16 ms·

Science and scientific expertise are more important than ever

108 points by MindGods 6y ago

arotical 6y ago
I've seen the term 'evidence-based policy' pop up all over the place. I take issue with people who use this phrase because most of the time their definition of evidence is not very well developed, and when the evidence is something they don't like they start to stretch their definition of evidence so they can dismiss implementing a certain policy. If evidence is only restricted to, and dictated by, academic papers, you leave room for companies and news media to start selectively reporting and funding studies they want to see or want people to see. And where are the scientific papers dedicated to studying this problem? No one is going to fund them. Now you have an entire society believing that corporate influence is not real because there is seemingly no evidence for it. If you only make decisions based on science you can pretend problems aren't real without a scientist's approval, and you can pretend solutions to those problems are bad if there is even a tiny bit of counter-evidence that supports your viewpoint.
- mindcrime 6y ago
  If you only make decisions based on science you can pretend problems aren't real without a scientist's approval, and you can pretend solutions to those problems are bad if there is even a tiny bit of counter-evidence that supports your viewpoint. And if you make decisions based on anything other than science, is the final outcome going to be any better? I admit that something that we might call "misuse of science" is a real thing, and a problem. But I don't see any solution that in any way involves de-emphasizing the importance of science in decision making.
  - arotical 6y ago
    Here's a scenario: You are tasked with dealing with a problem where there is little research and no scientific consensus. There is plenty of video evidence and other related pieces of non-so-scientific evidence, but most people don't count that in evidence-based policy. What do you do? Sometimes, I think, we have to make decisions when there's no clear solution, and it's better than just dismissing a very obvious problem as non-existent. So yes, include science in every decision, but it's not the be all end all of society, it never has been, and it's not good to teach people that you can't tackle issues without a known best solution.
    - acqq 6y ago
      > a problem where there is little research and no scientific consensus. > There is plenty of video evidence I can't even what you talk about. "Video evidence"? Edit: if I'd guess it's about "UFOs" for these there practically exists scientific consensus: no aliens proved, ever. "Video evidence" isn't the evidence of aliens.
      - domnomnom 6y ago
        Lmao, turtles all the way down my friend.
    - Retric 6y ago
      In the real world problems are never completely novel. Video game addiction for example clearly only showed up after video games, but it’s also closely related to other forms of addiction. So, simply using related models and then adjusting to new information as it shows up works just fine. If government happens to ban loot boxes for a decade it’s not that important if they get it wrong and that’s plenty of time to do real research and adjust policy. PS: If you disagree try and come up with a counter example.
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    We certainly shouldn't de-emphasize the importance of science. While not all scientific studies are correct, if someone makes a habit of saying "bah who cares what scientists think", they're gonna make bad decisions. But it's important to keep in mind that science is usually a tool to inform decisions, not a verdict to decide them. I see a lot of people declare we have to implement suchandsuch policy because that's what the science says, and almost all of them are adding implicit assumptions about values and goals to the studies they cite.
  - 0d9eooo 6y ago
    It depends on what you mean by "science." Science has become so political and subject to hype and fads, at least in biomedicine, that everyone should be deeply skeptical of every claim that is made. That doesn't mean that you should distrust everything completely, just that critical skepticism should be the norm. If by "science" you mean that "rigorous, logical empirical study" should be part of the decision-making, yes, I agree. If by "science" you mean that the statements of scientists with prestigious academic appointments should be given priority over other considerations, I say no. Outsider criticism should be welcome, and I think nonscientific considerations are sometimes required. One of the reasons society is in the mess it is in (at least in the US) is because of a failure to realize that certain segments, like the biomedical-scientific community, are just as driven by human failures as any other.
- feralimal 6y ago
  Even evidence might not be showing you what you think. Eg if you fund 10 studies in support of, er, say cats being dangerous to humans. 2 might find that to be true, 2 find that false, and 6 remain neutral. You can leave the 8 you that don't support what you want to show unpublished. You can then fund more studies that build on the 2 you like. Rinse and repeat. Pretty soon, driven by funding alone, you will have lots of 'evidence' that caters to your viewpoint. Is that science? Unfortunately, funding determines scientific reality.
  - ceejayoz 6y ago
    XKCD has a great comic demonstrating how this is done. https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
- Nursie 6y ago
  I don't believe that all policy should 100% have to be formed from scientific evidence, but there are places where the evidence is well researched and well understood, yet politicians legislate based on their own prejudices, directly flying in the face of both experts and evidence. In the face of this sort of behaviour, is it not reasonable to ask for more evidence-based policy? Or at least that real evidence be considered where it is available?
  - arotical 6y ago
    yeah this is fair
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  Social policy is inherently hard to get objective evidence for. Social experiments mostly don't work because the fact that it's an experiment alters the behavior of participants. This is part of why I don't think there is any value in UBI experiments. Our mental models influence the kinds of results we get. This is always true, but it's a bigger problem for some things than for others.
- nitwit005 6y ago
  It depends how strictly you take the idea. Often people just want some sort of demonstration that people at least looked into things and thought about the alternatives.
jp555 6y ago
First thing that came to my mind was.. "Guys, guys, Galileo wasn't actually cancelled. He just found out that free speech has consequences." @KonstantinKisin Good luck!
- throwaway29102 6y ago
  He wouldn’t be the first academic in history to get the facts right and the delivery wrong.
  - jp555 6y ago
    Eric Weinstein talks about the DISC - Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. I had a friend get tenure at a university, and her stories added fuel to the fire in my mind that the DISC is very real, and everywhere.
    - throwaway29102 6y ago
      One man’s DISC is another’s memetic immune system. Communicating new ideas is hard, and the burden is carried exclusively by the originator of the idea.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  That is just wrong on several levels including the conflation of the monopoly on violence's censorship with community reaction. It wouldn't even be cancelation by the standards of "Nobody wants to have anything to do with the dude who shouted racial slurs at a holocaust survivor is being cancelled." definition.
octaveguin 6y ago
Politicizing science will make science less scientific and more political. It will not work the other way.
- 0d9eooo 6y ago
  It's already too political. I agree with you; just saying that everything bad in that regard will get even worse.
  - azinman2 6y ago
    Anything becomes political as soon as a second person gets added.
- domnomnom 6y ago
  Exactly. There is just no simple solution, only likely applied optimizations in certain contexts that those in the trenches will be able to discover.
- jp555 6y ago
  “When you mix politics and science, you get politics.” — John M. Barry from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Influenza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Influenza
  - vixen99 6y ago
    As with mixing ice cream with 1% of s
  - btrettel 6y ago
    As far as I can tell, that quote does not appear in the cited book. https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22When+you+mix+politics+and+science,+you+get+politics.%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0#v=onepage&q=politics&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&printsec=fron... A nearly identical quote appears in this editorial by the same author: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/coronavirus-shutdown.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/coronavirus-shutd...
Press2forEN 6y ago
> An engaged and well-informed public has always been the foundation of our democracy Is there even a shred of scientific evidence to support this hypothesis? I see it in print so often that it appears to be a axiom that is considered so correct as to be unquestionable.
- supernova87a 6y ago
  Since you bring it up, I agree with you! I would say that in the past, the engaged and well-informed public (and few honestly) were valued by the policy/decision makers because they generally were or closely related to the decision makers. The democratization of opinion and influence has not gone well for technical experts and correct information getting to (or influencing) people in positions of responsibility. Everyone (no matter how ill-informed) is so able to issue opinions and "make their voices heard" that people in responsibility get confused who they should worry about satisfying. Sometimes democracy (and democratization of information) is not a purely good thing.
  - phkahler 6y ago
    >> that people in responsibility get confused who they should worry about satisfying. That's a problem too. Worry about who to satisfy compromises science, truth and long term goals.
- mod 6y ago
  I agree. In my lifetime I have never known the average person to be engaged, nor informed. I think they're mostly mis-informed for the past 10+ years. People just believe whatever outlandish title comes across their facebook feed. I had about 12 people ask me if I heard the news--that wayfair was selling missing children on their website, disguised as fancy cabinets. It took me about 12 seconds to find out it was a theory with no evidence put forth by an anonymous reddit poster. 2/12 changed their minds when I showed them that.
  - vorpalhex 6y ago
    I made the terrible mistake of trying to convince someone out of this insane view only to remember the old quote, "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into". Maybe we should just devote the entirety of a school year to basic rationalism and logic...
SubiculumCode 6y ago
Then fund us. I'm about to leave science because I can't find a position.
- btrettel 6y ago
  I'm almost done my PhD (defense next week) and I'm starting as a patent examiner later this month. That was the only job I was offered, and I applied overwhelmingly to research positions. There really aren't enough research positions out there. (And before someone asks: I worked in a very practical area of engineering.) With that being said, increasing total funding can only go so far. A bigger problem to me is that the available funding is not allocated well. When certain professors make $300K+ per year yet can't find money for postdocs and their students make less than $20K per year, CERN asks for billions that could be spent on more important projects, and universities take a huge percentage of grants as overhead (often without clear justification), it seems obvious to me that there are plenty of ways to improve the situation without increasing funding. I could go on. I think the research enterprise is incredibly inefficient, and not by necessity.
  - pnw_hazor 6y ago
    Good luck at the USPTO. I worked with some former examiners (patent attorneys now). The early years are a grind to say the least.
- nickthemagicman 6y ago
  I feel like there should be funding devoted to scientist just starting their career so that they can prove what they're capable of.
  - btrettel 6y ago
    That's what PhD fellowships like the NSF fellowship are supposed to do as far as I know.
DrNuke 6y ago
That’s why I started a content project earlier this year but my admittedly very small evidence is not in the line of this article: my readers just want easy & simple bullet point to grasp “facts”, instead of first-hand expertise, references or debates. Science is a process, though, not black or white definitive assertions.
boxed 6y ago
It's a pity they didn't use the word "truth". that's what's at stake here: not just the lack of science but the total abolishing of truth, no matter how trivial.
pvaldes 6y ago
Translation. "Is year of elections and we should say something about science". To enjoy the article at this fullest, play this in the background with an orchestra of tiny violins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbvcp480Y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbvcp480Y4 My pleasure
gukov 6y ago
Independent interpretation (ie. done not for clicks and views) of scientific data is more important than ever.
ohduran 6y ago
Maybe the reason we are in this mess is because we relied too much on science, and too little on actual humanities (rhetoric, logic, and so on)? I hear about hermeneutics more and more in my circle: how to communicate trumps what is communicated. I can see why Fauci and many top scientists fail to convince people like Trump and his supporters: he knows, but can't communicate what he knows so that information is conveyed, and not simply stated.
- tensor 6y ago
  It has to start with truth though, and science is the only method to gain truth about the world. Logic can infer but you still need to test the assumptions. That's not to say that communication isn't important, it's crucial, but communication without science is useless. In fact, we see just what happens with excellent communication and no science: outright fake news, fake claims, manipulation, loss of freedom, and worse.
- faangFar 6y ago
  I come from a logical background and I wonder if statistics should take priority over nitty gritty science. Yes we understand pandemic physics, but we should be looking to prioritize a strong majority policy rather than the few. I don't think Fauci uses statistics in his reasoning.
  - Nursie 6y ago
    Who are these "few" in your opinion? In what way are they being prioritised over the majority?
- newacct583 6y ago
  That sounds like you're blaming Fauci for failing to convince Trump? Isn't that backwards? The point to having a head of state (or any senior executive) is that you pick them for the ability to derive input from and synthesize decisions from a large group of experts who can't independently all enforce their own rules. That is the function of a senior executive! I mean... this is The Problem writ small, really. What really happened with why "America Turned Away From Science" isn't anything to do with science at all. It's the the population used to have a sense that there were "experts" out there with a "consensus" on important items. And that consensus went away, as now we have whole media ecosystems whose role is to redirect this kind of consensus building. So Fox, which started as a way to redirect the 70's/80's consensus opinions about, say, the welfare state and Keynsian economics, is now serving to tell people that "the experts" say masks are going to kill them and that the virus is a fraud.
faangFar 6y ago
Mods have deleted this question with no reasoning- Why is the "science" solution to lockdown? This is a prioritization of a minority population at the expense of an overwhelming majority. Logic would say to prioritize (pick your numbers, I don't care) the 99.5% over the 0.5%. My hypothesis is that since it's a healthcare issue, the leaders are less math/statistics inclined and more focused on biology.
- newacct583 6y ago
  That's just wrong. Is Japan, or Korea, or Germany needlessly locked down to "prioritize a minority population"? No. Those economies are largely open now. The US isn't making the wrong decision about prioritizing hard choices, it's simply MAKING THE WRONG CHOICES. This was a largely solvable problem. We just failed.
  - faangFar 6y ago
    The question isn't what we should have done, that's easy. What should we do now?
    - newacct583 6y ago
      Exactly the same things! There's no too late with a virus, the same things work to treat it no matter what the infection counts are. Stay home. If you can't stay home, wear a mask and stay outside. Don't travel. Get tested regularly if you can't meet these rules. Follow the instructions of the scientists we've all been ignoring. Vote for people who will (or against those who won't). Your argument seems to be of the form "Well, we fucked up, but it's too late now so we might as well open up." That's just not true. We can still fix this and save tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.
      - faangFar 6y ago
        Seems a bit oversimplified because you need to lockdown for the next 1.5 years. You need to exert the police force against peaceful protestors. All while sacrificing the mental and physical health of the 99.5%. Here's a question, why does the mental and physical health of the 99.5% take lower priority than the 0.5% oldest and most obese people?
raziel2701 6y ago
What's the point of being an expert if no one will listen?
cuspy 6y ago
Given the track record of institutional science and the ever-growing list of regulatory failures, moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of scientific expertise, why do so many people seem to think that simply doubling down and bullying the general population into compliance with expert consensus will ever work? What if institutional science in the US has a legitimacy crisis because it has failed to police its own corruption and failed to address its own limitations and vulnerabilities? What if everyday people can see this more clearly than those striving on the margins of these institutions? Personally, as a scientist, I am comforted that there are enough others out there who doubt the entire notion of a scientific establishment that the population should "trust" to make decisions without oversight. Our numbers are growing, and I know many people who fight every day to ensure we will never be ruled by unquestionable expert consensus. Anyone who has been inside these institutions knows exactly how petty and arbitrary the hierarchical structures can be. I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily. I think the constant stream of these articles just illustrates the massive social blind spot that comes from training STEM professionals solely for careers rather than for citizenship, communication and community membership. STEM training itself has sadly become a hierarchical, cult-like, anti-intellectual system that deprives students of critical thinking skills.
- manux 6y ago
  > scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily. Bought off by who? I presume the "elite families" you mention. So either way we are ruled by the wealthy in this model. There are other options of course and I assume you would agree, I just wanted to point out my surprise at this false dichotomy (that's not even a dichotomy since they're mostly the same scenario). I also agree 100% that STEM professionals should be trained to be citizens first.
  - cuspy 6y ago
    I was thinking primarily of other states or foreign entities who have an interest in undermining competitivity, stealing or suppressing emerging technologies. Mentioning elite families was as an illustrative contrast, since at least domestic entities (who may want to maintain a monopoly on certain technologies) would be less directly incentivised to undermine the institutions that serve them.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Science is important. Science is great. I love science. Let's just be extremely careful when trying to apply the latest scientific achievements in our day to day lives. Phlogiston theory of 17th century was wrong. Race theory of 18th century was wrong. Semmelweis was laughed at in 19th century. And lobotomies were perfectly scientific for treating depressed patients for most of 20th century. I doubt 21st century's science is any special here...
- readingnews 6y ago
  Four examples of bad science? I see a trend in these comments that people here are pretty anti-science. I would like to remind us all to just take a peek around us, and look at what was not even possible, not even imaginable, a mere fifty to one hundred years ago. We are speaking to one another using faradays laws and discoveries, teslas fascination with wireless and countless physicists and engineers that build practically everything you see. Computers, the internet, wireless... does anyone here remember polio, or how the flu used to kill far more than today (with the exception of the COVID)? I find it fascinating how easily we beat down on science and academic scientists in general. Are there bad scientists? Sure. Are there bad people? Sure, but the narrative I find myself reading more and more is all scientists are bad, and all research should be stopped, as it is somehow costing everyone else money or the money is being used wrongly. I think the percentage of that is incredibly small. I only hope we are still educating our children enough in the future to realize the tiny bad percentage of people we hear about (be it in science or the general population) is not representative of all.
  - AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
    How many examples would be enough? Five? Fifty five? Quite a lot of people here (including yours truly) have scientific background. All I'm saying is: let's be careful and let's be skeptical - as real scientists are.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    Were all of them bad science? (The first two were clearly so, but I'm not sure about the last ones.) Because if so, it's easy to look a bit more and find completely wrong conclusions taken from good science too. But anyway, all of those were mainstream at some time. The point is that yielding to experts is anti-science. The fact that your experts work in a research lab instead of a church makes little difference here. Scientific decision making requires that at a minimum you verify your experts results, and be ready to notice when they are wrong. This article is as anti-science as the policies it is trying to fight, and this is a bad thing that can only create mistrust from the public.
cyberrod411 6y ago
This is true, but at least in the US, its more and more devalued everyday.
renewiltord 6y ago
There's science and then there's the theatre of science and the fans of the theatre of science will attempt to browbeat you into ignoring the science because they are concerned with the continued operation of the theatre. So, for instance, when the CDC recommended no mask usage and all the conformist fans of the theatre of science started pulling their shit, the ones who follow the science ignored them. Government scientific institutions have reputations that are shot through with these "for the greater good" lies. Science is important, but no one is going to listen to the Scientific Theatre any more.
- timr 6y ago
  https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/ https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Interesting. Semi-convincing. Adjusting priors on the mask thing downward slightly.
tengbretson 6y ago
A lot of what is said in this article only really makes sense if you define science to be "what is said or done by someone called a scientist."
AcerbicZero 6y ago
Honest question, why is democracy always the "flag" people wrap themselves in when defending these kinds of positions? I get that democracy is somewhat better than feudalism, but at the end of the day I don't really care if the king is standing on my neck, or if its a mob of unruly peasants. Tyranny is tyranny, and democracy has demonstrated a great affinity for it when it suits the mob. Democracy seems to be the best of the bad options available, but without the strong protections afforded by an deep seated respect for individual liberty and freedom, there isn't much difference in end result. If anything modern academia's treatment of "Science!" is a nice little peak under the covers of what happens when you let the mob make the rules - Thought becomes regimented to the point of absurdity and you either get on board, or get (thrown) over board.

108 points by MindGods 6y ago

I've seen the term 'evidence-based policy' pop up all over the place. I take issue with people who use this phrase because most of the time their definition of evidence is not very well developed, and when the evidence is something they don't like they start to stretch their definition of evidence so they can dismiss implementing a certain policy. If evidence is only restricted to, and dictated by, academic papers, you leave room for companies and news media to start selectively reporting and funding studies they want to see or want people to see. And where are the scientific papers dedicated to studying this problem? No one is going to fund them. Now you have an entire society believing that corporate influence is not real because there is seemingly no evidence for it. If you only make decisions based on science you can pretend problems aren't real without a scientist's approval, and you can pretend solutions to those problems are bad if there is even a tiny bit of counter-evidence that supports your viewpoint.

mindcrime 6y ago
If you only make decisions based on science you can pretend problems aren't real without a scientist's approval, and you can pretend solutions to those problems are bad if there is even a tiny bit of counter-evidence that supports your viewpoint. And if you make decisions based on anything other than science, is the final outcome going to be any better? I admit that something that we might call "misuse of science" is a real thing, and a problem. But I don't see any solution that in any way involves de-emphasizing the importance of science in decision making.
- arotical 6y ago
  Here's a scenario: You are tasked with dealing with a problem where there is little research and no scientific consensus. There is plenty of video evidence and other related pieces of non-so-scientific evidence, but most people don't count that in evidence-based policy. What do you do? Sometimes, I think, we have to make decisions when there's no clear solution, and it's better than just dismissing a very obvious problem as non-existent. So yes, include science in every decision, but it's not the be all end all of society, it never has been, and it's not good to teach people that you can't tackle issues without a known best solution.
  - acqq 6y ago
    > a problem where there is little research and no scientific consensus. > There is plenty of video evidence I can't even what you talk about. "Video evidence"? Edit: if I'd guess it's about "UFOs" for these there practically exists scientific consensus: no aliens proved, ever. "Video evidence" isn't the evidence of aliens.
    - domnomnom 6y ago
      Lmao, turtles all the way down my friend.
  - Retric 6y ago
    In the real world problems are never completely novel. Video game addiction for example clearly only showed up after video games, but it’s also closely related to other forms of addiction. So, simply using related models and then adjusting to new information as it shows up works just fine. If government happens to ban loot boxes for a decade it’s not that important if they get it wrong and that’s plenty of time to do real research and adjust policy. PS: If you disagree try and come up with a counter example.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  We certainly shouldn't de-emphasize the importance of science. While not all scientific studies are correct, if someone makes a habit of saying "bah who cares what scientists think", they're gonna make bad decisions. But it's important to keep in mind that science is usually a tool to inform decisions, not a verdict to decide them. I see a lot of people declare we have to implement suchandsuch policy because that's what the science says, and almost all of them are adding implicit assumptions about values and goals to the studies they cite.
- 0d9eooo 6y ago
  It depends on what you mean by "science." Science has become so political and subject to hype and fads, at least in biomedicine, that everyone should be deeply skeptical of every claim that is made. That doesn't mean that you should distrust everything completely, just that critical skepticism should be the norm. If by "science" you mean that "rigorous, logical empirical study" should be part of the decision-making, yes, I agree. If by "science" you mean that the statements of scientists with prestigious academic appointments should be given priority over other considerations, I say no. Outsider criticism should be welcome, and I think nonscientific considerations are sometimes required. One of the reasons society is in the mess it is in (at least in the US) is because of a failure to realize that certain segments, like the biomedical-scientific community, are just as driven by human failures as any other.
feralimal 6y ago
Even evidence might not be showing you what you think. Eg if you fund 10 studies in support of, er, say cats being dangerous to humans. 2 might find that to be true, 2 find that false, and 6 remain neutral. You can leave the 8 you that don't support what you want to show unpublished. You can then fund more studies that build on the 2 you like. Rinse and repeat. Pretty soon, driven by funding alone, you will have lots of 'evidence' that caters to your viewpoint. Is that science? Unfortunately, funding determines scientific reality.
- ceejayoz 6y ago
  XKCD has a great comic demonstrating how this is done. https://xkcd.com/882/ https://xkcd.com/882/
Nursie 6y ago
I don't believe that all policy should 100% have to be formed from scientific evidence, but there are places where the evidence is well researched and well understood, yet politicians legislate based on their own prejudices, directly flying in the face of both experts and evidence. In the face of this sort of behaviour, is it not reasonable to ask for more evidence-based policy? Or at least that real evidence be considered where it is available?
- arotical 6y ago
  yeah this is fair
DoreenMichele 6y ago
Social policy is inherently hard to get objective evidence for. Social experiments mostly don't work because the fact that it's an experiment alters the behavior of participants. This is part of why I don't think there is any value in UBI experiments. Our mental models influence the kinds of results we get. This is always true, but it's a bigger problem for some things than for others.
nitwit005 6y ago
It depends how strictly you take the idea. Often people just want some sort of demonstration that people at least looked into things and thought about the alternatives.

jp555 6y ago

First thing that came to my mind was.. "Guys, guys, Galileo wasn't actually cancelled. He just found out that free speech has consequences." @KonstantinKisin Good luck!

throwaway29102 6y ago
He wouldn’t be the first academic in history to get the facts right and the delivery wrong.
- jp555 6y ago
  Eric Weinstein talks about the DISC - Distributed Idea Suppression Complex. I had a friend get tenure at a university, and her stories added fuel to the fire in my mind that the DISC is very real, and everywhere.
  - throwaway29102 6y ago
    One man’s DISC is another’s memetic immune system. Communicating new ideas is hard, and the burden is carried exclusively by the originator of the idea.
Nasrudith 6y ago
That is just wrong on several levels including the conflation of the monopoly on violence's censorship with community reaction. It wouldn't even be cancelation by the standards of "Nobody wants to have anything to do with the dude who shouted racial slurs at a holocaust survivor is being cancelled." definition.

octaveguin 6y ago

Politicizing science will make science less scientific and more political. It will not work the other way.

0d9eooo 6y ago
It's already too political. I agree with you; just saying that everything bad in that regard will get even worse.
- azinman2 6y ago
  Anything becomes political as soon as a second person gets added.
domnomnom 6y ago
Exactly. There is just no simple solution, only likely applied optimizations in certain contexts that those in the trenches will be able to discover.
jp555 6y ago
“When you mix politics and science, you get politics.” — John M. Barry from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Influenza https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Influenza
- vixen99 6y ago
  As with mixing ice cream with 1% of s
- btrettel 6y ago
  As far as I can tell, that quote does not appear in the cited book. https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&printsec=frontcover&dq=%22When+you+mix+politics+and+science,+you+get+politics.%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0#v=onepage&q=politics&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=BYsW6qTP0pMC&printsec=fron... A nearly identical quote appears in this editorial by the same author: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/coronavirus-shutdown.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/coronavirus-shutd...

Press2forEN 6y ago

> An engaged and well-informed public has always been the foundation of our democracy Is there even a shred of scientific evidence to support this hypothesis? I see it in print so often that it appears to be a axiom that is considered so correct as to be unquestionable.

supernova87a 6y ago
Since you bring it up, I agree with you! I would say that in the past, the engaged and well-informed public (and few honestly) were valued by the policy/decision makers because they generally were or closely related to the decision makers. The democratization of opinion and influence has not gone well for technical experts and correct information getting to (or influencing) people in positions of responsibility. Everyone (no matter how ill-informed) is so able to issue opinions and "make their voices heard" that people in responsibility get confused who they should worry about satisfying. Sometimes democracy (and democratization of information) is not a purely good thing.
- phkahler 6y ago
  >> that people in responsibility get confused who they should worry about satisfying. That's a problem too. Worry about who to satisfy compromises science, truth and long term goals.
mod 6y ago
I agree. In my lifetime I have never known the average person to be engaged, nor informed. I think they're mostly mis-informed for the past 10+ years. People just believe whatever outlandish title comes across their facebook feed. I had about 12 people ask me if I heard the news--that wayfair was selling missing children on their website, disguised as fancy cabinets. It took me about 12 seconds to find out it was a theory with no evidence put forth by an anonymous reddit poster. 2/12 changed their minds when I showed them that.
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  I made the terrible mistake of trying to convince someone out of this insane view only to remember the old quote, "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into". Maybe we should just devote the entirety of a school year to basic rationalism and logic...

SubiculumCode 6y ago

Then fund us. I'm about to leave science because I can't find a position.

btrettel 6y ago
I'm almost done my PhD (defense next week) and I'm starting as a patent examiner later this month. That was the only job I was offered, and I applied overwhelmingly to research positions. There really aren't enough research positions out there. (And before someone asks: I worked in a very practical area of engineering.) With that being said, increasing total funding can only go so far. A bigger problem to me is that the available funding is not allocated well. When certain professors make $300K+ per year yet can't find money for postdocs and their students make less than $20K per year, CERN asks for billions that could be spent on more important projects, and universities take a huge percentage of grants as overhead (often without clear justification), it seems obvious to me that there are plenty of ways to improve the situation without increasing funding. I could go on. I think the research enterprise is incredibly inefficient, and not by necessity.
- pnw_hazor 6y ago
  Good luck at the USPTO. I worked with some former examiners (patent attorneys now). The early years are a grind to say the least.
nickthemagicman 6y ago
I feel like there should be funding devoted to scientist just starting their career so that they can prove what they're capable of.
- btrettel 6y ago
  That's what PhD fellowships like the NSF fellowship are supposed to do as far as I know.

DrNuke 6y ago

That’s why I started a content project earlier this year but my admittedly very small evidence is not in the line of this article: my readers just want easy & simple bullet point to grasp “facts”, instead of first-hand expertise, references or debates. Science is a process, though, not black or white definitive assertions.

boxed 6y ago

It's a pity they didn't use the word "truth". that's what's at stake here: not just the lack of science but the total abolishing of truth, no matter how trivial.

pvaldes 6y ago

Translation. "Is year of elections and we should say something about science". To enjoy the article at this fullest, play this in the background with an orchestra of tiny violins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbvcp480Y4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XMbvcp480Y4 My pleasure

gukov 6y ago

Independent interpretation (ie. done not for clicks and views) of scientific data is more important than ever.

ohduran 6y ago

Maybe the reason we are in this mess is because we relied too much on science, and too little on actual humanities (rhetoric, logic, and so on)? I hear about hermeneutics more and more in my circle: how to communicate trumps what is communicated. I can see why Fauci and many top scientists fail to convince people like Trump and his supporters: he knows, but can't communicate what he knows so that information is conveyed, and not simply stated.

tensor 6y ago
It has to start with truth though, and science is the only method to gain truth about the world. Logic can infer but you still need to test the assumptions. That's not to say that communication isn't important, it's crucial, but communication without science is useless. In fact, we see just what happens with excellent communication and no science: outright fake news, fake claims, manipulation, loss of freedom, and worse.
faangFar 6y ago
I come from a logical background and I wonder if statistics should take priority over nitty gritty science. Yes we understand pandemic physics, but we should be looking to prioritize a strong majority policy rather than the few. I don't think Fauci uses statistics in his reasoning.
- Nursie 6y ago
  Who are these "few" in your opinion? In what way are they being prioritised over the majority?
newacct583 6y ago
That sounds like you're blaming Fauci for failing to convince Trump? Isn't that backwards? The point to having a head of state (or any senior executive) is that you pick them for the ability to derive input from and synthesize decisions from a large group of experts who can't independently all enforce their own rules. That is the function of a senior executive! I mean... this is The Problem writ small, really. What really happened with why "America Turned Away From Science" isn't anything to do with science at all. It's the the population used to have a sense that there were "experts" out there with a "consensus" on important items. And that consensus went away, as now we have whole media ecosystems whose role is to redirect this kind of consensus building. So Fox, which started as a way to redirect the 70's/80's consensus opinions about, say, the welfare state and Keynsian economics, is now serving to tell people that "the experts" say masks are going to kill them and that the virus is a fraud.

faangFar 6y ago

Mods have deleted this question with no reasoning- Why is the "science" solution to lockdown? This is a prioritization of a minority population at the expense of an overwhelming majority. Logic would say to prioritize (pick your numbers, I don't care) the 99.5% over the 0.5%. My hypothesis is that since it's a healthcare issue, the leaders are less math/statistics inclined and more focused on biology.

newacct583 6y ago
That's just wrong. Is Japan, or Korea, or Germany needlessly locked down to "prioritize a minority population"? No. Those economies are largely open now. The US isn't making the wrong decision about prioritizing hard choices, it's simply MAKING THE WRONG CHOICES. This was a largely solvable problem. We just failed.
- faangFar 6y ago
  The question isn't what we should have done, that's easy. What should we do now?
  - newacct583 6y ago
    Exactly the same things! There's no too late with a virus, the same things work to treat it no matter what the infection counts are. Stay home. If you can't stay home, wear a mask and stay outside. Don't travel. Get tested regularly if you can't meet these rules. Follow the instructions of the scientists we've all been ignoring. Vote for people who will (or against those who won't). Your argument seems to be of the form "Well, we fucked up, but it's too late now so we might as well open up." That's just not true. We can still fix this and save tens or hundreds of thousands of lives.
    - faangFar 6y ago
      Seems a bit oversimplified because you need to lockdown for the next 1.5 years. You need to exert the police force against peaceful protestors. All while sacrificing the mental and physical health of the 99.5%. Here's a question, why does the mental and physical health of the 99.5% take lower priority than the 0.5% oldest and most obese people?

raziel2701 6y ago

What's the point of being an expert if no one will listen?

cuspy 6y ago

Given the track record of institutional science and the ever-growing list of regulatory failures, moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of scientific expertise, why do so many people seem to think that simply doubling down and bullying the general population into compliance with expert consensus will ever work? What if institutional science in the US has a legitimacy crisis because it has failed to police its own corruption and failed to address its own limitations and vulnerabilities? What if everyday people can see this more clearly than those striving on the margins of these institutions? Personally, as a scientist, I am comforted that there are enough others out there who doubt the entire notion of a scientific establishment that the population should "trust" to make decisions without oversight. Our numbers are growing, and I know many people who fight every day to ensure we will never be ruled by unquestionable expert consensus. Anyone who has been inside these institutions knows exactly how petty and arbitrary the hierarchical structures can be. I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily. I think the constant stream of these articles just illustrates the massive social blind spot that comes from training STEM professionals solely for careers rather than for citizenship, communication and community membership. STEM training itself has sadly become a hierarchical, cult-like, anti-intellectual system that deprives students of critical thinking skills.

manux 6y ago
> scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily. Bought off by who? I presume the "elite families" you mention. So either way we are ruled by the wealthy in this model. There are other options of course and I assume you would agree, I just wanted to point out my surprise at this false dichotomy (that's not even a dichotomy since they're mostly the same scenario). I also agree 100% that STEM professionals should be trained to be citizens first.
- cuspy 6y ago
  I was thinking primarily of other states or foreign entities who have an interest in undermining competitivity, stealing or suppressing emerging technologies. Mentioning elite families was as an illustrative contrast, since at least domestic entities (who may want to maintain a monopoly on certain technologies) would be less directly incentivised to undermine the institutions that serve them.

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago

Science is important. Science is great. I love science. Let's just be extremely careful when trying to apply the latest scientific achievements in our day to day lives. Phlogiston theory of 17th century was wrong. Race theory of 18th century was wrong. Semmelweis was laughed at in 19th century. And lobotomies were perfectly scientific for treating depressed patients for most of 20th century. I doubt 21st century's science is any special here...

readingnews 6y ago
Four examples of bad science? I see a trend in these comments that people here are pretty anti-science. I would like to remind us all to just take a peek around us, and look at what was not even possible, not even imaginable, a mere fifty to one hundred years ago. We are speaking to one another using faradays laws and discoveries, teslas fascination with wireless and countless physicists and engineers that build practically everything you see. Computers, the internet, wireless... does anyone here remember polio, or how the flu used to kill far more than today (with the exception of the COVID)? I find it fascinating how easily we beat down on science and academic scientists in general. Are there bad scientists? Sure. Are there bad people? Sure, but the narrative I find myself reading more and more is all scientists are bad, and all research should be stopped, as it is somehow costing everyone else money or the money is being used wrongly. I think the percentage of that is incredibly small. I only hope we are still educating our children enough in the future to realize the tiny bad percentage of people we hear about (be it in science or the general population) is not representative of all.
- AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
  How many examples would be enough? Five? Fifty five? Quite a lot of people here (including yours truly) have scientific background. All I'm saying is: let's be careful and let's be skeptical - as real scientists are.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  Were all of them bad science? (The first two were clearly so, but I'm not sure about the last ones.) Because if so, it's easy to look a bit more and find completely wrong conclusions taken from good science too. But anyway, all of those were mainstream at some time. The point is that yielding to experts is anti-science. The fact that your experts work in a research lab instead of a church makes little difference here. Scientific decision making requires that at a minimum you verify your experts results, and be ready to notice when they are wrong. This article is as anti-science as the policies it is trying to fight, and this is a bad thing that can only create mistrust from the public.

cyberrod411 6y ago

This is true, but at least in the US, its more and more devalued everyday.

renewiltord 6y ago

There's science and then there's the theatre of science and the fans of the theatre of science will attempt to browbeat you into ignoring the science because they are concerned with the continued operation of the theatre. So, for instance, when the CDC recommended no mask usage and all the conformist fans of the theatre of science started pulling their shit, the ones who follow the science ignored them. Government scientific institutions have reputations that are shot through with these "for the greater good" lies. Science is important, but no one is going to listen to the Scientific Theatre any more.

timr 6y ago
https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-politics/ https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Interesting. Semi-convincing. Adjusting priors on the mask thing downward slightly.

tengbretson 6y ago

A lot of what is said in this article only really makes sense if you define science to be "what is said or done by someone called a scientist."

AcerbicZero 6y ago

Honest question, why is democracy always the "flag" people wrap themselves in when defending these kinds of positions? I get that democracy is somewhat better than feudalism, but at the end of the day I don't really care if the king is standing on my neck, or if its a mob of unruly peasants. Tyranny is tyranny, and democracy has demonstrated a great affinity for it when it suits the mob. Democracy seems to be the best of the bad options available, but without the strong protections afforded by an deep seated respect for individual liberty and freedom, there isn't much difference in end result. If anything modern academia's treatment of "Science!" is a nice little peak under the covers of what happens when you let the mob make the rules - Thought becomes regimented to the point of absurdity and you either get on board, or get (thrown) over board.