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

nature.com

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

#321

Post by esyir »

pdonis wrote: post #284
aeternus wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't think that this is an issue. You can make these support / refute conditions visible, and leave it to the viewer to judge if they're reasonable.

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

#322

Post by dnbgfher »

kian wrote: post #215
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’d argue that this is, in fact, a failing of the language of description, and that going back and refactoring terms and systematizing the folk knowledge of a given field would go a long way towards fixing the public attitudes towards that field. We should give more respect to people who make existing concepts easier to understand, or simpler and cheaper to prove or demonstrate. Then maybe we wouldn’t have to spend s…

I think you're fundamentally misunderstanding the problem.

We do have a problem with nomenclature being fractured, even within fields, never mind between them. But that's not the problem.

The problem is that when you get deep enough into how things work, things just get really complex and they stop behaving in ways and patterns that humans experience the world. They end up being things that cannot be simplified down to a common human experience in any meaningful way. At best, you can take a portion of the concept and make an analogy to some limited portion of a common experience without lying too much. But they are fundamentally not the same, so you cannot use the analogy to discover anything new about the original concept.

There is also a problem of the time it takes to internalize new ideas and concepts. You can't quickly and easily give someone an intuitive understanding of anything - it takes work and experience and time on their part to get there. I don't see how going and reworking nomenclatures of entire fields is going to make people more willing or able to devote their time to this. Mostly you'll have to put in incredible amount of work, convince far too many people to do things a different way because you said so, and all you'll have really done is save some (significant) annoyance from students getting their feet wet in a new field.

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

#323

Post by shstalwart »

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…

To me, this sounds suspiciously like a No True Scottsmen argument. What you describe is the science we have. Maybe we can fix some of the corruption and pollution in the literature, maybe we can't. But it seems, to me, disingenuous to blame the "public" for conflating the science that exists with the Platonic ideal.

FWIW, I'm about to defend my PhD in a STEM discipline. In my eyes, science has far less credibility to me now than it did five years ago before I saw how the sausage is made. That's an N of at least one that this not only a problem outside scientific circles.

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

#324

Post by dwaltrip »

icelancer wrote: post #316
dwaltrip wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology and science are recursively interdependent. They are very much not simply "different" things. Due to this layered interdependence, the computer is in fact a shining example of scientific achievement just as much as it is one of technological advancement.

Science is a method. It is very different than Technology.

Yes, they are different, but they are also deeply connected. Science requires tools, which technology provides. New discoveries and understanding then enable new tech and new tools, which allows for new science, and so on and so forth.

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

#325

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

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…

> Your phrasing makes it sound like you're conflating science and physical reality

Really, it doesn't. Science is exactly the process that does all those things, because science is the process which forms the methods and artifacts we use in such a way that they successfully exploit the mechanisms of the natural world.

> but it's the work they do with that knowledge that accomplishes those things

That is an obviously nonsensical statement. Yes, that work is a component of accomplishing those things, but so is the science. An engineer or doctor that did not use scientific results nor scientific methodology would not accomplish anything either. And arguably, what engineers and doctors do, when done right, is also science. An engineer building a plane is building a (physically represented) hypothesis of how something can be made to fly, and then tests that hypothesis. The only difference between what you would call a scientist and what you would call an engineer is the generalized applicability of their result, not the fundamental methodology they are using to arrive at that result--in particular in comparison to the "alternative", namely a faith-based epistemology, which is what is generally proposed by those sceptical of the scientific method.

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

#327

Post by asabjorn »

icelancer wrote: post #316
dwaltrip wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technology and science are recursively interdependent. They are very much not simply "different" things. Due to this layered interdependence, the computer is in fact a shining example of scientific achievement just as much as it is one of technological advancement.

Science is a method. It is very different than Technology.

It is as different as dropping a stone is not physics. One drops a stone and it follows the laws physics predicts, and with physics you can make more accurate predictions of complex systems.

The laws would still be there without physics, but our tools and capability to manipulate them would be greatly diminished.

It is actually a bit intellectually lazy to use literary critical theory To critique things outside literature, because it is obvious it has no explanatory power outside the subjective reading of a book.

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

#328

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

war1025 wrote: post #36
x220 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to think that "religion" means "blind adherence to something ", which is really, really narrow. Is COBOL a religion?

"dogmatic belief in the scientific method" is as much a religion as anything else. Particularly when you are talking about it as a precept for the general public.

No, it's not a religion, it's simply a nonsense phrase. The scientific method at its core is the rejection of dogmatic belief, and thus you are talking about "dogmatic belief in the rejection of dogmatic belief", which is simply a sequence of words that doesn't have any meaning.

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

#329

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

dnautics wrote: post #42
dymk wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Religion and science derive understanding about the world in fundamentaly different and incompatible ways. To call it religion is just incorrect.

As a scientist here's my take: 1) in the ultimate abstraction, science is a religion. It depends on the precept that the rules are more or less or measurably the same from today to yesterday to tomorrow. You can't bootstrap empiricism without begging the question, so, there is at least one item of faith at the core. 2) excepting this, science in the ideal is indeed a wholly different beast. So you could say it is thi…

> 1) in the ultimate abstraction, science is a religion. It depends on the precept that the rules are more or less or measurably the same from today to yesterday to tomorrow. You can't bootstrap empiricism without begging the question, so, there is at least one item of faith at the core.

That's actually wrong, albeit widely believed. In a purely random world with no patterns that could possibly be discovered, empiricism still gives you the optimal result. The only difference between such a world and a world with patterns is that in a purely random world, any other method would also give you the optimal result, because no method has any predictive power. Empiricism gives you optimal results no matter whether the world has patterns or not, in contrast to all other methods, which only give you optimal results if the world has no patterns. So, if you want to have optimal results, empiricism is the way to go, there are no alternatives unless you already know that you are in an unpredictable world.

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

#330

Post by zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC »

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…

> That's the fundamental problem: how difficult is it to say

It's trivial, which is why that's exactly what scientists are saying?

What was your point again?

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