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Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#41

Post by Retric »

arotical wrote: post #8
mindcrime wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you only make decisions based on science you can pretend problems aren't real without a scientist's approval, and you can pretend solutions to those problems are bad if there is even a tiny bit of counter-evidence that supports your viewpoint. And if you make decisions based on anything other than science, is the final outcome going to be any better? I admit that something that we might call "misuse of science" is…

Here's a scenario: You are tasked with dealing with a problem where there is little research and no scientific consensus. There is plenty of video evidence and other related pieces of non-so-scientific evidence, but most people don't count that in evidence-based policy. What do you do? Sometimes, I think, we have to make decisions when there's no clear solution, and it's better than just dismissing a very obvious pro…

In the real world problems are never completely novel. Video game addiction for example clearly only showed up after video games, but it’s also closely related to other forms of addiction.

So, simply using related models and then adjusting to new information as it shows up works just fine. If government happens to ban loot boxes for a decade it’s not that important if they get it wrong and that’s plenty of time to do real research and adjust policy.

PS: If you disagree try and come up with a counter example.

Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#42

Post by nostromo »

jfengel wrote: post #40
nostromo wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The nudge towards reality is easily overwhelmed by a thumb on the scale of the wrong answer. What’s the evidence supporting this? I've noticed this trend of all sides of every political debate declaring that the other side has fallen for "fake news." In actuality, it's often that people with the "wrong answer" just have a different value system than the people with "right answer."

I provided a link. You don't get to sea-lion me by just repeating "evidence" until you've demonstrated that you've at least read the sources I gave you already.

The wikipedia article you linked doesn't make this claim.

The primary example, that cigarette companies tried to hide that smoking causes cancer, doesn't prove this point -- the vast majority of people know this and the propaganda effort was a failure.

Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#43

Post by ptero »

jfengel wrote: post #26
Press2forEN wrote: post #6

> An engaged and well-informed public has always been the foundation of our democracy Is there even a shred of scientific evidence to support this hypothesis? I see it in print so often that it appears to be a axiom that is considered so correct as to be unquestionable.

Democracy has never really relied on people being well-informed. The "wisdom of crowds" incorporates a lot of ignorance. It just assumes that ignorance is random, while informed opinion will tend to have a bias in favor of reality. If 49% of the people make a random guess one way, and 49% of people make a random guess the other way, then 2% of people who actually know something will put the best-informed answer over…

This is a very interesting point, thank you!

I wonder though if another issue is at play: in the past both well-informed and random folks would mostly have "swayable" opinions (mostly certain, but leave room for a doubt; thus open to arguments and possibly a change of opinion), currently most opinions seem to have a religious hardness to them. This makes science less influential -- people tend to put a lot of spin on key findings to avoid changing their views.

This is judging by newspapers and magazines of 50 years ago and talking to older generations; not sure how objective this is.

Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#44

Post by dragontamer »

sandworm101 wrote: post #28
Press2forEN wrote: post #6

> An engaged and well-informed public has always been the foundation of our democracy Is there even a shred of scientific evidence to support this hypothesis? I see it in print so often that it appears to be a axiom that is considered so correct as to be unquestionable.

>> well-informed public has always been the foundation of our democracy I'd say maybe a well-informed electorate . Until very recently, the majority of "the public" wasn't allowed to vote and so had very limited input into "our democracy".

Can you elaborate?

The two major extensions of our electorate were (former) slaves and then women. Do you believe that these groups are more easily manipulated?

Or are you talking about some other group that I forgot about?

Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#45

Post by faangFar »

ohduran wrote: post #34

Maybe the reason we are in this mess is because we relied too much on science, and too little on actual humanities (rhetoric, logic, and so on)? I hear about hermeneutics more and more in my circle: how to communicate trumps what is communicated. I can see why Fauci and many top scientists fail to convince people like Trump and his supporters: he knows, but can't communicate what he knows so that information is conve…

I come from a logical background and I wonder if statistics should take priority over nitty gritty science.

Yes we understand pandemic physics, but we should be looking to prioritize a strong majority policy rather than the few.

I don't think Fauci uses statistics in his reasoning.

Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#46

Post by bhupy »

munificent wrote: post #36
octaveguin wrote: post #5

Politicizing science will make science less scientific and more political. It will not work the other way.

The counter-argument is that there is no value in doing scientific research if you don't use the results to influence human choices.

The counter-counter-argument is that if you don't decouple the "doing of the scientific research" from "influencing human choices", you might compromise the endeavor of scientific research altogether.

The same institutions don't need to do both, and that they are separate is usually because "is" questions and "ought" questions are answered via different mechanisms.

Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#47

Post by faangFar »

Mods have deleted this question with no reasoning- Why is the "science" solution to lockdown? This is a prioritization of a minority population at the expense of an overwhelming majority.

Logic would say to prioritize (pick your numbers, I don't care) the 99.5% over the 0.5%.

My hypothesis is that since it's a healthcare issue, the leaders are less math/statistics inclined and more focused on biology.

Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#48

Post by xdavidliu »

nostromo wrote: post #42
jfengel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I provided a link. You don't get to sea-lion me by just repeating "evidence" until you've demonstrated that you've at least read the sources I gave you already.

The wikipedia article you linked doesn't make this claim. The primary example, that cigarette companies tried to hide that smoking causes cancer, doesn't prove this point -- the vast majority of people know this and the propaganda effort was a failure.

You are missing the point: there's an entire field of study about the claim and the various ways that it's true. The wikipedia article is about that field of study. Hence, the only way the claim would be false would be if that entire field of study were completely junk (e.g. homeopathy or neurolinguistic programming), which from the wikipedia article, it doesn't look so.

Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#49

Post by jfengel »

LordFast wrote: post #29
jfengel wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy has never really relied on people being well-informed. The "wisdom of crowds" incorporates a lot of ignorance. It just assumes that ignorance is random, while informed opinion will tend to have a bias in favor of reality. If 49% of the people make a random guess one way, and 49% of people make a random guess the other way, then 2% of people who actually know something will put the best-informed answer over…

Huh, never thought about the math like that. It makes a lot of sense, thanks for sharing. P.S. Before the age of social media, was there not the same level of risk of induced ignorance through traditional media campaigns and propaganda? If not, why not?

Propaganda has always been a problem, and it's hard to quantify if it's actually worse now or merely different. Even if it's merely different, though, it feels like it's the kind of problem that should be solvable. In so many cases people aren't merely misinformed but actively hostile to science in a way that should bite them in the butt sooner rather than later. Surely, one thinks, that should make it possible to resolve it, at least a little.

Re: Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

#50

Post by btrettel »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #12

Then fund us. I'm about to leave science because I can't find a position.

I'm almost done my PhD (defense next week) and I'm starting as a patent examiner later this month. That was the only job I was offered, and I applied overwhelmingly to research positions. There really aren't enough research positions out there. (And before someone asks: I worked in a very practical area of engineering.)

With that being said, increasing total funding can only go so far. A bigger problem to me is that the available funding is not allocated well. When certain professors make $300K+ per year yet can't find money for postdocs and their students make less than $20K per year, CERN asks for billions that could be spent on more important projects, and universities take a huge percentage of grants as overhead (often without clear justification), it seems obvious to me that there are plenty of ways to improve the situation without increasing funding. I could go on. I think the research enterprise is incredibly inefficient, and not by necessity.

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