211–220 of 402 posts
And just like with basic medicine people are now saying "Show me!" and "What about this?" and the scientists are either unwilling or unable to defend their positions.
That's why the trust in science is eroding.
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Do you mean you shouldn't raise your kids based on science? You shouldn't experiment to see what works with your child, or you just shouldn't do experiments on your child?
Children need love, compassion and a lot of patience. They want to be treated like living beings, not like science projects. Yes science in general can obviously make some generic guidelines or provide some good insights in very specific questions of this childraising enterprise, but the vast majority of choices and everyday actions will fall outside of this.
I find the distance, that analysing behaviour brings, actually helps with the patience, and compassion (if they're having a weird tantrum because they wanted something trivial). I also think it keeps me motivated in consciously raising my kids, rather than just passively whiling away the years.
Maybe I have younger kids, so there aren't really any philosophical issues being raised.
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Interpersonal relationships?
I'm a fan of NVC(non-violent communication) and that framework could be summarized by the sentence, "when you do X,I feel Y". You basically become an instrument that reports on your internal state, plus you're also supposed to avoid assuming anything about the other person's internal state. This is a lot more like science then the usual default of blaming and assumptions and implicit expectations that most people con…
Communication like that can be very helpful when dealing with personal conflict -- marriage, friendships, etc., but I can't see how that would help in the public sphere.
If a political opponent, writer, or public speaker were to say or write something like that, it would be irritating and off-putting. I'd think "OK, but what's your point?"
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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…
My friends sometimes try to validate conclusions of the papers or just re-run the data crunching presented in those papers.
They never succeed. Either the data sets don't actually match the data sets in papers, or something in the formulas is off, or the code does not even compile.
I did computation physics in college. We had to write code as the paper of homework/tests. Our TA would never run our binaries. He would take our source code, compile it, feed it two of his data sets (we had one) and check the result. If the student's code did not compile, the student would get an F for that homework. If the student's code bombed on the data set that was shared with students, the student would automatically get an F. And only if the second data set got different results than he expected would he go chasing the errors and potentially still give a good grade. By the end of two semesters everyone knew one never tweaked the code to just run the known data set and get the known result.
Science would benefit tremendously if this was the approach.
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Yes, but the scientific community has in-part brought this upon themselves. The actual research is inaccessible to the public, hidden behind paywalls in subscription-only journals, and written in a form that is very difficult if not impossible for the general public to understand. For most of the general public, the output of the scientific community is just a poorly translated and often misleading headline.
It's also become incredibly complex and utterly alien to even practitioners in the fields - I can't read computer science doctoral dissertations with any degree of understanding. That's not a failing of the language, that's an evolution of it - we're at a point now where we need years and years of education to be able to be able to speak the language required for the research. It absolutely is difficult for the gener…
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It's easy if you're deciding between two masses for an electron. In that case you've already decided that some theory which describes electrons is the one for you--so in that context one is a fact that the other is just plain false. But it gets tricky in cases where you're deciding between facts whose enclosing theories are incompatible. Is gravity a force, or is it an acceleration? Each is a fact in its own theory--…
>Is gravity a force, or is it an acceleration? Each is a fact in its own theory--the more relevant question has to do with your situation: which theory is more useful? I would call that a model, not a fact. And, as the saying goes, all models are wrong. If it's impossible to do an experiment that shows one model to be better than another in a situation, then the choice is meaningless. Both are fine.
As science gets more complex, we either need to create a way for people to perform this bottom-up reasoning themselves, or we need to appeal to authority.
Appeal to authority is dangerous and anti-scientific. IMO, people are right to reject that.
The way in which public considers science today is much more analogous to the way the public considered religion during the time of Galileo. Think of the way people are castigated for not believing in scientific "truths". I see signs in peoples yard saying that "in this house, we believe science is real". As someone who has studied biochemistry for years, this kind of reverence for science is truly troubling. The one…
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…
Political biases in every aspect from results interpretation to what questions we're allowed to ask, historical "just so" arguments that are sometimes falling flat (much to the detriment of the health of the planet), the lack of "negative results" studies due to funding biases and the replication crisis work together to cause a profound skepticism of the body of scientific institutional knowledge to be in some ways _more scientific_ than just reading and accepting the latest scientific news.
The way in which public considers science today is much more analogous to the way the public considered religion during the time of Galileo. Think of the way people are castigated for not believing in scientific "truths". I see signs in peoples yard saying that "in this house, we believe science is real". As someone who has studied biochemistry for years, this kind of reverence for science is truly troubling. The one…
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There's a beautiful article that I think serves as a model example. In the field of education, there's a certain idea that's believed by many teachers, but which scientists (in cognitive psychology / learning science) know to be a myth. Against this background, this article (“Why mythbusting fails”) discusses why the scientists' approach towards transmitting this knowledge fails to convince its audience. It is worth reading, because it is really about persuasion, about dealing with disagreements between people: https://deansforimpact.org/why-mythbusting-fails-a-guide-to-...
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Science is many things:
1. A wonderful method for arriving at reliable knowledge. The best we have.
2. The set of facts accumulated via that method. This set will always be tentative, incomplete and contain some fraction of false positives.
3. The set of facts believed by professional scientists today.
What would be good for people to trust would be (1) > (2) > (3), but for people taking sides, the priority is inverted: they care more that people be on the side of science (against religion or whatever), than that they apply the scientific method wherever possible.
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In his books like The Mosaic Distinction and the Price of Monotheism, the author Jan Assmann discusses the idea of “counterreligions”. Though many people in Western society may no longer be religious in one sense, they still retain certain attitudes picked up from it, like the missionary/crusader zeal of treating those who do not believe in the same things as them as enemies needing to be either converted or fought, general condescension towards “heathens”, etc. We see this in discussions about politics or nearly anything, where people neatly get polarized into opposing sides rather than a gradual spectrum as one may expect.
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In this very article, see things like:
> Science denial, however, is like crime: combating it requires…
(treating disbelievers as heretics to be fought)
> Galileo cleverly acknowledged the values of his enemies.
I don't know about Galileo's views, but why view acknowledgement of others' values as merely a “clever” device? How about replacing “cleverly” with “sincerely”, and “enemies” with “real people we'd like to persuade”?
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> 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…
So I have some grad/phd student friends and a small computational lab - enough cores, ram, storage and jobbing engines that in 2000s it would have been a respectable not quite super computer but none the less very powerful system capable of crunching lots of numbers quickly. My friends sometimes try to validate conclusions of the papers or just re-run the data crunching presented in those papers. They never succeed .…
This is just the original idea behind science as developed in the renaissance. The resistance to checking each others work is a recent phenomenon.
Edit to add a source:
> "the foundation of scientific societies compelled scientists to change the way in which experiments were presented so that not only members of the scientific community but also the inexperienced reader would be able to repeat them by following the same steps.
[...]
Robert Boyle also played an important role in the evolution of scientific writing (Gotti,1996, 2001; Hunter, 2007). Fulton (1932: 78) has highlighted the contribution of the scientist, describing Boyle’s undertaking “to establish science as an integral part of the intellectual life of ordinary men”. He encouraged scientists to write in a language that their contemporaries could understand, and he undoubtedly did more than anyone of his time to make scientific methodology part of the intellectual equipment of educated men.
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According to Gotti, one of the features of experimental essays is brevity, but this brevity of form does not imply brevity in the exposition of the subject. On the contrary, experiments are usually reported in full, furnishing the reader with all the minutest details. The aim of such a report is, after all, to make it possible for the experiment to be repeated, making the precision of the description an important factor." https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2007.20.06
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There is a huge difference between swatting someone to get their attention and hitting someone with enough force to cause injury.
If it's meant as a punishment it's not "to get their attention"; it's done to inflict pain. Again, it wouldn't be acceptable with an adult; just apply the same standard.