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

#361

Post by balabaster » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:25 PM UTC

shstalwart wrote: post #323

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…

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 t…

I don't blame the public. You can no more blame the public for their perceptions than you can blame a dog for being a dog.

You have the perceptions you have because of the ideals you were sold in school and in your childhood. The role models you choose are those that make you aspire to be the very best human being you can... at least, this was my world. Integrity means something. Honour means something.

So to come out and find that the science I was taught, chase the evidence to find the truth, has been subverted and is now chase the narrative, find the evidence to support the narrative - that's a fundamental problem for me because what is being sold as science in the real world is not what I was taught science was supposed to be in school.

It seems that many others were taught to manipulate the world around them at everyone else's expense to get ahead. They were taught that their own goals and objectives were more important than those of humanity. Are they any more wrong?

Can I blame people for trying to get rich when we're taught in the West that money is success? It buys freedom and happiness. When all the propaganda fed to us by the media every day brainwashes us into believing this narrative, can I really blame anyone for doing whatever they have to, to get rich?

I'm not blaming the public. It's not a trivial problem to solve. We don't live in a culture that rewards integrity. We live in a culture that rewards behaviour that makes people rich.

If you don't put authenticity and integrity at the heart of your cultural beliefs, how can you blame anyone when they ignore it to chase money, which you will be rewarded for?

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

#362

Post by balabaster » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:42 PM UTC

rumcajz wrote: post #314

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…

I don't understand medicine much. I would prefer to believe my doctor. However, if my doctor suggests using homeopathics I will start questioning any other advice they might give me.

If my doctor is also getting kickbacks for prescribing me drugs for something that probably isn't what I have, then what incentive does he have to diagnose me properly when the drugs I do need don't pay him to endorse them?

Having doctors and hospitals getting kickbacks for promoting certain drugs is an ethical problem that needs to be curtailed. This all feeds into public perception.

If you want to be seen as having integrity, you have to act with integrity.

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

#363

Post by sqrt17 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:45 PM UTC

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.

> 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. ... which is why the actual sciences (and other research disciplines) use methods that have more of a family resemblance to the prototypic scientific method than being point-for-point identical with it.

Many common points exist - showing your reasoning and evidence rather than to appeal to authority, and the idea that hypotheses should be falsifialbe (in the sense of Thomas Kuhn) to be central ideas. Both of these very good idea in all situations in which you're actually interested in the truth, rather than having a shoot-first-ask-questions-later situation where you need to act on imperfect information.

There's no disaster waiting to happen, at least not in comparison to other tools of reasoning being misused. Sophism (i.e. people playing mind games to make their claims look better) exists inside and outside of science, just as self-interest and wanting to increase your own sphere of influence do, but that's no fault of the scientific method (any more than it is a fault of religion when it occurs there). Any system that lends credibility and authority to people will (loosely mis-citing Bourdieu) attract power-mongery.

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

#364

Post by balabaster » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC

xkcd-sucks wrote: post #337

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…

All of this is correct. From teaching science at the collegiate level, it also seems like a shockingly large proportion of students want to be told the truth by an authority (not necessarily because they're "intellectually lazy"), and are not so good at looking at the world with their own eyes.

Life is complicated. It seems now that it's way more complicated than at any time in our past, but I think the truth is more likely that we didn't see it was complicated back then because a lot was shielded from us. We just didn't need to worry about it as kids. Plus, we have the world at our fingertips now and didn't back then. We have access to so much information that it's all but impossible to sift through it all and figure out what can be trusted and what can't. Nobody can keep up.

This is why none of us are masters of everything and we tend to specialize in niches. We want to be told the truth by an authority because we don't have the time to dig into everything ourselves. We want happy fulfilling lives. That means we can't look at everything with our own eyes, we need to be able to trust authorities. The less we can trust what we're being told, the more we have to research ourselves, the less time we're able to spend doing what we love with the people we love, the more miserable and disconnected our lives become.

We need to be told the truth by an authority and we need them to have the integrity to chase the truth and deliver it to us honorably.

It's not that we're not good at looking at the world with our own eyes, it's not that we're not capable, it's that we just don't have the time and we've run out of the energy to do so.

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

#365

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 3:27 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #359

logseman wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sci-Hub isn't exactly easy to use or recommended by the larger community a grad student is likely to encounter.

If you're smart enough to use HN's interface, you're smart enough to Google/copy/paste a DOI string into the sci-hub website. Not a criticism of you personally, but right now it's absurdly easy to bypass scientific paywalls if you're even slightly motivated. PS Scientists almost uniformly hate the predatory scientific publishing system, want it destroyed, and aren't trying to prevent you from reading their work.

[deleted]

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

#366

Post by mywittyname » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

brandonmenc wrote: post #207

mywittyname wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been going on since long, long before p-hacking and the replication crisis. And I honestly find these to be very different issues. It was common for people in the US to reject the idea of smoking as a cause of lung cancer until like the 1980s. Scientific consensus on this fact was reached in the 60s and was suspected for a while before that. Yet, it took like 40 years for the public to agree. Think about wha…

> It was common for people in the US to reject the idea of smoking as a cause of lung cancer until like the 1980s. Scientific consensus on this fact was reached in the 60s and was suspected for a while before that. Yet, it took like 40 years for the public to agree. You're exaggerating. It did not take until after the year 2000 for the public to believe that smoking causes cancer.

No I'm not...

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3894634/

> The public relations campaign -- which would extend for over 40 years -- was designed with the goal of reassuring the public, especially current smokers, that the question of whether smoking caused harm was an “open controversy” (1, 4, 14).

> A poll conducted in 1966 found only 40% of Americans recognizing smoking as a major cause of cancer, while 27% said it was a minor cause and one-third said the science was not yet able to tell (2). In 2001 Gallup re-asked this same question and found 71% of Americans naming smoking as a major cause of cancer, with 11% saying it was a minor cause and 16% unsure (26).

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

#367

Post by tabtab » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 3:47 PM UTC

throwawayjava wrote: post #288

tabtab wrote: post #127

A bigger problem is when and how to rely on "subject experts". My car mechanic knows far more about cars than I do, but he/she may also be biased into recommending unnecessary costly repairs to line her/her pocket. Climate change skeptics often question the financial motivation of climatologists. It's certainly something to consider, but they rarely propose alternatives. For example, a committee could be set up to in…

> Climate change skeptics often question the financial motivation of climatologists. It's certainly something to consider, but they rarely propose alternatives. I don't think this argument is being made in good faith. More importantly, it's kind of absurd on face. Science pays horribly. See: literally any thread on HN about PhD programs. See also: levels.fyi vs. the starting salary for asst. profs at your local state…

The fact they are not paid well may be used as more evidence they are "bribe-able". I'm not saying they have been bribed, only that low pay cannot be reliable used as evidence either way.

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

#368

Post by thetrumanshow » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 3:54 PM UTC

savingthrow wrote: post #341

thetrumanshow wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't escape this context, sure. But I was hoping for expansion on the idea where the poster stated "They should be investigated if their parenting is so poor that they resort to physical violence against the child." ... to which my reply is to ask what the limits are. I can certainly imagine scenarios where leading by the arm would be considered violence, as it can cause pain and has the potential to injure.

You grab a child by the arm and drag it -- that's potentially violence, but we'd need to look at the action as a whole. You hold a child's hand to guide it -- that's probably not violence. HN needs a name for the falacy that people always seek to define precise exact rules for everything, ignoring the way that courts work by investigating the context of an action.

Seeking precise rules for something is, in spirit, the exact opposite of what a logical fallacy is.

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

#369

Post by eanzenberg » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 4:57 PM UTC

notyourday wrote: post #347

eanzenberg wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Settled science." The 2100 predictions have varied so widely. Most current simulations predict 1-4ft increase in sealevel by 2100. The predicted effects have varied widely and will probably continue to.

Lets run a thought experiment. It is 2100 and the sealevel increased by 0.25 inches. Did those 1-4ft increase predictions increase or decrease scientific authority?

It's statistical, which a lot of people and I mean a LOT of people don't understand or can't comprehend. The prediction is valid to some error and there's a small change the sealevel increase will be 0.25 inches or 10ft. As time goes on (from 2019) the predictions should get more accurate but I've already seen widely different predictions out to 2100.

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

#370

Post by weberc2 » Tue, Mar 19, 2019, 5:38 PM UTC

matthewdgreen wrote: post #285

weberc2 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

1. You use sci-hub. Or write the researchers. Scientists don’t want to keep their work secret nor do they want a “priestly caste”, they want it out there and read. They work like dogs so people on HN can read and actually understand their work and not write about their political feelings instead. 2. Even if you’re not qualified to do the science yourself, you try to reject implausible ideas like the notion that there…

> try to reject implausible ideas like the notion that there’s some grand scientific conspiracy against your preferred ideas

You mean like academics who push blank slatism to prop up dubious political outcomes? Or people who push notions of racist math or sexist physics?

The questions are 1) how/why do our institutions allow these frauds to be so prevalent/powerful 2) how do we make the necessary changes 3) how do we help laypeople distinguish between ideologues and real academics?