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Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Science Works

200 points by XzetaU8 6y ago

rmrfrmrf 6y ago
No mention of funding of scientific studies and the ongoing replication crisis?
wegs 6y ago
This was not what I expected. I expected the standard line about how the general public should trust scientists, and a fight for a greater role of scientists in decision-making. It was a good read. I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of the flaws of scientific processes: * Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes * Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines * Impact over integrity in hiring * Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone) ... and so on. As well as a clearer understanding of how we go from hypothesis to fact. In many policy discussions, I see individual scientific papers cited which is a nonsense way to use science. One can find a paper which says anything and most results are false. That's still part of the process. Once a result has been poked at from enough directions, it becomes a theory and then an fact. Connecting the hypothetical process to empirical process would be awesome to see in schools.
- nvahalik 6y ago
  Science is seeing full-well the problem that many religions (at least, those with Scriptures) have been having for centuries. (s/hypothesis/belief/ and s/fact/creed/). * I see individual scripture references cited (out of context). (Called "proof texting"... "See, here's the proof!") * One can find a verse which says anything (if you ignore the context). * Once an idea has been poked at from enough directions, it becomes a belief and then a creed (or a part of one). Science, like religion also has a method: exegesis vs. the scientific method. A source: scripture vs. creation. Etc. etc. Sadly, this is not a problem which can be "fixed". You can have your die-hard zealots on either side. The evidence can be placed before them. You can show them that their error (heresy) has been denounced for a thousand years. But yet erroneous beliefs are still rampant.
  - gspr 6y ago
    I'll bite: examples, please.
    - nvahalik 6y ago
      Sure. There are several that I've personally had to deal with: baptism (by creed? by birth?), the nature of hell/eternal fate of the wicked, nature of Christ, even the support of slavery, etc. The one that I see that's really in play right now actually has to do with the nature of hell/fate of the wicked. You've probably heard the fate of the wicked is that whoever does not believe will go to hell: a place of eternal conscious torment (ECT). Proponents of this position will lean heavily on various scriptures: * "It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, 'where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.'" Mark 9:47-48 * "..lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever." (Rev 20:10). There are a couple of examples. And they are used. A lot. However, the last couple of hundred years (at least, that we know of, perhaps further back, though it wasn't discussed as much) is the idea of annihilationism: That the fate of the wicked is not ECT but rather is simply to finally die again forever. The doctrine of final judgement (for our purposes here is clearly defined in Matthew 25:31-46) declares that all of the dead will be raised and will be judged. So, if you were dead, you will be raised and then the final judgement will be made and the two sides (the left and the right) will go to their inheritance: either Christ's kingdom or eternal fire. But the idea that eternal fire _means_ eternal conscious torment for the wicked makes some specific assumptions that many people assume but are not supported: * Why is it assumed that all who are raised are now immortal? * Why does the nature of the fire (i.e. that it is eternal) mean that it must burn eternally rather than simply describe its provenance and its effectiveness. For me (and for many others), we do not find the "evidence" of ECT compelling and can actually point to a number of other areas where ECT makes no sense. The biggest example is everyone's favorite verse: John 3:16 (For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him shall not PERISH but have ETERNAL LIFE). EMPHASIS MINE. In what world does "Perish" mean "be alive but tortured forever"? Anyway, the point is that many people start with the end in mind. They start with ECT and work their way backwards. Scripture has the advantage over the natural sciences in that (at least for protestants) we believe the canon is closed and therefore no new information can be made available. We have what we have to work with.
- brightball 6y ago
  If you ever take the time to read the studies being cited, they also rarely say what people think they say when citing them.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  > I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of the flaws of scientific processes: >* Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes >* Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines >* Impact over integrity in hiring >* Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone) None of these are part of the scientific process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
  - thereddaikon 6y ago
    They didn't at any point say the scientific method. And I'm pretty sure that's intentional because there is nothing inherently wrong with the scientific method. The problem is with the processes we have built around modern academia which leads to a system that does not give an ideal or intended outcome.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      Yes, but I guess I wouldn’t label them as scientific processes, which I would assume be in line with the scientific method. These listed problems are all people and people’s incentives problems, and have nothing to do with science. They exist just as much in non scientific endeavors, and so attaching the word science to them seems meaningless, and at worst muddies people’s understanding of science.
      - thereddaikon 6y ago
        Scientific processes =/= scientific method The problem is with the business of science. Processes are very much a business concept that most adults can understand. We develop new processes every day Furthermore it was used plural so it can't possibly be the scientific method because not only is that a proper noun but there is only one scientific method while there are many scientific processes. And yes they can be specific to science. The process of getting published in a peer reviewed journal is unique to academia. Or what about the process of getting grant funding for research? I know, you will say but that isn't science. But nobody is arguing against the validity of the scientific method. At least nobody worth listening to. When people say there are flaws with science that must be addressed they are saying they are flaws with the business of science. And the scientific community is not doing a great job of fixing them.
- neonological 6y ago
  These are political flaws and flaws with human systems. You are missing the logical flaw buried within the scientific method itself. Nothing in science and therefore reality can be proven to be true. We can only falsify things in science. What this means is every claim ever made by anyone or any scientist from now to eternity can never be proven to be true. We can only make repeated attempts at falsifying things. After we fail to falsify a thing enough times we can say, hey this theory is maybe true. That is the best science can do and that is what nobody, including most of the people on hacker news do NOT understand. There is literally no such thing as an actual “fact” in science and therefore in reality as we know it. This flaw is the origin of most of the distrust in science it is also the reason why blind trust of the scientific method itself is wrong. No claim made by a scientist has actually ever been proven.
  - kbelder 6y ago
    Why do you see it as a flaw? Constantly shedding false beliefs equates to constant improvement. We all want to get closer to the truth; science is one technique for doing so, and since there's no direct line to God, it's the most efficient one. It has the best corrective feedback loops.
    - neonological 6y ago
      I see it as a flaw because in logic and math, it is very possible to prove your theorems to be true. It is just not possible to do so in reality. Logic is a game with a limited domain. Reality has an unknown domain, hence the inability to prove anything. Because this feature doesn’t exist in science it is therefore a flaw. Additionally it doesn’t align with human intuition. Humans assume by default that things can be proven and that facts exist. The truth is that nothing can be proven and facts don’t actually exist. This is counter intuitive and therefore although science is the best tool we have, the counterintuitive qualities science possesses justifies calling these things flaws. This relatively unknown “flaw” is what drives most of the debate in the political arena. No scientist can ever prove global warming to be true. It is fundamentally impossible. The debate would be over long ago if there was some way for science to prove global warming to be real.
jp555 6y ago
People should be more aware... of the collapse of science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
- analog31 6y ago
  The replication crisis is serious, but it's not the collapse of science. Maxwell's equations still stand, for example. You can still identify chemical elements from their spectra. And so forth. That is not to diminish the problem. Over-reliance in purely statistical methods has gotten us in trouble -- in some fields more than others. Probably the main issue is that the fields affected are ones that happen to the biggest right now, with potential impact on quality of life and public policy. Fields that are doing a better job of weathering the storm, such as physics, have tended to have a larger tool belt, and the use of statistics is kept in check by other methods such as the development of theory, and the ability to study problems from multiple vantage points. Also, physicists can choose our battles, and only look at problems where more robust statistics can be used.
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    Even in the fields most affected, I'm not aware of any knowledge generation efforts outside of science that are going better. It might just be that the social sciences and medicine are really hard, and our best efforts fail often. Edit: I mean the best effort we could reasonably make as a society, naturally there have been individuals and groups who have been doing things they knew or should have known were wrong for their own reasons.
    - a_conservative 6y ago
      This comment really made me think, thank you for that. I agree with everything you said. I think the danger comes from people using results that aren't (can't?) be replicated and treating them as if they were fact. "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."
avsteele 6y ago
As a working physicist I think the authors suggestions are not likely to improve education. Discussions of Kuhn are just not appropriate for secondary school science education. These classes are for teaching the bare basic of bio, chem, and physics to see if the kids enjoy them. As it stands they can barely do this. They aren't there to teach 'how science works' except in the most rudimentary sense, and its hard for me to think science education would be improved by removing core material in favor of a discussion of the peer review process! The author's suggestion might be appropriate for social studies, or a a special, AP level class where logical positivism, Karl popper, and Kuhn might be discussed. I refer the interested reader here to: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2975230-scientific-method-in-practice https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2975230-scientific-metho...
- krona 6y ago
  I know half a dozen or so PhD's in microbiology at one of the leading research institutions. They don't understand the philosophy of science beyond what I was taught aged 10-11. I don't think the basics of Karl Popper and Kuhn are beyond the grasp of a secondary school student, considering their importance not just in science but in the world we now live in.
  - ta988 6y ago
    Thats because many PhD are just glorified technicians (same technicians we purged out of our labs doing one of the worst mistake of the last decades I believe). So we get all those PhD learning 3d printing, microcontrollers, programming for creating new devices, tools and whatever else. Where for technicians it would have been a much shorter turnaround. Of course the individuals learn new (basic level) skills. But it also impedes discovery and leaves a whole category of people out of the door. In PhD I was once told I couldn't put the technician on the authors list because he was paid to do his job...
    - ravel-bar-foo 6y ago
      The line between scientific and non-scientific contributions can be fuzzy. One would not put the supplier of a chemical in the authors list ... unless the synthesis and distribution was done as part of a collaboration and it is the compound which makes the experiment possible. But then, there is a lot of leeway in "collaboration"
amelius 6y ago
I can't blame people for being sceptical about science given all the crap that is in our food these days, all the fake nutrition science, fad diets, and the inability of governments to fix it.
JuliusPullo 6y ago
Science is always inconclusive. Theories are not theorems; everything is open to questioning, no matter how much sense it seems to make. That is why science advances, to begin with. And yet, people are told (mostly by politicians with agendas) that they are supposed to "believe" science, which of course means to believe the latest a scientist said. No, don't teach the young that they need to believe science. Teach them to question it, always. And to question it in a formal, disciplined and rational way, even if they agree with what is being said. Especially on issues like anthropogenic climate change, where the implied solution is to surrender individual freedoms to a omni-powerful faceless government that is supposed to protect us all.
- neonological 6y ago
  In a sense yes. Science cannot prove things to be true, but falsification is conclusive. If observations are 100% accurate you can definitively falsify things and conclude that something is false. The same cannot be said for proving something to be true.
peter_retief 6y ago
There are a lot of people who claim science in defence of an opinion. IMHO science has got to bad place and has become very political.
calebm 6y ago
After things like the food pyramid, it's hard to imagine why people would ever question what scientists say. /s
- rmah 6y ago
  Given that scientists had essentially zero say in the food pyramid, I fail to see how it's relevant here.
  - frockington1 6y ago
    The government advertised the food pyramid as a scientific fact. About a year ago the government advertised the general population should not wear masks as a scientific fact as well
    - rmah 6y ago
      What does that have to do with scientists?
- kertoip_1 6y ago
  Are you referencing some specific event? Never heard of controversies linked to food pyramid
trey-jones 6y ago
I think it's natural for an expert in any field to be frustrated by the general public's lack of expertise. Indeed, as true expertise seems to become less and less common, I don't think it's unusual for this frustration to increase. I think this is the reason for the absurd notion that "everybody should learn to code" that was fairly pervasive on Hacker News a few years back. Thankfully that seems to have died down... As far as trusting the actual experts to make good decisions and tell the truth, that's tough. It seems to me that so many people are just out to get a quick buck. Often that means exaggerating and/or twisting the truth to suit a particular narrative. I'm not anti-capitalist, but there is clearly room for improvement to the system.
breck 6y ago
No mention of git. If it's not on the global information tracker, it ain't science. There's no excuse anymore. Let me repeat because this is important. If you aren't putting your research in Git, and publishing the repo, and are instead doing things like PDFs and Docs and private datasets, please don't call yourself scientist (exception: "bench" folks who are grinding out the data and not too involved in the analysis/publishing process). That was acceptable 50 years ago, but the environment has changed. That is not acceptable anymore. I don't care if that's not how academia does it. It's so obviously the right thing to do.
- vngzs 6y ago
  You have the right idea, but an unhelpful perspective. Certainly not everyone who isn't a software developer is a "phony scientist!" If you'd like to convince scientists to come around to your line of thinking, explain the problems with current research papers. Tell them about the problems with publishing papers only, how others struggle to reproduce their research, and how it leaves much bad research that would be invalidated far sooner except that the information to recreate their trial was absent. Then explain how sharing the code and data with Git (or similar) can solve this problem. You'll find that you are much more persuasive.
  - breck 6y ago
    I agree with you that this isn't a persuasive approach. But I'm cutting to the chase. If anyone is working on this—helping onboard academics and non-programmers to git—this is an idea I'm looking to support (as an investor, donor, or whatever).
    - a_conservative 6y ago
      Isn't git an implementation detail here? Git repos don't have to be publicly available. They also don't have to contain history or multiple versions at all. I'm guessing what you really want is: 1) open formats for data 2) plain text instead of proprietary blobs 3) the ability to replicate calculations easily 4) the ability to see some sort of evolution or mistake-fixing in the project's history.
imwillofficial 6y ago
The need for the public? There is a need for scientists to know how science works.
- pdamoc 6y ago
  The University of Medicine where I got my Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering is now teaching a course in Homeopathy. So, yeah.... there is also a need for "scientists" to know how science works.
endisneigh 6y ago
I question the premise of this article - what evidence is there that the general population doesn’t understand how science works? I think they know perfectly well how it works - and that like everything else it’s been corrupted by politics and money. Arguably the only fields of science free from this corruption are physics and chemistry, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I was wrong about that.
- leetcrew 6y ago
  skepticism is good. people should be skeptical of science, especially by the time it reaches popular media. but skepticism isn't very useful unless you can evaluate roughly how skeptical to be about a particular finding. five sigma physics finding replicated by multiple studies? probably good, but there's always some chance of systemic error. n=10 psychology study never replicated and all the subjects were white male college students? let's take that one with a big grain of salt.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Understanding this is probably the best lesson I took away from my Six Sigma Black Belt training.
- hannasanarion 6y ago
  How often have you heard the phrase "gravity/evolution/sedimentation/cosmology is just a theory". Maybe some of the people who are using that are rhetorical, but as somebody who was very invested in the Evangelical Christian community in Arizona for the better part of a decade, there are a lot of people who believe it genuinely, that when scientists use the word "theory", it should be understood to mean "guess".
  - rmrfrmrf 6y ago
    But that's what "theory" means. It is, in fact, a guess; a guess that could be flat-out wrong the second a piece of contradictory evidence comes to light. But, instead of acknowledging that, for some reason a large group of Science Defenders have chosen this hill to die on where actually theory means infallible truth that mustn't be challenged, especially not from the likes of the common man. There is such a drive to prove the religious wrong that we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and created some kind of anti-religion where all skepticism is immediately put down and skeptics are excommunicated.
jes 6y ago
I found this assertion, near the end of the article, questionable: “Science as inquiry,” with its focus on evidence and logic, can do no more than communicate the details of a few empirical studies. To my knowledge, inquiry can be as broad or as narrow as one wishes to make it. The utility of evidence and logic is not limited to narrow domains, is it? I hope I’m not just cherry picking something to satisfy my own biases.
DanielBMarkham 6y ago
I don't think most folks understand the problem, although the essay is getting there. In general, I don't think epistemology can be taught until pupils have enough world experience to map what's being taught with the rest of the body of scientific literature. In general, and I am wildly stereotyping, all people want a quick answer and then to move on. Younger people tend to do this quicker. Older people tend to dwell too long on all of the possibilities. Epistemological understanding of how science actually works encourages us to accept both of these tendencies as being needed. That's a tough thing to get across if people are already predisposed to learning the quick answer and going to the next topic, whether that's in a blog entry, book, or secondary school education. I'm not sure it's possible. Quite related: I published this a couple of days ago. Been debating whether or not to submit it here. It's a difficult subject. It's extremely important, but sadly simply because it's important doesn't mean people will be able to accept or understand it. https://danielbmarkham.com/its-time-to-intellectually-grow-up/ https://danielbmarkham.com/its-time-to-intellectually-grow-u... tl;dr This is a problem because it's not the kind of thing that people consume well. See HN reactions.
ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago
I was having this exact discussion with a philosophy of science major a few days ago. We were both bothered by the current fetishization of science. It's troubling that otherwise well-educated, logical people have come to elevate science as this god-like authority, and scientific consensus as the source of all truths. The discussion came to Kuhn and the often touted belief in popular culture that science is not always completely right but in essence it's one big model of nature that keeps getting better and so we should trust it implicitly, while ignoring the concept of paradigm shift that arises specifically from people outside the consensus. Coupled with the fact that dissent gets blurred with denialism, and that the absence of evidence has come to mean "evidence of absence" on the news, it's become really tricky to discuss things critically without being openly mocked. I wish I had time to read more philosophy, even as a scientist you learn a whole bunch about science, it's really enlightening.
- frockington1 6y ago
  > Coupled with the fact that dissent gets blurred with denialism This is what gives me the biggest headache. When discussing any politically motivated topic you can't ask questions that even remotely disagree with the popular Science opinion of the day. I had a professor scold me for asking if there were any natural phenomenon that may also be contributing to rising CO2 levels
  - jfengel 6y ago
    The professor has without doubt heard the question thousands of times, by those with dishonest intent. Because the answer is always no. There are no natural phenomena that coincide precisely with the industrial revolution. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere tracks exactly the amount of fossil fuels being dug out of the ground. CO2 levels had been stable for millennia before that, and then they changed sharply. Nothing natural has gone on to change that. If the question were intended honestly, you wouldn't call it "disagreement". You'd be asking for information and would make your decision after you had it. If your description is correct, that's why your professor scolded you. The name for disagreeing without knowledge is "denial". The name for asking questions that you don't really intend to listen to the answers is "sea lioning", which is a tactic for wasting time and frustrating people. It's dishonest and rude. If the situation was as I understood it from your description, I'm not surprised that they spoke sharply to you.
tgv 6y ago
> Moreover, scientific agreement among experts —typically interpreted by logical empiricists as the result of univocal scientific method and as an indicator of truth— should be seen more critically for what it is: social agreement. Isn't the whole point of science that you can get out of that by trying? Apply your theories in practice, and see if they work. It doesn't matter whether the theory goes with or against general consensus. That unfortunately doesn't hold for theories that describe only minute, very restricted domains. And that not only includes fields like dark matter, where experimentation is nearly impossible, but also 99.9% of the social sciences, where consensus is the only yard stick for theories that by far outsize the data on which they are based. Fortunately for the discussion, the author kept that thorny problem far away by focusing on the safe area of natural sciences. Now back to the article: "science education ... should normalize scientific disagreement (distinguishing it from science denialism) and include discussion of the social epistemological institutions and processes by which scientific inquiry proceeds. These include the education of future researchers as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, the peer review process for grants and publications, the discursive interactions of researchers in laboratory meetings and conferences, diversity and inclusion issues, and the norms of scientific integrity." While social aspects of practicing science may throw some light on why one theory gets more traction than another, it seems to me putting the cart before the horse. It will not make students appreciate the difference between the competing theories, but will make science education a dull exercise in processes and factoids, to be listed in a test, where you'll get a passing grade if you can keep "epistemological" and "inquiry" apart. And in the worst case, it will undermine the last bit of trust in science, because it's just an attempt at a centralizing power grab. Who proves that which ideas about these issues are right? I doubt the author has even got the tiniest bit of data to underline her argument.
isolli 6y ago
Simplifying a bit, I believe it's important to distinguish between hard, experimental science (physics), not fully experimental science (climate, medicine) and social science (economics). For instance, medicine is not fully experimental in the sense that you cannot take the same person and subject it repeatedly to the same, or a slightly different, experiment. Hard science has a) better tools at its disposal (repeatable experiments) and b) is not subject to the influence of financial interests. Companies don't care about this or that theory, all they care about are results that work and provide useful technology. Some companies do, however, have a strong interest in the outcomes of research in climate change, medicine, and economics, so they will exercise influence on research precisely in those domains that are less founded in experimentation and more uncertain.
- aww_dang 6y ago
  Governments have a stake in these fields as well.
frockington1 6y ago
This article classifies differing opinions into 2 categories, those I like (disagreement) and those I don't like (deniers). The strategies outlined here will further decrease the publics faith in science.
CA0DA 6y ago
This does not address a concern I have had: models are not science. Many models can be created, and then over time one if found to be correct, so we assume that one can predict the future. It cannot.
lettergram 6y ago
Honestly, as someone who spends a significant amount of time reading and attempting to replicate papers... I have very little faith in most papers, though the concepts themselves often appear okay. My friends and family also doing research have added to my questioning most papers. It’s probably healthy to have a lot of skepticism, the paper itself should convince through the research methods and sample size. Unfortunately, the incentives align more with skirting the truth than being honest. That’s why each paper, in my opinion, requires a healthy dose of skepticism. As an example, in January 2021 the PCR protocol to identify covid-19 was finally updated and a warning sent out that there were possible issues. Specifically, issues that would lead to higher false positives. My wife who does PCRs regularly immediately identified the issue in AUGUST 2021. This means it had to have been known prior to that date, yet wasn’t discussed for political reasons
- webmaven 6y ago
  > My wife who does PCRs regularly immediately identified the issue in AUGUST 2021. Well, heck, predicting the future and pointing out other people's mistakes is dead easy when you have access to a time-machine, isn't it?
  - lettergram 6y ago
    The point I'm making is they knew months prior to announcing it that there was an issue. If we were worried about the "science" it would have been announced right away, instead it was the day after inauguration.
Tycho 6y ago
Maybe some billionaire could set up an institution to keep scientists honest. Like it wouldn't try to do any original research, it would be purely dedicated to finding whether published research replicates, verifying the statistical analyses on which published research rests, and busting academic fraud (eg. citation rings). Over time legitimate scientists would crave its stamp of approval and make their research easier to verify (eg. publish the source code). It would be a good training ground and employment scheme too.
swayvil 6y ago
Our society is and always has been primarily authoritarian in its thinking. Merely "explaining how it works" isn't going to change that one speck. To change it you'd have to change the people in some fundamental way.
biffstallion 6y ago
SCIENCE! Except for gender DNA.
biffstallion 6y ago
SCIENCE!!! Except for Gender DNA, Macroeconomics, Voter Fraud Detection, etc...
pdamoc 6y ago
I think that there really is a need for the general public to know what science IS. How it came about, how it works. Unfortunately, for that to happen at the level it needs, there needs to be a change in how Education works everywhere. We are still using a 19th century tool designed for a very different context. Maria Montessori tried to bring the tool into the 20th century about 100 years ago but who is trying to do the same for the 21st century? The way I found it explained best was in an Alan Kay presentation where he spoke about the insight Francis Bacon got into the fact that the brain works in a faulty way and what to do about it. Scientific thinking is how we get around the very well documented [1] array of cognitive biases. Learning about those biases in ways that a) makes them obvious, b) provides ways to compensate might make a person able to detect them early and to approach them in the proper way. Another wonderful tool I found is Chris Argyris's Ladder of Inference. Trouble is that this kind of tools need to be inculcated at a very early age so they get used and become second nature to the person. Learning them later in life is a heck lot more difficult, especially when they conflict with fundamental aspects of one's identity. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...
ajarmst 6y ago
I'd settle for a rough familiarity amongst science journalists and their editors, but I like the aspiration. Couple of questions, though: do we mean how science should work, or how it actually works in practice (and no, not just Kuhn: his conclusions were only surprising to other non-scientists, and primarily seem to have been valuable for Sociologists nursing a discipline-wide inferiority complex and 'scientists' like Andrew Wakefield who want to blame the establishment and not their own sociopathy.) We're coming up on two decades since Ionnidis, and Psychology still seems to be primarily a collection of unconfirmed small population studies of undergraduate psych students. Medical doctors can't explain or apply freshman statistics. Research directions (and, too often, results) are chosen by investors and donors. The modern west has more taboos about what assumptions and received truths it is permissible to question and investigate than the most repressive theocracies. Much of theoretical physics seems to be aimed at exploring untestable hypotheses and frameworks. And, my personal favourite: the phrase 'scientific consensus' is now used so often and without critique and introspection that it's actually become trite.
johndoe42377 6y ago
Lol, it won't fly. First of all, science is just a methodology of establishing truth about some aspects of what we call reality. Everything which cannot be verified by a reproducible experiment is not a science. All theories, therefore, are mere theories. Analogue of religious sects. It also automatically disqualifies all humanities, and especially socially constructed bullshit like race theories, etc. That, in turn, will strip high social status of academics and "people doing science" from way too many people (which is absolutely good, so it will never happen). Science as a social construction took (along with big government) place of religion as prestigious occupation and the way to have a high social status.
trashtester 6y ago
From about the 1600s, science gained authority at the expense of theology due to its ability to predict and manipulate the physical world. Physics, chemestry and engineering allowed us to do things that would have been seen as magical a couple of centuries earlier. Those nations and individuals who rejected science became losers. But as the term "science" gained in authority, other institutions were losing influence, in particular theologians and similar ideologes. Many of these wanted to be seen as having authority similar to what scientists enjoyed. Since most people realize that "Theology" is not real science, new names and tactics have been invented to help camuflage institutions as "scientific", such as "Intelligent Design", "<insert identity group> studies" where the practitions care more about the idelogical consequences than the ability to predict real world outcomes. These institutions will both promote science denialism within their own ranks and also cause it within opposing ideologies. Both intelligent design advocates and gender studies advocates will reject findings from science (mostly biology) when they contradict their preferred ideology, even when the findings are as close to scientific facts as it is possible to come. Both do that by presenting bad faith arguments and also labelling non-believers within their ranks as what would in earlier times be labeled "evil heretics". When even "scientific facts" are attacked like that, other disciplines with varying predictive power, such as climate science, economics or cosmology will suffer even more effective assaults by ideologes. If we cannot somehow stop this developement, we are heading for another "Dark Age". I honestly dont know how this developement can be stopped at this point. At the very least, it will require cooperation across idelogical boundaries to do so, and this can only happen if the science denial of both sides are simultaneously purged.
- WildParser 6y ago
  I'm not very optimistic about avoiding a "Dark Age". Rational thinking and the idea to look at data seems to be completely foreign to most people I know. Higher educated people seem to absorb and repeat dogmas and propaganda unfiltered even faster. Some patterns I have come across: Alpha-Rational: Claiming that ideas that come from authority (dogma) or self (narcissism) are rational - rejecting to look at any data. Anti-Rational: Reject the idea to look at data "life is uncertain", "data is garbage", "it's immoral to look at data" - although there is a lot of good data and drawing conclusions is not even difficult. Malicious rational: Know your science and cherry-pick data for profit to support the highest bidder.
OliverJones 6y ago
A long time ago I studied biochem in university. It took me until the third time memorizing the Krebs cycle (energy metabolism) to start asking "how the heck did Krebs et al figure this out?" And I had already read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I memorized Krebs for the SECOND time. I, personally, got stuck in received wisdom for too long. Science is a discipline for confronting mystery. It's about what we don't know. It's also big business, driven by money, prestige, and power (like most human endeavors). In that sense, it's a lot like religion. Religion, as practiced in the US, has the four pillars of the Wesleyan quadrilateral: * Scripture * Tradition * Reason * Experience * The Pennsylvania science-teaching guidelines notwithstanding, school science curricula are mostly teaching "scripture." No, I don't mean wakky interpretations of ancient texts. I mean memorizing received wisdom and getting tested on accurate memories. The Krebs cycle is an advanced hunk of that kind of scripture. Tradition comes into play when, for example, grad students fear to challenge the stuff discovered by the Nobel laureates who run their labs. It's valid to critique the way tradition controls inquiry. Reason and experience: Those are cognitive tools to use when doing the Karl Popper thing: dreaming up things that can be proven wrong and then trying to prove them wrong. But we need at least some scripture and tradition to apply reason and experience. Learning science is hard even when it's just "scripture" and "tradition". Embracing the mysteries -- the unknown -- is even harder. Science means accepting that "everything we know might be wrong." We should still try.
GoodJokes 6y ago
Honestly, it sounds like scientists need to understand science better.
noxer 6y ago
The media use "the science" not "science" to tell people what is "the truth". That is the problem. People are first told that something is "the truth" then if it later turns out to be wrong it eradicates trust in science. Its backwards. In science if something is proven wrong, it should increase trust because it demonstrates that mistakes if made are found and corrected. It demonstrates that science does accumulates more valid than invalid information over time because invalid stuff is removed. There is also a fear to accepting that we (humanity or science) dont know something yet. Its better to simply accept that we dont know than to choose or worse let others choose based on no evidence.
- neonological 6y ago
  yeah that’s true. Most people are searching for definitive truths. The problem is it doesn’t exist, and science is the closest thing it.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
I read Carl Sagan's, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" and it really nailed home how many issues are caused by a fundamental lack of understanding and belief in science. It's a great short read.
lavamantis 6y ago
It a way science is very similar to free speech. Its can be very harmful when misused, but generally the answer to bad science is not LESS science, but BETTER science. The proper role of the education system of any given country, and a good predictor of its success, is how well it teaches us to evaluate the difference.
neonological 6y ago
Science has political problems and social problems yes. But many people don’t understand that from a purely logical perspective there is a fundamental flaw with science. Almost no one knows this. You cannot prove anything to be true with science. Therefore, in other words, you cannot prove anything to be true in reality as we know it. Even when your observations are 100% accurate it is fundamentally impossible to prove anything in science (and your observations can never be 100% accurate). If you understand this concept then you fundamentally understand science and you’ll be able to see where all the debate and misunderstandings about science comes from. Every single claim made by a scientist has never ever actually been proven ever. The key is that you need to understand why science can’t prove anything. There is an extremely logical explanation for why proof is impossible in reality. Proof is the domain of logic, not science. To quote Einstein: “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Additionally there are two main axiomatic assumptions about the physical world that has to be made that have to be made in order for science to work as a logical consequence. You must assume logic is true (which is recursive and obvious) but you also must assume probability is true. Probability applying to the real world does not arise as a theoretical consequence of axiomatic logic being true. Probability itself must be assumed to be an axiom alongside logic, science works because we assume it works.
motohagiography 6y ago
The root of this discussion is about whether science is necessary or suitable for public policy, and we should probably accept that policy is not scientific, and nor should it be. The alleged scientific findings used as a basis for policy justifications today is mostly compromised and irreproducable junk designed to befog, mesmerize, and browbeat average people into submission, while an elite for whom words have no fixed meanings struggle among themselves for control of bureaucracies. When policymakers say they defer to "the science" it is forfeiting their responsibility to act with wisdom and good judgment. Democracy predates science by some three millennia, and to say that we can or should create a scientific democracy is nonsense. Democracy is an ideal and a quality, it is not a system that can be engineered from data with scientific findings or processes. Further, if you engineer a society with policies based on data and laws that only a few initiates understand, that is the specific antithesis to democracy. In the west, we use democratic processes to produce our elite classes, but unfortunately we do not produce wise ones, and they're happy to dodge accountability by blaming scientists or the weather. Science doesn't create trust in authority either, it produces verification, reproducibility, and models for new tools. Science and data are neither sufficient, nor necessary conditions for wise policy that supports life and creates growth, even when it has made some great contributions to our well being. To say that science shows a given policy is good because it has a scientific justification is circular reasoning. When you say you believe in science, either you practice it, or you trust its institutional practitioners, which basically means you trust the systems of academic administrators to make policy. Again, not democratic at all. We actually don't need a public understanding of how science works, we just need to hold policymakers to a standard of accountability where they can't slither behind binders of gibberish when called to account for their decisions.
- rayiner 6y ago
  This is a really important point--exemplified by COVID. You can't delegate governance to scientific experts. That's not their job and they're not qualified to do it. Don't get me wrong--public officials should base policies on the scientific consensus, when it exists. But a scientific consensus can't tell you what to do about it. It can't tell you what trade-offs to make, or how to integrate a scientific truth into a social framework. Most important, politicians must deal with the fact that science often doesn't have clear answers on important matters. Something as simple as "should pregnant women get the COVID vaccine?" is the subject of dispute.
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6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
This article is complaining that people are taught a rigorous form of science that not enough science meets, and asks that it’s replaced by some sociology of science to determine which scientists to trust. It’s not wrong, and maybe I’m too much of an idealist in believing that “science as inquiry” is the right goal to aspire to, and that it’s feasible. In my mind, we just don’t teach kids science as inquiry well. It’s too much like the heavily complained about way we teach math, where it’s formulas you just plug things into. Kids can plug a, b, and c into a quadratic formula but then can’t handle a word problem. Likewise with science. You’re taught it as a bunch of rote mechanical steps at the expense of teaching to do the “word problems.” Any science education track that doesn’t include a stats and experimental design course isn’t teaching science as a tool, in my book. It’s just teaching facts. Maybe I’m wrong and teaching kids more than memorization is too lofty a goal, but I think statistical illiteracy is more of a barrier than “science as inquiry” is.
andred14 6y ago
It is obvious now that some "doctors" and "scientists" have been lying constantly in 2020/2021
guscost 6y ago
Rant about COVID and the death of (popular/political) science is linked in my bio. You will probably either hate it or love it.
auganov 6y ago
> “Science as inquiry” education, at its best, teaches students an ideal set of methods for improving scientific knowledge. It suggests that our current scientific knowledge has grown, over the past four centuries since the scientific revolution (when modern science is widely held to have come about), in this ideal way. Even if that were true, there is an implicit dependence on students trusting that what they are taught in the classroom has been discovered and justified in this ideal way. Very much agree with the author that the social aspect of the industry of science should be taught more. But it's exactly thanks to "'science as inquiry' education" that so many embrace mainstream climate change theories. Many genuinely think there's some undeniable evidence and logic making "climate scientists" believe in cataclysmic runaway warming. The truth is, we don't even have good temperature measurements. Most "climate scientists" have no expertise in measuring temperatures. They're not that interested in improving temp monitoring tech. They're not embracing satellite temperature monitoring which is superior in almost every way to traditional surface stations. Instead, they tend to ignore it or focus on its (few) flaws. Why? Because satellite data shows no net warming since 1998 which contradicts many mainstream theories. The guy who pioneered satellite temp monitoring happens to be a major skeptic. GISS, the most widely used temperature dataset is based on simple old-school surface stations. Not that many of them, in fact. It's so bad that they're known to publish errors so blatant that they have been spotted (by "deniers") by checking against local weather websites. One has to understand negative results are inherently uninteresting to scientists and the broader public. It's not that rouge scientist conspire to dominate a field. When you conclude there's nothing going on or that there are fundamental epistemic limitations to studying a given field, you have much less of an incentive to participate. If you still do, your work is bound to be "against" [what's out there], rather than "for" something. Hard to make a career out of being a hater. Or to even enjoy it.
- ascar 6y ago
  The thing is that the widespread believe in global warming doesn't just stem from temperature measurements, but a multitude of other observable facts that do fit in the theory (i.e. experiments do not invalidate the theory). But just picking up your satellite argument. A quick google search reveals many articles disputing that satellites show no increase in global temperatures. One article [1] even claims corrected sattelite measurements show a higher increase than surface measurements. [1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-data-shows-140-faster-warming-since-1998 https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-da...
bartimus 6y ago
The whole concept of "scientific consensus" is unscientific. It's always politically loaded. It also screws up the concept of checks and balances when the reason of existence for certain scientific jobs (and titles) is dependent on the existence of (and payed for by) a certain political issue.
dfilppi 6y ago
People dont trust politicians, and they are the ones selectively using science as a justification for increasing their power.
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afandian 6y ago
Any developers who want to help with the scholarly infrastructure that underpins scholarly publishing workflows (DOIs, scholarly metadata and related things), Crossref have a job opening. Speaking personally, it's one of those rare jobs that feels embedded in an important mission. https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-developer/ https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-dev... (but only open for a couple more days!)
specialist 6y ago
Quoting the OC: > Believing based on trust is a pervasive human practice, not confined to scientific inquiry. Rationalists ignore the role of identity in beliefs. My socially awkward brother transmuted from becoming the next Jacques Cousteau to full throated Young Earth Creationist. He had the best schooling. He assisted with biological and sociological research. Why did my brother flip? I've been pondering this for decades. In a nutshell, my theory is he traded his beliefs for acceptance. He adopted a completely new identity in order to belong to a group. The evidence for the centrality of identity as basis of our beliefs, what some LessWrong pundits called Belief As Attire, is slowly accumulating. No amount of scientific literacy, media literacy, critical thinking, logic will successfully inoculate people from cults. There's some new research that shows early exposure helps. Such as teaching kids about pseudosciences like cryptozoology. Similarly, there's some evidence that empathy and community engagement and socialization help protect people from falling prey to cults.
pjettter 6y ago
the problem is that in schools, kids learn not science, but examples of science, without understanding what science is. They don't learn biology, but examples of biology, without understanding any context, history, aims. They don't learn about languages, but just an example of a language, and only small parts of it. There is no context, and especially, there is not even an attempt to connect one thing to another, or to provide any context or relation. Sadly, schools don't even teach learning anymore. They just teach succeeding by imitation. So yes, we're in big trouble. Or they, if you're old enough.
carapace 6y ago
The whole point of science is that you don't need to trust someone's words, you can repeat the experiment for yourself. I trust physicists (in re: physics) more than I trust my mother. But if you can't repeat the experiment, if you can't make precise predictions that can be invalidated, is what you're doing really science? This is crucial when it comes to fixing policy: economists, sociologist, psychologists and other quasi-scientific folks are the astrologers and numerologists of our current age. They trade on the successes of genuine science to garner political legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. But by doing that they tarnish the public perception of the impartiality of the proper scientist, diminishing their own glamour and polluting the public's appreciation for the value of genuine science. Science gets respect from pretty much everybody (whether they own it or not. Very few anti-science folks go so far as to deny themselves the benefits of science like electricity and aspirin.) It's the "soft sciences" that can't make predictions, that can't be tested, and that are used as political leverage that people (rightly IMO) don't trust. - - - - Let me throw out a personal example. There's a system of knowledge and practice called "Neurolinguistic Programming" that I know from personal experience works really really well, but if you go look at the Wikipedia page for it it's decried as pseudo-science. I have little respect and no trust for the "scientists" who can't replicate NLP stuff because I've been able to do it as well as tens or hundreds of thousands of other people pretty easily. Now that's bad enough but if these "scientists" managed to persuade legislators to make laws against NLP on the basis of their "science" I would see that as a very serious problem. (Although not a problem with science. Science isn't the problem because science is not what they are doing.) Yet I am not an anti-vaxxer nor a climate denialist. - - - - Bottom line: Science has nothing to prove. Repeat the experiment for yourself. E = mc² for everybody everywhere. That's science.
Chris2048 6y ago
The word "science" is the hard end of what should be a gradient. Sometimes just "truth-seeking", evidence-based, quantitative or numerate are good enough without having to invoke the spectre of "science". Maybe we need a general term (rational?) for describing appropriate terms, of which "science" is only appropriate to some fields.
madhadron 6y ago
I don't think it's so much a public understanding issue, since most of the public doesn't understand much of anything about the world they live in. Rather, it's our inability as a society to deal with those who need facts to go away for their ends.

200 points by XzetaU8 6y ago

No mention of funding of scientific studies and the ongoing replication crisis?

wegs 6y ago

This was not what I expected. I expected the standard line about how the general public should trust scientists, and a fight for a greater role of scientists in decision-making. It was a good read. I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of the flaws of scientific processes: * Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes * Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines * Impact over integrity in hiring * Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone) ... and so on. As well as a clearer understanding of how we go from hypothesis to fact. In many policy discussions, I see individual scientific papers cited which is a nonsense way to use science. One can find a paper which says anything and most results are false. That's still part of the process. Once a result has been poked at from enough directions, it becomes a theory and then an fact. Connecting the hypothetical process to empirical process would be awesome to see in schools.

nvahalik 6y ago
Science is seeing full-well the problem that many religions (at least, those with Scriptures) have been having for centuries. (s/hypothesis/belief/ and s/fact/creed/). * I see individual scripture references cited (out of context). (Called "proof texting"... "See, here's the proof!") * One can find a verse which says anything (if you ignore the context). * Once an idea has been poked at from enough directions, it becomes a belief and then a creed (or a part of one). Science, like religion also has a method: exegesis vs. the scientific method. A source: scripture vs. creation. Etc. etc. Sadly, this is not a problem which can be "fixed". You can have your die-hard zealots on either side. The evidence can be placed before them. You can show them that their error (heresy) has been denounced for a thousand years. But yet erroneous beliefs are still rampant.
- gspr 6y ago
  I'll bite: examples, please.
  - nvahalik 6y ago
    Sure. There are several that I've personally had to deal with: baptism (by creed? by birth?), the nature of hell/eternal fate of the wicked, nature of Christ, even the support of slavery, etc. The one that I see that's really in play right now actually has to do with the nature of hell/fate of the wicked. You've probably heard the fate of the wicked is that whoever does not believe will go to hell: a place of eternal conscious torment (ECT). Proponents of this position will lean heavily on various scriptures: * "It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, 'where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.'" Mark 9:47-48 * "..lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever." (Rev 20:10). There are a couple of examples. And they are used. A lot. However, the last couple of hundred years (at least, that we know of, perhaps further back, though it wasn't discussed as much) is the idea of annihilationism: That the fate of the wicked is not ECT but rather is simply to finally die again forever. The doctrine of final judgement (for our purposes here is clearly defined in Matthew 25:31-46) declares that all of the dead will be raised and will be judged. So, if you were dead, you will be raised and then the final judgement will be made and the two sides (the left and the right) will go to their inheritance: either Christ's kingdom or eternal fire. But the idea that eternal fire _means_ eternal conscious torment for the wicked makes some specific assumptions that many people assume but are not supported: * Why is it assumed that all who are raised are now immortal? * Why does the nature of the fire (i.e. that it is eternal) mean that it must burn eternally rather than simply describe its provenance and its effectiveness. For me (and for many others), we do not find the "evidence" of ECT compelling and can actually point to a number of other areas where ECT makes no sense. The biggest example is everyone's favorite verse: John 3:16 (For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him shall not PERISH but have ETERNAL LIFE). EMPHASIS MINE. In what world does "Perish" mean "be alive but tortured forever"? Anyway, the point is that many people start with the end in mind. They start with ECT and work their way backwards. Scripture has the advantage over the natural sciences in that (at least for protestants) we believe the canon is closed and therefore no new information can be made available. We have what we have to work with.
brightball 6y ago
If you ever take the time to read the studies being cited, they also rarely say what people think they say when citing them.
lotsofpulp 6y ago
> I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of the flaws of scientific processes: >* Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes >* Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines >* Impact over integrity in hiring >* Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone) None of these are part of the scientific process. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
- thereddaikon 6y ago
  They didn't at any point say the scientific method. And I'm pretty sure that's intentional because there is nothing inherently wrong with the scientific method. The problem is with the processes we have built around modern academia which leads to a system that does not give an ideal or intended outcome.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Yes, but I guess I wouldn’t label them as scientific processes, which I would assume be in line with the scientific method. These listed problems are all people and people’s incentives problems, and have nothing to do with science. They exist just as much in non scientific endeavors, and so attaching the word science to them seems meaningless, and at worst muddies people’s understanding of science.
    - thereddaikon 6y ago
      Scientific processes =/= scientific method The problem is with the business of science. Processes are very much a business concept that most adults can understand. We develop new processes every day Furthermore it was used plural so it can't possibly be the scientific method because not only is that a proper noun but there is only one scientific method while there are many scientific processes. And yes they can be specific to science. The process of getting published in a peer reviewed journal is unique to academia. Or what about the process of getting grant funding for research? I know, you will say but that isn't science. But nobody is arguing against the validity of the scientific method. At least nobody worth listening to. When people say there are flaws with science that must be addressed they are saying they are flaws with the business of science. And the scientific community is not doing a great job of fixing them.
neonological 6y ago
These are political flaws and flaws with human systems. You are missing the logical flaw buried within the scientific method itself. Nothing in science and therefore reality can be proven to be true. We can only falsify things in science. What this means is every claim ever made by anyone or any scientist from now to eternity can never be proven to be true. We can only make repeated attempts at falsifying things. After we fail to falsify a thing enough times we can say, hey this theory is maybe true. That is the best science can do and that is what nobody, including most of the people on hacker news do NOT understand. There is literally no such thing as an actual “fact” in science and therefore in reality as we know it. This flaw is the origin of most of the distrust in science it is also the reason why blind trust of the scientific method itself is wrong. No claim made by a scientist has actually ever been proven.
- kbelder 6y ago
  Why do you see it as a flaw? Constantly shedding false beliefs equates to constant improvement. We all want to get closer to the truth; science is one technique for doing so, and since there's no direct line to God, it's the most efficient one. It has the best corrective feedback loops.
  - neonological 6y ago
    I see it as a flaw because in logic and math, it is very possible to prove your theorems to be true. It is just not possible to do so in reality. Logic is a game with a limited domain. Reality has an unknown domain, hence the inability to prove anything. Because this feature doesn’t exist in science it is therefore a flaw. Additionally it doesn’t align with human intuition. Humans assume by default that things can be proven and that facts exist. The truth is that nothing can be proven and facts don’t actually exist. This is counter intuitive and therefore although science is the best tool we have, the counterintuitive qualities science possesses justifies calling these things flaws. This relatively unknown “flaw” is what drives most of the debate in the political arena. No scientist can ever prove global warming to be true. It is fundamentally impossible. The debate would be over long ago if there was some way for science to prove global warming to be real.

jp555 6y ago

People should be more aware... of the collapse of science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

analog31 6y ago
The replication crisis is serious, but it's not the collapse of science. Maxwell's equations still stand, for example. You can still identify chemical elements from their spectra. And so forth. That is not to diminish the problem. Over-reliance in purely statistical methods has gotten us in trouble -- in some fields more than others. Probably the main issue is that the fields affected are ones that happen to the biggest right now, with potential impact on quality of life and public policy. Fields that are doing a better job of weathering the storm, such as physics, have tended to have a larger tool belt, and the use of statistics is kept in check by other methods such as the development of theory, and the ability to study problems from multiple vantage points. Also, physicists can choose our battles, and only look at problems where more robust statistics can be used.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  Even in the fields most affected, I'm not aware of any knowledge generation efforts outside of science that are going better. It might just be that the social sciences and medicine are really hard, and our best efforts fail often. Edit: I mean the best effort we could reasonably make as a society, naturally there have been individuals and groups who have been doing things they knew or should have known were wrong for their own reasons.
  - a_conservative 6y ago
    This comment really made me think, thank you for that. I agree with everything you said. I think the danger comes from people using results that aren't (can't?) be replicated and treating them as if they were fact. "It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so."

avsteele 6y ago

As a working physicist I think the authors suggestions are not likely to improve education. Discussions of Kuhn are just not appropriate for secondary school science education. These classes are for teaching the bare basic of bio, chem, and physics to see if the kids enjoy them. As it stands they can barely do this. They aren't there to teach 'how science works' except in the most rudimentary sense, and its hard for me to think science education would be improved by removing core material in favor of a discussion of the peer review process! The author's suggestion might be appropriate for social studies, or a a special, AP level class where logical positivism, Karl popper, and Kuhn might be discussed. I refer the interested reader here to: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2975230-scientific-method-in-practice https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2975230-scientific-metho...

krona 6y ago
I know half a dozen or so PhD's in microbiology at one of the leading research institutions. They don't understand the philosophy of science beyond what I was taught aged 10-11. I don't think the basics of Karl Popper and Kuhn are beyond the grasp of a secondary school student, considering their importance not just in science but in the world we now live in.
- ta988 6y ago
  Thats because many PhD are just glorified technicians (same technicians we purged out of our labs doing one of the worst mistake of the last decades I believe). So we get all those PhD learning 3d printing, microcontrollers, programming for creating new devices, tools and whatever else. Where for technicians it would have been a much shorter turnaround. Of course the individuals learn new (basic level) skills. But it also impedes discovery and leaves a whole category of people out of the door. In PhD I was once told I couldn't put the technician on the authors list because he was paid to do his job...
  - ravel-bar-foo 6y ago
    The line between scientific and non-scientific contributions can be fuzzy. One would not put the supplier of a chemical in the authors list ... unless the synthesis and distribution was done as part of a collaboration and it is the compound which makes the experiment possible. But then, there is a lot of leeway in "collaboration"

amelius 6y ago

I can't blame people for being sceptical about science given all the crap that is in our food these days, all the fake nutrition science, fad diets, and the inability of governments to fix it.

JuliusPullo 6y ago

Science is always inconclusive. Theories are not theorems; everything is open to questioning, no matter how much sense it seems to make. That is why science advances, to begin with. And yet, people are told (mostly by politicians with agendas) that they are supposed to "believe" science, which of course means to believe the latest a scientist said. No, don't teach the young that they need to believe science. Teach them to question it, always. And to question it in a formal, disciplined and rational way, even if they agree with what is being said. Especially on issues like anthropogenic climate change, where the implied solution is to surrender individual freedoms to a omni-powerful faceless government that is supposed to protect us all.

neonological 6y ago
In a sense yes. Science cannot prove things to be true, but falsification is conclusive. If observations are 100% accurate you can definitively falsify things and conclude that something is false. The same cannot be said for proving something to be true.

peter_retief 6y ago

There are a lot of people who claim science in defence of an opinion. IMHO science has got to bad place and has become very political.

calebm 6y ago

After things like the food pyramid, it's hard to imagine why people would ever question what scientists say. /s

rmah 6y ago
Given that scientists had essentially zero say in the food pyramid, I fail to see how it's relevant here.
- frockington1 6y ago
  The government advertised the food pyramid as a scientific fact. About a year ago the government advertised the general population should not wear masks as a scientific fact as well
  - rmah 6y ago
    What does that have to do with scientists?
kertoip_1 6y ago
Are you referencing some specific event? Never heard of controversies linked to food pyramid

trey-jones 6y ago

I think it's natural for an expert in any field to be frustrated by the general public's lack of expertise. Indeed, as true expertise seems to become less and less common, I don't think it's unusual for this frustration to increase. I think this is the reason for the absurd notion that "everybody should learn to code" that was fairly pervasive on Hacker News a few years back. Thankfully that seems to have died down... As far as trusting the actual experts to make good decisions and tell the truth, that's tough. It seems to me that so many people are just out to get a quick buck. Often that means exaggerating and/or twisting the truth to suit a particular narrative. I'm not anti-capitalist, but there is clearly room for improvement to the system.

breck 6y ago

No mention of git. If it's not on the global information tracker, it ain't science. There's no excuse anymore. Let me repeat because this is important. If you aren't putting your research in Git, and publishing the repo, and are instead doing things like PDFs and Docs and private datasets, please don't call yourself scientist (exception: "bench" folks who are grinding out the data and not too involved in the analysis/publishing process). That was acceptable 50 years ago, but the environment has changed. That is not acceptable anymore. I don't care if that's not how academia does it. It's so obviously the right thing to do.

vngzs 6y ago
You have the right idea, but an unhelpful perspective. Certainly not everyone who isn't a software developer is a "phony scientist!" If you'd like to convince scientists to come around to your line of thinking, explain the problems with current research papers. Tell them about the problems with publishing papers only, how others struggle to reproduce their research, and how it leaves much bad research that would be invalidated far sooner except that the information to recreate their trial was absent. Then explain how sharing the code and data with Git (or similar) can solve this problem. You'll find that you are much more persuasive.
- breck 6y ago
  I agree with you that this isn't a persuasive approach. But I'm cutting to the chase. If anyone is working on this—helping onboard academics and non-programmers to git—this is an idea I'm looking to support (as an investor, donor, or whatever).
  - a_conservative 6y ago
    Isn't git an implementation detail here? Git repos don't have to be publicly available. They also don't have to contain history or multiple versions at all. I'm guessing what you really want is: 1) open formats for data 2) plain text instead of proprietary blobs 3) the ability to replicate calculations easily 4) the ability to see some sort of evolution or mistake-fixing in the project's history.

imwillofficial 6y ago

The need for the public? There is a need for scientists to know how science works.

pdamoc 6y ago
The University of Medicine where I got my Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering is now teaching a course in Homeopathy. So, yeah.... there is also a need for "scientists" to know how science works.

endisneigh 6y ago

I question the premise of this article - what evidence is there that the general population doesn’t understand how science works? I think they know perfectly well how it works - and that like everything else it’s been corrupted by politics and money. Arguably the only fields of science free from this corruption are physics and chemistry, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I was wrong about that.

leetcrew 6y ago
skepticism is good. people should be skeptical of science, especially by the time it reaches popular media. but skepticism isn't very useful unless you can evaluate roughly how skeptical to be about a particular finding. five sigma physics finding replicated by multiple studies? probably good, but there's always some chance of systemic error. n=10 psychology study never replicated and all the subjects were white male college students? let's take that one with a big grain of salt.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Understanding this is probably the best lesson I took away from my Six Sigma Black Belt training.
hannasanarion 6y ago
How often have you heard the phrase "gravity/evolution/sedimentation/cosmology is just a theory". Maybe some of the people who are using that are rhetorical, but as somebody who was very invested in the Evangelical Christian community in Arizona for the better part of a decade, there are a lot of people who believe it genuinely, that when scientists use the word "theory", it should be understood to mean "guess".
- rmrfrmrf 6y ago
  But that's what "theory" means. It is, in fact, a guess; a guess that could be flat-out wrong the second a piece of contradictory evidence comes to light. But, instead of acknowledging that, for some reason a large group of Science Defenders have chosen this hill to die on where actually theory means infallible truth that mustn't be challenged, especially not from the likes of the common man. There is such a drive to prove the religious wrong that we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and created some kind of anti-religion where all skepticism is immediately put down and skeptics are excommunicated.

jes 6y ago

I found this assertion, near the end of the article, questionable: “Science as inquiry,” with its focus on evidence and logic, can do no more than communicate the details of a few empirical studies. To my knowledge, inquiry can be as broad or as narrow as one wishes to make it. The utility of evidence and logic is not limited to narrow domains, is it? I hope I’m not just cherry picking something to satisfy my own biases.

DanielBMarkham 6y ago

I don't think most folks understand the problem, although the essay is getting there. In general, I don't think epistemology can be taught until pupils have enough world experience to map what's being taught with the rest of the body of scientific literature. In general, and I am wildly stereotyping, all people want a quick answer and then to move on. Younger people tend to do this quicker. Older people tend to dwell too long on all of the possibilities. Epistemological understanding of how science actually works encourages us to accept both of these tendencies as being needed. That's a tough thing to get across if people are already predisposed to learning the quick answer and going to the next topic, whether that's in a blog entry, book, or secondary school education. I'm not sure it's possible. Quite related: I published this a couple of days ago. Been debating whether or not to submit it here. It's a difficult subject. It's extremely important, but sadly simply because it's important doesn't mean people will be able to accept or understand it. https://danielbmarkham.com/its-time-to-intellectually-grow-up/ https://danielbmarkham.com/its-time-to-intellectually-grow-u... tl;dr This is a problem because it's not the kind of thing that people consume well. See HN reactions.

ad404b8a372f2b9 6y ago

I was having this exact discussion with a philosophy of science major a few days ago. We were both bothered by the current fetishization of science. It's troubling that otherwise well-educated, logical people have come to elevate science as this god-like authority, and scientific consensus as the source of all truths. The discussion came to Kuhn and the often touted belief in popular culture that science is not always completely right but in essence it's one big model of nature that keeps getting better and so we should trust it implicitly, while ignoring the concept of paradigm shift that arises specifically from people outside the consensus. Coupled with the fact that dissent gets blurred with denialism, and that the absence of evidence has come to mean "evidence of absence" on the news, it's become really tricky to discuss things critically without being openly mocked. I wish I had time to read more philosophy, even as a scientist you learn a whole bunch about science, it's really enlightening.

frockington1 6y ago
> Coupled with the fact that dissent gets blurred with denialism This is what gives me the biggest headache. When discussing any politically motivated topic you can't ask questions that even remotely disagree with the popular Science opinion of the day. I had a professor scold me for asking if there were any natural phenomenon that may also be contributing to rising CO2 levels
- jfengel 6y ago
  The professor has without doubt heard the question thousands of times, by those with dishonest intent. Because the answer is always no. There are no natural phenomena that coincide precisely with the industrial revolution. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere tracks exactly the amount of fossil fuels being dug out of the ground. CO2 levels had been stable for millennia before that, and then they changed sharply. Nothing natural has gone on to change that. If the question were intended honestly, you wouldn't call it "disagreement". You'd be asking for information and would make your decision after you had it. If your description is correct, that's why your professor scolded you. The name for disagreeing without knowledge is "denial". The name for asking questions that you don't really intend to listen to the answers is "sea lioning", which is a tactic for wasting time and frustrating people. It's dishonest and rude. If the situation was as I understood it from your description, I'm not surprised that they spoke sharply to you.

tgv 6y ago

> Moreover, scientific agreement among experts —typically interpreted by logical empiricists as the result of univocal scientific method and as an indicator of truth— should be seen more critically for what it is: social agreement. Isn't the whole point of science that you can get out of that by trying? Apply your theories in practice, and see if they work. It doesn't matter whether the theory goes with or against general consensus. That unfortunately doesn't hold for theories that describe only minute, very restricted domains. And that not only includes fields like dark matter, where experimentation is nearly impossible, but also 99.9% of the social sciences, where consensus is the only yard stick for theories that by far outsize the data on which they are based. Fortunately for the discussion, the author kept that thorny problem far away by focusing on the safe area of natural sciences. Now back to the article: "science education ... should normalize scientific disagreement (distinguishing it from science denialism) and include discussion of the social epistemological institutions and processes by which scientific inquiry proceeds. These include the education of future researchers as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, the peer review process for grants and publications, the discursive interactions of researchers in laboratory meetings and conferences, diversity and inclusion issues, and the norms of scientific integrity." While social aspects of practicing science may throw some light on why one theory gets more traction than another, it seems to me putting the cart before the horse. It will not make students appreciate the difference between the competing theories, but will make science education a dull exercise in processes and factoids, to be listed in a test, where you'll get a passing grade if you can keep "epistemological" and "inquiry" apart. And in the worst case, it will undermine the last bit of trust in science, because it's just an attempt at a centralizing power grab. Who proves that which ideas about these issues are right? I doubt the author has even got the tiniest bit of data to underline her argument.

isolli 6y ago

Simplifying a bit, I believe it's important to distinguish between hard, experimental science (physics), not fully experimental science (climate, medicine) and social science (economics). For instance, medicine is not fully experimental in the sense that you cannot take the same person and subject it repeatedly to the same, or a slightly different, experiment. Hard science has a) better tools at its disposal (repeatable experiments) and b) is not subject to the influence of financial interests. Companies don't care about this or that theory, all they care about are results that work and provide useful technology. Some companies do, however, have a strong interest in the outcomes of research in climate change, medicine, and economics, so they will exercise influence on research precisely in those domains that are less founded in experimentation and more uncertain.

aww_dang 6y ago
Governments have a stake in these fields as well.

frockington1 6y ago

This article classifies differing opinions into 2 categories, those I like (disagreement) and those I don't like (deniers). The strategies outlined here will further decrease the publics faith in science.

CA0DA 6y ago

This does not address a concern I have had: models are not science. Many models can be created, and then over time one if found to be correct, so we assume that one can predict the future. It cannot.

lettergram 6y ago

Honestly, as someone who spends a significant amount of time reading and attempting to replicate papers... I have very little faith in most papers, though the concepts themselves often appear okay. My friends and family also doing research have added to my questioning most papers. It’s probably healthy to have a lot of skepticism, the paper itself should convince through the research methods and sample size. Unfortunately, the incentives align more with skirting the truth than being honest. That’s why each paper, in my opinion, requires a healthy dose of skepticism. As an example, in January 2021 the PCR protocol to identify covid-19 was finally updated and a warning sent out that there were possible issues. Specifically, issues that would lead to higher false positives. My wife who does PCRs regularly immediately identified the issue in AUGUST 2021. This means it had to have been known prior to that date, yet wasn’t discussed for political reasons

webmaven 6y ago
> My wife who does PCRs regularly immediately identified the issue in AUGUST 2021. Well, heck, predicting the future and pointing out other people's mistakes is dead easy when you have access to a time-machine, isn't it?
- lettergram 6y ago
  The point I'm making is they knew months prior to announcing it that there was an issue. If we were worried about the "science" it would have been announced right away, instead it was the day after inauguration.

Tycho 6y ago

Maybe some billionaire could set up an institution to keep scientists honest. Like it wouldn't try to do any original research, it would be purely dedicated to finding whether published research replicates, verifying the statistical analyses on which published research rests, and busting academic fraud (eg. citation rings). Over time legitimate scientists would crave its stamp of approval and make their research easier to verify (eg. publish the source code). It would be a good training ground and employment scheme too.

swayvil 6y ago

Our society is and always has been primarily authoritarian in its thinking. Merely "explaining how it works" isn't going to change that one speck. To change it you'd have to change the people in some fundamental way.

biffstallion 6y ago

SCIENCE! Except for gender DNA.

biffstallion 6y ago

SCIENCE!!! Except for Gender DNA, Macroeconomics, Voter Fraud Detection, etc...

pdamoc 6y ago

I think that there really is a need for the general public to know what science IS. How it came about, how it works. Unfortunately, for that to happen at the level it needs, there needs to be a change in how Education works everywhere. We are still using a 19th century tool designed for a very different context. Maria Montessori tried to bring the tool into the 20th century about 100 years ago but who is trying to do the same for the 21st century? The way I found it explained best was in an Alan Kay presentation where he spoke about the insight Francis Bacon got into the fact that the brain works in a faulty way and what to do about it. Scientific thinking is how we get around the very well documented [1] array of cognitive biases. Learning about those biases in ways that a) makes them obvious, b) provides ways to compensate might make a person able to detect them early and to approach them in the proper way. Another wonderful tool I found is Chris Argyris's Ladder of Inference. Trouble is that this kind of tools need to be inculcated at a very early age so they get used and become second nature to the person. Learning them later in life is a heck lot more difficult, especially when they conflict with fundamental aspects of one's identity. [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitive_bias_codex_en.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...

ajarmst 6y ago

I'd settle for a rough familiarity amongst science journalists and their editors, but I like the aspiration. Couple of questions, though: do we mean how science should work, or how it actually works in practice (and no, not just Kuhn: his conclusions were only surprising to other non-scientists, and primarily seem to have been valuable for Sociologists nursing a discipline-wide inferiority complex and 'scientists' like Andrew Wakefield who want to blame the establishment and not their own sociopathy.) We're coming up on two decades since Ionnidis, and Psychology still seems to be primarily a collection of unconfirmed small population studies of undergraduate psych students. Medical doctors can't explain or apply freshman statistics. Research directions (and, too often, results) are chosen by investors and donors. The modern west has more taboos about what assumptions and received truths it is permissible to question and investigate than the most repressive theocracies. Much of theoretical physics seems to be aimed at exploring untestable hypotheses and frameworks. And, my personal favourite: the phrase 'scientific consensus' is now used so often and without critique and introspection that it's actually become trite.

johndoe42377 6y ago

Lol, it won't fly. First of all, science is just a methodology of establishing truth about some aspects of what we call reality. Everything which cannot be verified by a reproducible experiment is not a science. All theories, therefore, are mere theories. Analogue of religious sects. It also automatically disqualifies all humanities, and especially socially constructed bullshit like race theories, etc. That, in turn, will strip high social status of academics and "people doing science" from way too many people (which is absolutely good, so it will never happen). Science as a social construction took (along with big government) place of religion as prestigious occupation and the way to have a high social status.

trashtester 6y ago

From about the 1600s, science gained authority at the expense of theology due to its ability to predict and manipulate the physical world. Physics, chemestry and engineering allowed us to do things that would have been seen as magical a couple of centuries earlier. Those nations and individuals who rejected science became losers. But as the term "science" gained in authority, other institutions were losing influence, in particular theologians and similar ideologes. Many of these wanted to be seen as having authority similar to what scientists enjoyed. Since most people realize that "Theology" is not real science, new names and tactics have been invented to help camuflage institutions as "scientific", such as "Intelligent Design", "<insert identity group> studies" where the practitions care more about the idelogical consequences than the ability to predict real world outcomes. These institutions will both promote science denialism within their own ranks and also cause it within opposing ideologies. Both intelligent design advocates and gender studies advocates will reject findings from science (mostly biology) when they contradict their preferred ideology, even when the findings are as close to scientific facts as it is possible to come. Both do that by presenting bad faith arguments and also labelling non-believers within their ranks as what would in earlier times be labeled "evil heretics". When even "scientific facts" are attacked like that, other disciplines with varying predictive power, such as climate science, economics or cosmology will suffer even more effective assaults by ideologes. If we cannot somehow stop this developement, we are heading for another "Dark Age". I honestly dont know how this developement can be stopped at this point. At the very least, it will require cooperation across idelogical boundaries to do so, and this can only happen if the science denial of both sides are simultaneously purged.

WildParser 6y ago
I'm not very optimistic about avoiding a "Dark Age". Rational thinking and the idea to look at data seems to be completely foreign to most people I know. Higher educated people seem to absorb and repeat dogmas and propaganda unfiltered even faster. Some patterns I have come across: Alpha-Rational: Claiming that ideas that come from authority (dogma) or self (narcissism) are rational - rejecting to look at any data. Anti-Rational: Reject the idea to look at data "life is uncertain", "data is garbage", "it's immoral to look at data" - although there is a lot of good data and drawing conclusions is not even difficult. Malicious rational: Know your science and cherry-pick data for profit to support the highest bidder.

OliverJones 6y ago

A long time ago I studied biochem in university. It took me until the third time memorizing the Krebs cycle (energy metabolism) to start asking "how the heck did Krebs et al figure this out?" And I had already read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I memorized Krebs for the SECOND time. I, personally, got stuck in received wisdom for too long. Science is a discipline for confronting mystery. It's about what we don't know. It's also big business, driven by money, prestige, and power (like most human endeavors). In that sense, it's a lot like religion. Religion, as practiced in the US, has the four pillars of the Wesleyan quadrilateral: * Scripture * Tradition * Reason * Experience * The Pennsylvania science-teaching guidelines notwithstanding, school science curricula are mostly teaching "scripture." No, I don't mean wakky interpretations of ancient texts. I mean memorizing received wisdom and getting tested on accurate memories. The Krebs cycle is an advanced hunk of that kind of scripture. Tradition comes into play when, for example, grad students fear to challenge the stuff discovered by the Nobel laureates who run their labs. It's valid to critique the way tradition controls inquiry. Reason and experience: Those are cognitive tools to use when doing the Karl Popper thing: dreaming up things that can be proven wrong and then trying to prove them wrong. But we need at least some scripture and tradition to apply reason and experience. Learning science is hard even when it's just "scripture" and "tradition". Embracing the mysteries -- the unknown -- is even harder. Science means accepting that "everything we know might be wrong." We should still try.

GoodJokes 6y ago

Honestly, it sounds like scientists need to understand science better.

noxer 6y ago

The media use "the science" not "science" to tell people what is "the truth". That is the problem. People are first told that something is "the truth" then if it later turns out to be wrong it eradicates trust in science. Its backwards. In science if something is proven wrong, it should increase trust because it demonstrates that mistakes if made are found and corrected. It demonstrates that science does accumulates more valid than invalid information over time because invalid stuff is removed. There is also a fear to accepting that we (humanity or science) dont know something yet. Its better to simply accept that we dont know than to choose or worse let others choose based on no evidence.

neonological 6y ago
yeah that’s true. Most people are searching for definitive truths. The problem is it doesn’t exist, and science is the closest thing it.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

I read Carl Sagan's, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" and it really nailed home how many issues are caused by a fundamental lack of understanding and belief in science. It's a great short read.

lavamantis 6y ago

It a way science is very similar to free speech. Its can be very harmful when misused, but generally the answer to bad science is not LESS science, but BETTER science. The proper role of the education system of any given country, and a good predictor of its success, is how well it teaches us to evaluate the difference.

neonological 6y ago

Science has political problems and social problems yes. But many people don’t understand that from a purely logical perspective there is a fundamental flaw with science. Almost no one knows this. You cannot prove anything to be true with science. Therefore, in other words, you cannot prove anything to be true in reality as we know it. Even when your observations are 100% accurate it is fundamentally impossible to prove anything in science (and your observations can never be 100% accurate). If you understand this concept then you fundamentally understand science and you’ll be able to see where all the debate and misunderstandings about science comes from. Every single claim made by a scientist has never ever actually been proven ever. The key is that you need to understand why science can’t prove anything. There is an extremely logical explanation for why proof is impossible in reality. Proof is the domain of logic, not science. To quote Einstein: “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Additionally there are two main axiomatic assumptions about the physical world that has to be made that have to be made in order for science to work as a logical consequence. You must assume logic is true (which is recursive and obvious) but you also must assume probability is true. Probability applying to the real world does not arise as a theoretical consequence of axiomatic logic being true. Probability itself must be assumed to be an axiom alongside logic, science works because we assume it works.

motohagiography 6y ago

The root of this discussion is about whether science is necessary or suitable for public policy, and we should probably accept that policy is not scientific, and nor should it be. The alleged scientific findings used as a basis for policy justifications today is mostly compromised and irreproducable junk designed to befog, mesmerize, and browbeat average people into submission, while an elite for whom words have no fixed meanings struggle among themselves for control of bureaucracies. When policymakers say they defer to "the science" it is forfeiting their responsibility to act with wisdom and good judgment. Democracy predates science by some three millennia, and to say that we can or should create a scientific democracy is nonsense. Democracy is an ideal and a quality, it is not a system that can be engineered from data with scientific findings or processes. Further, if you engineer a society with policies based on data and laws that only a few initiates understand, that is the specific antithesis to democracy. In the west, we use democratic processes to produce our elite classes, but unfortunately we do not produce wise ones, and they're happy to dodge accountability by blaming scientists or the weather. Science doesn't create trust in authority either, it produces verification, reproducibility, and models for new tools. Science and data are neither sufficient, nor necessary conditions for wise policy that supports life and creates growth, even when it has made some great contributions to our well being. To say that science shows a given policy is good because it has a scientific justification is circular reasoning. When you say you believe in science, either you practice it, or you trust its institutional practitioners, which basically means you trust the systems of academic administrators to make policy. Again, not democratic at all. We actually don't need a public understanding of how science works, we just need to hold policymakers to a standard of accountability where they can't slither behind binders of gibberish when called to account for their decisions.

rayiner 6y ago
This is a really important point--exemplified by COVID. You can't delegate governance to scientific experts. That's not their job and they're not qualified to do it. Don't get me wrong--public officials should base policies on the scientific consensus, when it exists. But a scientific consensus can't tell you what to do about it. It can't tell you what trade-offs to make, or how to integrate a scientific truth into a social framework. Most important, politicians must deal with the fact that science often doesn't have clear answers on important matters. Something as simple as "should pregnant women get the COVID vaccine?" is the subject of dispute.

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6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago

This article is complaining that people are taught a rigorous form of science that not enough science meets, and asks that it’s replaced by some sociology of science to determine which scientists to trust. It’s not wrong, and maybe I’m too much of an idealist in believing that “science as inquiry” is the right goal to aspire to, and that it’s feasible. In my mind, we just don’t teach kids science as inquiry well. It’s too much like the heavily complained about way we teach math, where it’s formulas you just plug things into. Kids can plug a, b, and c into a quadratic formula but then can’t handle a word problem. Likewise with science. You’re taught it as a bunch of rote mechanical steps at the expense of teaching to do the “word problems.” Any science education track that doesn’t include a stats and experimental design course isn’t teaching science as a tool, in my book. It’s just teaching facts. Maybe I’m wrong and teaching kids more than memorization is too lofty a goal, but I think statistical illiteracy is more of a barrier than “science as inquiry” is.

andred14 6y ago

It is obvious now that some "doctors" and "scientists" have been lying constantly in 2020/2021

guscost 6y ago

Rant about COVID and the death of (popular/political) science is linked in my bio. You will probably either hate it or love it.

auganov 6y ago

> “Science as inquiry” education, at its best, teaches students an ideal set of methods for improving scientific knowledge. It suggests that our current scientific knowledge has grown, over the past four centuries since the scientific revolution (when modern science is widely held to have come about), in this ideal way. Even if that were true, there is an implicit dependence on students trusting that what they are taught in the classroom has been discovered and justified in this ideal way. Very much agree with the author that the social aspect of the industry of science should be taught more. But it's exactly thanks to "'science as inquiry' education" that so many embrace mainstream climate change theories. Many genuinely think there's some undeniable evidence and logic making "climate scientists" believe in cataclysmic runaway warming. The truth is, we don't even have good temperature measurements. Most "climate scientists" have no expertise in measuring temperatures. They're not that interested in improving temp monitoring tech. They're not embracing satellite temperature monitoring which is superior in almost every way to traditional surface stations. Instead, they tend to ignore it or focus on its (few) flaws. Why? Because satellite data shows no net warming since 1998 which contradicts many mainstream theories. The guy who pioneered satellite temp monitoring happens to be a major skeptic. GISS, the most widely used temperature dataset is based on simple old-school surface stations. Not that many of them, in fact. It's so bad that they're known to publish errors so blatant that they have been spotted (by "deniers") by checking against local weather websites. One has to understand negative results are inherently uninteresting to scientists and the broader public. It's not that rouge scientist conspire to dominate a field. When you conclude there's nothing going on or that there are fundamental epistemic limitations to studying a given field, you have much less of an incentive to participate. If you still do, your work is bound to be "against" [what's out there], rather than "for" something. Hard to make a career out of being a hater. Or to even enjoy it.

ascar 6y ago
The thing is that the widespread believe in global warming doesn't just stem from temperature measurements, but a multitude of other observable facts that do fit in the theory (i.e. experiments do not invalidate the theory). But just picking up your satellite argument. A quick google search reveals many articles disputing that satellites show no increase in global temperatures. One article [1] even claims corrected sattelite measurements show a higher increase than surface measurements. [1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-data-shows-140-faster-warming-since-1998 https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-da...

bartimus 6y ago

The whole concept of "scientific consensus" is unscientific. It's always politically loaded. It also screws up the concept of checks and balances when the reason of existence for certain scientific jobs (and titles) is dependent on the existence of (and payed for by) a certain political issue.

dfilppi 6y ago

People dont trust politicians, and they are the ones selectively using science as a justification for increasing their power.

deleted 6y ago

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afandian 6y ago

Any developers who want to help with the scholarly infrastructure that underpins scholarly publishing workflows (DOIs, scholarly metadata and related things), Crossref have a job opening. Speaking personally, it's one of those rare jobs that feels embedded in an important mission. https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-developer/ https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-dev... (but only open for a couple more days!)

specialist 6y ago

Quoting the OC: > Believing based on trust is a pervasive human practice, not confined to scientific inquiry. Rationalists ignore the role of identity in beliefs. My socially awkward brother transmuted from becoming the next Jacques Cousteau to full throated Young Earth Creationist. He had the best schooling. He assisted with biological and sociological research. Why did my brother flip? I've been pondering this for decades. In a nutshell, my theory is he traded his beliefs for acceptance. He adopted a completely new identity in order to belong to a group. The evidence for the centrality of identity as basis of our beliefs, what some LessWrong pundits called Belief As Attire, is slowly accumulating. No amount of scientific literacy, media literacy, critical thinking, logic will successfully inoculate people from cults. There's some new research that shows early exposure helps. Such as teaching kids about pseudosciences like cryptozoology. Similarly, there's some evidence that empathy and community engagement and socialization help protect people from falling prey to cults.

pjettter 6y ago

the problem is that in schools, kids learn not science, but examples of science, without understanding what science is. They don't learn biology, but examples of biology, without understanding any context, history, aims. They don't learn about languages, but just an example of a language, and only small parts of it. There is no context, and especially, there is not even an attempt to connect one thing to another, or to provide any context or relation. Sadly, schools don't even teach learning anymore. They just teach succeeding by imitation. So yes, we're in big trouble. Or they, if you're old enough.

carapace 6y ago

The whole point of science is that you don't need to trust someone's words, you can repeat the experiment for yourself. I trust physicists (in re: physics) more than I trust my mother. But if you can't repeat the experiment, if you can't make precise predictions that can be invalidated, is what you're doing really science? This is crucial when it comes to fixing policy: economists, sociologist, psychologists and other quasi-scientific folks are the astrologers and numerologists of our current age. They trade on the successes of genuine science to garner political legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. But by doing that they tarnish the public perception of the impartiality of the proper scientist, diminishing their own glamour and polluting the public's appreciation for the value of genuine science. Science gets respect from pretty much everybody (whether they own it or not. Very few anti-science folks go so far as to deny themselves the benefits of science like electricity and aspirin.) It's the "soft sciences" that can't make predictions, that can't be tested, and that are used as political leverage that people (rightly IMO) don't trust. - - - - Let me throw out a personal example. There's a system of knowledge and practice called "Neurolinguistic Programming" that I know from personal experience works really really well, but if you go look at the Wikipedia page for it it's decried as pseudo-science. I have little respect and no trust for the "scientists" who can't replicate NLP stuff because I've been able to do it as well as tens or hundreds of thousands of other people pretty easily. Now that's bad enough but if these "scientists" managed to persuade legislators to make laws against NLP on the basis of their "science" I would see that as a very serious problem. (Although not a problem with science. Science isn't the problem because science is not what they are doing.) Yet I am not an anti-vaxxer nor a climate denialist. - - - - Bottom line: Science has nothing to prove. Repeat the experiment for yourself. E = mc² for everybody everywhere. That's science.

Chris2048 6y ago

The word "science" is the hard end of what should be a gradient. Sometimes just "truth-seeking", evidence-based, quantitative or numerate are good enough without having to invoke the spectre of "science". Maybe we need a general term (rational?) for describing appropriate terms, of which "science" is only appropriate to some fields.

madhadron 6y ago

I don't think it's so much a public understanding issue, since most of the public doesn't understand much of anything about the world they live in. Rather, it's our inability as a society to deal with those who need facts to go away for their ends.