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Scientists must fight for the facts

302 points by jkimmel 10y ago

loafa 10y ago
Not at all. As a scientist I say we must fight for uncertainty. The word "fact" has no place in science.
lutusp 10y ago
Has anyone else noticed the disturbing parallel between Trump's "Alternative facts" and the famous Nixon-era press office claim that "Previous statements are inoperative"?
- gravelc 10y ago
  We had 'core' promises and 'non-core' promises here in Australia. How politicians use language is quite instructive.
  - finid 10y ago
    Sounds like Donald Rumsfeld's known knowns and known unknowns
    - masklinn 10y ago
      Sounds rather more like Karl Rove's "reality-based communities" — which was not praise: > The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
    - hnhg 10y ago
      That wasn't quite the gaffe that a lot of people made it out to be though: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7121136.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7121136.stm
    - x0054 10y ago
      Without defending the misleading way this was used, there are such things as 1. Known knowns, 2. known unknowns, and 2. unknown unknowns. AKA stuff you know, stuff you know that you don't know, and stuff that you do not know that you don't know.
      - coldtea 10y ago
        It's basic epistemology.
    - jeremysmyth 10y ago
      It's nothing at all like that. Rumsfeld (much as it pains me to support anything he said) was categorizing knowledge in a way that's actually quite useful. Example: In education it's important for students to learn a wide range of things about a subject, even things they didn't know that they needed. This is why self-taught students often have large but important holes in their knowledge; they simply didn't know what they had to study, so they didn't look for it. If you know that you don't know something, that's a "known unknown", and you can plan to research it. If you don't know that you don't know something, then that's an unknown unknown, and that's a much harder problem to fix without external help or accidental discovery.
- allthatglitters 10y ago
  As "alternative facts" go, these pale in comparison to "a demonstration caused by an internet video"...
grabcocque 10y ago
Facts are weird beasts. We are terrible at recognising facts, for a number of reasons. For a start people tend to confuse them with truth. A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable. Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable, and therefore fall into the epistemologically nebulous category of "things which are not yet false". I'd suggest that trying to build a positivist bastion of truth on such shifting epistemological sands is doomed to fail.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable. That's the epistemology of Popper. Not necessarily how science works. See e.g. Fayerabends arguments in "Against Method".
- xjay 10y ago
  The half-life of facts (knowledge) [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge
- acqq 10y ago
  > A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. Where do you get that idea? A fact has to be "established." As in the trial, in front of a jury. Now in science, the jury are qualified scientists. Others simply aren't qualified. Even unqualified people can invalidate something that is believed to be a fact. But they can't do by just being loud. The jury has to acknowledge that that unqualified guy is not speaking nonsense. Read about the testing of EmDrive as an example. The guy who made it and can't explain it will still be accepted to be the discoverer, if his claimed effect gets to be really proved. The jury was skeptical, but they will still accept the results, if the measurements demonstrate it "beyond any doubt." At the moment, what was measured is far from that. Another example: global warming is a scientific fact. There are some loud persons claiming that it isn't so, but what they bring to support their claims is truly and utterly worthless. Who says that: the climate scientists, all in the world. How do we know it's true? Because that's how science works, the specialists are trained the whole life to recognize the valid claims. The valid claims would become a new facts. The deniers don't have them.
juskrey 10y ago
Scientists must have their skin in the game - so the facts will fight for themselves.
return0 10y ago
This kind of article does not belong to Nature. It talks about what the media said as evidence , undefined alternative facts, how "Rejecting mainstream science has become a theme for Trump", yet the only fact presented is that tillerson acknowledged climate change. Other than the fair criticism of pushing fossil fuels, it's a purely political fluff article. Even editorials should be based on facts in Nature.
- arekkas 10y ago
  Not true: freezing EPA funds, censoring EPA twitter, replacing web pages on climate change with fossile fuel propaganda, and disputing truth on live television We need to act, and we need to act now. Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    > Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles. The word "science" seems to mean almost everything nowadays. Twitter and television are not science. They are social constructs built around the works of engineering, which itself was based on some established scientific knowledge.
    - arekkas 10y ago
      >Twitter and television are not science. They are social constructs built around the works of engineering, which itself was based on some established scientific knowledge. I admit it's a long causality chain, but without the scientific methods, those things would not exist. Thus, those methods are what we need to preserve in order to advance, and this is very openly threatened by the current administration.
      - TeMPOraL 10y ago
        I agree that scientific method needs to be preserved, but honestly, I don't think the current US administration even enters top 10 of dangers to science itself. Science as both the methods and the established culture around it has been in serious trouble for years now, and a lot of that has to do with mass media reporting and with the way incentives for scientists are structured. As for Trump's administration creating creating a danger for the climate-change mitigation efforts, that's another topic.
lhnz 10y ago
> Within two days of Trump assuming power, White House > officials have found themselves embroiled in a > scandal over “alternative facts”. Those weren't alternative facts, those were lies. Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations. I won't be able to reclaim the term now that is smeared. But I wish people could point out when somebody is lying (or misleading) without trying to smear the existence of counterzeitgeist truth. Aside: why didn't anybody in the Trump administration respond by pointing out that Washington, D.C. is majority democrat, and that Bush's inauguration might have been a better comparison? Quite embarrassing that they would lie when deflating the authority of the comparison would have probably been more effective...
- danieltillett 10y ago
  Because this would require making a comparison to others.
  - netnichols 10y ago
    Hehe, exactly. "We had yuge crowds! The biggest crowds! At least when compared to Bush..."
- trombone22 10y ago
  The administration itself named their blatant lies "alternative facts", though I guess the media could be blamed for not reminding us strongly enough that we are discussing obvious lies.
  - lhnz 10y ago
    Yes, that is my point. Lies are lies. Facts are facts. The indiscriminate usage of the term by the mainstream media is a strategic mistake since they are giving ground to the frame of all facts being subjective and equally applicable. Remember that 'fake news' was quickly and effectively used by the alt-right to tarnish mainstream media. I expect 'alternative facts' will eventually be used against them, too. Also 'alternative facts' might be a position that the mainstream media needs to defend, if the current administration upped their game and began to mislead through selective usage of facts rather than more overt lying.
cderwin 10y ago
I think of late one of the problems is that there is a certain dogma within political circles and the media that the body of facts produced by scientists is absolute and irrefutable, when the truth is somewhat the opposite: the body of knowledge produced by science is constantly changing, individual results are continually reevaluated, and theories are compared against each other until there is a preponderance of evidence in favor of one over the others. I don't want to get too political, but one can't help but wonder if the way science has been talked about in the media has led to a skepticism of academia to an unhealthy degree.
- ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  That theory doesn't really align with the number of climate change denialists that appear on media channels and say that scientists are a) wrong, b) biased, c) not in consensus, d) unsure in their predictions, e) paid shills.
  - zerebubuth 10y ago
    I think it depends on context. As you point out, a lot of coverage is given to climate change denialists - out of proportion to the number of scientists who are sceptical of the consensus. Other examples of that include vaccine safety, evolution, GMO safety and cancer therapy. However, in other contexts it seems like the prevailing consensus is reported without any controversy. For example; many popular psychology books have been written and findings reported as truth, which is now being thrown into question by the recent reproducibility crisis in that field. I've not seen any coverage of "big bang denialists" or "inflation denialists", despite how esoteric some of these theories are. I'm tempted to see a link between those issues which negatively affect people's lives and the rise in belief in alternatives which are less negative (but potentially falsifiable). However, this is by no means a thorough review of the issues, and perhaps reflects my bias in recalling examples.
    - 0xfeba 10y ago
      > I'm tempted to see a link between those issues which negatively affect people's lives and the rise in belief in alternatives which are less negative (but potentially falsifiable). I recall reading about an effect who's name I forget, but it goes something like this: The larger and more distant a phenomenon is from the day-to-day of an individual, the less likely that individual is to accept it.
anon1253 10y ago
This isn't about facts. Science is rarely about facts. Empirical science is and cannot be about proofs. Proofs and facts are for the abstract, the ideal, left to philosophers, logicians, and occasionally mathematicians and computer scientists. No, this is about something much more sinister: denying the ability to reason about and disseminate observations. All empirical science can do is look at things, do experiments and come up with logically consistent and plausible theories or hypotheses that explain them. The value is rarely in the data: the value is in the reasoning around it. Observing, for example, that beaks in birds change depending on the environment is rarely interesting. The interesting bit is reasoning that traits get passed down to offspring in a survival of the fittest scheme. Similarly, observing that combustion engines release CO2, and there is more of it than before we had them … not particularly interesting. The interesting bit is that it acts as insulation to sunlight and that a lot of ecological and climate systems act as non-linear under the influence of temperature and CO2. Do I say this to downplay empirical science? On the contrary. However, the focus on facts is I think more harmful than it might appear in trying to protect our scientific legacy. Dump every table ever recorded on the internet as a torrent, and very little useful things will come from it. It's protecting the institutions and freedom to reason about, and talk about, those findings that is important; to be able to openly challenge them, and rigorously come up with "best explanations" (a human intellectual construct, not fact, not truth). Gag orders to silence academic findings, that is problematic. More so than trying to "protect" facts-of-the-matter as if they are somehow the pinnacle of human intellect. Corollary this is also why I always find "humanities are not science" or "this is not Nature worthy"-statements rather annoying. It's a no-true Scotchman fallacy. Science is more than stamp collection, it's more than peer-review, it's more than running elaborate statistical tests on randomized experiments: it's the collective human endeavor to understand the universe and ourselves, it's a mindset. A mindset that can, and should be, in constant flux as our understanding progresses (and sometimes regresses).
- hueving 10y ago
  >it's a mindset. No, it's more than that. Without the rigor to come up with testable hypothesis and reproducible results, you might as well be practicing religion. You can have a very inquisitive mindset but without applying scientific rigor, you're right in line with numerologists and whatever else. That's why people are so hard on shaky humanities studies that have poor experimental design, poor analysis, or terrible biases in the data. You can't derive meaningful conclusions from bad science. Garbage in => garbage out.
intended 10y ago
Comments here are still talking about defending facts. This is a losing argument. This is bread and circuses. Let scientists do science - comics and comedians are the weapon to reach for. America has lead the way for the past 4 decades in bringing the public into areas they don't have the prior knowledge to navigate. Anyone old enough to remember the climate change debates will remember a time when scientists didn't debate climate deniers because it gave climate deniers too much credibility! But what scientists didn't realize is that vested interests were setting them up. Cranks and fakers were nurtured and given air time by a certain news channel till they eventually the "public interest" invaded the scientific. At which point "science" lost. Science expected a debate, but walked into Spectacle. Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates. This is entertainment. If you don't treat it as such you lose space to the person who generates better TRPs.
- conjectures 10y ago
  +1 totally agree about comedians. We know that bullshit is asymmetric: it takes long to clear up than to cast. The way to take it down is to rip on the caster until they stop (or look ridiculous in voters' eyes) - this requires facts yes, but more importantly presentation.
  - protomyth 10y ago
    That can backfire pretty hard as it did in the last election. Ripping on the caster rarely stops with the one person. Going after whole swaths of people eventually just drives them not to talk except in a voting booth. I said it in another thread, if you keep demonizing people, they will eventually send demons.
    - jackmott 10y ago
      Lots of people with strong opinions on what not to do. Not seeing any opinions on what TO do.
      - deleted 10y ago
lstroud 10y ago
Selective outrage. Where has this been when scientists were quoting pharmaceutical jobs because they were being asked to omit facts?
tomkinstinch 10y ago
A march of scientists is being organized: https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/24/are-scientists-going-to-march-on-washington https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/speaking-of-scie...
nonbel 10y ago
I don't think it is as easy to identify "facts" as this article implies. For example, which of the following statements are factual: 1) The effective radiating temperature of the earth, T_e, is determined by the need for infrared emission from the planet to balance absorbed solar radiation: pi*R^2(1-A)*S_0 = 4*pi*R^2*sigma*T_e^4 where R is the radius of the earth, A the albedo of the earth, S_0 the flux of solar radiation, and sigma the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. 2) Rearranged, this equation gives: T_e = [S_0*(1-A)/(4*sigma)]^0.25 3) For A - 0.3 and So = 1367 watts per square meter, this yields T_e ~ 255 K. 4) The mean surface temperature is T_s ~ 288 K. 5) The excess, T_s - T_e, is the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds
- 08-15 10y ago
  1) Conclusion from a well supported theory (not a fact, but pretty darn close). It's only an approximation, though: what's the albedo of a heterogenous body and doesn't it depend on temperature? 2, 3) Simple conclusions from (1). 4) Fact... sort of. It needs a precise defintion of "mean surface temperature" that makes sense in the face of the equation in (1). Shouldn't you take the fourth root of the mean of the fourth power of temperature? For practical purposes, this is called a "ball park number". 5) Plain wrong. The correct coclusion is that either (a) the theory presented in (1) is wrong or (b) one of your inputs (R, A, sigma, S_0) is wrong. Turns out the value of A is wrong, and the simplistic idea of albedo is not good enough for the theory in (1).
msier79 10y ago
Seems like Python could use more TCL influence in regards to "split" and other nuances, from your description.
msier79 10y ago
Seems like Python could use more TCL influence in regards to "split" and other nuances, from your description.
imh 10y ago
People communicating scientific knowledge to the general public need to become more responsible in talking about uncertainty. Scientists in certain fields need to as well. When people hear a bunch of scientific facts that later turn out to be false, they will stop believing the experts. This happens all the time with nutrition and health "facts." Today drinking red wine is good for you and next decade it's bad for you. Hear that enough and you stop trusting nutrition studies. Same with anything coming out of the fields with reproducibility crises. You stop trusting them. If we properly communicated the limits of and uncertainty around these ideas, people wouldn't say we're crying wolf. If we had different layman's language to denote a theory of bunk and the theory of evolution, people wouldn't say "but it's just a theory," and experts might regain trust. If people stop presenting "X affects Y in certain conditions for mice, maybe" as "X affects Y for all humans, definitely" then lay people might stop associating that level of trust to things like climate change. At the very least, it becomes more defensible.
crawfordcomeaux 10y ago
The problem isn't people holding these anti-science beliefs. It's people holding these beliefs receiving human connection in the context of these beliefs primarily from people who share the same beliefs! We use differing beliefs as a reason to disconnect & disassociate, which is EXACTLY what got us Trump in the first place. Science knows this! We have to temporarily affirm their worldview before challenging specific pieces of it. The more foundational the belief, the deeper the connection needs to be. My hypothesis: we need to collectively learn nonviolent communication in order to hear the right on an emotional level. By connecting with them over all their deep-seated fears & beliefs, we can then more easily stay changing them.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago
Maybe scientists should first set their own house in order. * Reproducibility crisis - http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970 http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-... * P-hacking http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-errors-1.14700 http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-err... * Prominent scientists criticizing those who find math errors in their works http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/statcheck-psychology-replication http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/sta... (There are few facts more basic than math, and one of the scientists actually used the words "methodologic terrorism" to describe this effort) * Not publishing raw data so others can analyze it http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/08/16/science-without-open-data-isnt-science/#.WIjlefErLmE http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/08/16/sc... These issues, especially the last two make it seem that a lot of scientists are not fighting for the facts, but for their own academic position.
- akiselev 10y ago
  By scientists you do mean Elsevier shareholders, right?
- Vampires123432 10y ago
  exactly. what are these academics going to do, bite the hand that feeds??
Tloewald 10y ago
Using the word "unconventional" instead of a more accurate word such as "counterfactual" or "intentionally ignorant" is a poor start.
jbmorgado 10y ago
I disagree with this premise. A scientist job is to present the facts. It's the media, and ultimately the citizen job to fight for them.
Vampires123432 10y ago
If your research dollars are coming from a source that expects you to find evidence of man-caused climate change, you're going to find it.

302 points by jkimmel 10y ago

loafa 10y ago

Not at all. As a scientist I say we must fight for uncertainty. The word "fact" has no place in science.

Has anyone else noticed the disturbing parallel between Trump's "Alternative facts" and the famous Nixon-era press office claim that "Previous statements are inoperative"?

gravelc 10y ago
We had 'core' promises and 'non-core' promises here in Australia. How politicians use language is quite instructive.
- finid 10y ago
  Sounds like Donald Rumsfeld's known knowns and known unknowns
  - masklinn 10y ago
    Sounds rather more like Karl Rove's "reality-based communities" — which was not praise: > The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
  - hnhg 10y ago
    That wasn't quite the gaffe that a lot of people made it out to be though: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7121136.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7121136.stm
  - x0054 10y ago
    Without defending the misleading way this was used, there are such things as 1. Known knowns, 2. known unknowns, and 2. unknown unknowns. AKA stuff you know, stuff you know that you don't know, and stuff that you do not know that you don't know.
    - coldtea 10y ago
      It's basic epistemology.
  - jeremysmyth 10y ago
    It's nothing at all like that. Rumsfeld (much as it pains me to support anything he said) was categorizing knowledge in a way that's actually quite useful. Example: In education it's important for students to learn a wide range of things about a subject, even things they didn't know that they needed. This is why self-taught students often have large but important holes in their knowledge; they simply didn't know what they had to study, so they didn't look for it. If you know that you don't know something, that's a "known unknown", and you can plan to research it. If you don't know that you don't know something, then that's an unknown unknown, and that's a much harder problem to fix without external help or accidental discovery.
allthatglitters 10y ago
As "alternative facts" go, these pale in comparison to "a demonstration caused by an internet video"...

grabcocque 10y ago

Facts are weird beasts. We are terrible at recognising facts, for a number of reasons. For a start people tend to confuse them with truth. A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable. Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable, and therefore fall into the epistemologically nebulous category of "things which are not yet false". I'd suggest that trying to build a positivist bastion of truth on such shifting epistemological sands is doomed to fail.

coldtea 10y ago
>A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable. That's the epistemology of Popper. Not necessarily how science works. See e.g. Fayerabends arguments in "Against Method".
xjay 10y ago
The half-life of facts (knowledge) [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge
acqq 10y ago
> A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. Where do you get that idea? A fact has to be "established." As in the trial, in front of a jury. Now in science, the jury are qualified scientists. Others simply aren't qualified. Even unqualified people can invalidate something that is believed to be a fact. But they can't do by just being loud. The jury has to acknowledge that that unqualified guy is not speaking nonsense. Read about the testing of EmDrive as an example. The guy who made it and can't explain it will still be accepted to be the discoverer, if his claimed effect gets to be really proved. The jury was skeptical, but they will still accept the results, if the measurements demonstrate it "beyond any doubt." At the moment, what was measured is far from that. Another example: global warming is a scientific fact. There are some loud persons claiming that it isn't so, but what they bring to support their claims is truly and utterly worthless. Who says that: the climate scientists, all in the world. How do we know it's true? Because that's how science works, the specialists are trained the whole life to recognize the valid claims. The valid claims would become a new facts. The deniers don't have them.

juskrey 10y ago

Scientists must have their skin in the game - so the facts will fight for themselves.

return0 10y ago

This kind of article does not belong to Nature. It talks about what the media said as evidence , undefined alternative facts, how "Rejecting mainstream science has become a theme for Trump", yet the only fact presented is that tillerson acknowledged climate change. Other than the fair criticism of pushing fossil fuels, it's a purely political fluff article. Even editorials should be based on facts in Nature.

arekkas 10y ago
Not true: freezing EPA funds, censoring EPA twitter, replacing web pages on climate change with fossile fuel propaganda, and disputing truth on live television We need to act, and we need to act now. Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  > Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles. The word "science" seems to mean almost everything nowadays. Twitter and television are not science. They are social constructs built around the works of engineering, which itself was based on some established scientific knowledge.
  - arekkas 10y ago
    >Twitter and television are not science. They are social constructs built around the works of engineering, which itself was based on some established scientific knowledge. I admit it's a long causality chain, but without the scientific methods, those things would not exist. Thus, those methods are what we need to preserve in order to advance, and this is very openly threatened by the current administration.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I agree that scientific method needs to be preserved, but honestly, I don't think the current US administration even enters top 10 of dangers to science itself. Science as both the methods and the established culture around it has been in serious trouble for years now, and a lot of that has to do with mass media reporting and with the way incentives for scientists are structured. As for Trump's administration creating creating a danger for the climate-change mitigation efforts, that's another topic.

lhnz 10y ago

> Within two days of Trump assuming power, White House > officials have found themselves embroiled in a > scandal over “alternative facts”. Those weren't alternative facts, those were lies. Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations. I won't be able to reclaim the term now that is smeared. But I wish people could point out when somebody is lying (or misleading) without trying to smear the existence of counterzeitgeist truth. Aside: why didn't anybody in the Trump administration respond by pointing out that Washington, D.C. is majority democrat, and that Bush's inauguration might have been a better comparison? Quite embarrassing that they would lie when deflating the authority of the comparison would have probably been more effective...

danieltillett 10y ago
Because this would require making a comparison to others.
- netnichols 10y ago
  Hehe, exactly. "We had yuge crowds! The biggest crowds! At least when compared to Bush..."
trombone22 10y ago
The administration itself named their blatant lies "alternative facts", though I guess the media could be blamed for not reminding us strongly enough that we are discussing obvious lies.
- lhnz 10y ago
  Yes, that is my point. Lies are lies. Facts are facts. The indiscriminate usage of the term by the mainstream media is a strategic mistake since they are giving ground to the frame of all facts being subjective and equally applicable. Remember that 'fake news' was quickly and effectively used by the alt-right to tarnish mainstream media. I expect 'alternative facts' will eventually be used against them, too. Also 'alternative facts' might be a position that the mainstream media needs to defend, if the current administration upped their game and began to mislead through selective usage of facts rather than more overt lying.

cderwin 10y ago

I think of late one of the problems is that there is a certain dogma within political circles and the media that the body of facts produced by scientists is absolute and irrefutable, when the truth is somewhat the opposite: the body of knowledge produced by science is constantly changing, individual results are continually reevaluated, and theories are compared against each other until there is a preponderance of evidence in favor of one over the others. I don't want to get too political, but one can't help but wonder if the way science has been talked about in the media has led to a skepticism of academia to an unhealthy degree.

ZeroGravitas 10y ago
That theory doesn't really align with the number of climate change denialists that appear on media channels and say that scientists are a) wrong, b) biased, c) not in consensus, d) unsure in their predictions, e) paid shills.
- zerebubuth 10y ago
  I think it depends on context. As you point out, a lot of coverage is given to climate change denialists - out of proportion to the number of scientists who are sceptical of the consensus. Other examples of that include vaccine safety, evolution, GMO safety and cancer therapy. However, in other contexts it seems like the prevailing consensus is reported without any controversy. For example; many popular psychology books have been written and findings reported as truth, which is now being thrown into question by the recent reproducibility crisis in that field. I've not seen any coverage of "big bang denialists" or "inflation denialists", despite how esoteric some of these theories are. I'm tempted to see a link between those issues which negatively affect people's lives and the rise in belief in alternatives which are less negative (but potentially falsifiable). However, this is by no means a thorough review of the issues, and perhaps reflects my bias in recalling examples.
  - 0xfeba 10y ago
    > I'm tempted to see a link between those issues which negatively affect people's lives and the rise in belief in alternatives which are less negative (but potentially falsifiable). I recall reading about an effect who's name I forget, but it goes something like this: The larger and more distant a phenomenon is from the day-to-day of an individual, the less likely that individual is to accept it.

anon1253 10y ago

This isn't about facts. Science is rarely about facts. Empirical science is and cannot be about proofs. Proofs and facts are for the abstract, the ideal, left to philosophers, logicians, and occasionally mathematicians and computer scientists. No, this is about something much more sinister: denying the ability to reason about and disseminate observations. All empirical science can do is look at things, do experiments and come up with logically consistent and plausible theories or hypotheses that explain them. The value is rarely in the data: the value is in the reasoning around it. Observing, for example, that beaks in birds change depending on the environment is rarely interesting. The interesting bit is reasoning that traits get passed down to offspring in a survival of the fittest scheme. Similarly, observing that combustion engines release CO2, and there is more of it than before we had them … not particularly interesting. The interesting bit is that it acts as insulation to sunlight and that a lot of ecological and climate systems act as non-linear under the influence of temperature and CO2. Do I say this to downplay empirical science? On the contrary. However, the focus on facts is I think more harmful than it might appear in trying to protect our scientific legacy. Dump every table ever recorded on the internet as a torrent, and very little useful things will come from it. It's protecting the institutions and freedom to reason about, and talk about, those findings that is important; to be able to openly challenge them, and rigorously come up with "best explanations" (a human intellectual construct, not fact, not truth). Gag orders to silence academic findings, that is problematic. More so than trying to "protect" facts-of-the-matter as if they are somehow the pinnacle of human intellect. Corollary this is also why I always find "humanities are not science" or "this is not Nature worthy"-statements rather annoying. It's a no-true Scotchman fallacy. Science is more than stamp collection, it's more than peer-review, it's more than running elaborate statistical tests on randomized experiments: it's the collective human endeavor to understand the universe and ourselves, it's a mindset. A mindset that can, and should be, in constant flux as our understanding progresses (and sometimes regresses).

hueving 10y ago
>it's a mindset. No, it's more than that. Without the rigor to come up with testable hypothesis and reproducible results, you might as well be practicing religion. You can have a very inquisitive mindset but without applying scientific rigor, you're right in line with numerologists and whatever else. That's why people are so hard on shaky humanities studies that have poor experimental design, poor analysis, or terrible biases in the data. You can't derive meaningful conclusions from bad science. Garbage in => garbage out.

intended 10y ago

Comments here are still talking about defending facts. This is a losing argument. This is bread and circuses. Let scientists do science - comics and comedians are the weapon to reach for. America has lead the way for the past 4 decades in bringing the public into areas they don't have the prior knowledge to navigate. Anyone old enough to remember the climate change debates will remember a time when scientists didn't debate climate deniers because it gave climate deniers too much credibility! But what scientists didn't realize is that vested interests were setting them up. Cranks and fakers were nurtured and given air time by a certain news channel till they eventually the "public interest" invaded the scientific. At which point "science" lost. Science expected a debate, but walked into Spectacle. Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates. This is entertainment. If you don't treat it as such you lose space to the person who generates better TRPs.

conjectures 10y ago
+1 totally agree about comedians. We know that bullshit is asymmetric: it takes long to clear up than to cast. The way to take it down is to rip on the caster until they stop (or look ridiculous in voters' eyes) - this requires facts yes, but more importantly presentation.
- protomyth 10y ago
  That can backfire pretty hard as it did in the last election. Ripping on the caster rarely stops with the one person. Going after whole swaths of people eventually just drives them not to talk except in a voting booth. I said it in another thread, if you keep demonizing people, they will eventually send demons.
  - jackmott 10y ago
    Lots of people with strong opinions on what not to do. Not seeing any opinions on what TO do.
    - deleted 10y ago

lstroud 10y ago

Selective outrage. Where has this been when scientists were quoting pharmaceutical jobs because they were being asked to omit facts?

tomkinstinch 10y ago

A march of scientists is being organized: https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2017/01/24/are-scientists-going-to-march-on-washington https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/speaking-of-scie...

nonbel 10y ago

I don't think it is as easy to identify "facts" as this article implies. For example, which of the following statements are factual: 1) The effective radiating temperature of the earth, T_e, is determined by the need for infrared emission from the planet to balance absorbed solar radiation: pi*R^2(1-A)*S_0 = 4*pi*R^2*sigma*T_e^4 where R is the radius of the earth, A the albedo of the earth, S_0 the flux of solar radiation, and sigma the Stefan-Boltzmann constant. 2) Rearranged, this equation gives: T_e = [S_0*(1-A)/(4*sigma)]^0.25 3) For A - 0.3 and So = 1367 watts per square meter, this yields T_e ~ 255 K. 4) The mean surface temperature is T_s ~ 288 K. 5) The excess, T_s - T_e, is the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds

08-15 10y ago
1) Conclusion from a well supported theory (not a fact, but pretty darn close). It's only an approximation, though: what's the albedo of a heterogenous body and doesn't it depend on temperature? 2, 3) Simple conclusions from (1). 4) Fact... sort of. It needs a precise defintion of "mean surface temperature" that makes sense in the face of the equation in (1). Shouldn't you take the fourth root of the mean of the fourth power of temperature? For practical purposes, this is called a "ball park number". 5) Plain wrong. The correct coclusion is that either (a) the theory presented in (1) is wrong or (b) one of your inputs (R, A, sigma, S_0) is wrong. Turns out the value of A is wrong, and the simplistic idea of albedo is not good enough for the theory in (1).

msier79 10y ago

Seems like Python could use more TCL influence in regards to "split" and other nuances, from your description.

msier79 10y ago

Seems like Python could use more TCL influence in regards to "split" and other nuances, from your description.

imh 10y ago

People communicating scientific knowledge to the general public need to become more responsible in talking about uncertainty. Scientists in certain fields need to as well. When people hear a bunch of scientific facts that later turn out to be false, they will stop believing the experts. This happens all the time with nutrition and health "facts." Today drinking red wine is good for you and next decade it's bad for you. Hear that enough and you stop trusting nutrition studies. Same with anything coming out of the fields with reproducibility crises. You stop trusting them. If we properly communicated the limits of and uncertainty around these ideas, people wouldn't say we're crying wolf. If we had different layman's language to denote a theory of bunk and the theory of evolution, people wouldn't say "but it's just a theory," and experts might regain trust. If people stop presenting "X affects Y in certain conditions for mice, maybe" as "X affects Y for all humans, definitely" then lay people might stop associating that level of trust to things like climate change. At the very least, it becomes more defensible.

crawfordcomeaux 10y ago

The problem isn't people holding these anti-science beliefs. It's people holding these beliefs receiving human connection in the context of these beliefs primarily from people who share the same beliefs! We use differing beliefs as a reason to disconnect & disassociate, which is EXACTLY what got us Trump in the first place. Science knows this! We have to temporarily affirm their worldview before challenging specific pieces of it. The more foundational the belief, the deeper the connection needs to be. My hypothesis: we need to collectively learn nonviolent communication in order to hear the right on an emotional level. By connecting with them over all their deep-seated fears & beliefs, we can then more easily stay changing them.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 10y ago

Maybe scientists should first set their own house in order. * Reproducibility crisis - http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-reproducibility-1.19970 http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-... * P-hacking http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-errors-1.14700 http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-err... * Prominent scientists criticizing those who find math errors in their works http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/statcheck-psychology-replication http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/sta... (There are few facts more basic than math, and one of the scientists actually used the words "methodologic terrorism" to describe this effort) * Not publishing raw data so others can analyze it http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/08/16/science-without-open-data-isnt-science/#.WIjlefErLmE http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/08/16/sc... These issues, especially the last two make it seem that a lot of scientists are not fighting for the facts, but for their own academic position.

akiselev 10y ago
By scientists you do mean Elsevier shareholders, right?
Vampires123432 10y ago
exactly. what are these academics going to do, bite the hand that feeds??

Tloewald 10y ago

Using the word "unconventional" instead of a more accurate word such as "counterfactual" or "intentionally ignorant" is a poor start.

jbmorgado 10y ago

I disagree with this premise. A scientist job is to present the facts. It's the media, and ultimately the citizen job to fight for them.

Vampires123432 10y ago

If your research dollars are coming from a source that expects you to find evidence of man-caused climate change, you're going to find it.