3 ms·

Who decides the truth? I don’t want to muddy the waters too much but i am concerned with current trend to appeal to science as an authority of truth to justify

Who decides the truth? I don’t want to muddy the waters too much but i am concerned with current trend to appeal to science as an authority of truth to justify whatever public policy is in play. Scientific publishing can be a chaotic process where a healthy skepticism should be maintained. The truth is never easy to ascertain. In fact, one of the highest cited papers from an epidemiologist is titled « Why Most Published Research Findings Are False ». I found it to be a good meta-analysis that could easily challenge my previous field of computer vision where often fantastical results were obtained on a data set but could not be reproduced elsewhere. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

fractionalhare 6y ago
Online discourse would be vastly improved if everyone meticulously cited peer reviewed papers and used no other substantiation. It still wouldn't be perfect, but at least there'd be a commitment to rigor. The current status quo is telling people they're wrong, citing nothing, and telling them they "just haven't done enough research."
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  Maybe it wouldn't improve because people mostly argue over differing values, not differing research.
agumonkey 6y ago
I'm no PhD but the more I read pubmed the more I realize that science truth is often a time vetted average. The recent decade has been obsessed with truth as an road to ideal life. I believe in local first reality now, relativistically so.
jaredwiener 6y ago
There's a major difference between coming to different conclusions from a set of data, with completely fabricating nonsense. @BadMedicalTakes (https://twitter.com/badmedicaltakes https://twitter.com/badmedicaltakes) is just one quick way to see some of the stuff thats out there. Can we at least all agree that germs cause disease, there are no nanobots in any of the COVID vaccines, and that masks are not dangerous?

fractionalhare 6y ago

Online discourse would be vastly improved if everyone meticulously cited peer reviewed papers and used no other substantiation. It still wouldn't be perfect, but at least there'd be a commitment to rigor. The current status quo is telling people they're wrong, citing nothing, and telling them they "just haven't done enough research."

readflaggedcomm 6y ago
Maybe it wouldn't improve because people mostly argue over differing values, not differing research.

agumonkey 6y ago

I'm no PhD but the more I read pubmed the more I realize that science truth is often a time vetted average. The recent decade has been obsessed with truth as an road to ideal life. I believe in local first reality now, relativistically so.

jaredwiener 6y ago

There's a major difference between coming to different conclusions from a set of data, with completely fabricating nonsense. @BadMedicalTakes (https://twitter.com/badmedicaltakes https://twitter.com/badmedicaltakes) is just one quick way to see some of the stuff thats out there. Can we at least all agree that germs cause disease, there are no nanobots in any of the COVID vaccines, and that masks are not dangerous?