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I don’t think those signs indicate blind, unquestioning support for “scientific truths” as practiced by some mythical scientific priesthood. They are a response

I don’t think those signs indicate blind, unquestioning support for “scientific truths” as practiced by some mythical scientific priesthood. They are a response to a troubling political tendency that has made the evaluation of certain scientific findings into a question of political and tribal beliefs rather than one that involves proper skepticism, education and scientific investigation. If the situation was that there was a strong evidence-based disagreement about scientific findings, those signs wouldn’t be necessary. The situation is instead that a vast number of scientists are producing findings that contradict certain political preferences, and the response has not been a deeper investigation made in good faith — but rather an outright political rejection of the findings. “I support science” is not shorthand for “I take every scientific study as fact because scientists are gods,” but rather “I am inclined to give weight to scientific arguments in either direction as opposed to political arguments that reject those findings based on non-scientific reasoning.”

weberc2 8y ago
> The situation is instead that a vast number of scientists are producing findings that contradict certain political preferences, and the response has not been a deeper investigation made in good faith — but rather an outright political rejection of the findings. How does a layperson make a deeper investigation on their own? The research is typically paywalled, the jargon is inaccessible, the experiments are prohibitively expensive, etc etc. In effect, there is a priestly caste, and one which arguably excludes from the debate members of the skeptic's tribe (i.e., "people the skeptic might trust to address their concerns"). This is why heterodoxy and political diversity in the academy is soooo important. You might be inclined to say something like "conservatives select out of the academy" or "it's not my fault reality has a liberal bias" and you might even be right, but I don't think you'll find climate change very sympathetic to your position. In other words, this isn't affirmative action for conservatives, it's affirmative action (of conservatives) for the benefit of humanity. Disclaimers: I'm picking 'conservatives' and 'liberals' here because that's clearly the bent of the article. I'm also picking climate change since it seems to be the favorite example of science denialism. Of course, contrary to the angle of this article, science denialism isn't even an exclusively conservative phenomenon (blank slatism is a favorite of anti-science leftists--including leftist academics--and flat-earth and anti-vax are bipartisan beliefs).
- notyourday 8y ago
  So I have some grad/phd student friends and a small computational lab - enough cores, ram, storage and jobbing engines that in 2000s it would have been a respectable not quite super computer but none the less very powerful system capable of crunching lots of numbers quickly. My friends sometimes try to validate conclusions of the papers or just re-run the data crunching presented in those papers. They never succeed. Either the data sets don't actually match the data sets in papers, or something in the formulas is off, or the code does not even compile. I did computation physics in college. We had to write code as the paper of homework/tests. Our TA would never run our binaries. He would take our source code, compile it, feed it two of his data sets (we had one) and check the result. If the student's code did not compile, the student would get an F for that homework. If the student's code bombed on the data set that was shared with students, the student would automatically get an F. And only if the second data set got different results than he expected would he go chasing the errors and potentially still give a good grade. By the end of two semesters everyone knew one never tweaked the code to just run the known data set and get the known result. Science would benefit tremendously if this was the approach.
  - nonbel 8y ago
    >"Science would benefit tremendously if this was the approach." This is just the original idea behind science as developed in the renaissance. The resistance to checking each others work is a recent phenomenon. Edit to add a source: > "the foundation of scientific societies compelled scientists to change the way in which experiments were presented so that not only members of the scientific community but also the inexperienced reader would be able to repeat them by following the same steps. [...] Robert Boyle also played an important role in the evolution of scientific writing (Gotti,1996, 2001; Hunter, 2007). Fulton (1932: 78) has highlighted the contribution of the scientist, describing Boyle’s undertaking “to establish science as an integral part of the intellectual life of ordinary men”. He encouraged scientists to write in a language that their contemporaries could understand, and he undoubtedly did more than anyone of his time to make scientific methodology part of the intellectual equipment of educated men. [...] According to Gotti, one of the features of experimental essays is brevity, but this brevity of form does not imply brevity in the exposition of the subject. On the contrary, experiments are usually reported in full, furnishing the reader with all the minutest details. The aim of such a report is, after all, to make it possible for the experiment to be repeated, making the precision of the description an important factor." https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2007.20.06 https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2007.20.06
veritas_veritad 8y ago
the fault found in THAT line of reasoning is that the established scientific culture/institution doesn't even play ball by its own rules. Political biases in every aspect from results interpretation to what questions we're allowed to ask, historical "just so" arguments that are sometimes falling flat (much to the detriment of the health of the planet), the lack of "negative results" studies due to funding biases and the replication crisis work together to cause a profound skepticism of the body of scientific institutional knowledge to be in some ways _more scientific_ than just reading and accepting the latest scientific news.

weberc2 8y ago

> The situation is instead that a vast number of scientists are producing findings that contradict certain political preferences, and the response has not been a deeper investigation made in good faith — but rather an outright political rejection of the findings. How does a layperson make a deeper investigation on their own? The research is typically paywalled, the jargon is inaccessible, the experiments are prohibitively expensive, etc etc. In effect, there is a priestly caste, and one which arguably excludes from the debate members of the skeptic's tribe (i.e., "people the skeptic might trust to address their concerns"). This is why heterodoxy and political diversity in the academy is soooo important. You might be inclined to say something like "conservatives select out of the academy" or "it's not my fault reality has a liberal bias" and you might even be right, but I don't think you'll find climate change very sympathetic to your position. In other words, this isn't affirmative action for conservatives, it's affirmative action (of conservatives) for the benefit of humanity. Disclaimers: I'm picking 'conservatives' and 'liberals' here because that's clearly the bent of the article. I'm also picking climate change since it seems to be the favorite example of science denialism. Of course, contrary to the angle of this article, science denialism isn't even an exclusively conservative phenomenon (blank slatism is a favorite of anti-science leftists--including leftist academics--and flat-earth and anti-vax are bipartisan beliefs).

notyourday 8y ago
So I have some grad/phd student friends and a small computational lab - enough cores, ram, storage and jobbing engines that in 2000s it would have been a respectable not quite super computer but none the less very powerful system capable of crunching lots of numbers quickly. My friends sometimes try to validate conclusions of the papers or just re-run the data crunching presented in those papers. They never succeed. Either the data sets don't actually match the data sets in papers, or something in the formulas is off, or the code does not even compile. I did computation physics in college. We had to write code as the paper of homework/tests. Our TA would never run our binaries. He would take our source code, compile it, feed it two of his data sets (we had one) and check the result. If the student's code did not compile, the student would get an F for that homework. If the student's code bombed on the data set that was shared with students, the student would automatically get an F. And only if the second data set got different results than he expected would he go chasing the errors and potentially still give a good grade. By the end of two semesters everyone knew one never tweaked the code to just run the known data set and get the known result. Science would benefit tremendously if this was the approach.
- nonbel 8y ago
  >"Science would benefit tremendously if this was the approach." This is just the original idea behind science as developed in the renaissance. The resistance to checking each others work is a recent phenomenon. Edit to add a source: > "the foundation of scientific societies compelled scientists to change the way in which experiments were presented so that not only members of the scientific community but also the inexperienced reader would be able to repeat them by following the same steps. [...] Robert Boyle also played an important role in the evolution of scientific writing (Gotti,1996, 2001; Hunter, 2007). Fulton (1932: 78) has highlighted the contribution of the scientist, describing Boyle’s undertaking “to establish science as an integral part of the intellectual life of ordinary men”. He encouraged scientists to write in a language that their contemporaries could understand, and he undoubtedly did more than anyone of his time to make scientific methodology part of the intellectual equipment of educated men. [...] According to Gotti, one of the features of experimental essays is brevity, but this brevity of form does not imply brevity in the exposition of the subject. On the contrary, experiments are usually reported in full, furnishing the reader with all the minutest details. The aim of such a report is, after all, to make it possible for the experiment to be repeated, making the precision of the description an important factor." https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2007.20.06 https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.2007.20.06

veritas_veritad 8y ago

the fault found in THAT line of reasoning is that the established scientific culture/institution doesn't even play ball by its own rules. Political biases in every aspect from results interpretation to what questions we're allowed to ask, historical "just so" arguments that are sometimes falling flat (much to the detriment of the health of the planet), the lack of "negative results" studies due to funding biases and the replication crisis work together to cause a profound skepticism of the body of scientific institutional knowledge to be in some ways _more scientific_ than just reading and accepting the latest scientific news.