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Underlying this all is a sort of scientism issue. On the one hand you have a culture that assumes the framework of a scientific framework is "truth" and that th

Underlying this all is a sort of scientism issue. On the one hand you have a culture that assumes the framework of a scientific framework is "truth" and that the lingua franca of risk should be demonstrable evidence. On the other is a culture that denies the realism of the scientific studies, and sees risk in misrepresentative evidence. Generally speaking, the latter camp gets labeled as "antiscientific" by the former, and the former gets labeled as "elitist" or having conflicts of interest. It's part of a theme that seems to be popping up a lot in the last several years or so in numerous settings: which is worse, lack of evidence or misleading evidence? This example with the salmon is interesting to me because (if I'm understanding it correctly), the compound in the tire isn't the problem, it's a byproduct of tire breakdown. So I could see a chemist in the lab sitting there saying "ok we ran our tests on X it's fine" without understanding that in the real world, X reacts and breaks down into other compounds that are problematic. It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place. Within the bounds of the model, X is fine, but the model is wrong as a representation of reality, so the conclusions are wrong. I think underlying a lot of this are differing ideas of what is "scientific", or what constitutes the universe of risks. I don't see this dynamic changing until certain cultures surrounding scientific authority change.

whatshisface 6y ago
>It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place. What's your proposed alternative to science for determining the products of tire breakdown? Asking psychics? Polling facebook moms? Voting on it in Congress?
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Unfortunately, alternatives to science are being pushed right now in the current culture war. Google “other ways of knowing”. Worth pointing out just because your appeal to absurdism (which most of us would agree with) is losing steam in the marketplace of ideas.
- stfp 6y ago
  Look up scientism. The whole point is we need to accept that no single method will give us this kind of visibility and understanding, and given that fact we should be more careful about certain things, especially things we just seem to keep miscalculating and that have long-lasting, terrible effects. That's actual science vs. commercial/industrial marketing masquerading as science.
- monkeycantype 6y ago
  The scientific method enables us to rigorously build models. But it takes effort, so the model only expands in the directions where a person chooses to the do that work. Scientific models are a communal human artefact, flawed with the bias and inattention of those that built them. The is a lot we know about the world, from history, from our experience, that we are not able to express with enough rigor to include them in a scientific model. So we can be confident that our scientific understanding of any new compound, will not gives us a complete understanding of the impact of that compound in the world. From history we have a partial map of our ignorance. We know from past experience that there are realms of unknown - ecological effects, decomposition products, birth defects, health impacts - associated with new products. We know there is a very big difference between safe and no known adverse impacts Rather than an alternative to science, we need a more vigorous meta model, better appreciation of where the model ends, and a better model for how we should act given our ignorance. I don't think we lack the ability to do this, it's a matter of will and power.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    >The is a lot we know about the world, from history, from our experience, that we are not able to express with enough rigor to include them in a scientific model. Of course, gut feeling and "pontification-based" methods still have to prove themselves effective. You would need to have one group pontificate about the future using your meta-level thinking, and another group just focus on the concrete-level, and demonstrate that the proposed meta-model would improve the situation. A system to figure out what scientific discoveries were going to be made before they are made would be nice, but you can't just pick an oracle and say you've found it.
- derbOac 6y ago
  Maybe what I wrote was misleading or vague. What I mean is that to do a study, you have some model. It's implicit in the way the data is collected, whether that be experiment or observational study. But it's a model with assumptions. The problem is that all models are wrong to varying extents, but often in the scientific community the wrongness of models isn't recognized. You estimate your effect size or the p-value or posterior predictive p or whatever it is, but all those themselves are some estimates based on assumptions, and there's always some probability of being radically incorrect. My concern isn't with science per se, it's that science as a community is often too arrogant and underestimates the extent to which it is likely to be incorrect. I just think critics need to be given more respect, especially when the argument against the critics is "we did a carefully controlled lab study under isolated conditions." Maybe there needs to be a greater meta-scientific perspective with these things, like some policy that explicitly asks "how often when these types of evidence are submitted is something wrong?"
the_af 6y ago
> It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place Do you mean "this particular scientific model" (which lacks the analysis of byproducts) or the scientific method? If the latter, what other method would you use instead?
- FooHentai 6y ago
  The issue is that you can't prove a negative, not even the scientific method can achieve this. So you can prove harm, or benefits, but you can't prove an absence of harm. So while the scientific method is fine, applying it without an abundance of caution commensurate to the potential negative impacts leads to poor outcomes in the long run.
  - zamadatix 6y ago
    You can't truly "prove" harm or benefits either they just happen to be things you can very easily make the error bounds minuscule on. Likewise the problem with "absence of harm" is making the error bounds small is extremely slow and costly so we avoid it. The scientific method (or any method to this point) never ends up "proving" anything, you always have to set what error bounds are acceptable. Which leads to the real overall point I suppose - is there something better we could be using as "just never make anything new" isn't free of problems either so it's a question of "what's the best method" not "what method can guarantee something" (none so far can).
meowface 6y ago
The solution to poor results from scientific work is better scientific work, not throwing out the scientific model. The issue described is akin to testing some new code with unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and running it for some time in a dev environment, but not running it in a QA environment that mirrors production, and not monitoring it for issues when it does get deployed to production. The response there wouldn't be "the test/devops model isn't the correct one to use in the first place", it's that the testing and QA was inadequate because it only looked at an idealized model of reality and didn't consider "where the rubber meets the road" (literally). Testing something in isolation is insufficient, since you need to test the downstream effects and potential complex interactions with everything else in the environment. There is no testism problem; only a poor testing problem. Unless, as you say in your last sentence, one is just arguing about definition semantics - e.g. if "QA" falls under "testing", or, here, if "real-world observation" falls under "scientific testing". I'd argue both do. I think your concerns might be better phrased as "lab model" and "lab-ism".
xapata 6y ago
> the scientific model What you described isn't "the scientific model" but merely one flawed study. Science is the process of learning about the world. Scientific paradigms change. Right now we seem to have a statistical frequentist paradigm in most fields, but it's shifting towards Bayesian. The business science field still seems stuck in the case study / anecdote paradigm, though it's also shifting. If the science doesn't seek to learn about "the real world" then it's bad science.
ska 6y ago
> It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place. This seems to be a category error - after all it was science that found the problem also. I think you are poking around the edges of something real here, but suspect the thinking is muddy still and falling into a false dichotomy. There is a lot of confusion about the role of science and what it can and can't do, but I don't think it maps at all purely onto the "culture wars" as you are seeming to suggest.

whatshisface 6y ago

>It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place. What's your proposed alternative to science for determining the products of tire breakdown? Asking psychics? Polling facebook moms? Voting on it in Congress?

hombre_fatal 6y ago
Unfortunately, alternatives to science are being pushed right now in the current culture war. Google “other ways of knowing”. Worth pointing out just because your appeal to absurdism (which most of us would agree with) is losing steam in the marketplace of ideas.
stfp 6y ago
Look up scientism. The whole point is we need to accept that no single method will give us this kind of visibility and understanding, and given that fact we should be more careful about certain things, especially things we just seem to keep miscalculating and that have long-lasting, terrible effects. That's actual science vs. commercial/industrial marketing masquerading as science.
monkeycantype 6y ago
The scientific method enables us to rigorously build models. But it takes effort, so the model only expands in the directions where a person chooses to the do that work. Scientific models are a communal human artefact, flawed with the bias and inattention of those that built them. The is a lot we know about the world, from history, from our experience, that we are not able to express with enough rigor to include them in a scientific model. So we can be confident that our scientific understanding of any new compound, will not gives us a complete understanding of the impact of that compound in the world. From history we have a partial map of our ignorance. We know from past experience that there are realms of unknown - ecological effects, decomposition products, birth defects, health impacts - associated with new products. We know there is a very big difference between safe and no known adverse impacts Rather than an alternative to science, we need a more vigorous meta model, better appreciation of where the model ends, and a better model for how we should act given our ignorance. I don't think we lack the ability to do this, it's a matter of will and power.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  >The is a lot we know about the world, from history, from our experience, that we are not able to express with enough rigor to include them in a scientific model. Of course, gut feeling and "pontification-based" methods still have to prove themselves effective. You would need to have one group pontificate about the future using your meta-level thinking, and another group just focus on the concrete-level, and demonstrate that the proposed meta-model would improve the situation. A system to figure out what scientific discoveries were going to be made before they are made would be nice, but you can't just pick an oracle and say you've found it.
derbOac 6y ago
Maybe what I wrote was misleading or vague. What I mean is that to do a study, you have some model. It's implicit in the way the data is collected, whether that be experiment or observational study. But it's a model with assumptions. The problem is that all models are wrong to varying extents, but often in the scientific community the wrongness of models isn't recognized. You estimate your effect size or the p-value or posterior predictive p or whatever it is, but all those themselves are some estimates based on assumptions, and there's always some probability of being radically incorrect. My concern isn't with science per se, it's that science as a community is often too arrogant and underestimates the extent to which it is likely to be incorrect. I just think critics need to be given more respect, especially when the argument against the critics is "we did a carefully controlled lab study under isolated conditions." Maybe there needs to be a greater meta-scientific perspective with these things, like some policy that explicitly asks "how often when these types of evidence are submitted is something wrong?"

the_af 6y ago

> It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place Do you mean "this particular scientific model" (which lacks the analysis of byproducts) or the scientific method? If the latter, what other method would you use instead?

FooHentai 6y ago
The issue is that you can't prove a negative, not even the scientific method can achieve this. So you can prove harm, or benefits, but you can't prove an absence of harm. So while the scientific method is fine, applying it without an abundance of caution commensurate to the potential negative impacts leads to poor outcomes in the long run.
- zamadatix 6y ago
  You can't truly "prove" harm or benefits either they just happen to be things you can very easily make the error bounds minuscule on. Likewise the problem with "absence of harm" is making the error bounds small is extremely slow and costly so we avoid it. The scientific method (or any method to this point) never ends up "proving" anything, you always have to set what error bounds are acceptable. Which leads to the real overall point I suppose - is there something better we could be using as "just never make anything new" isn't free of problems either so it's a question of "what's the best method" not "what method can guarantee something" (none so far can).

meowface 6y ago

The solution to poor results from scientific work is better scientific work, not throwing out the scientific model. The issue described is akin to testing some new code with unit, integration, and end-to-end tests, and running it for some time in a dev environment, but not running it in a QA environment that mirrors production, and not monitoring it for issues when it does get deployed to production. The response there wouldn't be "the test/devops model isn't the correct one to use in the first place", it's that the testing and QA was inadequate because it only looked at an idealized model of reality and didn't consider "where the rubber meets the road" (literally). Testing something in isolation is insufficient, since you need to test the downstream effects and potential complex interactions with everything else in the environment. There is no testism problem; only a poor testing problem. Unless, as you say in your last sentence, one is just arguing about definition semantics - e.g. if "QA" falls under "testing", or, here, if "real-world observation" falls under "scientific testing". I'd argue both do. I think your concerns might be better phrased as "lab model" and "lab-ism".

xapata 6y ago

> the scientific model What you described isn't "the scientific model" but merely one flawed study. Science is the process of learning about the world. Scientific paradigms change. Right now we seem to have a statistical frequentist paradigm in most fields, but it's shifting towards Bayesian. The business science field still seems stuck in the case study / anecdote paradigm, though it's also shifting. If the science doesn't seek to learn about "the real world" then it's bad science.

ska 6y ago

> It's kind of a prime example of how the scientific model isn't the correct one to be using in the first place. This seems to be a category error - after all it was science that found the problem also. I think you are poking around the edges of something real here, but suspect the thinking is muddy still and falling into a false dichotomy. There is a lot of confusion about the role of science and what it can and can't do, but I don't think it maps at all purely onto the "culture wars" as you are seeming to suggest.