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For Some, Scientists Aren't the Authority on Science

37 points by happy-go-lucky 10y ago

dmfdmf 10y ago
If anyone on the left was paying attention they would know that it isn't science -v- anti-science as they demonize it but politicized science -v- independent science. It is amazing to me that the same people that dismiss "tobacco" or "soda industry" science/scientists have no problem accepting "government" science at face value. That govt now funds the vast majority of scientific research in the world it should come as no surprise that a lot of it such "science" is used to justify increasing govt power. This is not an explicit policy or devious strategy but implicit outcome of govt funded science performed by real human beings who respond to incentives. Read Ayn Rand's "The Establishing of an Establishment" in "Philosophy:Who Needs It" for a good explanation of the process. The politicization of science is destroying the credibility of science which should come as no surprise. NB: Before anyone jumps to conclusions; not a Trump supporter and did not vote for him. Also, I think that global warming is probably true based on historical and temperature records (but I put almost zero confidence in "climate models") but it is not nearly as dire as the scaremongers suggest.
- craigvn 10y ago
  If you dismiss government funded science and industry funded science as both being conflicted there is not much left. > "a lot of it such "science" is used to justify increasing govt power." Is this really true, or does the science suggest actionable outcomes that you are confusing with power. I suppose the scientists could just say do nothing, but with so much to learn that would seem very regressive.
  - pessimizer 10y ago
    Why would you dismiss either? Accepting an argument as being produced solely for the purpose of advancing the agendas of the people financing that argument isn't a reason to dismiss any argument that is not statistical in nature. Statistical arguments, however, are sensitive to the suppression of negative results, fuzzy classification schemes, and p-hacking.
  - humanrebar 10y ago
    > If you dismiss government funded science and industry funded science as both being conflicted there is not much left. With good science, one can anonymize the authorship and still have something useful to work with. I want to eliminate argument ad hominem, not pick a better ad hominem.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  Good luck doing any kind of fundamental science without government funding. > Read Ayn Rand's [...] for a good explanation of the process lol That pretty much explains it.
  - dmfdmf 10y ago
    <Good luck doing any kind of fundamental science without government funding.> This is exactly the issue that Rand addressed in her article regarding the Establishment. It is insidious and (eventually) undercuts even an honest researcher. <That pretty much explains it.> Yes, yes she did.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- humanrebar 10y ago
  The fact that you need the disclaimer at the end of your post is discouraging. I think you did well to put it in there, but it doesn't bode well for objective reason and thoughtful discourse. And that is directly relevant to the skepticism surrounding science in pop culture and mass media.
- stouset 10y ago
  > I think that global warming is probably true based on historical and temperature records (but I put almost zero confidence in "climate models") but it is not nearly as dire as the scaremongers suggest. Based on what? I'm asking seriously. I assume you're not a climate scientist. So, 95%+ of climate scientists (and realistically, more than that) believe that the threat is dire and also believe that our current models are accurate within reasonable margins of error. Given this, isn't it hubris to think you know more about this topic than they? Consider Dunning-Kruger. The people who've spent their lives studying the climate are the ones most skeptical of their own understanding of the problem, and yet they're also the ones sounding the alarm as loud as they can. What's the tipping point where you decide to accept the findings of essentially everyone in the field?
  - nice1 10y ago
    Why do you say 95%? Where is that number from? My own estimate is 15%, if you substract people who make these claims only so as to get grant funding which they would not get otherwise.
  - sien 10y ago
    The IPCC says: "It is extremely likely [95 percent confidence] more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together." That is very different from 95% of climate scientists think that the threat is dire. The IPCC says that perhaps 51% of the increase in temperature is due to greenhouse gasses AND other anthropogenic forcings, you're saying something quite different. That is the consensus.
    - sdenton4 10y ago
      Those are statements about the CAUSE of global warming, which doesn't say much about its effects (which are widely agreed to be dire). Knowing that 50 percent is anthropogenic means that we can reasonably look for anthropogenic solutions. Though so far game theory has outweighed rationality...
- tzs 10y ago
  > It is amazing to me that the same people that dismiss "tobacco" or "soda industry" science/scientists have no problem accepting "government" science at face value. When a scientist working at a lab in a tobacco company gets a result that puts tobacco in a bad light, the result likely won't get published. When a scientist working at an academic lab gets government funding, and gets a result the government doesn't like, the result likely will get published. That's a huge difference.
  - belovedeagle 10y ago
    Do you have any evidence supporting this claim?
    - tzs 10y ago
      The notable lack of very many papers from tobacco company labs reporting results that go against the interests of the company that owns the lab, and the large number of papers from academic scientists whose results are against the interests of the governments that funded them.
      - belovedeagle 10y ago
        Do you have examples of goverment-negative papers? Do you have data to back up the other claim? I don't think you've grasped the concept of "evidence" here.
MollyR 10y ago
Well within in nonevangelicals, this article was popular for a while. The Food Pyramid That Made Us Fat http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/29/934261/- http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/29/934261/- Not to mention the anti-vaccine people on all sides of the political and religious spectrum. This article really suggests to me a long term trend in the establishments loosing their credibility across multiple groups of people or at least that is the real issue.
- ssivark 10y ago
  This comment remimded me of an article titled "The death of expertise" : http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/ http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/ I just re-submitted it to HN for another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13058847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13058847
shshhdhs 10y ago
It's also important to hold science accountable with a healthy level of skepticism. There have only been a few reports on HN of bad science, journal bias, biased studies, and even potentially coverups (Theranos), but there are a lot more that occur that we don't notice. Science is not always real. Read past the headline, compare results, and follow the money.
- lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
  This post has little to do with science. You're talking about healthy media consumption with a misunderstanding on what being a published paper means. There's this huge disconnect among laypeople, which is probably the cause of the antiscience movement, that subscribes to the idea that once something is written down it becomes SCIENCE LAW. When infact all a peer reviewed article means is a group of qualifed folks couldn't see anything immediately wrong with your experimental setup that would color your results and so enter it into the total body of work. Then, when the next group wants to study in that field, they'll compare their results to yours, and either add credence to the established lexicon, or provide a competing hypothesis and body of evidence. With the exception of blatantly fraudulent studies (vaccines link to autism, early cold reports, etc) the idea that "science isn't always real" doesn't make much sense. Experiments can be flawed, conclusions can be faulty or incorrect, but the process behind them is still the same. There's neither anything stopping you from presenting a counter experiment; infact the community wants that. Just because the ideas behind good science doesn't sell papers, doesn't mean that it's not near 100% of the science being done.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago
  If you say that, it pretty much shows you don't understand how science works. Science is all about fine tuning that healthy level of skepticism. That's what science does.
  - vixen99 10y ago
    If you don't think 'follow the money' isn't a significant factor in how people (scientists included) work then you don't understand how human nature works.
Kenji 10y ago
Let us not turn science into a religion. Common sense goes a long way. The more politically controversial the topic, the less likely it is that science on it will be unbiased or valid at all. Religious organisations I don't even comment on.
- mjevans 10y ago
  Actually, I'd prefer if science, the worship of knowledge and the quest for enlightenment, WERE a religion. That is, if it were recognized as a /belief system/ and had the same tax benefits that religious organizations have.
  - gibbitz 10y ago
    I'm sure that those above who feel like the climate science that suggests man is contributing to global warming somehow benefits the government, would still suggest that the religious funding science gets is still clouding it's judgement. Funny that this never comes up when discussing the political agenda of Evangelicals...
- yongjik 10y ago
  Common sense: Everything that moves eventually stops. Science: LOL no. Common sense: When you drop something heavy, it falls faster. Science: Not really. Common sense: The sun circles us: it rises in the morning, and then sets in the evening. Science: Turns out you got that backwards. Common sense: Animals are the way they are, they don't change. Science: Actually they do. Common sense: Either this thing called "electron" passes this slit or that slit. Come on, they can't pass both slits at the same time, are you freaking kidding me? Science: Well, you're not gonna like this, but... Common sense, not even once.
lambdaphagy 10y ago
Are scientists the authority on behavioral genetics, hmm? How does the average NYT reader feel about the results of that field?
- mr_overalls 10y ago
  I feel like there are some specific results from behavioral genetics that you think would be controversial among Left-leaning people. Would you care to elaborate?
  - lambdaphagy 10y ago
    There are specific results that are especially unpalatable, but I'm thinking more of the general conclusion that all human behavioral traits are heritable. https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/all-human-behavioral-traits-are-heritable/ https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/all-human-behaviora...
lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
For any interested: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0963662516661090 http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0963662516661090 The actual paper, since this chain has been largely derailed for the confused to come in and conflate media/reporting with science.
imchillyb 10y ago
People treat science like it's a religious text, or a set of unalterable truths, and it's not. Science is a method; period. Science is a method humans use in order to produce a reproducible experiment -or sets of experiments- in order to collect data. The collected data is only as good as the tools we utilize to do our measuring. As such, when our tools improve, so does accuracy of the data we collect. There are a number of issues with this. The data can be incorrect, or incorrectly attributed as a causation instead of a correlation. The data can be manipulated in order to prove a bad theory. The tools can be flawed or not precise enough. The peers reviewing the data can be manipulated into consensus. The theory itself may be fundamentally flawed, but the inaccuracies of the tools used can seem to prove the theory (see: electron shells and superposition). Science -at its most basic- is a checklist. That checklist ensures that an experiment is both reproducible and as accurate as our data gathering tools allow -at the time. When our tools improve, change, or become obsolete our understanding must also. That's why to some people science always seems to have two heads and is double-tongued. As with most other things, education is the key to solving this bad-perception of science, scientists, and the data collected from experimentation and observation.
- tzs 10y ago
  By the definition of science you are using, wouldn't much of climate science, oceanography, geology, astronomy, cosmology, paleontology, and archaeology not be science? In all of those fields we have limited if any ability to conduct experiments.
  - carsongross 10y ago
    It's a matter of degree, but to some extent, yes. The conflation of experimentally verifiable science and observational science (and, even more so, social sciences) is the crux of the issue. This is not to say that observational or social sciences are useless, but that they are less authoritative and more open to confounding variables than experimental science. People use the results of the later as if they have the authority of the former. It is quite useful rhetorically and, unfortunately, as is so often the case, good rhetoric wins. What, do you hate science?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago
There are within science actually two types of "science". The one makes precise models and therefore predictions and treats failures of those models and predictions as a big deal, and takes verification so seriously that they would rather delay publication to make sure they results are absolutely correct and not a statistical anomaly. Examples of the first include the LHC and Higgs-Boson and LIGO and gravitional wave detection. The other type of science practically believes that "science" exists as a purely social construct where you convince others that you have ideas that are true. This science gives p-hacking, and irreproducible studies, and models and predictions that are wrong but that's ok because the over-arching theory is just fine. Examples of this are social sciences. Also, the second type of "science" seems to insert itself into media and be involved with telling people how they should live their lives. An example of this is the dietary industry with "science" backing. It turns out, the news media gives heavy preference to the second type of "science", the one with crappy models and predictions, but which the media feel can more easily become clickbait. Which article would you think most people would click on - "An explanation of gravity waves", or "Scientists say eating <common food> is killing you". In addition, because there is less dependence on precise models, the inherent bias of the "scientist" comes into play. Because of this, the science that most people see in popular media is not where precise models get refined, but one where outlandish predictions are made and then discarded for the opposite outlandish prediction. After being exposed to this, people decide that science changes from day to day, and that "scientists" are just really influence hungry people just out to tell people how to live their lives and claiming they should be listened to because they have some special knowledge or qualification - just like the "clergy" in the Middle Ages. PS: The left also has a low opinion of science. You can see this when you see people critiquing studies because they come from oil companies, tobacco companies, or sugar companies. If they really believed in science, they would know that science works regardless of the background of the people involved.
happy-go-lucky 10y ago
This reminds me of an apt quote from Feynman: science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.

If anyone on the left was paying attention they would know that it isn't science -v- anti-science as they demonize it but politicized science -v- independent science. It is amazing to me that the same people that dismiss "tobacco" or "soda industry" science/scientists have no problem accepting "government" science at face value. That govt now funds the vast majority of scientific research in the world it should come as no surprise that a lot of it such "science" is used to justify increasing govt power. This is not an explicit policy or devious strategy but implicit outcome of govt funded science performed by real human beings who respond to incentives. Read Ayn Rand's "The Establishing of an Establishment" in "Philosophy:Who Needs It" for a good explanation of the process. The politicization of science is destroying the credibility of science which should come as no surprise. NB: Before anyone jumps to conclusions; not a Trump supporter and did not vote for him. Also, I think that global warming is probably true based on historical and temperature records (but I put almost zero confidence in "climate models") but it is not nearly as dire as the scaremongers suggest.

craigvn 10y ago
If you dismiss government funded science and industry funded science as both being conflicted there is not much left. > "a lot of it such "science" is used to justify increasing govt power." Is this really true, or does the science suggest actionable outcomes that you are confusing with power. I suppose the scientists could just say do nothing, but with so much to learn that would seem very regressive.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Why would you dismiss either? Accepting an argument as being produced solely for the purpose of advancing the agendas of the people financing that argument isn't a reason to dismiss any argument that is not statistical in nature. Statistical arguments, however, are sensitive to the suppression of negative results, fuzzy classification schemes, and p-hacking.
- humanrebar 10y ago
  > If you dismiss government funded science and industry funded science as both being conflicted there is not much left. With good science, one can anonymize the authorship and still have something useful to work with. I want to eliminate argument ad hominem, not pick a better ad hominem.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
Good luck doing any kind of fundamental science without government funding. > Read Ayn Rand's [...] for a good explanation of the process lol That pretty much explains it.
- dmfdmf 10y ago
  <Good luck doing any kind of fundamental science without government funding.> This is exactly the issue that Rand addressed in her article regarding the Establishment. It is insidious and (eventually) undercuts even an honest researcher. <That pretty much explains it.> Yes, yes she did.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
humanrebar 10y ago
The fact that you need the disclaimer at the end of your post is discouraging. I think you did well to put it in there, but it doesn't bode well for objective reason and thoughtful discourse. And that is directly relevant to the skepticism surrounding science in pop culture and mass media.
stouset 10y ago
> I think that global warming is probably true based on historical and temperature records (but I put almost zero confidence in "climate models") but it is not nearly as dire as the scaremongers suggest. Based on what? I'm asking seriously. I assume you're not a climate scientist. So, 95%+ of climate scientists (and realistically, more than that) believe that the threat is dire and also believe that our current models are accurate within reasonable margins of error. Given this, isn't it hubris to think you know more about this topic than they? Consider Dunning-Kruger. The people who've spent their lives studying the climate are the ones most skeptical of their own understanding of the problem, and yet they're also the ones sounding the alarm as loud as they can. What's the tipping point where you decide to accept the findings of essentially everyone in the field?
- nice1 10y ago
  Why do you say 95%? Where is that number from? My own estimate is 15%, if you substract people who make these claims only so as to get grant funding which they would not get otherwise.
- sien 10y ago
  The IPCC says: "It is extremely likely [95 percent confidence] more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together." That is very different from 95% of climate scientists think that the threat is dire. The IPCC says that perhaps 51% of the increase in temperature is due to greenhouse gasses AND other anthropogenic forcings, you're saying something quite different. That is the consensus.
  - sdenton4 10y ago
    Those are statements about the CAUSE of global warming, which doesn't say much about its effects (which are widely agreed to be dire). Knowing that 50 percent is anthropogenic means that we can reasonably look for anthropogenic solutions. Though so far game theory has outweighed rationality...
tzs 10y ago
> It is amazing to me that the same people that dismiss "tobacco" or "soda industry" science/scientists have no problem accepting "government" science at face value. When a scientist working at a lab in a tobacco company gets a result that puts tobacco in a bad light, the result likely won't get published. When a scientist working at an academic lab gets government funding, and gets a result the government doesn't like, the result likely will get published. That's a huge difference.
- belovedeagle 10y ago
  Do you have any evidence supporting this claim?
  - tzs 10y ago
    The notable lack of very many papers from tobacco company labs reporting results that go against the interests of the company that owns the lab, and the large number of papers from academic scientists whose results are against the interests of the governments that funded them.
    - belovedeagle 10y ago
      Do you have examples of goverment-negative papers? Do you have data to back up the other claim? I don't think you've grasped the concept of "evidence" here.

MollyR 10y ago

Well within in nonevangelicals, this article was popular for a while. The Food Pyramid That Made Us Fat http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/29/934261/- http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/1/29/934261/- Not to mention the anti-vaccine people on all sides of the political and religious spectrum. This article really suggests to me a long term trend in the establishments loosing their credibility across multiple groups of people or at least that is the real issue.

ssivark 10y ago
This comment remimded me of an article titled "The death of expertise" : http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/ http://thefederalist.com/2014/01/17/the-death-of-expertise/ I just re-submitted it to HN for another discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13058847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13058847

shshhdhs 10y ago

It's also important to hold science accountable with a healthy level of skepticism. There have only been a few reports on HN of bad science, journal bias, biased studies, and even potentially coverups (Theranos), but there are a lot more that occur that we don't notice. Science is not always real. Read past the headline, compare results, and follow the money.

lordCarbonFiber 10y ago
This post has little to do with science. You're talking about healthy media consumption with a misunderstanding on what being a published paper means. There's this huge disconnect among laypeople, which is probably the cause of the antiscience movement, that subscribes to the idea that once something is written down it becomes SCIENCE LAW. When infact all a peer reviewed article means is a group of qualifed folks couldn't see anything immediately wrong with your experimental setup that would color your results and so enter it into the total body of work. Then, when the next group wants to study in that field, they'll compare their results to yours, and either add credence to the established lexicon, or provide a competing hypothesis and body of evidence. With the exception of blatantly fraudulent studies (vaccines link to autism, early cold reports, etc) the idea that "science isn't always real" doesn't make much sense. Experiments can be flawed, conclusions can be faulty or incorrect, but the process behind them is still the same. There's neither anything stopping you from presenting a counter experiment; infact the community wants that. Just because the ideas behind good science doesn't sell papers, doesn't mean that it's not near 100% of the science being done.
Florin_Andrei 10y ago
If you say that, it pretty much shows you don't understand how science works. Science is all about fine tuning that healthy level of skepticism. That's what science does.
- vixen99 10y ago
  If you don't think 'follow the money' isn't a significant factor in how people (scientists included) work then you don't understand how human nature works.

Kenji 10y ago

Let us not turn science into a religion. Common sense goes a long way. The more politically controversial the topic, the less likely it is that science on it will be unbiased or valid at all. Religious organisations I don't even comment on.

mjevans 10y ago
Actually, I'd prefer if science, the worship of knowledge and the quest for enlightenment, WERE a religion. That is, if it were recognized as a /belief system/ and had the same tax benefits that religious organizations have.
- gibbitz 10y ago
  I'm sure that those above who feel like the climate science that suggests man is contributing to global warming somehow benefits the government, would still suggest that the religious funding science gets is still clouding it's judgement. Funny that this never comes up when discussing the political agenda of Evangelicals...
yongjik 10y ago
Common sense: Everything that moves eventually stops. Science: LOL no. Common sense: When you drop something heavy, it falls faster. Science: Not really. Common sense: The sun circles us: it rises in the morning, and then sets in the evening. Science: Turns out you got that backwards. Common sense: Animals are the way they are, they don't change. Science: Actually they do. Common sense: Either this thing called "electron" passes this slit or that slit. Come on, they can't pass both slits at the same time, are you freaking kidding me? Science: Well, you're not gonna like this, but... Common sense, not even once.

lambdaphagy 10y ago

Are scientists the authority on behavioral genetics, hmm? How does the average NYT reader feel about the results of that field?

mr_overalls 10y ago
I feel like there are some specific results from behavioral genetics that you think would be controversial among Left-leaning people. Would you care to elaborate?
- lambdaphagy 10y ago
  There are specific results that are especially unpalatable, but I'm thinking more of the general conclusion that all human behavioral traits are heritable. https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/all-human-behavioral-traits-are-heritable/ https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2012/12/31/all-human-behaviora...

lordCarbonFiber 10y ago

For any interested: http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0963662516661090 http://sci-hub.cc/10.1177/0963662516661090 The actual paper, since this chain has been largely derailed for the confused to come in and conflate media/reporting with science.

imchillyb 10y ago

People treat science like it's a religious text, or a set of unalterable truths, and it's not. Science is a method; period. Science is a method humans use in order to produce a reproducible experiment -or sets of experiments- in order to collect data. The collected data is only as good as the tools we utilize to do our measuring. As such, when our tools improve, so does accuracy of the data we collect. There are a number of issues with this. The data can be incorrect, or incorrectly attributed as a causation instead of a correlation. The data can be manipulated in order to prove a bad theory. The tools can be flawed or not precise enough. The peers reviewing the data can be manipulated into consensus. The theory itself may be fundamentally flawed, but the inaccuracies of the tools used can seem to prove the theory (see: electron shells and superposition). Science -at its most basic- is a checklist. That checklist ensures that an experiment is both reproducible and as accurate as our data gathering tools allow -at the time. When our tools improve, change, or become obsolete our understanding must also. That's why to some people science always seems to have two heads and is double-tongued. As with most other things, education is the key to solving this bad-perception of science, scientists, and the data collected from experimentation and observation.

tzs 10y ago
By the definition of science you are using, wouldn't much of climate science, oceanography, geology, astronomy, cosmology, paleontology, and archaeology not be science? In all of those fields we have limited if any ability to conduct experiments.
- carsongross 10y ago
  It's a matter of degree, but to some extent, yes. The conflation of experimentally verifiable science and observational science (and, even more so, social sciences) is the crux of the issue. This is not to say that observational or social sciences are useless, but that they are less authoritative and more open to confounding variables than experimental science. People use the results of the later as if they have the authority of the former. It is quite useful rhetorically and, unfortunately, as is so often the case, good rhetoric wins. What, do you hate science?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago

There are within science actually two types of "science". The one makes precise models and therefore predictions and treats failures of those models and predictions as a big deal, and takes verification so seriously that they would rather delay publication to make sure they results are absolutely correct and not a statistical anomaly. Examples of the first include the LHC and Higgs-Boson and LIGO and gravitional wave detection. The other type of science practically believes that "science" exists as a purely social construct where you convince others that you have ideas that are true. This science gives p-hacking, and irreproducible studies, and models and predictions that are wrong but that's ok because the over-arching theory is just fine. Examples of this are social sciences. Also, the second type of "science" seems to insert itself into media and be involved with telling people how they should live their lives. An example of this is the dietary industry with "science" backing. It turns out, the news media gives heavy preference to the second type of "science", the one with crappy models and predictions, but which the media feel can more easily become clickbait. Which article would you think most people would click on - "An explanation of gravity waves", or "Scientists say eating <common food> is killing you". In addition, because there is less dependence on precise models, the inherent bias of the "scientist" comes into play. Because of this, the science that most people see in popular media is not where precise models get refined, but one where outlandish predictions are made and then discarded for the opposite outlandish prediction. After being exposed to this, people decide that science changes from day to day, and that "scientists" are just really influence hungry people just out to tell people how to live their lives and claiming they should be listened to because they have some special knowledge or qualification - just like the "clergy" in the Middle Ages. PS: The left also has a low opinion of science. You can see this when you see people critiquing studies because they come from oil companies, tobacco companies, or sugar companies. If they really believed in science, they would know that science works regardless of the background of the people involved.

happy-go-lucky 10y ago

This reminds me of an apt quote from Feynman: science is the organized skepticism in the reliability of expert opinion.