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

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

#241

Post by xvector »

TimTheTinker wrote: post #205
Barrin92 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's the point of science at all to be honest. The point of scientific endeavour is to discover facts about the world. That's a really hard job, and the majority of people are not scientists, and even a trained scientist cannot verify the overwhelming majority of existing science by themselves, which means that science, like any other sufficiently large human collaboration, requires institutions, trus…

> religion that puts food on their table, makes their planes stay in the sky and makes them healthy again when they fall sick Your phrasing makes it sound like you're conflating science and physical reality... that's kind of a pet peeve of mine (sorry). Science provides some of the knowledge required for engineers and doctors to do their jobs, but it's the work they do with that knowledge that accomplishes those thin…

I think that is very pedantic. Of course science != physical reality.

However, in general discussion no one is going to say

> "potentially flawed but workable approximation of natural 'rules' that allow us to to manipulate natural phenomenon in a manner that results in food on our table, planes in your sky, and cures for our sicknesses"

No, it's much more reasonable to say

> science that puts food on our table, planes in our sky, and cures for our sicknesses

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

#242

Post by cc439 »

mcguire wrote: post #156

" The imperial powers, especially after Sultan Abdülmecid I (1823–61), saw the cause as a lack of Western-style science. Yet could they import it, and still be faithful Muslims and patriotic citizens? The debate took place at all levels of Ottoman society, from government to popular culture, in novels, plays and even cartoons. When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder and first president of the Turkish Republic, declared i…

"Without that, it is possible for people who are not personally accomplished, who pontificate in recycled stock phrases, who polarize situations and who are insatiable braggarts coveting media coverage, to acquire power and influence."

This is almost perfectly personified in the form of Bill Nye the Science Guy post-2000 or thereabouts. I also feel this applies to practically all figures in the "pop science" scene to a lesser degree. Few meet the standard of being an "insatiable braggart" but most are attention hungry and willing to abandon their stated principles in pursuit of furthering their influence.

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

#243

Post by js2 »

effie wrote: post #240
MockObject wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hence, if any authority, 'scientific' or otherwise, asserts their authority instead of providing individually verifiable evidence of its claims, then we can say they are being unscientific, regardless of title. Indeed, the motto of the Royal Society is "Take nobody's word for it". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nullius_in_verba

Folk-wisdom version: 'talk is cheap'.

Those don't mean the same thing at all.

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

#244

Post by yeahitslikethat »

balabaster wrote: post #124
charliesharding wrote: post #5

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 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…

That's why I believe in science, but I don't believe in people.

People will and have corrupted every institution ever created.

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

#245

Post by cameronh90 »

Erlich_Bachman wrote: post #37
cameronh90 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may confuse believing in the scientific method for believing in the current scientific consensus, which as you point out is fluid. However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion.

A dogmatic belief in anything is detrimental. It takes wisdom to understand this. Many followers of science lack this. Scientific method is a great tool - for the type of questions that it is designed to deal with - and a disaster waiting to happen if used for other areas of inquiry.

I agree. However, most people are not philosophers, and are going to essentially pick a dogma. I think it's better that is the scientific method.

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

#246

Post by zxcvvcxz »

"Science" has real problems. We can't even discuss controversial viewpoints, such as case-specific dangers with vaccines (yes, they are real, and the CDC covered up data) and climate skepticism (does lowering CO2 really do anything meaningful, vs. the fact that we're coming out of an ice age from 10K+ years ago).

But it's impossible to have an evidence-backed rational conversation about these topics with scientists, let alone the general public.

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

#247

Post by cameronh90 »

mymythisisthis wrote: post #203
cameronh90 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may confuse believing in the scientific method for believing in the current scientific consensus, which as you point out is fluid. However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion.

That's how medieval scholasticsim was born. Originally logic, and the works of Greek philosophers were explored. Soon rules around logic became formalize, and a dogmatism set in. Afterwards students were discouraged from original thought around logic and just forced to learn the following mnemoic Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque prioris. Cesare, Camestres, Festino, Baroco secundae. Tertia Darapti, Disamis, Datisi,…

I think if you're studying science and logic, then you should definitely have a curiosity regarding the foundations of your field. But is that really something we can expect the general public to get involved in? It's a hugely mindbogglingly complex topic.

For the average person to look at the scientific method, conclude it (at least mostly) works and believe in the fundamentals of the process, I think, is a good thing.

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

#248

Post by effie »

tathougies wrote: post #166
cameronh90 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may confuse believing in the scientific method for believing in the current scientific consensus, which as you point out is fluid. However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion.

> However, for the average person, a dogmatic belief in the scientific method would be a huge step up over religion. But the scientific method is based on the idea of an unchanging God / reality. Without that fundamental belief, theres no point in determining how physics behaves in an experiment, because if everything happens at the whims of anthropomorphic gods, then there is no reason to expect the same experiment…

Determinism is an idea of physics based on unchanging God/reality, but science is more general. Science can work without determinism, there are probabilistic / statistical methods, or hypotheses of effective physical laws changing in time. In quantum experiments, things happen at whims of nature and some such experiments do not produce similar results when repeated, but look random.

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

#249

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

ben509 wrote: post #208
Nasrudith wrote: post #34

Really science shouldn't operate on authority in the first place ideally - it should speak for itself. In practice however there are limits to both time and ability to understand. It should be listened to for being more right as opposed to position. The most disturbing part isn't not trusting scientist but not trusting evidence, even that gathered by themselves. It is one thing to say believe light has infinite speed…

> In practice however there are limits to both time and ability to understand. It does seem that for some big ticket items like global warming the way to go would be have an open sourced app people can download and play with the simulations themselves. The scientists working on this stuff do make efforts to put this material together in a comprehensible form, so it's all out there. But it's very hard to trace anythin…

> It does seem that for some big ticket items like global warming the way to go would be have an open sourced app people can download and play with the simulations themselves.

It all depends on who writes the simulation. Tweak a few parameters and you have a balmy, lush green paradise in the Midwest without any winter snow.

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

#250

Post by makomk »

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…

Yeah, and sometimes the researchers are actively hostile to laypeople questioning their priestly caste.

For example, there's a fairly nasty and debilitating condition called CFS which respected British psychiatrists long ago decided was psychosomatic. So a few years ago, they ran a high-profile clinical trial called PACE which tried to prove this by testing their preferred psychiatric treatments, and naturally it concluded they were right. It was also fairly shoddy, which shouldn't surprise anyone on HN. In particular, the results in the final paper used a different and much weaker criteria for success than they'd intended to use at the start, which is a no-no. (There were a bunch of other issues with it too.)

A few trial patients and some outside scientists noticed this tried to get enough data to see what the results were if the researchers had done the scientifically valid thing and used their planned methodology, and that's when things got nasty. The researchers loudly cried to anyone who'd listen - and plenty did, because they were respected psychiatrists and the patients were officially nuts - that this was dangerous, vexatious harassment of scientists by activists, using their position to frame their pre-existing beliefs as science and questioning them as unscientific. All the proud, clever supporters of science bought into this and kept on doing so.

This was almost a decade ago now. The reason it springs to mind is that a few days ago, Reuters ran a long-form piece uncritically repeating the position that opposition to them is a dangerous attempt to silence scientists through harassment and abuse, and it made HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19377986 Discussion ensued as to whether suing the evil people discrediting their research into oblivion was enough or whether they needed to be jailed, and why universities hadn't fired staff who disagreed with their results yet.

Oh, and the punchline to all this: the researchers were almost all male, the condition in question primarily affects women. It turns out that science, at least as experienced by poor disabled women, might be more accurately described by all those pesky postmodernist complaints from the women's studies department than it is by the scientific method.

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