12 ms·

The Mistrust of Science

77 points by yarapavan 10y ago

im3w1l 10y ago
In response to the paragraphs about bad-faith pseudo science "To defend those beliefs... Science’s defenders have identified..." One field that has a lot of experience dealing with this is law. I wonder if the scientific community can learn anything from it.
- adrianratnapala 10y ago
  Mostly what scientists and lawyers can learn from each other is humility. For both (in different ways) invesitgating the truth of purported facts is important -- as is understanding the laws governing those facts. But lawyers are dealing with interested, intelligent agents, some of whom will try to game whatever environment they are faced with. Science has less of this problem, so it pushes harder into realms of precision that lawyers ought not dare enter. But scientists who wade into policy or legal fights should remember that they are n00bs who's methods are easily perverted.
stephengillie 10y ago
The nearly unbelievable level of rigor achieved by particle physics gives a harmful level of credence to numerous other fields, especially nutrition & medicine. Studies done across 8 people are given the same authorial credibility as studies done across 8 million protons, by lumping them all together as "science".
- Bromskloss 10y ago
  > Studies done across 8 people are given the same authorial credibility as studies done across 8 million protons The number alone doesn't tell us how reliable the conclusions are. This doesn't necessarily invalidate your point, though.
  - bobdole1234 10y ago
    Six orders of magnitude does give a little bit of an insight into reliability.
    - tremon 10y ago
      reliability, yes, extrapolation beyond the original 8 test subjects, no.
- api 10y ago
  This is often called "physics envy" in the sciences.
- arghbleargh 10y ago
  Yes, I think this has to be a major reason why people distrust science, and frankly I am sympathetic to it. Too many studies amount to a 2% statistical difference (with an analysis rife with biases) with no causal mechanism (or a highly speculative one). Relying on this type of evidence, while not worse than pseudoscience, still drastically weakens your position when trying to argue against claims like "vaccines cause autism". (Remember when fat was bad?) Also, even for the examples given in the piece, I think the truly "scientific" view has to be more nuanced: - vaccines cause autism: OK, we have no reason to believe that they do, but we don't know for sure that nothing in them can cause autism. But even if they did, we believe the effect must be quite small. - people are safer owning a gun: The science can't possibly say whether a particular person is safer or not owning a gun. But it does suggest that you may be underestimating the dangers of owning a gun. - genetically modified crops are harmful: So far they have not really been harmful, but we have only a vague idea of the likely consequences down the road. - climate change is not happening: Well, it's obviously happening, but a lot of similar questions are not clear. There's really no way to prove for sure that it's caused by humans or predict its consequences. We should still worry about it because of the potential consequences, but at the end of the day, we are still mostly working with educated guesses. At the end of the day, even when science is wrong, I think it tends to give answers that are much closer to the truth than e.g. random intuition. So that's why some people arguing against pseudoscience try to paint the actual science as absolute truth. They're using the ends to justify the means. But their arguments are sometimes over-reaching, and that can ultimately make them lose credibility.
jcoffland 10y ago
This speech has a lot of valid points with which I mostly agree but it seems to argue for unquestioned acceptance of the current conclusions of mainstream science. Although it's very much in mode right now, this has been proven repeatedly to be a bad idea. Unless you believe that we now finally have everything right you only have to look at history to see that consensus among scientists has been repeatedly incorrect. I don't make this argument to justify bad science or to argue for even less well supported conclusions. We don't know the answer to some questions and logically, some of the questions which we think we know the answer to, we do not. Therefore it is wise to remain skeptical while stamping out pseudoscience.
- jthacker 10y ago
  Unquestioning acceptance of science is definitely not a conclusion of this piece nor is it alluded to. The main argument of this piece is how "an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like" can allow you to reject claims when they are scientifically proven to be false. While he does not directly state that one should be skeptical of the scientific community he also never states that there should be unquestioning acceptance of it either. It is however made clear that skepticism is a key trait of being a scientist. He begins by pointing out the seeming contradiction of being a scientist who is "supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much" while "gathering facts and testing your predictions" before you "either affirm or reject the ideas at hand". Even then you still must "accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge." Establishing early on that a scientist must be willing to accept that "a contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge" while still advancing our collective understanding. "Knowledge has become too vast and complex for any one person [...] to convincingly master more than corners of it". You therefore must rely on the collective of scientific knowledge and those who practice it, the "scientific community". He points out the difference between this group and one of pseudoscientific thought is that the claims of the latter can be demonstrably rejected using the scientific method. A scientist must remain skeptical, but in order to be productive you also need to rely on your community, no one person can verify all claims. Being skeptical is inherit in being a scientist, and therefore part of the scientific community. Relying on the scientific community is not akin to unquestioning acceptance. Questioning established beliefs while backing it with scientific evidence is the key difference between the scientific community and the pseudoscientific one.
internaut 10y ago
Atul has missed something very important here. Firstly; it is true that many right wing persons and groups mistrust science for fallacious reasons. However this is not interesting. And it does not explain the decline in trust in science. Take the theory of evolution. Many religious conservatives do not believe it. However they were certainly aware of the concept fifty years ago. They didn't believe it then either. Logically their trust level on that point can't have changed much. So; it is something else. My opinion is that the right wing rely on their intuitions. This will sound like I'm castigating them as unscientific, but this is not true. Intuition is a genuine information discovery system, sometimes flawed, but, and this is the key point, usually right in a way that increases the odds of survival or else it could not exist. So the question we need to ask is: why would the right wing feel queasy about science today? Consider the following: 1. Their tribal enemy has overwhelming majorities in large scientific fields. That by itself is enough of an explanation. The intuition that your native enemy is likely out to get you by means fair or foul is a pretty good intuition. 2. Universities teach liberalism. It is so pervasive that commonly students and professors don't realize this. They are the proverbial fish in water. If you believe conservatives have low IQs or are intrinsically biased against the scientific method, you've been drinking the kool-aid. If universities don't teach liberalism then it is quite remarkable how synchronized the students are in their beliefs on liberal talking points. This isn't an accident and it has nothing to do with rigorous logical arguments. If as a student you read enough old books you'll run into trouble pretty quickly because the right wing weren't the straw men identified on television shows such as the Colbert Report or The Daily Show. Quite simply there exists a strong intellectual heritage on the right and most students never encounter it because the media and faculty are usually incapable of steelmanning their opponents arguments. That does tend to happen when point (1) is true. 3. There have been no major scientific discoveries seen as directly beneficial to the human race for some time now. This will be my controversial point I think. It is a simple one. Every field has a need to justify its existence, regardless of whether it's astrology or astronomy. Astronomy needs to provide useful data, new evidence of discovery, and astrology needs to make people feel entertained. If either field stops accomplishing those things they become stagnant and eventually they get forgotten. This will be a bitter pill to swallow but consider that the discovery of DNA and the Human Genome Project has had no meaningful effect on people's lives. They aren't living longer or better because of these projects. Many promises have been made with each development, but no meaningful change has occurred. Naturally there are many worthwhile scientific projects which don't directly affect us and especially not right away. However the intuition when hearing that 'something doesn't affect you but could in the distant future and also by the way could you please give us money today' is that you may be listening to a description of a scam. Perhaps technology has stopped integrating scientific knowledge into useful products and services in the way it used to. What matters is that people are broadly looking over their lives, hearing how batteries/cancer will be solved soon by some whiz-bang-discovery and then later hearing nothing and thinking they've been hearing a lot of squealing but not much pork. Common people use common sense, and that's saying to them we haven't been back to the moon in half a century. That major diseases remain unsolved problems. That their wages haven't gone up in decades. Eventually youthful optimism becomes lost for what is a completely rational intuition. These are all areas science is supposed to indirectly relate to, and people aren't seeing it anymore. All the time they have heard how wonderful 'progress' and 'science' is, but not seen it for themselves outside of, say, computing or information science. So those are my 3 reasons why a right wing person would grow to distrust science and scientists.
bluenose69 10y ago
Fifty years ago, an academic told the world: "think for yourself and question authority" (T. Leary, 1967: how to operate your brain). The second part of the phrase has been repeated on everything from bumper stickers to toddler's clothing, but the first part has largely been put aside, for, while the academy has continued to tell people that authorities are to be mistrusted, it has at the same time ignored its mission of helping young people learn how to think. Top grades are awarded to students who struggle with simple mathematics, sentence construction, and the elements of logic. Fifty years is a long time. The vast majority of high-school teachers were taught in todays watered-down system, so there is little hope at that location on the educational conveyor belt. There is some potential at the university level, because university professors are largely self-made people. But it is hard to hold to standards, when universities regard students as clients and professors as service providers, and where the path to promotion is paved by good "metrics" (bums in seats, enthusiastic course reviews, etc.) that are bought most easily by grade inflation. The commencement speech is wonderful. But these words don't need to be heard by students at Caltech, regularly ranked the top university in the world. And replaying them in the New Yorker magazine doesn't exactly get them to the ears that need to hear them. Maybe social media will help, so thanks, HN, for this.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
I would love to see these studies repeated, but asking whether the public believes different reliable, well-studied conclusions of science. For the most part, all these studies ask is whether people trust scientific results that contradict conservative ideology. But there are a variety of reliable scientific results that contradict other ideologies. What would happen if they were included? Examples: - Variance in female intelligence/math ability/other traits is smaller than for men, at roughly the rate Larry Summers famously speculated about. - Different races within the US have different intelligence levels, and that intelligence is highly predictive of adult outcomes. - Demand curves for labor are downward sloping. - In the nature vs nurture battle, nature won. - Teacher performance can be reliably evaluated with statistics (e.g. VAM). - There is no scientifically demonstrated benefit to organic food, and no harm from GMO.
- Alex3917 10y ago
  The problem is most of those aren't even true, e.g. c.f. my notes on VAM: http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-problems http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-prob... http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation Most of which are from the primary sources referenced in Diane Ravitch's book: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465036589/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465651203&sr=8-1&keywords=diane+ravitch+the+death+and+life+of+the+great+american+school+system https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp...
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    Diane Ravitch, such an unbiased source. Lets assume the counterfactual - that teacher performance has no measurable effect. The logical conclusion is that since quality is irrelevant, we should focus on cost. I assume that you support this conclusion? Diane Ravitch certainly doesn't. The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high, that the effect of teachers fades over time, and that the effect of teachers is small. None of this implies VAM doesn't work. Many of your sources don't even agree with you. For instance, the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate! Some years back I recall we discussed this, and I suggested you go learn about the difference between variance and bias. Have you done this? Incidentally, you do bring up yet another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.
meeper16 10y ago
Why did science reject women in the past as if it was scientific to do so?
dctoedt 10y ago
Dr. Atul Gawande is one of my heroes; he's arguably one of the most influential public-health thinkers around. Practicing surgeon. Med-school professor. Stanford undergrad, Harvard Medical School. Rhodes Scholar. MacArthur Fellow. Frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Author of several books; I think I've read them all, and all of them were excellent. "Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and also chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande (footnotes omitted)
deleted 10y ago
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beloch 10y ago
One thing not touched on in this article is how much distrust in science is generated by bad journalism. Journalists routinely overstate and misinterpret results willfully to sell more copy, and all too often they just get things plain wrong. Even if their error is so egregious that they feel compelled to print a retraction a week later, the damage is done. A lot of people will remember the original article as "Truth" for decades. The current decline of paid jobs in journalism suggests that insisting on more qualified journalists to report on science may not be an achievable goal. What we should be doing instead is encouraging scientists to make greater efforts in explaining their work directly to the public. Universities routinely employ publicists to write "plain English" articles about the accomplishments of their researchers to promote their University's brand. These articles, despite being created in collaboration with the scientists, are frequently full of all the journalistic excesses I've described above. If you show errors in such articles to the scientists the article is about, they'll just laugh nervously and shrug, because the final copy was out of their hands. If you speak both French and English, there's no need to communicate to another English speaker using French put through a bad translator. Most scientists are capable of writing well enough to communicate with other humans. It's time to cut the translators out and have scientists communicate directly with the public. Yes, give them editorial feedback to weed out jargon and simplify things adequately, but leave them with full control of what is actually published. The results may be less impressively bombastic and poetic, but they should at least not be hopelessly wrong or outright dishonest.
- joe_the_user 10y ago
  The article goes into the area of ideologies but perhaps in not enough detail. The Internet accelerates the existing situation where any broadly popular position, whether religion or New Age Healing or whatever, can create self-contained, self-reinforcing network of self-defined experts. And even more, even if journalists correctly report scientific results, the real challenge is correctly conveying the "skeptical and imaginative (but not too imaginative)" quality described in the article.
- tcpekin 10y ago
  Some journals require a lay-person abstract, which I think is very nice.
lips 10y ago
Just a little reminder that non-nutjobs can: - Object to GMO crops on basis of politics and intellectual property. - Support organic cultivation for reasons of environmental and cultural preservation.
- douche 10y ago
  Organic cultivation is kind of a silly concept. Who cares whether the fertilizers that you put on crops are processed industrially, or biologically? Objections to pesticides, I can understand, given that some of them, incidentally the ones that actually work, like DDT, are sort of detrimental to humans as well as pests. Mostly it's an excuse to mark up vegetables 250%. Hybrid seed that doesn't grow true if reused is kind of an issue, but that has nothing to do with GMO crops, versus regular, naturally bred hybrids. EDIT: source, grew up as basically a poor white Yankee subsistence farmer. Could probably have qualified as an organic farmer, if we didn't sprinkle Sevin and Rotenone on things to keep them from having the invasive beetles chew the bejeesus out of them. Hint: bugs eat Sevin and Rotenone and just become larger, angrier mutant variations of themselves, like the Hulk munching on concentrated gamma radiation.
mcguire 10y ago
I was recently listening to a Science magazine podcast[1] discussing this year's AAAS meeting[2] and particularly a session called, "A War on Science? Vaccines, Climate Change, GMOs, and the Role of Science"[3]. The presenter was especially impressed by the argument of one of the speakers, that there is no "War on Science". There are conflicts on specific issues, but "science" itself is so powerful that it is the backdrop for those conflicts. Both sides on any of the conflicts want to present science to support their side. The point being that framing any issue as being a "War on Science" (or a mistrust of science) is (a) sloppy, (b) misrepresenting all of the sides, and (c) unlikely to be effective. [1] http://www.sciencemag.org/podcasts http://www.sciencemag.org/podcasts [2] http://www.aaas.org/event/2016-aaas-annual-meeting http://www.aaas.org/event/2016-aaas-annual-meeting [3] https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session12441.html https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session12441.ht...
PCMcGee 10y ago
As most protectors of the establishment are wont to do, the author conflates lack of trust in science with lack of trust in the system used to produce medicines. Putting the profit motive ahead of concerns for safety, performing biased studies while burying relevant data through intimidation and lawsuits, and past history of incredible breaches of public trust is quite enough evidence to make any rational person question the medical system and it's willful, arrogant ignorance in pursuit of competitive advantage. If you want to increase the rate at which people immunize, the answer is simple and obvious, change the for-profit medical industry to an open, verifiable and free model. Anyone who would put the future of the human race into the hands of for profit corporations, deserves to be ejected from the gene pool at the soonest opportunity. A virus is more trustworthy than the likes of Monsanto, Bayer, GSK or any other of these vampires of human misery.

77 points by yarapavan 10y ago

In response to the paragraphs about bad-faith pseudo science "To defend those beliefs... Science’s defenders have identified..." One field that has a lot of experience dealing with this is law. I wonder if the scientific community can learn anything from it.

adrianratnapala 10y ago
Mostly what scientists and lawyers can learn from each other is humility. For both (in different ways) invesitgating the truth of purported facts is important -- as is understanding the laws governing those facts. But lawyers are dealing with interested, intelligent agents, some of whom will try to game whatever environment they are faced with. Science has less of this problem, so it pushes harder into realms of precision that lawyers ought not dare enter. But scientists who wade into policy or legal fights should remember that they are n00bs who's methods are easily perverted.

stephengillie 10y ago

The nearly unbelievable level of rigor achieved by particle physics gives a harmful level of credence to numerous other fields, especially nutrition & medicine. Studies done across 8 people are given the same authorial credibility as studies done across 8 million protons, by lumping them all together as "science".

Bromskloss 10y ago
> Studies done across 8 people are given the same authorial credibility as studies done across 8 million protons The number alone doesn't tell us how reliable the conclusions are. This doesn't necessarily invalidate your point, though.
- bobdole1234 10y ago
  Six orders of magnitude does give a little bit of an insight into reliability.
  - tremon 10y ago
    reliability, yes, extrapolation beyond the original 8 test subjects, no.
api 10y ago
This is often called "physics envy" in the sciences.
arghbleargh 10y ago
Yes, I think this has to be a major reason why people distrust science, and frankly I am sympathetic to it. Too many studies amount to a 2% statistical difference (with an analysis rife with biases) with no causal mechanism (or a highly speculative one). Relying on this type of evidence, while not worse than pseudoscience, still drastically weakens your position when trying to argue against claims like "vaccines cause autism". (Remember when fat was bad?) Also, even for the examples given in the piece, I think the truly "scientific" view has to be more nuanced: - vaccines cause autism: OK, we have no reason to believe that they do, but we don't know for sure that nothing in them can cause autism. But even if they did, we believe the effect must be quite small. - people are safer owning a gun: The science can't possibly say whether a particular person is safer or not owning a gun. But it does suggest that you may be underestimating the dangers of owning a gun. - genetically modified crops are harmful: So far they have not really been harmful, but we have only a vague idea of the likely consequences down the road. - climate change is not happening: Well, it's obviously happening, but a lot of similar questions are not clear. There's really no way to prove for sure that it's caused by humans or predict its consequences. We should still worry about it because of the potential consequences, but at the end of the day, we are still mostly working with educated guesses. At the end of the day, even when science is wrong, I think it tends to give answers that are much closer to the truth than e.g. random intuition. So that's why some people arguing against pseudoscience try to paint the actual science as absolute truth. They're using the ends to justify the means. But their arguments are sometimes over-reaching, and that can ultimately make them lose credibility.

jcoffland 10y ago

This speech has a lot of valid points with which I mostly agree but it seems to argue for unquestioned acceptance of the current conclusions of mainstream science. Although it's very much in mode right now, this has been proven repeatedly to be a bad idea. Unless you believe that we now finally have everything right you only have to look at history to see that consensus among scientists has been repeatedly incorrect. I don't make this argument to justify bad science or to argue for even less well supported conclusions. We don't know the answer to some questions and logically, some of the questions which we think we know the answer to, we do not. Therefore it is wise to remain skeptical while stamping out pseudoscience.

jthacker 10y ago
Unquestioning acceptance of science is definitely not a conclusion of this piece nor is it alluded to. The main argument of this piece is how "an understanding of what real truth-seeking looks like" can allow you to reject claims when they are scientifically proven to be false. While he does not directly state that one should be skeptical of the scientific community he also never states that there should be unquestioning acceptance of it either. It is however made clear that skepticism is a key trait of being a scientist. He begins by pointing out the seeming contradiction of being a scientist who is "supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but not too much" while "gathering facts and testing your predictions" before you "either affirm or reject the ideas at hand". Even then you still must "accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that all knowledge is just probable knowledge." Establishing early on that a scientist must be willing to accept that "a contradictory piece of evidence can always emerge" while still advancing our collective understanding. "Knowledge has become too vast and complex for any one person [...] to convincingly master more than corners of it". You therefore must rely on the collective of scientific knowledge and those who practice it, the "scientific community". He points out the difference between this group and one of pseudoscientific thought is that the claims of the latter can be demonstrably rejected using the scientific method. A scientist must remain skeptical, but in order to be productive you also need to rely on your community, no one person can verify all claims. Being skeptical is inherit in being a scientist, and therefore part of the scientific community. Relying on the scientific community is not akin to unquestioning acceptance. Questioning established beliefs while backing it with scientific evidence is the key difference between the scientific community and the pseudoscientific one.

internaut 10y ago

Atul has missed something very important here. Firstly; it is true that many right wing persons and groups mistrust science for fallacious reasons. However this is not interesting. And it does not explain the decline in trust in science. Take the theory of evolution. Many religious conservatives do not believe it. However they were certainly aware of the concept fifty years ago. They didn't believe it then either. Logically their trust level on that point can't have changed much. So; it is something else. My opinion is that the right wing rely on their intuitions. This will sound like I'm castigating them as unscientific, but this is not true. Intuition is a genuine information discovery system, sometimes flawed, but, and this is the key point, usually right in a way that increases the odds of survival or else it could not exist. So the question we need to ask is: why would the right wing feel queasy about science today? Consider the following: 1. Their tribal enemy has overwhelming majorities in large scientific fields. That by itself is enough of an explanation. The intuition that your native enemy is likely out to get you by means fair or foul is a pretty good intuition. 2. Universities teach liberalism. It is so pervasive that commonly students and professors don't realize this. They are the proverbial fish in water. If you believe conservatives have low IQs or are intrinsically biased against the scientific method, you've been drinking the kool-aid. If universities don't teach liberalism then it is quite remarkable how synchronized the students are in their beliefs on liberal talking points. This isn't an accident and it has nothing to do with rigorous logical arguments. If as a student you read enough old books you'll run into trouble pretty quickly because the right wing weren't the straw men identified on television shows such as the Colbert Report or The Daily Show. Quite simply there exists a strong intellectual heritage on the right and most students never encounter it because the media and faculty are usually incapable of steelmanning their opponents arguments. That does tend to happen when point (1) is true. 3. There have been no major scientific discoveries seen as directly beneficial to the human race for some time now. This will be my controversial point I think. It is a simple one. Every field has a need to justify its existence, regardless of whether it's astrology or astronomy. Astronomy needs to provide useful data, new evidence of discovery, and astrology needs to make people feel entertained. If either field stops accomplishing those things they become stagnant and eventually they get forgotten. This will be a bitter pill to swallow but consider that the discovery of DNA and the Human Genome Project has had no meaningful effect on people's lives. They aren't living longer or better because of these projects. Many promises have been made with each development, but no meaningful change has occurred. Naturally there are many worthwhile scientific projects which don't directly affect us and especially not right away. However the intuition when hearing that 'something doesn't affect you but could in the distant future and also by the way could you please give us money today' is that you may be listening to a description of a scam. Perhaps technology has stopped integrating scientific knowledge into useful products and services in the way it used to. What matters is that people are broadly looking over their lives, hearing how batteries/cancer will be solved soon by some whiz-bang-discovery and then later hearing nothing and thinking they've been hearing a lot of squealing but not much pork. Common people use common sense, and that's saying to them we haven't been back to the moon in half a century. That major diseases remain unsolved problems. That their wages haven't gone up in decades. Eventually youthful optimism becomes lost for what is a completely rational intuition. These are all areas science is supposed to indirectly relate to, and people aren't seeing it anymore. All the time they have heard how wonderful 'progress' and 'science' is, but not seen it for themselves outside of, say, computing or information science. So those are my 3 reasons why a right wing person would grow to distrust science and scientists.

bluenose69 10y ago

Fifty years ago, an academic told the world: "think for yourself and question authority" (T. Leary, 1967: how to operate your brain). The second part of the phrase has been repeated on everything from bumper stickers to toddler's clothing, but the first part has largely been put aside, for, while the academy has continued to tell people that authorities are to be mistrusted, it has at the same time ignored its mission of helping young people learn how to think. Top grades are awarded to students who struggle with simple mathematics, sentence construction, and the elements of logic. Fifty years is a long time. The vast majority of high-school teachers were taught in todays watered-down system, so there is little hope at that location on the educational conveyor belt. There is some potential at the university level, because university professors are largely self-made people. But it is hard to hold to standards, when universities regard students as clients and professors as service providers, and where the path to promotion is paved by good "metrics" (bums in seats, enthusiastic course reviews, etc.) that are bought most easily by grade inflation. The commencement speech is wonderful. But these words don't need to be heard by students at Caltech, regularly ranked the top university in the world. And replaying them in the New Yorker magazine doesn't exactly get them to the ears that need to hear them. Maybe social media will help, so thanks, HN, for this.

yummyfajitas 10y ago

I would love to see these studies repeated, but asking whether the public believes different reliable, well-studied conclusions of science. For the most part, all these studies ask is whether people trust scientific results that contradict conservative ideology. But there are a variety of reliable scientific results that contradict other ideologies. What would happen if they were included? Examples: - Variance in female intelligence/math ability/other traits is smaller than for men, at roughly the rate Larry Summers famously speculated about. - Different races within the US have different intelligence levels, and that intelligence is highly predictive of adult outcomes. - Demand curves for labor are downward sloping. - In the nature vs nurture battle, nature won. - Teacher performance can be reliably evaluated with statistics (e.g. VAM). - There is no scientifically demonstrated benefit to organic food, and no harm from GMO.

Alex3917 10y ago
The problem is most of those aren't even true, e.g. c.f. my notes on VAM: http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-efficacy http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-problems http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-statistical-prob... http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation http://www.alexkrupp.com/Citevault.html#vam-implementation Most of which are from the primary sources referenced in Diane Ravitch's book: https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp/0465036589/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1465651203&sr=8-1&keywords=diane+ravitch+the+death+and+life+of+the+great+american+school+system https://www.amazon.com/Death-Great-American-School-System/dp...
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Diane Ravitch, such an unbiased source. Lets assume the counterfactual - that teacher performance has no measurable effect. The logical conclusion is that since quality is irrelevant, we should focus on cost. I assume that you support this conclusion? Diane Ravitch certainly doesn't. The bulk of your notes show simply that variance is high, that the effect of teachers fades over time, and that the effect of teachers is small. None of this implies VAM doesn't work. Many of your sources don't even agree with you. For instance, the Mathematica evaluation suggests a 74% accuracy rate! Some years back I recall we discussed this, and I suggested you go learn about the difference between variance and bias. Have you done this? Incidentally, you do bring up yet another solid scientific conclusion that cuts against non-conservative ideologies: teachers don't matter much at all.

meeper16 10y ago

Why did science reject women in the past as if it was scientific to do so?

dctoedt 10y ago

Dr. Atul Gawande is one of my heroes; he's arguably one of the most influential public-health thinkers around. Practicing surgeon. Med-school professor. Stanford undergrad, Harvard Medical School. Rhodes Scholar. MacArthur Fellow. Frequent contributor to the New Yorker. Author of several books; I think I've read them all, and all of them were excellent. "Atul Gawande (born November 5, 1965) is an American surgeon, writer, and public health researcher. He practices general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Samuel O. Thier Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. In public health, he is executive director of Ariadne Labs, a joint center for health systems innovation, and also chairman of Lifebox, a nonprofit that works on reducing deaths in surgery globally." [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atul_Gawande (footnotes omitted)

deleted 10y ago

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beloch 10y ago

One thing not touched on in this article is how much distrust in science is generated by bad journalism. Journalists routinely overstate and misinterpret results willfully to sell more copy, and all too often they just get things plain wrong. Even if their error is so egregious that they feel compelled to print a retraction a week later, the damage is done. A lot of people will remember the original article as "Truth" for decades. The current decline of paid jobs in journalism suggests that insisting on more qualified journalists to report on science may not be an achievable goal. What we should be doing instead is encouraging scientists to make greater efforts in explaining their work directly to the public. Universities routinely employ publicists to write "plain English" articles about the accomplishments of their researchers to promote their University's brand. These articles, despite being created in collaboration with the scientists, are frequently full of all the journalistic excesses I've described above. If you show errors in such articles to the scientists the article is about, they'll just laugh nervously and shrug, because the final copy was out of their hands. If you speak both French and English, there's no need to communicate to another English speaker using French put through a bad translator. Most scientists are capable of writing well enough to communicate with other humans. It's time to cut the translators out and have scientists communicate directly with the public. Yes, give them editorial feedback to weed out jargon and simplify things adequately, but leave them with full control of what is actually published. The results may be less impressively bombastic and poetic, but they should at least not be hopelessly wrong or outright dishonest.

joe_the_user 10y ago
The article goes into the area of ideologies but perhaps in not enough detail. The Internet accelerates the existing situation where any broadly popular position, whether religion or New Age Healing or whatever, can create self-contained, self-reinforcing network of self-defined experts. And even more, even if journalists correctly report scientific results, the real challenge is correctly conveying the "skeptical and imaginative (but not too imaginative)" quality described in the article.
tcpekin 10y ago
Some journals require a lay-person abstract, which I think is very nice.

lips 10y ago

Just a little reminder that non-nutjobs can: - Object to GMO crops on basis of politics and intellectual property. - Support organic cultivation for reasons of environmental and cultural preservation.

douche 10y ago
Organic cultivation is kind of a silly concept. Who cares whether the fertilizers that you put on crops are processed industrially, or biologically? Objections to pesticides, I can understand, given that some of them, incidentally the ones that actually work, like DDT, are sort of detrimental to humans as well as pests. Mostly it's an excuse to mark up vegetables 250%. Hybrid seed that doesn't grow true if reused is kind of an issue, but that has nothing to do with GMO crops, versus regular, naturally bred hybrids. EDIT: source, grew up as basically a poor white Yankee subsistence farmer. Could probably have qualified as an organic farmer, if we didn't sprinkle Sevin and Rotenone on things to keep them from having the invasive beetles chew the bejeesus out of them. Hint: bugs eat Sevin and Rotenone and just become larger, angrier mutant variations of themselves, like the Hulk munching on concentrated gamma radiation.

mcguire 10y ago

I was recently listening to a Science magazine podcast[1] discussing this year's AAAS meeting[2] and particularly a session called, "A War on Science? Vaccines, Climate Change, GMOs, and the Role of Science"[3]. The presenter was especially impressed by the argument of one of the speakers, that there is no "War on Science". There are conflicts on specific issues, but "science" itself is so powerful that it is the backdrop for those conflicts. Both sides on any of the conflicts want to present science to support their side. The point being that framing any issue as being a "War on Science" (or a mistrust of science) is (a) sloppy, (b) misrepresenting all of the sides, and (c) unlikely to be effective. [1] http://www.sciencemag.org/podcasts http://www.sciencemag.org/podcasts [2] http://www.aaas.org/event/2016-aaas-annual-meeting http://www.aaas.org/event/2016-aaas-annual-meeting [3] https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session12441.html https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2016/webprogram/Session12441.ht...

PCMcGee 10y ago

As most protectors of the establishment are wont to do, the author conflates lack of trust in science with lack of trust in the system used to produce medicines. Putting the profit motive ahead of concerns for safety, performing biased studies while burying relevant data through intimidation and lawsuits, and past history of incredible breaches of public trust is quite enough evidence to make any rational person question the medical system and it's willful, arrogant ignorance in pursuit of competitive advantage. If you want to increase the rate at which people immunize, the answer is simple and obvious, change the for-profit medical industry to an open, verifiable and free model. Anyone who would put the future of the human race into the hands of for profit corporations, deserves to be ejected from the gene pool at the soonest opportunity. A virus is more trustworthy than the likes of Monsanto, Bayer, GSK or any other of these vampires of human misery.