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

#251

Post by bookofjoe » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 11:42 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #147

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…

>in this house, we believe science is real Or maybe those people, even if they don't have much of a grasp on the scientific method, see the material progress and results of scientific work and conclude that they're going to place trust in scientific authority? This is an entirely false equivalence. One can trust scientists even without understanding science, on the fact alone that research produces results that every…

"The Strange Case of Francis Collins" https://samharris.org/the-strange-case-of-francis-collins/

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

#252

Post by trophycase » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 11:43 PM UTC

Foucault brings up interesting points regarding science and power. In that those with power have control over what kind of information is created and distributed. We can see this through corporate sponsored science, where they both control the production of new knowledge, and attempt to convince the public of one thing or another that supports their cause through the production of knowledge.

IMO this is one of the reasons we are observing an epistemic crisis in our political sphere, "post-truth" if you will. Where it isn't about what is said, but about who says it and the manufacturer of such knowledge. A lot of modern "woke" thought (anti-vax, flat earth, climate change denialism) centers around an opposition to modern institutions of knowledge manufacture. So anti-vax is less about believing that vaccines are harmful, and more about being opposed to the western medical establishment and forced medication by the government. Climate change denialism is less about holding the view there is no change, but more about opposing the "progressives" and the "NWO lobbyists" who are trying to force change down our throat. Flat earth movement is less about believing that the Earth is flat, and more about being opposed to anti-christian sources of knowledge as well as being opposed to information manufactured by the government. I won't say that they don't believe these things, but when we are talking about scientific authority, we need to understand why these people choose to let certain knowledge manufacturers have authority over others. In some respects, their heart is in the right place, being opposed to centralized institutions of knowledge production, it is just sad that a lot of them are prone to irritating theories like these.

Another issue with current science is of course funding difficulties and publication bias. The feedback loop of needing to have something to show for your work that is going to provide immediate benefit somewhere isn't doing any favors.

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

#253

Post by effie » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 11:44 PM UTC

incompatible wrote: post #191

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…

Alright, say I want to replace my dogmatic belief that scientific methods are the best way of understanding the Universe. What should I replace it with?

That there are also different methods, and sometimes they are useful.

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

#254

Post by jimbokun » Mon, Mar 18, 2019, 11:47 PM UTC

gus_massa wrote: post #161

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…

A very big problem is that press coverage exaggerate the importance of clickbait articles. Two non political / economical cases: * Is 'Oumuamua an alien spacehip / solar sail? * Does the Tabby's star have a alien megastructure / partial Dyson sphere? You can't blame to Monsanto for them. The article appears, get a huge press coverage, the authors get interviewed, and somewhere the fact that it's only an improbable we…

Remarkable how often the answer to headlines ending in a question mark is "no". Counter examples seem exceedingly rare.

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

#255

Post by shrimp_emoji » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:01 AM UTC

kabwj wrote: post #122

x220 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ask your doctor about it instead of listening to a Facebook group.

After the opioid crisis why should I trust my doctor?

Some kind of bullshit multivariate game theoretical common sense analysis in your head about the different interests at play and their degrees of impunity vs. mandated responsibility and the estimated probability that you're being lied to in the context of your variable knowledge of the technologies and concepts involved idk lol that's how I do it.

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

#256

Post by maire » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:02 AM UTC

bsder wrote: post #190

maire wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A really good book to read on this is "the Signal and the Noise" by Nate Silver. Basically, the scientific method requires modeling the system correctly which only works for certain kinds of systems. Systems where the complexity exceeds the available data causes people to see patterns where they don't exist and to be overly confident in their interpretation of the data. The entire area of nutrition and weight managem…

> The entire area of nutrition and weight management is a joke. Medicine is problematic and Psychology is questionable. Note that the issue is that there is a human in that system. The problem is that we (rightfully!) don't easily allow experiments on humans that might be harmful. And, as an aside, nutrition and weight management does have people doing real science (things like studies of hunter gatherer societies wi…

Scientists are trying to study nutrition, it is just that the data is inconclusive. Yet the popular media reports each conflicting study as fact.

Here is an interesting Stanford Medicine study of individual variation on the impact on low carb vs low fat. The punchline is that they still don't know after a fairly rigorous study.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SBZ4HYOxf0

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

#257

Post by pdonis » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:03 AM UTC

Nasrudith wrote: post #202

pdonis wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's this trend of elevating skepticism to denial simply for political reasons Well, there's just as much of a trend of claiming your position is "science" when it isn't, simply for political reasons. For example, by any reasonable standards, economics is not a science; yet people who question the current orthodoxy in economics, for example by questioning whether having the Federal Reserve print money is really a g…

Economics should be fact based at least. I personally would call it a science but a soft one from there being so many variables and interpretations. It does produce some hard facts - mostly in the form of "what not to do" We already know that hyperinflation relative to growth is a way to ruin an economy quickly for instance. Similarly the issue with federal reserve denialism is that they have rhetoric but not much un…

> Precious metal backed currency has lead to countless expensive wars and travesties because it effectively started to be a brake/cap on growing economies.

I'm not sure either part of this is true. The evidence of the 20th century doesn't give much support to the thesis that fiat money helps prevent wars. Nor is it clear that a fixed, or at any rate slowly growing, quantity of money acts as a brake on economic growth. Current economic orthodoxy says it does, but current economic orthodoxy doesn't make good predictions.

> I can understand some unease about the role of the federal reserve but it should have some role even if it is stuck on "try to map to economic growth instead of attempting stimulus or bubble deflation".

You wouldn't need a central bank to implement a policy of "keep the total quantity of money in some defined relationship to the total size of the economy". In fact you wouldn't want a central bank to implement that policy, because a central bank wouldn't give newly printed money to everyone in the economy in proportion to the amount of money they currently hold, which is the only fair way to print money.

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

#258

Post by aeternus » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

pdonis wrote: post #227

aeternus wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would like to see a tool that lists all modern scientific hypotheses and theories along with the published experiments that support or refute the theory/hypothesis. The theories should be linked to show what builds upon what. Wikipedia is probably the closest we have to this right now. As science gets more complex, we either need to create a way for people to perform this bottom-up reasoning themselves, or we need…

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.

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

#259

Post by pdonis » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:04 AM UTC

unknownkadath wrote: post #236

pdonis wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> that's not what the article says. Meaning, the article doesn't say science is supposed to be an authority? Let's see: "It is tempting to think that scientific authority is natural and will soon reassert itself like a sturdy self-righting boat knocked over by a rogue wave. The ugly truth is that science is more like Facebook, whose positive features are also vulnerabilities. Precisely because it allows us to connect…

Words have multiple meanings. What you are doing is dishonest strawmanning by conflating multiple meanings of the word "authority."

> What you are doing is dishonest strawmanning by conflating multiple meanings of the word "authority."

No, what I am doing is giving meaning to the word "authority" according to how the author actually uses it.

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

#260

Post by yters » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 12:08 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.

Aristotle believed in intelligent design.