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My worry with pieces like this is that they're meant to encourage intellectual diversity in scientific discourse, but some people will undoubtedly try to use th

My worry with pieces like this is that they're meant to encourage intellectual diversity in scientific discourse, but some people will undoubtedly try to use them as "teach the controversy!" to justify any kind of crazy non-scientific idea. How do we teach people to draw that line? Or is that a lost cause?

ayakura 7y ago
> How do we teach people to draw that line By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0] It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines. [0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-med...
- ceejayoz 7y ago
  This makes us susceptible to what's essentially a Gish gallop, though. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop, for those unfamiliar.) It takes inordinately more time and knowledge to debunk a false claim than it does to make it.
  - taneq 7y ago
    Also worth noting that false claims need not be malicious to serve as a DOS attack. An army of untrained ‘researchers’ drawing improbable conclusions from randomly combined snippets of scientific papers can generate a huge amount of pseudoscientific ‘sourced-looking’ ideas. Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.
ravitation 7y ago
Well, one issue, is that this article (and many like it) only address controversy, and not whether a given controversy is warranted by evidence. I think it's important in discussing intellectual diversity to emphasize that going against established thought requires compelling evidence, usually rightfully so. It also doesn't help that their only example of intellectual diversity is itself flawed, and not convincing, even to the authors.
sbussard 7y ago
Why are you afraid of non-scientific ideas? Science is a light to illuminate the truth. What's the point of having a light if you are hiding ideas? There is no line to draw except against this kind of censorship. We ought to teach others tools for thought, not indoctrinate based off of our own biases, lest the next generation progress no further than us.
- zeroxfe 7y ago
  GP specified in scientific discourse. It's fine to discuss non-scientific ideas -- just don't call it out as science.
- streb-lo 7y ago
  I know you think you're being profound but this essentially just tripe. Science is based on data and repetition. That's the pay-to-play scientific discussion requires otherwise we're not "illuminating truth" we're just regurgitating shit.
- toofy 7y ago
  > Why are you afraid of non-scientific ideas? I’m not sure where you got the idea that people are afraid of non-scientific ideas–I see them discussed all over online everyday by thousands and thousands of people. No one is afraid of them, we just don’t consider them to be science. There should always remain a sharp dividing line between non-scientific/scientific and for good reason.
  - sbussard 7y ago
    > There should always remain a sharp dividing line between non-scientific/scientific and for good reason. That is a patronizing statement. If science can't defend itself then we're more screwed than we thought. Truth exists outside of Science (to state otherwise would not be a scientific statement, thus a contradiction). That leaves room for crack pot theories to potentially have truth in them. To bar them or dismiss them based off personal bias is crime against healthy intellectual discourse. Who is imposing irrational beliefs on whom? That is where the sharp dividing line should be drawn.
- 7y ago
SuoDuanDao 7y ago
Scientific discourse is based on the assumption that all parties have the basic reading comprehension to look at the primary data. I'm not really worried about creationism or climate stabilism competing given those conditions. And if those aren't the conditions, it's not scientific discourse.
- wolco 7y ago
  See you are part of that group. If data was presented today that conflicted with your existing views you would try to label and disprove it. Science must be neutral. Proof of climate stabilism through existing feedback processes may happen or not. We won't know until the data says this. If science is not neutral it becomes religion. Even gravity is just a theory.
  - duckMuppet 7y ago
    Well said. I'm not sure the good religious folks here who are evidently big believers in the Rona calamity can fully comprehend your ideas though. For most here, i suspect it's a bridge to far.
    - wolco 7y ago
      That science should be neutral? I would hope some would be seeking that path. The idea that science is evolving with every experiment/test we attempt. To freeze on a single point of view is belief (religion) instead of fact (science). Hopefully that bridge isn't too far for most.
  - hannasanarion 7y ago
    This comment shows a shocking lack of scientific literacy. You can't "disprove" data. Data are the root facts that science is based on, and all data from trustworthy sources is treated the same by all scientists. Nobody ever "disproves" data. What can be proven or disproven are hypotheses, the truths about underlying mechanisms of the world that we seek to learn about through data. A hypothesis about how something behaves can be proven or disproven with data, the data itself is absolute truth. A good hypothesis explains the data that we see, a bad one will be contradicted by data collection. There is no such thing as "just a theory". In common parlance sure, but in scientific speech "theory" is a technical term that refers to a hypothesis that has stood up to all feasible tests that could have disproven it. Gravity is a phenomenon, observed by lots of data, all of which discovered so far confirms the theory of general relativity, upgraded from hypothesis after gravitational bending of light (which the hypothesis predicted)was observed in 1919.
yters 7y ago
What is the line between scientific and non-scientific idea?

ayakura 7y ago

> How do we teach people to draw that line By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0] It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines. [0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-media-bias https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-med...

ceejayoz 7y ago
This makes us susceptible to what's essentially a Gish gallop, though. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop, for those unfamiliar.) It takes inordinately more time and knowledge to debunk a false claim than it does to make it.
- taneq 7y ago
  Also worth noting that false claims need not be malicious to serve as a DOS attack. An army of untrained ‘researchers’ drawing improbable conclusions from randomly combined snippets of scientific papers can generate a huge amount of pseudoscientific ‘sourced-looking’ ideas. Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.

ravitation 7y ago

Well, one issue, is that this article (and many like it) only address controversy, and not whether a given controversy is warranted by evidence. I think it's important in discussing intellectual diversity to emphasize that going against established thought requires compelling evidence, usually rightfully so. It also doesn't help that their only example of intellectual diversity is itself flawed, and not convincing, even to the authors.

sbussard 7y ago

Why are you afraid of non-scientific ideas? Science is a light to illuminate the truth. What's the point of having a light if you are hiding ideas? There is no line to draw except against this kind of censorship. We ought to teach others tools for thought, not indoctrinate based off of our own biases, lest the next generation progress no further than us.

zeroxfe 7y ago
GP specified in scientific discourse. It's fine to discuss non-scientific ideas -- just don't call it out as science.
streb-lo 7y ago
I know you think you're being profound but this essentially just tripe. Science is based on data and repetition. That's the pay-to-play scientific discussion requires otherwise we're not "illuminating truth" we're just regurgitating shit.
toofy 7y ago
> Why are you afraid of non-scientific ideas? I’m not sure where you got the idea that people are afraid of non-scientific ideas–I see them discussed all over online everyday by thousands and thousands of people. No one is afraid of them, we just don’t consider them to be science. There should always remain a sharp dividing line between non-scientific/scientific and for good reason.
- sbussard 7y ago
  > There should always remain a sharp dividing line between non-scientific/scientific and for good reason. That is a patronizing statement. If science can't defend itself then we're more screwed than we thought. Truth exists outside of Science (to state otherwise would not be a scientific statement, thus a contradiction). That leaves room for crack pot theories to potentially have truth in them. To bar them or dismiss them based off personal bias is crime against healthy intellectual discourse. Who is imposing irrational beliefs on whom? That is where the sharp dividing line should be drawn.
7y ago

SuoDuanDao 7y ago

Scientific discourse is based on the assumption that all parties have the basic reading comprehension to look at the primary data. I'm not really worried about creationism or climate stabilism competing given those conditions. And if those aren't the conditions, it's not scientific discourse.

wolco 7y ago
See you are part of that group. If data was presented today that conflicted with your existing views you would try to label and disprove it. Science must be neutral. Proof of climate stabilism through existing feedback processes may happen or not. We won't know until the data says this. If science is not neutral it becomes religion. Even gravity is just a theory.
- duckMuppet 7y ago
  Well said. I'm not sure the good religious folks here who are evidently big believers in the Rona calamity can fully comprehend your ideas though. For most here, i suspect it's a bridge to far.
  - wolco 7y ago
    That science should be neutral? I would hope some would be seeking that path. The idea that science is evolving with every experiment/test we attempt. To freeze on a single point of view is belief (religion) instead of fact (science). Hopefully that bridge isn't too far for most.
- hannasanarion 7y ago
  This comment shows a shocking lack of scientific literacy. You can't "disprove" data. Data are the root facts that science is based on, and all data from trustworthy sources is treated the same by all scientists. Nobody ever "disproves" data. What can be proven or disproven are hypotheses, the truths about underlying mechanisms of the world that we seek to learn about through data. A hypothesis about how something behaves can be proven or disproven with data, the data itself is absolute truth. A good hypothesis explains the data that we see, a bad one will be contradicted by data collection. There is no such thing as "just a theory". In common parlance sure, but in scientific speech "theory" is a technical term that refers to a hypothesis that has stood up to all feasible tests that could have disproven it. Gravity is a phenomenon, observed by lots of data, all of which discovered so far confirms the theory of general relativity, upgraded from hypothesis after gravitational bending of light (which the hypothesis predicted)was observed in 1919.

yters 7y ago

What is the line between scientific and non-scientific idea?