Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 103 posts

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#91

Post by HeyWolfey »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #30
HeyWolfey wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only you can stop the very dangerous people! Consider the fact that you are a byproduct of the endless programming and propaganda behind the War on Terror. If you have no doubts on that subject, YOU are wrong.

"Consider the fact that you are a byproduct of the endless programming and propaganda behind the War on Terror." Can you expand on that? It sounds like it may contain a very interesting perspective, but I'm not quite sure what you mean.

Here's a reply that helps, but it was flagged because it doesn't meet the approval of the "Right Side of History"(tm) committee that runs HackerNews.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518364

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#92

Post by lemagedurage »

to3m wrote: post #86
lemagedurage wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By all means, call it silly, all the more incentive to get to the bottom of it. "more like the process of actually assembling a persuasive argument" Why do you use "persuasive" there? If you were right you should be able to prove your point without politeness. Furthermore, if you /need/ politeness to be considered right, /then/ either they're buying bs or you're selling bs. Both are bad for this world. In my view, pe…

You're assuming that the way people behave is wrong, and that the way you think they should behave is right. Well, guess what: they're going to keep on behaving as they do anyway, no matter what you think. Now suppose you still want to convince people of something. Are you going to adopt a technique that works, or one that doesn't?

If i can't convince someone based on reasoning and need social manipulation, then i shouldn't want to convince them.

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#93

Post by zaarn »

mikeash wrote: post #71
ars wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can't fathom the other side and where they're coming from, you, are in fact, biased beyond listening to facts, and are likely wrong. This one especially applies to politics. If you are one of those looking for "sanity", or "common sense", and can't imagine how the other side can possibly hold some position, then this applies to you.

It really depends on the topic, and there are times where trying to find sense in the other side’s position is the road to madness. If you’re debating the optimal sales tax rate, yes, being unable to comprehend the other side means you’re doing it wrong. If the topic is, say, wiping out people of a particular religion, not so much.

>wiping out people of a particular religion, not so much.

As a nihilist I would disagree.

The kind of people that want to do that have a much different set of morality and ethics.

There is no objective moral framework that you can base claims for or against wiping out a particular religion. You can however use your own, personal, subjective moral framework and most people will probably have something vaguely compatible to it and agree with you that wiping out religions and it's people is bad.

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#94

Post by zaarn »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #69
TheAdamAndChe wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but there is also the real possibility that your beliefs are irrational as well. Everyone thinks they're right, and everyone has a train of thought that has led to that belief.

A key test for rationality is prediction. If you believe that banning sex education in schools will decrease teen pregnancy, and it turns out that teen pregnancy rates actually increase when teens aren't educated, then your belief about sex education isn't rational. Many - possibly most - public policy decisions are open to this kind of testing. The fact that formal testing rarely happens, and that it's consistently…

A rational thought may not be a predictive thought.

Before people knew the earth was a globe, it was entirely rational to think everything that goes up goes down again.

And for all testing you can do, ie, throwing an apple up, it'll come down again.

It is entirely rational to conclude from the available evidence that everything falls down when thrown.

But recently we've discovered that things you throw up hard enough may not fall down at all.

Thusly, the rational thought was still rational but wrong.

Predictability is important when you want to evaluate scientific models (ie, assume earth is flat, assume earth is round, assume earth is a mostly round potato all have different predictive quality, though the first ones are easier and sometimes sufficient)

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#95

Post by zaarn »

ninkendo wrote: post #79
HeyWolfey wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are bad because you were told for decades they are bad. The fact I even have to explain that is confirmation at how complete the indoctrination is. Are you seriously attempting to take a morally absolutist position, as if showing an image of a Nazi to aliens would automatically make them recoil in horror as if that particular combination of attire and behavior managed to stumble upon some absolute fixed point of…

Are you seriously attempting to show that nazis aren't bad? Serious question. What have I been falsely indoctrinated about? What should I have been exposed to as an alternate view on nazis? Do history books count as "indoctrination"? To your other point, I would imagine showing aliens concentration camps would make them recoil in horror, yes.

There is fairly good moral consensus that nazis are bad so it's probably not wrong to say "Nazis are bad" in most contexts.

But, IMO, morality and ethics are subjective, so for a minority of people who don't share this consensus, yes, nazis aren't bad.

An alien race that has constructed a feudal slave society might not object to concentration camps at all. They might love the idea.

Nazis, from a purely objective standpoint, are not bad. But not good either. What they did is facts.

Only when the human observer comes in, ie, you and me, we introduce morality and you and me both think that those things are bad and should not be done.

Or how Death expressed it in Discworld; "take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy"

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#96

Post by dang »

HeyWolfey wrote: post #91
AlexCoventry wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Consider the fact that you are a byproduct of the endless programming and propaganda behind the War on Terror." Can you expand on that? It sounds like it may contain a very interesting perspective, but I'm not quite sure what you mean.

Here's a reply that helps, but it was flagged because it doesn't meet the approval of the "Right Side of History"(tm) committee that runs HackerNews. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16518364

Actually users flagged it, because it obviously breaks the site guidelines.

It doesn't matter what ideology you're battling for or against. It's the genre of ideological flamewar itself that's damaging here, and therefore unwelcome, and therefore will get you banned if you keep doing it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#97

Post by cgiles »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #81
cgiles wrote: post #72

I would use Andrew Gelman and John Ioannidis as prototypes for the Good Critic and Bad Critic, respectively. Gelman does real, solid work and confines his righteous takedowns to a side hobby. And his criticisms are directed at individual, specific cases, with evidence, and he reserves most of his wrath for repeat offenders rather than one-off mistakes, which are unavoidable given enough projects. He confines criticis…

> Ioannidis' claim to fame is writing a hand-waving, philosophical argument in order to cast doubt on all research at once. It's solid probabilistic reasoning about the dominant statistical methodology, and its conclusions have been empirically demonstrated in multiple fields.

It is solid probabilistic reasoning if you accept:

- A publication bias term u that is pulled out of thin air for different scenarios.

- A parameter R that reflects the unknowable proportion of true relationships/hypotheses in a field compared to the universe of possible hypotheses. The pre-study odds he calculates are determined entirely by R.

Actually this paper provides a good framework for determining what factors will affect the PPV of a field. In that regard it was a good contribution. But the enormous leap to the title -- which can only be achieved by massive assumptions about R and u -- was baseless fearmongering and demagoguery.

If one wants to address these issues at the 50,000 feet level, it would be far better to look at something concrete, such as reproducibility rates, as indeed many have done, rather than models based on pre-study odds. If we actually knew the pre-study odds, or IOW the proportion of hypotheses in hypothesis space that are true, then we could just correct our p-values for that and be done with it. Although I suppose that many Bayesians would not see any problem with abstracting away everything we don't know into priors R and u, making wild guesses about them, and drawing conclusions.

We do have a replication crisis on our hands. But the pre-study odds, whatever they are, are unchangeable. If this paper had been framed in terms of "the lower the pre-study odds, the higher the power will need to be to compensate to get an acceptable level of reproducibility", I would accept it wholeheartedly, although then it would have been a simple and obvious statement rather than a citation-grabber.

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#98

Post by AlexCoventry »

cgiles wrote: post #97
AlexCoventry wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ioannidis' claim to fame is writing a hand-waving, philosophical argument in order to cast doubt on all research at once. It's solid probabilistic reasoning about the dominant statistical methodology, and its conclusions have been empirically demonstrated in multiple fields.

It is solid probabilistic reasoning if you accept: - A publication bias term u that is pulled out of thin air for different scenarios. - A parameter R that reflects the unknowable proportion of true relationships/hypotheses in a field compared to the universe of possible hypotheses. The pre-study odds he calculates are determined entirely by R . Actually this paper provides a good framework for determining what facto…

Of course pre-study odds are low in fields querying complex systems on the basis of extremely weak theoretical frameworks.

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#99

Post by cgiles »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #98
cgiles wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is solid probabilistic reasoning if you accept: - A publication bias term u that is pulled out of thin air for different scenarios. - A parameter R that reflects the unknowable proportion of true relationships/hypotheses in a field compared to the universe of possible hypotheses. The pre-study odds he calculates are determined entirely by R . Actually this paper provides a good framework for determining what facto…

Of course pre-study odds are low in fields querying complex systems on the basis of extremely weak theoretical frameworks.

I agree. However, nothing much better is available. I loved reading work from the Santa Fe Institute and Stuart Kauffman and so on, but the reality is that despite their best efforts, they provided nothing better. General statements about the system-as-a-whole, but no specifics about where to look for the etiology of a specific disease or process. Nobels await those who could do more.

Until such time as someone does bring theory to biology, for example, wet-labbers (not me) struggle on. I am in a little doubt as to whether general theories about complex systems could provide useful predictive frameworks, but if so, great. But until then, pre-study odds are zero if you don't do the study.

Re: How not to be a crank: rules for not being a science-dick

#100

Post by AlexCoventry »

cgiles wrote: post #99
AlexCoventry wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course pre-study odds are low in fields querying complex systems on the basis of extremely weak theoretical frameworks.

I agree. However, nothing much better is available. I loved reading work from the Santa Fe Institute and Stuart Kauffman and so on, but the reality is that despite their best efforts, they provided nothing better. General statements about the system-as-a-whole, but no specifics about where to look for the etiology of a specific disease or process. Nobels await those who could do more. Until such time as someone does…

I wasn't appealing to complexity theory as the solution. I was arguing that Ioannidis's assumptions about R are reasonable.
Post reply on HN