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It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself. We started out with the well and good ability of science and engineering to unders

by ufmace 6y ago

It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself. We started out with the well and good ability of science and engineering to understand some things and produce revolutionary useful goods. Now it seems like other fields where such principles aren't really applicable have attempted to borrow the trappings of science in order to co-opt the trust that people have given it. The only time a phrase like "trust the science" starts to seem necessary is when this scheme has been found out, and somebody is trying to preserve it. Many of the big society-level issues that we grapple with are more properly questions of economics than science. It's more about how we choose to value various courses of action and potential consequences against each other, and there's rarely a clear, obvious, or simple answer. "Science" can only give us an estimate of what the results of a particular course of action might be, it cannot compare once against another and tell us with certainty which one is better. "Trust the science" is usually a rhetorical weapon used by a side that is attempting to show one particular potential outcome as the worst thing imaginable that must be avoided at all costs, but in reality there are rarely things that bad. I'd like to have a world where we can look at the actual science and economic costs of all choices and rationally debate exactly which road to take, but it sure feels like we're only moving further away from that world.

amirkdv 6y ago
> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself I think this is true but I doubt it's anything new. I think the fundamental similarity between religious belief and "trusting the science" is the psychological simplicity of delegation to authority, and probably a deep seated property of the human mind. Not knowing the right answer to questions we deem important, or worse the mental state of doubting what we've been raised to consider foundational and "obvious", is just too uncomfortable for the majority of people (I would've said all people, but I can't be sure).
- dmingod666 6y ago
  True, but the problem is that religion can not be questioned, changed or reasoned with in any meaningful way. Science can. If we lose this distinction between the 2, then we just end up with a new religion with more modern priests.
  - corban1 6y ago
    >Science can. But can we though?
    - guscost 6y ago
      Only after you have co-authored several papers with the very people you are trying to question, and earned a credential, it seems.
      - AstralStorm 6y ago
        Not really. First you have to understand the paper in question, so you need at least partial background. Then you would have to find the authors. Many sensational paper authors or citation hunters don't like to answer critical questions. Nor is often raw data/algorithms/notes published so you can check if there is a problem.
        guscost 6y ago
        That practice of “not publishing all code and data” really sets off the BS detector.
        roel_v 6y ago
        Are you a scientist? Because it really doesn't. For example, in most papers that I think harder than normal about, I don't care so much about 'the data' as I do about a description of what this 'data' is actually meant to represent, and how it was collected and processed. (I'm talking here about things that are a bit more complicated than e.g. railfall measurements or any other such lab-like, STEM topics) E.g., I do quite a bit of population modeling. You would think that 'population' is relatively easy to quantify, but it really isn't, and I can talk for hours about how cavalier people throw their 'population data' numbers into models and make all sorts of conclusions based on objectively wrong interpretations what this 'data' is. If the vast majority of papers can't even get that right, I don't care as much about the HN idea of what 'reproducibility' is - i.e. check if 'git clone <xyz> && run_model.sh && run_tests.sh' says 'All OK!' at the end.
da_big_ghey 6y ago
Agreed. The most visible manifestation of this is that I've recently noticed is the phrase, "wear the mask." Not the message, but the phrase. You see, it's not an ordinary English construction like "wear a mask" is. So when I see people saying it, I can be pretty sure that it was copy-pasted word-for-word as a slogan, not the expression of an original thought. I don't have an issue with the message, but it bugs me because it's such a visible example of people just repeating something. Most of the people saying to "trust the science" haven't read any more of it than the people saying not to or peddling conspiracy theories. And of course, there is no "the science". "The science" for decades said that fat was bad and carbs were fine. There was other science that said otherwise, but that's what "the science" said. Same with tobacco and many other things. And people believed them, because they just "trusted the science" instead of doing their own reading. The most scientific thing one can do is to always view something with skepticism and subject evidence to harsh scrutiny. There is a reason that things as well-established as evolution and relativity are still theories. I like Murray Rothbard's take on this "scientism", and would recommend his writings. https://mises.org/library/mantle-science https://mises.org/library/mantle-science
- dijksterhuis 6y ago
  oi, wear your mask.
geedy 6y ago
I appreciate your call to pay attention to subtlety. And in that light: Both science and economics are used broadly and brutally to justify a biases. Both are ignored for their ability to measure, and used to shout over disagreements instead. May we use both for more nuanced conversations, instead of less.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
pushrax 6y ago
> other fields where such principles aren't really applicable Statistics and reasoning are almost always applicable, and that's the extent science is applied to most fields. If you want people to act in an evidence-based way without invoking trust/faith, they need to understand statistics and be able to evaluate studies on their statistical merit. Unfortunately that's quite difficult and the educational systems we have do a poor job of teaching it. Statistics is subtle. For example, "It turns out, most doctors don’t know actually know probability." https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/11/12/doctors-dont-know-bayes-theorem/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/11/12/doctors-dont-k...
- stonogo 6y ago
  It looks like the author of that article isn't too clear on the matter either, since there's a fundamental arithmetic error leading to a self-contradictory claim halfway through the article.
  - pushrax 6y ago
    Indeed. The comments section shows the history; the author mindlessly corrected a non-error into an error. This looked like a decent summary at a glance but that issue is definitely distracting.
- laingc 6y ago
  To build on that, most scientists* are also terrible at statistics. Perhaps more controversially, I also don't think statistics in general is a particularly rigorous or well-founded field. Where there is any analysis at all in the field - that is, very rarely - it provides guarantees only with hefty assumptions and in the limit. I'm fine with that from a theoretical perspective, but practitioners of all stripes seem to assume that with real world phenomena, the data either satisfy the assumptions or, more defensibly, don't violate the assumptions by enough to invalidate the results. I don't know about others, but I see real-world datasets all the time that wildly invalidate the assumptions of common regression analysis, to take just one example. To reign this little rant back into a well-formed comment, perhaps my summary is "everything and everyone is wrong, almost all the time, and I'm not quite sure how to fix that." * In my personal experience.
phkahler 6y ago
>> Many of the big society-level issues that we grapple with are more properly questions of economics than science. I would add that resolving those issues should involve engineers because they try to design solutions that take reality into account. To often solutions from politics and government are based on hope and intent. Sometimes they dont even care about money, principles or goals.
- dmingod666 6y ago
  That ignores the understanding problem of power struggle for resources between those that have a lot and those that don't. It assumes all actors have intentions for the "common good". The system is the way it is because it works for someone, it just seems broken to you because you are not the beneficiary..
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
    And here comes philosophy. Is it that hard to point out flaws where beneficiaries are few and uneven? It should be obvious to anyone from looking at the numbers, yet literally nothing is done until powder keg explodes. And then things can go even worse. Most importantly, nobody is actually experimenting. (Not even the Chinese.) Status quo is king, old tried solutions are queen, and propaganda is jack.
    - gretch 6y ago
      >nobody is actually experimenting Experimentation with society requires risk taking and uncertainty. Of course no one wants it. What if someone came up to you and said "hey we're going to put your kid into a new type of experimental school. We think there's a a 50% chance we can save money on education but there's 20% chance they'll be severely undereducated. Btw, you can't opt out because that would mess up the integrity of the randomized selection process" That's some dystopian level shit
hn_throwaway_99 6y ago
Yes, I completely agree. The reason this is very disheartening to me is because I believe the thing that is really special and awesome about science as a discipline is that it teaches people how to critically evaluate and weigh evidence in support of a hypothesis. So instead of teaching people how to be good critical thinkers (and, especially in this day and age, ascertain whether a particular source of evidence should be trusted and what the potential biases that source may have), "trust the science" has been turned into a pretty empty appeal to authority. This has been pretty evident in the past year when the experts have often been wrong, or at least pushed their opinions in a way that wasn't really supported by the underlying evidence ("the public doesn't need to wear masks" back in March is a good example). It actually wasn't really that hard to dig in to the underlying evidence, assess the validity of that evidence, and make up your mind for yourself.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  While it wasn't that hard, general public does not know where to even look for primary or even preliminary evidence. Much less how to evaluate the densely written papers. So in the end it is reliant on science communicators, and there is enough people who are either bad at it, fake it or altogether evil and misrepresenting scientific evidence for it to fail. You always will have some authority needed as you have to be able to read really well and a lot of practice with the specific field to handle the outputs of science.
  - konjin 6y ago
    In the middle ages multiplication was a skill that was taught at universities. Somehow we now teach it to 7 year olds. The reason why we haven't done the same for critical thinking is that the people in charge won't be if we had a citizenry which could think logically. Case in point: NYC and SF have the worst homelessness problem of any city despite being in the hands of the party that keeps saying they are for the poor. That you now have dozens of reasons lined up in your head why it's not their fault despite having the power to solve it for decades and should be let off the hook is the lack of critical thinking in American education at work.
analog31 6y ago
In my view, the flip side is that "science is a religion" is also a weapon.
beloch 6y ago
Real science is not without it's problems but, in general, nothing comes close to it for producing trustworthy and useful results. There is plenty of pseudoscience masquerading as science unfortunately. A good book to read on this is Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". A significant portion of the book is devoted to what Sagan calls a "Baloney detection kit" that he thinks everyone should have. If more people could accurately distinguish science from pseudoscience, the world might be a better place. My personal pick for pseudoscience that is routinely given credence by the general public is nutritional studies. Any study that says an oddly specific food (e.g. blueberries) is a "superfood" is probably baloney. Producers of that food probably got together and funded a study that, surprise, says what they produce is good to eat! Why aren't other berries just as good? What about berries vs other fruit? What is in blueberries that is not present in other berries? The thing about nutritional studies is that they're so hard to do properly that virtually nobody does. If you wanted to find out which foods are genuinely healthy you'd need a large sample size of people willing to have their diets and activities micro-managed in a way that would make most people rebel. You could probably do a decent study if you had enough money, but nobody is willing to foot the bill. The only people with skin in the game (e.g. blueberry producers) have no interest in a study that puts blueberries fairly in their place amongst a plethora of other foods. My crazy prediction is that, sometime in the next century or two, we're actually going to become interested enough in optimizing healthy bodies that governments will start funding real scientific studies on nutrition, exercise, etc.. The crap that's out there today is going to be seen as utter quackery, albeit with some nuggets of truth mixed in almost by random chance.
- ironmagma 6y ago
  Knowing what is science and what is pseudoscience is a science itself. To take a trivial example, consider the climate change topic. Read a couple randomly chosen papers and if you’re unlucky, you might come out of it thinking global warming isn’t real. (Remember, papers like that do exist and although they are a minority, random number generation doesn’t know about that.) How do you know if the papers you read are a representative sample? How do you know the papers that are published are a representative sample? It boils down to some disturbing epistemological conclusions. You can use metastudies, but then the metastudies could have the same problem, or worse, might not exist. (In my experience they usually don’t.)
bloaf 6y ago
Reposting a comment I made a few years ago on a thread lamenting the "church of TED." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9209761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9209761 I think that in science there is an inherent tension between what scientists know and what what the public knows. Scientific knowledge is covered in asterisks. To read and understand science typically requires an extensive amount of background knowledge; without that it is very easy to misinterpret the strength, significance, or applicability of a scientific finding. Many of the asterisks are themselves scientific conclusions with their own set of asterisks. The public, at least in areas which are not immediately relevant to daily life, cannot be assumed to have that background knowledge. Therefore, the tension is essentially this: How can scientists make people aware of (or interested in) scientific knowledge if they have to strip out all the asterisks when talking to them? Making science into a catechism is simply one solution to the above problem. Ignore the asterisks and turn the fundamental findings of physics and chemistry into dogma and dispense it as gospel truth. I actually am somewhat o.k. with this. Sure, Joe Public might come away with an over-simplified and over-confident knowledge about what science says, but I think that a clumsy knowledge of scientific facts is better than the impression that scientific knowledge is arcane and out of reach. After all, it is highly unlikely that Joey P. will find himself in a situation where it is very important for him to really understand all the subtleties behind his k-8 scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is likely to come in handy. The only problems with the science-as-religion solution are a potential "loss of faith" and the perception of arbitrarity with regards to scientific findings. The first can easily happen when someone learns about a new finding which contradicts the dogmatic version of science but is entirely consistent with the heavily asterisked actual scientific consensus. The second problem is basically "rejectability;" if people think that science is a set of arbitrary rules, then they are free to reject them the same way they would reject other religions.
- dmingod666 6y ago
  I think falling for the Science as religion trap is a bad choice in the long run. Why not Math as a religion, dumb down complex problems, if it's wrong for the common Joe, it's okay cause he wouldn't understand it anyway.. not a good strategy.. I think if Science has a knowledge management problem, that should be addressed rather than dumbing down of things for public consumption.
sanp 6y ago
Could you give examples of one side attempting to show one potential outcome as the worst thing possible?
dmingod666 6y ago
Thankfully there are a few places on the internet where a statement about not having faith in Science is not automatically blasphemous. Everytime I see "TRUST SCIENCE" - I picture a customer for quantum healing crystals. I have faith in religion. Science my friend stands on that other line there where everything has to be proven. That is the strength of science. If it tries to get in the religion line where I need to put faith and belief it's no longer Science.
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  Science is where almost nothing is proven. Most findings are mutable, preliminary and incomplete. Engineering is where things are proven, by building things using or that are proving scientific findings. For example, Randomized Controlled Trials are one of the final engineering steps for drugs, with partial engineering step being chemistry and process chemistry. Similar steps should be done but are often omitted for social sciences. The exception to this is pure mathematics. Example from biology: you found some fun cellular process model description. Fine, now you have to mess with it using engineering to prove it actually works in the way you described, is not missing crucial steps and so on. This for example happened a lot in gerontology - studies of aging. People latching on to small pieces of mechanism which actually are not very relevant or actionable. Examples from physics are machines that use physics theories, such as quantum communication devices, particle colliders, clocks or nanostructured devices. Examples from chemistry are evaluations of synthesis processes step by step by introducing various process changes. Analysis is rather on the side, as without engineering first you cannot really proceed with it.
  - cwalv 6y ago
    > Science is where almost nothing is proven. Most findings are mutable, preliminary and incomplete. This may be debatable, but seems to accurately describe what most academics call "science". The more common understanding is what's described in the parent. Often times when people say "trust the science" they're referring to results in the first category, but people take it to mean not "these results are preliminary and unproven" (and filled with asterisks), but instead "to deny this is denying empirical fact."
centimeter 6y ago
Humans are hard-wired to be religious, and in the absence of a well-structured religion, most people will default to poorly-constructed religions like secular state scientism. This doesn't apply to everyone, but I think it applies to at least 80% of the population.
- LesZedCB 6y ago
  i think it's more like all human brains need heuristics to process the vast amount of data in the universe. the best heuristics come in the form of grand narratives, such as traditional religions, historical materialism, transhumanism, or whatever works for each brain.
sriku 6y ago
There is some danger in publicly adopting a "science has become religion" position. Just as "trust the science" can be used as a rhetorical weapon, "science has become another religion" can be too .. and usually to more dangerous effect because a lot of what is essentially known bullshit (see https://www.callingbullshit.org https://www.callingbullshit.org) gets accommodated by the latter compared to the former. There are reasonable accepted empirical approaches in accepted use today. Any team that follows these methods and reports honestly can be trusted more than a team that doesn't. Also "trust" is a loaded word .. but mostly we just mean "predictability" - ex: to "trust someone" means to be sure that if you know what they've said, you can predict what they'll do. Much of empirical science is about offering up data and models that aid such predictability, so declaring "trust the science is extinct" is an outright rejection of these empirical methods (ex: randomised control trials) that have taken a long time to mature and take root as standard practice. What is needed though is to be able to separate the science from policy making. As Dietrich Dörner has shown in "The Logic of Failure" [1], folks in the hard sciences don't fare very well when policy making in systems with complex causally interconnected parts is tasked upon them due to learnt heuristics that don't fare well in that world. Let science do its thing - which is inform and educate. Let policies be made by those with more full understanding of the system into which changes need to be effected. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Situations/dp/0201479486 https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Si...
- notsureaboutpg 6y ago
  >Let science do its thing - which is inform and educate. Let policies be made by those with more full understanding of the system into which changes need to be effected. But what about when scientists collaborate with the policy-makers to shape public perception about how to inform and educate people? One prime example is last years long and detailed study on how there was no "gay gene". In effect, homosexual activity and inclinations could not be shown to be the result of any specific gene expression after many trials and searches for such. The scientists, worried about how this result would look to the public, worked with LGBTQ advocacy groups to shape how the paper would be released to the media and explained to the public[1]. Now, a sizable portion in HN's demographic will feel this is all well and good, but how far should this go? The uncomfortable truth here is that people are not "born gay" as we have been told so often. And that has been a very important talking point in the past two decades when debating about gay rights. Many people were convinced to support gay rights for this reason alone (however we might feel about that, it's true). They very well may feel duped by scientists and no longer "trust the science". How far should scientists go to shield the public from uncomfortable truths? And how much will the public continue to trust them when such veiling of the truth is made known to them? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6
pdamoc 6y ago
> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself. This might be because there is very, very little scientific thinking in the general population. People like doctors who, due to their education, should have scientific thinking, no longer can be trusted to have this scientific thinking. Instead of approaching issues with a scientific attitude, the resort to "trust me, I'm a doctor". Scientific thinking, at its core, is just "things might not be how you think they are". It is a type of skepticism about your own thinking and a reliance, or trust, on a set of processes that have been proven to produce useful epistemic truths. A good example of this is the Monty Hall problem where loss aversion would make most people pick the suboptimal solution. The Cognitive Bias Codex [1] documents a lot of these cognitive biases. So, the way to move forward is to fix the education process so that this kind of thinking is inculcated into most children by age 12. [1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...
dr_dshiv 6y ago
Karl Popper called it "scientism". Popper, K. (1978). Natural selection and the emergence of mind. Dialectica, 339-355.
cycomanic 6y ago
I find it rather unfortunate that this comment is the top comment, because I think the "science is like a religion" is both misleading and a strategy to dismiss evidence which don't align with ones ideological views (which is a very human reaction to be fair and it takes conscious effort to avoid, speaking from my own experience). As you acknowledge the scientific method has given completely new technology (I find your choice of words "revolutionary useful goods" a bit weird, as if the only purpose of science was to produce new goods). You're setting up a bit of a straw man that science can not tell us with certainty what is the better course of action. Stating that science can give answers with absolute certainty is a stark misunderstanding of the scientific process (something alluded to in the article). However, trusting the (scientific) evidence (what is typically meant when people use "trust the science") can very definitely guide our decision making process. People typically bring up "trust the science" when proposals are being rejected based on some "ideological" reasoning. To give a more concrete example, in the discussion about universal basic income, one of the main counterarguments is that people will just stop working. The answer to that counterargument is "trust the science", because every study made, has found that in fact people don't just stop working. Now one might still reject the concept of UBI for various other reasons, but this should be underpinned by evidence based arguments, not saying that the side which says trust the science (evidence) is treating it like a religion. When people use the term "trust the science" what they typically mean is "trust the (scientific) evidence" and yes that is what we should be doing, even outside the "technological fields". The "trust the science" argument is often made when people reject an
- chopin 6y ago
  Socio-economic science is rife of p-hacking. The vast majority of those studies are not reproducible. Your argument would be stronger if you'd choose a different example. I would assume that most studies on UBI are done by strong supporters of it which introduces enough subconscious bias to make them problematic. In the medical area (testing medications) history is full of wrong studies either by negligence or just by greed. "Trust the science" is never a good argument as being to general. I'd trust most of the science in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Apart from those there are too many shenanigans.
paganel 6y ago
> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself. People like Jacques Ellul had been warning us about that for at least five or six decades now, I guess that's how long it takes from an idea first being "caught" as actually "existing" (for lack of a better word) to becoming so prevalent as to be very easily observable. I'd also very highly recommend the works of Ulrich Beck [1], well, his "Risk Society" to be more precise, to quote wikipedia: "Risk society is the manner in which modern society organizes in response to risk" [2]. It is a book written in the mid '80s, right before Chernobyl, and recently other people have (re-)discovered him too, like in this "Foreign Policy" article [3] from last August. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Beck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Beck [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_society [3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-could-save-us-from-coronavirus/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-cou...
nmaleki 6y ago
The part about religion reminds me of an excerpt from the "circular reasoning" wikipedia article. "-"using the scientific method to judge the scientific method is circular reasoning". Scientists attempt to discover the laws of nature and to predict what will happen in the future, based on those laws. However, per David Hume's problem of induction, science cannot be proven inductively by empirical evidence, and thus science cannot be proven scientifically." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning
throw0101a 6y ago
> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself. See: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
Person5478 6y ago
Back in the mid to late 90's I predicted this. I used to tell friends that science would be the new religion and scientists the new priests. And indeed that's exactly what has happened. Nothing gives more authority nowadays than "scientists believe...". And to your later point, nothing is a bigger indicator of the fakeness you describe more than the use of statistics as an official sounding WAG(Wild Ass Guess). Computer Scientists don't need statistics as anything other than a guidepost of where to potentially look next, but for many of the "sciences" nowadays statistics is the end output.
skocznymroczny 6y ago
The problem with blindindly "believing the science" is that with enough money you can get scientific results that push a certain narrative. We are learning now that most of the anti-fat dietician push was sponsored by sugary drink companies. Likewise we are learning that a lot of "clean air" research is sponsored by fossil fuel companies. What current research will we learn about 10-20 years from now that it was mostly sponsored by a party with a commercial interest?

by ufmace 6y ago

amirkdv 6y ago

> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself I think this is true but I doubt it's anything new. I think the fundamental similarity between religious belief and "trusting the science" is the psychological simplicity of delegation to authority, and probably a deep seated property of the human mind. Not knowing the right answer to questions we deem important, or worse the mental state of doubting what we've been raised to consider foundational and "obvious", is just too uncomfortable for the majority of people (I would've said all people, but I can't be sure).

dmingod666 6y ago
True, but the problem is that religion can not be questioned, changed or reasoned with in any meaningful way. Science can. If we lose this distinction between the 2, then we just end up with a new religion with more modern priests.
- corban1 6y ago
  >Science can. But can we though?
  - guscost 6y ago
    Only after you have co-authored several papers with the very people you are trying to question, and earned a credential, it seems.
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      Not really. First you have to understand the paper in question, so you need at least partial background. Then you would have to find the authors. Many sensational paper authors or citation hunters don't like to answer critical questions. Nor is often raw data/algorithms/notes published so you can check if there is a problem.
      - guscost 6y ago
        That practice of “not publishing all code and data” really sets off the BS detector.
        roel_v 6y ago
        Are you a scientist? Because it really doesn't. For example, in most papers that I think harder than normal about, I don't care so much about 'the data' as I do about a description of what this 'data' is actually meant to represent, and how it was collected and processed. (I'm talking here about things that are a bit more complicated than e.g. railfall measurements or any other such lab-like, STEM topics) E.g., I do quite a bit of population modeling. You would think that 'population' is relatively easy to quantify, but it really isn't, and I can talk for hours about how cavalier people throw their 'population data' numbers into models and make all sorts of conclusions based on objectively wrong interpretations what this 'data' is. If the vast majority of papers can't even get that right, I don't care as much about the HN idea of what 'reproducibility' is - i.e. check if 'git clone <xyz> && run_model.sh && run_tests.sh' says 'All OK!' at the end.

da_big_ghey 6y ago

Agreed. The most visible manifestation of this is that I've recently noticed is the phrase, "wear the mask." Not the message, but the phrase. You see, it's not an ordinary English construction like "wear a mask" is. So when I see people saying it, I can be pretty sure that it was copy-pasted word-for-word as a slogan, not the expression of an original thought. I don't have an issue with the message, but it bugs me because it's such a visible example of people just repeating something. Most of the people saying to "trust the science" haven't read any more of it than the people saying not to or peddling conspiracy theories. And of course, there is no "the science". "The science" for decades said that fat was bad and carbs were fine. There was other science that said otherwise, but that's what "the science" said. Same with tobacco and many other things. And people believed them, because they just "trusted the science" instead of doing their own reading. The most scientific thing one can do is to always view something with skepticism and subject evidence to harsh scrutiny. There is a reason that things as well-established as evolution and relativity are still theories. I like Murray Rothbard's take on this "scientism", and would recommend his writings. https://mises.org/library/mantle-science https://mises.org/library/mantle-science

dijksterhuis 6y ago
oi, wear your mask.

geedy 6y ago

I appreciate your call to pay attention to subtlety. And in that light: Both science and economics are used broadly and brutally to justify a biases. Both are ignored for their ability to measure, and used to shout over disagreements instead. May we use both for more nuanced conversations, instead of less.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pushrax 6y ago

> other fields where such principles aren't really applicable Statistics and reasoning are almost always applicable, and that's the extent science is applied to most fields. If you want people to act in an evidence-based way without invoking trust/faith, they need to understand statistics and be able to evaluate studies on their statistical merit. Unfortunately that's quite difficult and the educational systems we have do a poor job of teaching it. Statistics is subtle. For example, "It turns out, most doctors don’t know actually know probability." https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/11/12/doctors-dont-know-bayes-theorem/ https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/11/12/doctors-dont-k...

stonogo 6y ago
It looks like the author of that article isn't too clear on the matter either, since there's a fundamental arithmetic error leading to a self-contradictory claim halfway through the article.
- pushrax 6y ago
  Indeed. The comments section shows the history; the author mindlessly corrected a non-error into an error. This looked like a decent summary at a glance but that issue is definitely distracting.
laingc 6y ago
To build on that, most scientists* are also terrible at statistics. Perhaps more controversially, I also don't think statistics in general is a particularly rigorous or well-founded field. Where there is any analysis at all in the field - that is, very rarely - it provides guarantees only with hefty assumptions and in the limit. I'm fine with that from a theoretical perspective, but practitioners of all stripes seem to assume that with real world phenomena, the data either satisfy the assumptions or, more defensibly, don't violate the assumptions by enough to invalidate the results. I don't know about others, but I see real-world datasets all the time that wildly invalidate the assumptions of common regression analysis, to take just one example. To reign this little rant back into a well-formed comment, perhaps my summary is "everything and everyone is wrong, almost all the time, and I'm not quite sure how to fix that." * In my personal experience.

phkahler 6y ago

>> Many of the big society-level issues that we grapple with are more properly questions of economics than science. I would add that resolving those issues should involve engineers because they try to design solutions that take reality into account. To often solutions from politics and government are based on hope and intent. Sometimes they dont even care about money, principles or goals.

dmingod666 6y ago
That ignores the understanding problem of power struggle for resources between those that have a lot and those that don't. It assumes all actors have intentions for the "common good". The system is the way it is because it works for someone, it just seems broken to you because you are not the beneficiary..
- AstralStorm 6y ago
  And here comes philosophy. Is it that hard to point out flaws where beneficiaries are few and uneven? It should be obvious to anyone from looking at the numbers, yet literally nothing is done until powder keg explodes. And then things can go even worse. Most importantly, nobody is actually experimenting. (Not even the Chinese.) Status quo is king, old tried solutions are queen, and propaganda is jack.
  - gretch 6y ago
    >nobody is actually experimenting Experimentation with society requires risk taking and uncertainty. Of course no one wants it. What if someone came up to you and said "hey we're going to put your kid into a new type of experimental school. We think there's a a 50% chance we can save money on education but there's 20% chance they'll be severely undereducated. Btw, you can't opt out because that would mess up the integrity of the randomized selection process" That's some dystopian level shit

hn_throwaway_99 6y ago

Yes, I completely agree. The reason this is very disheartening to me is because I believe the thing that is really special and awesome about science as a discipline is that it teaches people how to critically evaluate and weigh evidence in support of a hypothesis. So instead of teaching people how to be good critical thinkers (and, especially in this day and age, ascertain whether a particular source of evidence should be trusted and what the potential biases that source may have), "trust the science" has been turned into a pretty empty appeal to authority. This has been pretty evident in the past year when the experts have often been wrong, or at least pushed their opinions in a way that wasn't really supported by the underlying evidence ("the public doesn't need to wear masks" back in March is a good example). It actually wasn't really that hard to dig in to the underlying evidence, assess the validity of that evidence, and make up your mind for yourself.

AstralStorm 6y ago
While it wasn't that hard, general public does not know where to even look for primary or even preliminary evidence. Much less how to evaluate the densely written papers. So in the end it is reliant on science communicators, and there is enough people who are either bad at it, fake it or altogether evil and misrepresenting scientific evidence for it to fail. You always will have some authority needed as you have to be able to read really well and a lot of practice with the specific field to handle the outputs of science.
- konjin 6y ago
  In the middle ages multiplication was a skill that was taught at universities. Somehow we now teach it to 7 year olds. The reason why we haven't done the same for critical thinking is that the people in charge won't be if we had a citizenry which could think logically. Case in point: NYC and SF have the worst homelessness problem of any city despite being in the hands of the party that keeps saying they are for the poor. That you now have dozens of reasons lined up in your head why it's not their fault despite having the power to solve it for decades and should be let off the hook is the lack of critical thinking in American education at work.

analog31 6y ago

In my view, the flip side is that "science is a religion" is also a weapon.

beloch 6y ago

Real science is not without it's problems but, in general, nothing comes close to it for producing trustworthy and useful results. There is plenty of pseudoscience masquerading as science unfortunately. A good book to read on this is Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". A significant portion of the book is devoted to what Sagan calls a "Baloney detection kit" that he thinks everyone should have. If more people could accurately distinguish science from pseudoscience, the world might be a better place. My personal pick for pseudoscience that is routinely given credence by the general public is nutritional studies. Any study that says an oddly specific food (e.g. blueberries) is a "superfood" is probably baloney. Producers of that food probably got together and funded a study that, surprise, says what they produce is good to eat! Why aren't other berries just as good? What about berries vs other fruit? What is in blueberries that is not present in other berries? The thing about nutritional studies is that they're so hard to do properly that virtually nobody does. If you wanted to find out which foods are genuinely healthy you'd need a large sample size of people willing to have their diets and activities micro-managed in a way that would make most people rebel. You could probably do a decent study if you had enough money, but nobody is willing to foot the bill. The only people with skin in the game (e.g. blueberry producers) have no interest in a study that puts blueberries fairly in their place amongst a plethora of other foods. My crazy prediction is that, sometime in the next century or two, we're actually going to become interested enough in optimizing healthy bodies that governments will start funding real scientific studies on nutrition, exercise, etc.. The crap that's out there today is going to be seen as utter quackery, albeit with some nuggets of truth mixed in almost by random chance.

ironmagma 6y ago
Knowing what is science and what is pseudoscience is a science itself. To take a trivial example, consider the climate change topic. Read a couple randomly chosen papers and if you’re unlucky, you might come out of it thinking global warming isn’t real. (Remember, papers like that do exist and although they are a minority, random number generation doesn’t know about that.) How do you know if the papers you read are a representative sample? How do you know the papers that are published are a representative sample? It boils down to some disturbing epistemological conclusions. You can use metastudies, but then the metastudies could have the same problem, or worse, might not exist. (In my experience they usually don’t.)

bloaf 6y ago

Reposting a comment I made a few years ago on a thread lamenting the "church of TED." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9209761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9209761 I think that in science there is an inherent tension between what scientists know and what what the public knows. Scientific knowledge is covered in asterisks. To read and understand science typically requires an extensive amount of background knowledge; without that it is very easy to misinterpret the strength, significance, or applicability of a scientific finding. Many of the asterisks are themselves scientific conclusions with their own set of asterisks. The public, at least in areas which are not immediately relevant to daily life, cannot be assumed to have that background knowledge. Therefore, the tension is essentially this: How can scientists make people aware of (or interested in) scientific knowledge if they have to strip out all the asterisks when talking to them? Making science into a catechism is simply one solution to the above problem. Ignore the asterisks and turn the fundamental findings of physics and chemistry into dogma and dispense it as gospel truth. I actually am somewhat o.k. with this. Sure, Joe Public might come away with an over-simplified and over-confident knowledge about what science says, but I think that a clumsy knowledge of scientific facts is better than the impression that scientific knowledge is arcane and out of reach. After all, it is highly unlikely that Joey P. will find himself in a situation where it is very important for him to really understand all the subtleties behind his k-8 scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is likely to come in handy. The only problems with the science-as-religion solution are a potential "loss of faith" and the perception of arbitrarity with regards to scientific findings. The first can easily happen when someone learns about a new finding which contradicts the dogmatic version of science but is entirely consistent with the heavily asterisked actual scientific consensus. The second problem is basically "rejectability;" if people think that science is a set of arbitrary rules, then they are free to reject them the same way they would reject other religions.

dmingod666 6y ago
I think falling for the Science as religion trap is a bad choice in the long run. Why not Math as a religion, dumb down complex problems, if it's wrong for the common Joe, it's okay cause he wouldn't understand it anyway.. not a good strategy.. I think if Science has a knowledge management problem, that should be addressed rather than dumbing down of things for public consumption.

sanp 6y ago

Could you give examples of one side attempting to show one potential outcome as the worst thing possible?

dmingod666 6y ago

Thankfully there are a few places on the internet where a statement about not having faith in Science is not automatically blasphemous. Everytime I see "TRUST SCIENCE" - I picture a customer for quantum healing crystals. I have faith in religion. Science my friend stands on that other line there where everything has to be proven. That is the strength of science. If it tries to get in the religion line where I need to put faith and belief it's no longer Science.

AstralStorm 6y ago
Science is where almost nothing is proven. Most findings are mutable, preliminary and incomplete. Engineering is where things are proven, by building things using or that are proving scientific findings. For example, Randomized Controlled Trials are one of the final engineering steps for drugs, with partial engineering step being chemistry and process chemistry. Similar steps should be done but are often omitted for social sciences. The exception to this is pure mathematics. Example from biology: you found some fun cellular process model description. Fine, now you have to mess with it using engineering to prove it actually works in the way you described, is not missing crucial steps and so on. This for example happened a lot in gerontology - studies of aging. People latching on to small pieces of mechanism which actually are not very relevant or actionable. Examples from physics are machines that use physics theories, such as quantum communication devices, particle colliders, clocks or nanostructured devices. Examples from chemistry are evaluations of synthesis processes step by step by introducing various process changes. Analysis is rather on the side, as without engineering first you cannot really proceed with it.
- cwalv 6y ago
  > Science is where almost nothing is proven. Most findings are mutable, preliminary and incomplete. This may be debatable, but seems to accurately describe what most academics call "science". The more common understanding is what's described in the parent. Often times when people say "trust the science" they're referring to results in the first category, but people take it to mean not "these results are preliminary and unproven" (and filled with asterisks), but instead "to deny this is denying empirical fact."

centimeter 6y ago

Humans are hard-wired to be religious, and in the absence of a well-structured religion, most people will default to poorly-constructed religions like secular state scientism. This doesn't apply to everyone, but I think it applies to at least 80% of the population.

LesZedCB 6y ago
i think it's more like all human brains need heuristics to process the vast amount of data in the universe. the best heuristics come in the form of grand narratives, such as traditional religions, historical materialism, transhumanism, or whatever works for each brain.

sriku 6y ago

There is some danger in publicly adopting a "science has become religion" position. Just as "trust the science" can be used as a rhetorical weapon, "science has become another religion" can be too .. and usually to more dangerous effect because a lot of what is essentially known bullshit (see https://www.callingbullshit.org https://www.callingbullshit.org) gets accommodated by the latter compared to the former. There are reasonable accepted empirical approaches in accepted use today. Any team that follows these methods and reports honestly can be trusted more than a team that doesn't. Also "trust" is a loaded word .. but mostly we just mean "predictability" - ex: to "trust someone" means to be sure that if you know what they've said, you can predict what they'll do. Much of empirical science is about offering up data and models that aid such predictability, so declaring "trust the science is extinct" is an outright rejection of these empirical methods (ex: randomised control trials) that have taken a long time to mature and take root as standard practice. What is needed though is to be able to separate the science from policy making. As Dietrich Dörner has shown in "The Logic of Failure" [1], folks in the hard sciences don't fare very well when policy making in systems with complex causally interconnected parts is tasked upon them due to learnt heuristics that don't fare well in that world. Let science do its thing - which is inform and educate. Let policies be made by those with more full understanding of the system into which changes need to be effected. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Situations/dp/0201479486 https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Si...

notsureaboutpg 6y ago
>Let science do its thing - which is inform and educate. Let policies be made by those with more full understanding of the system into which changes need to be effected. But what about when scientists collaborate with the policy-makers to shape public perception about how to inform and educate people? One prime example is last years long and detailed study on how there was no "gay gene". In effect, homosexual activity and inclinations could not be shown to be the result of any specific gene expression after many trials and searches for such. The scientists, worried about how this result would look to the public, worked with LGBTQ advocacy groups to shape how the paper would be released to the media and explained to the public[1]. Now, a sizable portion in HN's demographic will feel this is all well and good, but how far should this go? The uncomfortable truth here is that people are not "born gay" as we have been told so often. And that has been a very important talking point in the past two decades when debating about gay rights. Many people were convinced to support gay rights for this reason alone (however we might feel about that, it's true). They very well may feel duped by scientists and no longer "trust the science". How far should scientists go to shield the public from uncomfortable truths? And how much will the public continue to trust them when such veiling of the truth is made known to them? [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6

pdamoc 6y ago

> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself. This might be because there is very, very little scientific thinking in the general population. People like doctors who, due to their education, should have scientific thinking, no longer can be trusted to have this scientific thinking. Instead of approaching issues with a scientific attitude, the resort to "trust me, I'm a doctor". Scientific thinking, at its core, is just "things might not be how you think they are". It is a type of skepticism about your own thinking and a reliance, or trust, on a set of processes that have been proven to produce useful epistemic truths. A good example of this is the Monty Hall problem where loss aversion would make most people pick the suboptimal solution. The Cognitive Bias Codex [1] documents a lot of these cognitive biases. So, the way to move forward is to fix the education process so that this kind of thinking is inculcated into most children by age 12. [1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...

dr_dshiv 6y ago

Karl Popper called it "scientism". Popper, K. (1978). Natural selection and the emergence of mind. Dialectica, 339-355.

cycomanic 6y ago

I find it rather unfortunate that this comment is the top comment, because I think the "science is like a religion" is both misleading and a strategy to dismiss evidence which don't align with ones ideological views (which is a very human reaction to be fair and it takes conscious effort to avoid, speaking from my own experience). As you acknowledge the scientific method has given completely new technology (I find your choice of words "revolutionary useful goods" a bit weird, as if the only purpose of science was to produce new goods). You're setting up a bit of a straw man that science can not tell us with certainty what is the better course of action. Stating that science can give answers with absolute certainty is a stark misunderstanding of the scientific process (something alluded to in the article). However, trusting the (scientific) evidence (what is typically meant when people use "trust the science") can very definitely guide our decision making process. People typically bring up "trust the science" when proposals are being rejected based on some "ideological" reasoning. To give a more concrete example, in the discussion about universal basic income, one of the main counterarguments is that people will just stop working. The answer to that counterargument is "trust the science", because every study made, has found that in fact people don't just stop working. Now one might still reject the concept of UBI for various other reasons, but this should be underpinned by evidence based arguments, not saying that the side which says trust the science (evidence) is treating it like a religion. When people use the term "trust the science" what they typically mean is "trust the (scientific) evidence" and yes that is what we should be doing, even outside the "technological fields". The "trust the science" argument is often made when people reject an

chopin 6y ago
Socio-economic science is rife of p-hacking. The vast majority of those studies are not reproducible. Your argument would be stronger if you'd choose a different example. I would assume that most studies on UBI are done by strong supporters of it which introduces enough subconscious bias to make them problematic. In the medical area (testing medications) history is full of wrong studies either by negligence or just by greed. "Trust the science" is never a good argument as being to general. I'd trust most of the science in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Apart from those there are too many shenanigans.

paganel 6y ago

> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself. People like Jacques Ellul had been warning us about that for at least five or six decades now, I guess that's how long it takes from an idea first being "caught" as actually "existing" (for lack of a better word) to becoming so prevalent as to be very easily observable. I'd also very highly recommend the works of Ulrich Beck [1], well, his "Risk Society" to be more precise, to quote wikipedia: "Risk society is the manner in which modern society organizes in response to risk" [2]. It is a book written in the mid '80s, right before Chernobyl, and recently other people have (re-)discovered him too, like in this "Foreign Policy" article [3] from last August. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Beck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Beck [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_society https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_society [3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-could-save-us-from-coronavirus/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-cou...

nmaleki 6y ago

The part about religion reminds me of an excerpt from the "circular reasoning" wikipedia article. "-"using the scientific method to judge the scientific method is circular reasoning". Scientists attempt to discover the laws of nature and to predict what will happen in the future, based on those laws. However, per David Hume's problem of induction, science cannot be proven inductively by empirical evidence, and thus science cannot be proven scientifically." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning

throw0101a 6y ago

> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself. See: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

Person5478 6y ago

Back in the mid to late 90's I predicted this. I used to tell friends that science would be the new religion and scientists the new priests. And indeed that's exactly what has happened. Nothing gives more authority nowadays than "scientists believe...". And to your later point, nothing is a bigger indicator of the fakeness you describe more than the use of statistics as an official sounding WAG(Wild Ass Guess). Computer Scientists don't need statistics as anything other than a guidepost of where to potentially look next, but for many of the "sciences" nowadays statistics is the end output.

skocznymroczny 6y ago

The problem with blindindly "believing the science" is that with enough money you can get scientific results that push a certain narrative. We are learning now that most of the anti-fat dietician push was sponsored by sugary drink companies. Likewise we are learning that a lot of "clean air" research is sponsored by fossil fuel companies. What current research will we learn about 10-20 years from now that it was mostly sponsored by a party with a commercial interest?