Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

blogs.scientificamerican.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 134 posts

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#41

Post by Gravityloss »

apo wrote: post #9

You have a group of people in Washington tasked with doling out money for research. By its very nature this federal funding has politicized science for a long time. Ask anyone who has been through a scientific PhD program whether or not their field has been politicized because of grants received or not received. The trick this article plays is to argue in part that science needs to be politicized the right way. Diver…

Probably if you spend enough time and effort you can find something political in, say, the mathematics papers written by any given university research team on any given year. But if a politician advocates for teaching that Pi is exactly three, in my opinion that's on a whole different level.

Your post advocates for false equivalence, in a somewhat indirect manner. We get to "all science is politicized". And then the muddling of the waters is complete.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#42

Post by torstenvl »

throwaway713 wrote: post #4

One of the problems with the “defend science” movement is that it’s often being (mis)-used to support philosophical positions that are fundamentally unanswerable by science: concepts like afterlife, gender, and when life begins. I’m not saying I disagree with the popular viewpoints, but science is the wrong tool for the job. (Does human life have inherent value? I don’t know, but better predictive models and more exp…

When life begins is clearly a scientific question. Perhaps you mean the question of when society should recognize and protect personhood?

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#43

Post by goodfight »

povertyworld wrote: post #18

This seems like another case of the left being shortsighted like when the left cheers as bigtech purges conservatives never imagining that left voices can and will be next if they ever became a threat. In this case, they seem only focused on climate change, but they should consider that there may be other scientific facts that go counter to left narratives. I seem to remember James Damore's scandalous post riddled wi…

Exactly.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#44

Post by fromthestart »

BrainlingPdx wrote: post #15
fromthestart wrote: post #6

>Diversity in science is not just for optics. We need scientists from diverse backgrounds in all senses of the word—race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, geography, etc If you don't want science to be attacked politically, don't politicize science. We don't need to make sure that our scientists represent every color of the skin spectrum with a representative range of disabilities. We need objective, competent work…

Except that we are now seeing this is WRONG. Look at AI and machine learning. We are now finding algorithms that have implicit racial biases because the only people who worked on them were Asian and Caucasian. Not that the people working on them explicitly tried to write the algorithms with bias, they simply did because humans are BAD at projecting outside of their own experiences and what they see in the mirror. Tha…

>We are now finding algorithms that have implicit racial biases because the only people who worked on them were Asian and Caucasian

How do you know that these biases aren't just representative of actual biases in reality? More importantly, given the relatively small proportion of AI applications that operate on human data, indication of such a bias is a poor argument for the value of diversity across the industry.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#45

Post by mises »

BrainlingPdx wrote: post #15
fromthestart wrote: post #6

>Diversity in science is not just for optics. We need scientists from diverse backgrounds in all senses of the word—race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, geography, etc If you don't want science to be attacked politically, don't politicize science. We don't need to make sure that our scientists represent every color of the skin spectrum with a representative range of disabilities. We need objective, competent work…

Except that we are now seeing this is WRONG. Look at AI and machine learning. We are now finding algorithms that have implicit racial biases because the only people who worked on them were Asian and Caucasian. Not that the people working on them explicitly tried to write the algorithms with bias, they simply did because humans are BAD at projecting outside of their own experiences and what they see in the mirror. Tha…

The problem with calling something biased is that it carries a connotation of racism. There is a difference between disparate impact and disparate treatment, to use Eric Holder's terminology. I don't think humans are "projecting their own experiences", I think that the dataset that is fed to algorithms over-represents whites because they constitute a larger portion of the population. It may also over-represent asians because they are a larger portion of the silicon valley labor force. This does not mean they are attempting to mis-treat blacks, hispanics, etc.

Maybe there is progress to be made, but it will be difficult to make a facial-recognition algorithm work as well on the 13% of the population that is black compared to 77% white. That is, until the third world becomes a market. Then, they will be tremendously biased to non-whites, though I don't consider either bad.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#46

Post by antepodius »

SolaceQuantum wrote: post #25

Forgive me for my ignorance- I was under the impression that scientific inquiry has always been strongly affected by politics. See: The argument on whether or not evolution is real. The discovery that the sun does not revolve around the earth. The entire controversy behind the discovery of and research into AIDS. Is there something new I'm not understanding?

When someone else does it, it's Politics. When We do it, it's Science.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#47

Post by eitland »

> 47 percent of scientists at the National Park Service and 35 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency report they had been asked to omit the phrase "climate change" from their work.

I guess a certain percentage of those who asked scientists to do that did it for the same reason I dislike many (but certainly not all) blockchain initiatives: it has been bolted on a something where it didn't belong just to "profit" (or profit in the case of blockchains) from something that is hyped by the media.

Climate change is serious, but it detracts from important work when people are abusing those words to get funding for other unrelated research.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#48

Post by komali2 »

Veen wrote: post #21

> We need scientists from diverse backgrounds in all senses of the word—race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, geography, etc. I note a diversity of politics isn’t included.

Well given that the article is about defending science from politics, I'd imagine it would extend to removing politics in all senses of the word from science.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#49

Post by antepodius »

BrainlingPdx wrote: post #15
fromthestart wrote: post #6

>Diversity in science is not just for optics. We need scientists from diverse backgrounds in all senses of the word—race, ethnicity, gender, class, ability, geography, etc If you don't want science to be attacked politically, don't politicize science. We don't need to make sure that our scientists represent every color of the skin spectrum with a representative range of disabilities. We need objective, competent work…

Except that we are now seeing this is WRONG. Look at AI and machine learning. We are now finding algorithms that have implicit racial biases because the only people who worked on them were Asian and Caucasian. Not that the people working on them explicitly tried to write the algorithms with bias, they simply did because humans are BAD at projecting outside of their own experiences and what they see in the mirror. Tha…

>That have biases because Where are you pulling this causation from?

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#50

Post by tokai »

torstenvl wrote: post #42
throwaway713 wrote: post #4

One of the problems with the “defend science” movement is that it’s often being (mis)-used to support philosophical positions that are fundamentally unanswerable by science: concepts like afterlife, gender, and when life begins. I’m not saying I disagree with the popular viewpoints, but science is the wrong tool for the job. (Does human life have inherent value? I don’t know, but better predictive models and more exp…

When life begins is clearly a scientific question. Perhaps you mean the question of when society should recognize and protect personhood ?

I think your post clearly shows that it is a question of semantics.
Post reply on HN