The Unbearable Asymmetry of Bullshit

And yet otherwise reasonable people embrace the concept of "scientific consensus" most notably in the man made global warming discussion. This is nothing but an appeal to authority . While it is true that commonly good ideas are accepted by a majority of researchers in the relevant field, it is not 100% guaranteed. It is such a shame that we reach for the "scientific consensus" argument when there is no need due to the overwhelming evidence for man made global warming. It's lazy, sloppy, and encourages group think over rational inquiry.

I consider pseudo intelectual leftist dogmatic equvalent to religious right - but it doesn't mean i treat every questioning/skepticism as equal/valid/productive.

When you're discussing anything nontrivial it takes a lot of effort/knowledge to dispute a flawed argument (disproportionately harder than making one IMO) - disregarding someone on biases/agenda is a decent heuristic.

In mathematics, multiple authors are always listed alphabetically by family name; ie there is no "first" or "second" author.

In the situation you describe, the paper would probably be singly authored, and the author would write something like "Thanks to my advisor _____ and to my colleagues ____ for many helpful discussions" in an acknowledgments section.

If the contributions were more serious, then possibly the author would invite the others to co-author with him/her, and the others would then either accept (and then help write the paper) or politely decline and say "just mention me in the acknowledgments".

At least in my experience, co-authorship carries responsibilities: to help with the writing, the figures, references, dealing with editors and with submission to journals, speaking about the research at seminars/conferences, etc.

I take issue with Brandolini's maxim: "The amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it."

This assumes that we know, a priori, what is bullshit and what is not. Sometimes bullshitters know they are bullshitting, but most often they do not.

What I think is really going on here is that the scientific method is crap for this sort of thing, there is no such thing as "empirical truth" that exists in the real world, and subjective debate, reasoning, and so on, is hard and requires enormous effort on all parts.

Let's consider another hypothetical work of bullshit by one Maleficent. I, an oblivious third party, come across her published work. How am I to know that this work is bullshit?

The traditional response is that we use the scientific method, verifiability and empiricism, to test the bounds of a proposed model against observation. "You said Planet X should be at y, but it is actually at z, therefore bullshit." To quote Laurence Laurentz: 'Would that it were so simple.'

The problem here is that observation is fraught, and is usually based on its own assumptions. For example, let's say Maleficent is studying treatments for depression; to do so she must observe whether an individual is "depressed" or "not depressed". How the fuck should she do this? Frequently people use questionnaire measures like the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). Is this a valid tool? I have been heavily depressed when I scored low on the BDI, so I would say not. But what IS a valid tool? Is there any objective criterion we can bring to bear, here? What is it? Does "depression" even exist as a thing?

This problem, that observations are themselves laden with assumptions and based on pre-existing models, is a mire that all science is forced to wade through. Before we make decisions about anything, we must have a lens with which to view the world - but that, itself, is a decision!

More broadly speaking this is a problem with deductive reasoning, and because empiricism claims to be based on deductive reasoning it falls into error as a result. Because it is impossible to begin with truth, any scientific observation must be riddled through with approximations. And usually, we are unaware of the approximations that are blinding us when we build flawed models on top of them.

This is the main reason we get bullshit: there is no good way to do science.

this belongs on medium.com