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People have no idea which sciences are robust
- NikolaeVarius 10y agoIMO the "March for Science" movement and these kinds of "People who don't vote the same as me do so because they're not as smart as me" kinds of things are starting to really annoy me. Science is a tool/process. Not an agenda. Everyone in their own heads will choose whether or not to believe something regardless of how much SCIENCE they shout. The same people who yell SCIENCE on the internet could be the same people who turn around and claim that weight and calories are independent of each other, no matter how much that doesn't make sense.
- nickpinkston 10y agoSure the SCIENCE crowd can be a bit much, but science has an "agenda" of finding the truth and making that knowledge useful for people. That has clear political ramifications: climate change, pollution, GMO foods, heliocentric solar system, etc. Science may not have an agenda (ish?), but it does support/detract from others agendas. Humanism is likely the agenda of the marchers, and their aesthetics/ethics are informed by "science".
- xaa 10y agoIs this somehow related to the article? The implicit assumption behind the linked study is that not all sciences are equally precise and robust. Therefore "we should always trust science" and "we should never trust science" are simplistic; rather, we should trust a field to the degree it has reliable methods and robust and reproducible results. So far, so good. But the main finding in OP is that people's perceptions of a field's accuracy relative to other fields is not always correctly calibrated. My institute sent me an invite to the "March for Science". I don't plan to participate because I don't think scientists should get political in their professional capacity. But to the extent that the March is trying to send the message: "you don't get to cherrypick which scientific results you like and defund the rest", I support it.
- Bluestrike2 10y agoYes, science is a tool/process: it's "the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment." Beyond the actual research and work, science--and the empiricism that defines it and the scientific method--is the embodiment of a very firm epistemological position. In a sense, when people talk about "science" in general terms, they're talking about a way of looking at the world. It's not just about what sort of collected knowledge you have available. It's about how that knowledge is collected and verified, and how it can shape one's perception of new information. There are precursors to the scientific method than can be traced back millennia. While over 2600 years separate us from when the Edwin Smith Papyrus[0] was written (c. 1600 BCE), the rationalism present in most of the text, its case study approach, and an emphasis on observation and diagnosis are all things that any doctor today would clearly recognize despite the very obvious differences in medical knowledge between then and now. Or consider the Empirics of the 3rd century BCE and their approach to medicine versus the Dogmatic school. Babylonian astronomers in the 8th century BCE developed a systematic approach that would later inform classic Greek and Hellenistic astronomers (and likely philosophers in general), even though the Greeks would develop an unhealthy obsession with cosmology and spheres that...led them astray a bit. In On the Parts of Animals: Book III, Aristotle stated that "Males have more teeth than females in the case of men, sheep, goats, and swine; in the case of other animals observations have not yet been made." While his observations were dead wrong, and have been mocked for years, his point about further observation is important. Thinkers from Bertrand Russel to B. F. Skinner have misinterpreted Aristotle's approach: despite his erroneous conclusions, the fact that they were due to incorrect data/observations rather than flawed logic is important. That said, empiricism in this vain didn't have nearly as much of an effect on cultures as did traditional beliefs, cosmology, ontology, theology, etc. With the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, everything changed: empiricism and rationalism (despite the disputes between the two), came to shape European intelligentsia. Cue Francis Bacon's Novum Organum and deliberate experimentation. Taken together, it changed the direction of western civilization. Anyhow, my belabored point is this: "science" is intrinsically tied to a fundamental change in human thought that helped shape how even non-scientists think about and interact with the world around them. When people talk about the need for scientific understanding in politics, they aren't saying that those they disagree with politically are stupid. Or that their voices are of less worth. Rather, they're looking at what's becoming a rejection--in whole or part--of a scientific mindset in favor of one that can be immensely dangerous. In the public discourse, the debate over climate change is largely being waged over dogmatic and ideological terms, rather than as a scientific debate over the data itself. Anti-vaxers, anti-GMO activists, etc. all pursue lines of argument where empirical data is not only not used, but in many cases, is categorically rejected. By allowing ideology to shade or even shape perception, such individuals--and those who implement policies on the basis of their arguments--are creating an environment where enlightenment ideas and the scientific method are able to be marginalized. That doesn't make those individuals "stupid." It makes them human, and it's natural to prioritize beliefs and values differently from one another. But one of the greatest legacies of the scientific revolution is the ability to, as William Whewell described it, was a "transition from an implicit trust in the internal powers of man's mind to a professed dependence upon external observation; and from an unbounded reverence for the wisdom of the past, to a fervid expectation of change and improvement."[1] To step back from that legacy is to limit our ability to apply scientific knowledge in how all of us develop those beliefs and values. Is all shouting about "SCIENCE" enlightened? Of course not. But that's often the case regardless of the subject at hand. One of my biggest fears about the March for Science is that it will make it even easier for people to cherrypick scientific data to support their beliefs by rejecting scientists as yet another political grouping. Instead of being a separate, apolitical force, "science" becomes nothing more than another political grouping. And that would be disastrous. 0. https://ceb.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/flash/smith/smith.html https://ceb.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/flash/smith/smith.html 1. https://archive.org/stream/philosophyinduc04whewgoog#page/n328/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/philosophyinduc04whewgoog#page/n3...
- msandford 10y agoPhysics and chemistry are pretty robust, everything else is far squishier. It's pretty easy to get identical atoms or molecules or subatomic particles. It's much harder to grow a field of identical plants or raise hundreds of identical mice.
- analog31 10y agoIt's also harder to do things to plants and mice, much less humans, without knocking them so far out of balance that it ceases to be a meaningful experiment.
- jfarlow 10y agoThat's a strong statement. I'd say it 'ceases to be trivially interpretable'. And I think this is part of where the 'the published paper said ___ so it must be true!' disparity between scientists and public becomes more apparent. In biology when you design a good experiment, run it, come up with a model that fits your experiment, no scientist would ever pretend that their articulated model was how things actually worked. It's close, it's reasonable, but many more publications would be needed to confirm it. A single publication just is not enough to decomplexify the entanglements in biology. Many other scientists will use that model as the basis for their newer experiment, and when their results do not comport, they alter, adjust, or if need be, discard the original model. The trouble with biology is it might take an entire 'Cell' paper (12 pages of dense publication - ie, many many grad-student-years of work) just to come up with the most simplistic model for what the biological experiment observed. That doesn't mean it wasn't meaningful - it was just much more complicated and less easily well-describable than physics and chemistry experiments. But very much like physics and chemistry, there is a definite trend towards a well-described and predictable system. Models actually get increasingly accurate over time. And this feature might be part of the border in defining a 'robust' science.
- xaa 10y ago> just to come up with the most simplistic model Yeap. Bioinformatician here. Not only are most published models overly simplistic -- which everyone acknowledges -- but I think our bigger problem is we don't even have a reasonable "meta-model" of biology. What I mean by that is, imagine experiments were instantaneous and free. How would we then incorporate the results into a mathematical/computational/predictive framework that describes biological reality in a way analogous to physics? AFAIK, we haven't the foggiest clue. Biology is pretty theory-light and empiricism-heavy, probably because we have good results with things like "I dunno what this mold is secreting, but it seems to be killing the bacteria!" So our experimental results are pretty precise (although arguably not "robust" between strains/conditions/etc), when people bother to use n>3, but the models and theory are anything but.
- alganet 10y agoPeople have no idea what science is
- saycheese 10y agoOkay, what is science?
- SpacePotatoe 10y agoHe can't tell because he is a human
- alganet 10y agoI like the definition that Carl Sagan presented on Cosmos: > It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.
- throw_away_777 10y agoI really wish "data" journalism did a better job of conveying uncertainty. It is incredibly common to see comments like such-and-such increased 10%, without any comment on what the number of such-and-such actually was or if the 10% change was statistically significant. Likewise journalists often make claims that are not supported by the research. Scientists don't have the reach to describe their results to the public, news organizations need to do a better job of conveying the results accurately.
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- andrewclunn 10y agoIronically, polling and association studies like this would be something I'd classify as low precision.
- charles-salvia 10y agoThe article attributes a lot of the results to the perception of varying degrees of precision in these various fields, but a lot of the results are also explainable via US politics. Words like "climate change", and by extension "climatology", are so politically charged that tribalism usually kicks in when many people hear these terms. A similar thing happens with evolution, however there is also a religious dimension there alongside the political dimension.
- jgeada 10y agoAlso related, people need to understand what "wrong" means in the context of sciences. In many cases, wrong is merely that our model improved, but the old model was still perfectly adequate for most practical purposes. Isaac Asimov wrote a wonderful essay on the subject: http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm http://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.htm
- II2II 10y agoThe author spends a lot of time talking about precision and seems surprised that people think astrophysics is imprecise. Much of astrophysics is imprecise, and one result builds upon another to that imprcision propagates. Of course the redeeming quality of astrophysics is that many of the uncertanties are easy to quantify, so at least we can say how well we know what we know.
- jbapple 10y agoSome sciences are not robust because they are hard to make robust. In contrast, forensic science, the example given in this article as perceived by the public as robust, seems to be set up by the government's criminal justice apparatus to ensure that the state imprisons and executes as many people as possible. Examples of impossible and absurd forensic science include the results of James Grigson, Pamela Fish, Annie Dookhan, Michael West, Steven Hayne, John Preston, and FBI hair analysis. For example, Steven Hayne claimed that he could tell from a bullet wound that more than one person was holding the gun. John Preston claimed his dog could track a human scent on a street after a hurricane. Annie Dookhan and Pamela Fish falsified drug and DNA tests.
- pdkl95 10y ago(I've posted this before, but it's very relevant to this topic) Learning to filter guesswork and scams from robust claims is easily the most important skill that the general pubic needs to learn. It's hard to progress in any other topic if you don't understand the basic methods for filtering good information from the many mistakes, misinterpretations, scams and other bad data. Democracy and modern civilization itself requires at least some understanding of the scientific method. Sagan's warning in "The Demon-Haunted World"[1] was frighteningly prescient: I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... Until the public "baloney detection kit"[2] (and uses it regularly), trying to teach other topics is probably a waste of time, especially when you aren't even speaking the same language[3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Demon-Haunted_World [2] https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-kit-carl-sagan/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/01/03/baloney-detection-k... [3] http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resistance-of-s/ http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2007/05/31/more-than-just-resi...
- d-sc 10y agoIt's interesting how there is likely more people reading this from hackernews than the 217 people surveyed in the study.
- drallison 10y agoThe sample studied by Broomell and Kane contained 217 people! While the results may be "interesting" and "evocative", the size of the sample really does not allow any conclusions to be drawn. The arstechnica post ignores the details; read the original paper.
- DrScump 10y agoAn online survey at that, meaning that they can't even properly gauge if that sample was representative at all.
- 77pt77 10y agolowdown: > The fields that were labelled as “least precise” were psychology and evolution. Also on this end of the scale were economics, climate science, and—wait for it—astrophysics. On the other end, forensics was perceived as the field with the highest level of precision, followed by aerospace engineering. > They also note that classing medical research, seismology, and nuclear engineering at roughly similar levels of precision is giving a bit too much credit to seismology and medical research.