when and how to rely on "subject experts". My car mechanic knows far more about cars than I do, but he/she may also be biased into recommending unnecessary costly repairs to line her/her pocket. Climate change skeptics often question the financial motivation of climatologists. It's certainly something to consider, but they rarely propose alternatives. For example, a committee could be set up to in…

> Climate change skeptics often question the financial motivation of climatologists. It's certainly something to consider, but they rarely propose alternatives.

I don't think this argument is being made in good faith.

More importantly, it's kind of absurd on face. Science pays horribly. See: literally any thread on HN about PhD programs. See also: levels.fyi vs. the starting salary for asst. profs at your local state university branch campus.

Whenever someone makes this argument, I show them a picture of the apartment I lived in during grad school and then point out that even the "winners" of the rat race who get professorships can leave academia and double their income over night.

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#289

Post by ardy42 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:00 AM UTC

pvaldes wrote: post #224

yters wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there is the fact that science was created by religious societies, Christianity in particular. Many of the fundamental discoveries came about due to religious motivations and religious principles: the world is orderly and understandable because it was created by a transcendent mind. Take away religion and we would not have science.

Well, Aristotle is still studied. Nobody pray to Zeus.

> Well, Aristotle is still studied

Didn't Aristotle basically say a projectile will move in a straight line until it basically "runs out of gas," even though everyone who's ever thrown something can see that's not true, just because he thought it ought to work that way?

Re: The rise and fall of scientific authority, and how to bring it back

#290

Post by xfs » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:01 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #270

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once you do an experiment and record certain results, those results don't change. You seem to believe that facts are like rocks: You can look at a rock with one pair of glasses, and then you can put a different pair of glasses on and be reasonably assured that you're looking at the same rock. This works because the laws of physics give us a context in which rocks can be individuated. Reality is a convenient authori…

> So far as I can tell, there is no such authority for facts. Huh? You just described it: reality is the authority. > I think this situation is simpler if these all count as separate facts. No, they are different theoretical descriptions of the facts. The facts are the particular experimental apparatus Michelson and Morley used and the particular numbers they recorded when they made their measurements. > Do "the fact…

Raw facts are meaningless without models, theories, or even, ideologies. Without meaning you can't do anything useful with it, or anything "that works." You always have to have a theory in order to predict the future based on facts and then have experiments to verify the predictions. No meaningful experiments can exist without a establishing theory.

All facts are alternative facts in the sense that facts are only accessible and made meaningful through theories and there is no one true theory.