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We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

blogs.scientificamerican.com

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Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#61

Post by cwkoss »

xamuel wrote: post #20
areoform wrote: post #16

When these issues are raised, people tend to have two counter-productive reactions. The first is abject defeatism. The second anger at the messenger and accusations that they're a part of the problem. Or, in other words, talking about politicizing science is politicizing science. Both have justifiable viewpoints at their core but are harmful in the long-term nonetheless. The first is harmful and wrong for a straightf…

Because that's not what science is. Science is the study of physical objects via empirical experiments. If you're talking about morality or ethics, those aren't physical objects and you can't make empirical experiments about them.

Kind of funny that many of the impassioned pleas to respect science are often pleading for support of things that are not scientific.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#62

Post by kaitai »

bluGill wrote: post #53
Gravityloss wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably if you spend enough time and effort you can find something political in, say, the mathematics papers written by any given university research team on any given year. But if a politician advocates for teaching that Pi is exactly three, in my opinion that's on a whole different level. Your post advocates for false equivalence, in a somewhat indirect manner. We get to "all science is politicized". And then the…

What value is in that mathematical papers though? Most of it is correct within itself, but useless for anything real world and always will be. There is only so much labor we have as society. We need to make choices as to what we do. If everybody was willing we could dedicate society to just math. People can sleep under their desk at work, eat the mass produced cafeteria food, never watch sports, just work eat sleep.…

Mathematics is surprisingly useful. You've used your credit card online -- where'd that encryption algorithm come from? "Useless" math. You've booked a flight online -- where'd that schedule come from? Uh, math again: all that optimization, those traveling salesman problems.

Right now I'm doing all sorts of work studying risk in financial networks, studying public health, all using math that was considered "pure" just 20 years ago. Actually, at the moment I'm looking up papers on the tropical geometry of deep learning.

Certainly I realize society has decided math is not the most valuable thing, which is why I'll be seeking to do "machine learning" instead in the next year or so, rather than education & research (useless for anything in the real world!). I'm sure I'll add more to humanity when I'm optimizing for ad clicks :)

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#63

Post by kaitai »

eitland wrote: post #47

> 47 percent of scientists at the National Park Service and 35 percent at the Environmental Protection Agency report they had been asked to omit the phrase "climate change" from their work. I guess a certain percentage of those who asked scientists to do that did it for the same reason I dislike many (but certainly not all) blockchain initiatives: it has been bolted on a something where it didn't belong just to "prof…

I have to say, parks and the environment are, ah, pretty impacted by climate... Why do you think that discussion of climate is "bolted on" to parks/environment unnecessarily?

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#64

Post by xamuel »

komali2 wrote: post #54
fromthestart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm constantly baffled by people like yourself who have accepted that culture influences technical work, but are unable to draw the logical conclusion that certain cultures are therefore better predisposed to success in a given industry than others. You can't have it both ways. If we concede that culture influences ability, then we must accept that merit based hiring will inevitably result in disproportionate rep…

I believe the difference is the concept of "uplifting." Given two people, one who had money and therefore lots of high-quality STEM education, and another who does not have money and struggling to acquire a STEM education while also dealing with poverty (and the poorer quality education that comes with it), yes, probably the rich kid will do better at their job sooner. But there's nothing inherently preventing the po…

That's a really interesting way of looking at things. How do you reconcile that with the notion of Darwinian evolution? Is it not true that individual organisms are born with small mutations which make them more or less suitable for an environment, and that over long time periods, the ones who are more suitable for an environment will flourish in that environment? Are you suggesting the individual could reverse a detrimental inherited mutation in his own lifetime (as opposed to the lifetime of his distant descendants), if properly nurtured?

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#65

Post by malvosenior »

komali2 wrote: post #54
fromthestart wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'm constantly baffled by people like yourself who have accepted that culture influences technical work, but are unable to draw the logical conclusion that certain cultures are therefore better predisposed to success in a given industry than others. You can't have it both ways. If we concede that culture influences ability, then we must accept that merit based hiring will inevitably result in disproportionate rep…

I believe the difference is the concept of "uplifting." Given two people, one who had money and therefore lots of high-quality STEM education, and another who does not have money and struggling to acquire a STEM education while also dealing with poverty (and the poorer quality education that comes with it), yes, probably the rich kid will do better at their job sooner. But there's nothing inherently preventing the po…

> But there's nothing inherently preventing the poorer kid from doing just as good, if not better, a job.

Maybe, maybe not. I say this as a poor person who often out competes people with much more privileged backgrounds. There are plenty of "stereotypical poor people" that will never be as good as those who grew up with healthy diets, education, parental supervision... Yes, I've done well but I was always in the top 1% of achievement, even when poor. People like me are already succeeding today and don't need any special "uplifting". Those that do will most likely never be at the level of their peers. If they could, they would already be there.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#66

Post by GreaterFool »

instantwhat wrote: post #60

This discussion is a good example of why downvoting, graying comment text, and specifically, downvoting for disagreement, are bad. The solution to the problem this story is about is robust, fearless discussion in pursuit of truth. But what I see here are many thoughtful, reasoned comments being shamed and made hard-to-read by people who aren't able or willing to rebut them. It is cowardly and anti-intellectual. It's…

So one starts with 1 point. Someone clicks downvote, it goes to 0 and the comment disappears, right? That's too fast IMHO.

Perhaps a better system would be to upvote only? Then constructive comments would raise to the top and who really cares what's long way down?

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#67

Post by kaitai »

xamuel wrote: post #29
BrainlingPdx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that we are now seeing this is WRONG. Look at AI and machine learning. We are now finding algorithms that have implicit racial biases because the only people who worked on them were Asian and Caucasian. Not that the people working on them explicitly tried to write the algorithms with bias, they simply did because humans are BAD at projecting outside of their own experiences and what they see in the mirror. Tha…

What would it take for you to falsify your stance? If nothing can make you falsify it, then that's not science, that's pseudoscience. Unconscious bias entering AI is bad. But consider this scenario. Imagine for decades, there's been a chemical leak in Cleveland, which has been causing people there to become worse at math. An AI detects that people from Cleveland are worse at math. Do you just throw the data away beca…

This is a straw man argument. It's easy to find examples of algorithms that are biased -- let's just look at facial recognition. Sure, there are situations like what you describe, but are you going to argue then that dark-skinned women really must be men, or more manly, or something, just because Amazon's facial recognition algorithm has trouble with dark-skinned women?

The parent is not making a "scientific" claim. They are making a workflow/process claim. It is not the case that all things are "science" or "pseudoscience". There are many other topics humans can discuss.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#68

Post by kaitai »

mises wrote: post #45
BrainlingPdx wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that we are now seeing this is WRONG. Look at AI and machine learning. We are now finding algorithms that have implicit racial biases because the only people who worked on them were Asian and Caucasian. Not that the people working on them explicitly tried to write the algorithms with bias, they simply did because humans are BAD at projecting outside of their own experiences and what they see in the mirror. Tha…

The problem with calling something biased is that it carries a connotation of racism. There is a difference between disparate impact and disparate treatment, to use Eric Holder's terminology. I don't think humans are "projecting their own experiences", I think that the dataset that is fed to algorithms over-represents whites because they constitute a larger portion of the population. It may also over-represent asians…

"Biased" still has real statistical meaning. It is unfortunate that people treat these problems with an aim to justifying their virtue rather than creating a product that works (not saying you are doing this, just commenting that often the reaction is about personal virtue rather than actual technical accuracy).

It is not more difficult to make a facial-recognition algorithm work on black people -- or Asian people, to pick another example in the news (iPhone & users in China). Just choose your input data appropriately. All it takes is some work and a model that wasn't trained on Caucasian faces.

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#69

Post by chris_mc »

xamuel wrote: post #64
komali2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the difference is the concept of "uplifting." Given two people, one who had money and therefore lots of high-quality STEM education, and another who does not have money and struggling to acquire a STEM education while also dealing with poverty (and the poorer quality education that comes with it), yes, probably the rich kid will do better at their job sooner. But there's nothing inherently preventing the po…

That's a really interesting way of looking at things. How do you reconcile that with the notion of Darwinian evolution? Is it not true that individual organisms are born with small mutations which make them more or less suitable for an environment, and that over long time periods, the ones who are more suitable for an environment will flourish in that environment? Are you suggesting the individual could reverse a det…

Are you fucking saying that Darwinian evolution is the cause of underrepresented minorities in white collar jobs? What fucking planet are you from?

Re: We Must Defend Science in the Face of Political Attacks

#70

Post by chris_mc »

malvosenior wrote: post #65
komali2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the difference is the concept of "uplifting." Given two people, one who had money and therefore lots of high-quality STEM education, and another who does not have money and struggling to acquire a STEM education while also dealing with poverty (and the poorer quality education that comes with it), yes, probably the rich kid will do better at their job sooner. But there's nothing inherently preventing the po…

> But there's nothing inherently preventing the poorer kid from doing just as good, if not better, a job. Maybe, maybe not. I say this as a poor person who often out competes people with much more privileged backgrounds. There are plenty of "stereotypical poor people" that will never be as good as those who grew up with healthy diets, education, parental supervision... Yes, I've done well but I was always in the top…

Just because you didn't need uplifting doesn't mean others don't need it. Your "bootstraps" argument is such BS.
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