14 ms·

When scientific orthodoxy resembles religious dogma

116 points by version_five 5y ago

api 5y ago
That's just human beings acting like human beings. Every orthodoxy behaves the same way up to a point because this is how primate power hierarchies behave. The thing that makes science different isn't that scientists are more rational than everyone else but that it's possible to challenge a scientific finding with evidence. Even with evidence some people will still resist, but if you publish your experiment and your findings and it gets replicated you at least have a chance of changing enough minds to change overall opinion quickly. Other kinds of dogmas such as religious or (most) political ideologies are untestable and therefore impossible to challenge in any way other than through force or sophistry (force of mental gymnastics?). Opinions in those spheres therefore change very, very slowly and usually more in response to unrelated events such as demographic shifts or wars than in response to anything relevant to the topic.
- skissane 5y ago
  > The thing that makes science different isn't that scientists are more rational than everyone else but that it's possible to challenge a scientific finding with evidence. Even with evidence some people will still resist, but if you publish your experiment and your findings and it gets replicated you at least have a chance of changing enough minds to change overall opinion quickly. I don't know. I'm quite a fan of Lynn Waterhouse's 2013 book Rethinking Autism: Variation and Complexity. Waterhouse argues that there has never been any good scientific evidence to support the existence of autism or ASD, that what evidence has accumulated undermines rather than supports the theory that it exists, and that it is past time that researchers abandoned the concept and moved on to something else. (At the end of her book, she tentatively proposes replacing the concept of autism/ASD with "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment".) But I very much get the impression that few want to take her argument seriously, not due to the quality of her arguments, but because people have so much invested into the concept of autism/ASD – there is a whole community of people who identify with the concept as a diagnosis for themselves and their family members, there are many professionals who have built their entire career on the concept, entire institutions, billions of dollars of funding (both for research and for support services), and Waterhouse's ideas are just too threatening to all of that for many people to seriously consider them. The social, cultural, political and economic/financial factors supporting the theory are more important than the question of its scientific truth. (To be clear, Waterhouse doesn't deny that the symptoms of autism/ASD, in their immense variety, actually exist. She has spent much of her career working with children who suffer from these symptoms, and she knows how disabling they can be for individuals and their families. But she argues that autism/ASD is a scientific dead-end in terms of actually finding effective treatments for these symptoms, that abandoning the concept is necessary to move the research forward to discovering their real causes, which will hopefully lead in turn to effective treatments for them.)
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    But researchers and clinicians don't believe that ASD is a single disorder. No professional assumes that clinical classification implies only a single underlying etiology, and a cluster of phenotypes for clinical distress is precisely what a classification is for.
    - skissane 5y ago
      In Waterhouse's book, she isn't simply assuming that "ASD is a single disorder". (Although she does argue that if you study the history of ASD research, a lot of it has been based on that assumption, and that even in recent years people still get funding for research projects which effectively presume that.) One of her arguments in particular is that the tying of the two symptom domains of social impairments and repetitive behaviours into a single disorder – or group of related disorders, or spectrum – (she doesn't think those three different framings of "ASD" ultimately change the conclusion) lacks good scientific justification. But, that was one of Kanner's most basic assumptions, and if you break that link what you have isn't autism anymore – you've actually got something much closer to her own proposal of "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment" (or, DSM-5 social pragmatic communication disorder with the repetitive behaviour exclusion removed)
  - clairity 5y ago
    my working hypothesis on spectrums of all sorts is that we inevitably misrepresent the extremes as separate phenomena (because, strong esteem boost for the “discoverer”), rather than the ends of a continuous distribution, and that causes us to misunderstand all sorts of as-yet-unexplained phenomena as problems. severe autism certainly looks like something different, but we’ve let the label, and the stigmatization that inevitably follows, to trickle down the distribution until it butts unnaturally right up against “normal” (asperger’s, in this example), creating cognitive dissonances we can’t reconcile. you also see this with adhd, introversion/extroversion, and all sorts of psychosocial categorizations.
    - skissane 5y ago
      > severe autism certainly looks like something different Some authors [0] have criticised that idea though. Severe ASD very often (but not always) co-occurs with intellectual disability, but intellectual disability with and without ASD don't actually look that different from each other, and we really have to ask how useful it is to distinguish ASD from non-ASD in cases of intellectual disability. Added to that, in many jurisdictions people with an ASD diagnosis get better services, so there is continuing pressure to reclassify people from ID without ASD to ID with ASD, not justified on any scientific grounds, but simply because they'll get better supports with the ASD label than without it. That has driven a lot of diagnostic substitution from pure ID to ID+ASD, and lends support to the argument that the whole thing is more about society and culture than actual science [0] see for example Graham Collins, "Does a Diagnosis of ASD Help Us to Help a Person with Intellectual Disabilities?" in Katherine Runswick-Cole, Rebecca Mallett, Sami Timimi (editors). Re-Thinking Autism: Diagnosis, Identity and Equality. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016. pp. 204–220
threatofrain 5y ago
> The only requirement is for ideas to be popular within a large community that finds them legitimate. We live in a community and aren’t individually capable of mastering all these modern competencies. The healthy way to manage these burdens is to share them with community members and to trade on faith or credibility. We can’t all be empiricists. Unfortunately communities can vary drastically in the number of lawyers, doctors, dentists, and scientists made available, and some have become thoroughly infected with misinformation, such as anti-COVID folks.
rgrieselhuber 5y ago
I can’t count the number of times I’ve had people tell me “I don’t think it’s appropriate to question science.” I’m always left speechless.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  Not going to defend that phrasing, but I do think that a lay person questioning *scientific consensus is generally of zero usefulness. Loeb's assertions are generally rejected by the scientific mainstream precisely because they are questioned. If they weren't questioned (if he wasn't a domain expert), they'd be ignored.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    I think they usually don't get anywhere, but i think its important that the general public realizes that science is a process, and one that can be argued about using evidence. I think a lot of harm comes from treating scientists like priests who reveal divine infalliable wisdom to the mere mortals - in a certain way it even promotes the crazies, since once people start treating science as Truth capital T, beyond questioning, its just as logical for them to switch to some other Truth, whether it be flat earth or whatever.
    - rejectedandsad 5y ago
      I really don't think most people are confused about this - most understand science is a process backed by evidence. When people say "trust the science" they aren't pointing to an immutable conclusion. Generally, at the level of lay people the science being discussed isn't even complicated enough where the process of inquiry is even terribly relevant - there's lots to learn about the origins of the Earth, but "trusting the science" on the fact that the solar system is heliocentric is perfectly valid outside of doing your own experiments. > since once people start treating science as Truth capital T, Woo backed by "science" (see every invocation of "quantum physics" in New Age shit) isn't new, and is not the same as the overwhelming consensus on the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, for instance.
- 5y ago
tomlockwood 5y ago
What amazes me is that so many people, including our venerable PG, are so good at identifying groupthink and orthodoxies, are sure they aren't part of those things, and yet see orthodoxies and groupthink threateningly hovering everywhere. And, the articles keep getting upvoted, by popular demand. So clearly a lot of people also think this way!
schleiss 5y ago
Galileo didn't have it easy either. The more push back, the more likely you'll write history. Even it means you have to face the inquisition or whatever name it has at the time...
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  Galileo didn't have it easy he was tortured. Current day academics do have it easy at least in the democratic countries. They might face criticism but not torture. Reminds me of a recent incident where a right-wing politician compared having to wear a Covid-mask to the Holocaust.
ahwvd37js 5y ago
I did my PhD in astrophysics, and I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas. I won't say crack pot because he is a legit tenured astronomer at Harvard, but I have seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count. (Eg, life could have evolved in interstellar space https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 ) Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo and the rest of the community is the Church when he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas.
- xqcgrek 5y ago
  Avi Loeb has become a punch line in my circles too
- toomim 5y ago
  Perhaps you're not aware that "fringe idea" is precisely the type of research that can turn out to usurp the mainstream and disrupt old paradigms. The idea that the earth travels around the sun was once a "fringe idea." > he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the ... untestability, of his ideas. The idea of the earth going around the sun was untestable until Tycho Brahe got enough data and Kepler put it together in a way that could more parsimoniously and accurate predict planetary motion. In other words, the experience that you describe perfectly fits into his argument. You might want to read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to get the full picture.
  - dekhn 5y ago
    The person you're criticizing got a PhD in astrophysics. They definitely would be familiar with all the situations you describe. They've probably also read the wikipedia page for Kuhn's book. The reality is that Loeb made a claim that is not inconsistent with evidence, but is very fanciful. And the alternative hypotheses are all simpler, and explain the observations well enough that I think either Occam's razor or common sense would say that unless Loeb can somehow conjure up some unquestionable data, it's unlikely his claim will ever be verified or falsified and the mainstream will continue to believe (rightly, I think) that we didn't just see an alien corvette. Hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras, unless you're on the African savannah, or something like that.
chunky1994 5y ago
While I appreciate why Avi Loeb would author an article like this (for those unfamiliar he posited that Oumuamua was of an intelligent alien origin and hence garnered some pushback), it seems a bit ungenerous in spirit to how science is done these days. He states that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence so the thesis that skepticism is healthy is still embedded here, however I think he's unwilling to consider (or unconcerned about the idea) that the alien origin claim could very well be misinterpreted/lead credence to a lot of crackpot claims in the lay public which is the source of most of the pushback. While we do not currently have an explanation for Oumuamua and I cannot intelligently speak on which of the four possibilities mentioned in the article is more likely, communicating science to the lay public is often better done once a theory has been absorbed into the general underpinnings of the larger scientific body of evidence at hand rather than when it is at the precipice to avoid inadvertently misleading people.
- gameswithgo 5y ago
  I heard him talk to, I think Joe Rogan, about Oumuamua, and he presented the case that the unexplained acceleration could not be outgassing because no tail was observed. He also said it was weird that the velocity of the object was effectively stationary compared to the average velocity of this area of the galaxy, as if it was a kind of lighthouse/beacon. This seemed pretty compelling to me. Eventually after digging deeper on both these topics I learned that it is absolutely possible to have outgassing that doesn't leave a tail, that could cause the observed acceleration. And that something being stationary relative to the other objects in this area of the galaxy is not at all unusual. This kind of made me feel he was either being disingenuous or was just too emotionally invested in it being aliens to think clearly. Sure, it could still be aliens, nonetheless, so could every rock and spot we see in the sky, though.
beervirus 5y ago
The scientific orthodoxy rejected the Covid-19 “lab leak conspiracy theory” as crazy, based on no evidence whatsoever. Trump supported it, therefore it must be wrong. It’s not looking so crazy anymore.
- epgui 5y ago
  Oftentimes the best we can do is make "educated guesses". Most domain experts, myself included, think it less likely that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab. This is not a unanimous position, and most scientists probably don't have a "dogmatic" view of this. Rather, we seek first to find and understand the consensus position, and then to test it. That you or anyone else might disagree, or might not be able to imagine what type of mental model would lead to such an "educated guess", neither reverses the burden of the proof, nor eliminates the presumption of good faith, nor Occam's razor. Taking the position that it came from a lab requires more assumptions and more unsubstantiated beliefs than not taking this position. It's just like Russel's teapot.
  - Gustomaximus 5y ago
    > Taking the position that it came from a lab requires more assumptions and more unsubstantiated beliefs than not taking this position. Does it? One view is it came from a lab. The other common view is it came from a wet market. There seems to be evidence the lab was studying covid. While the wet market was seafood focused and I'm yet to see anything showing wildlife meat, let alone bats, while respecting media not showing this doesn't mean they weren't there. Both are possible but it seems to me more likely a lab studying COVID (confirmed or likely?) plus has a history of multiple virus escapes has as good likelyhood and assumptions as an unproven a bat meat section at a seafood market from a bat that would have been likely had to have been transported over 1500km to reach the market if taken from the wild. Personally, I dont think we will ever know the truth and don't claim any answer is correct, but there seems less of a leap of faith on the lab than the wet market to me.
  - Mindless2112 5y ago
    "lab leak" does not necessarily imply "originated in a lab". The lab can bring in a virus from the wild to study and then have a leak.
segfault720 5y ago
The author of this article has been on several podcasts including Lex Fridman's, where he has discussed these issues further: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plcc6E-E1uU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plcc6E-E1uU .
stephc_int13 5y ago
Dogma, religious or otherwise, is nothing else than a by-product of the gregarious characteristics of our nature. The use of logic does not help much as long as emotions are strong, we can only reason by stepping back and be as detached as possible.
dekhn 5y ago
I've written before about this: there has long been a "protein orthodoxy" which always defaults to the hypothesis that if something interesting happened, protein did it. For example when people finally reached the interesting question "what is the molecule which confers heredity", almost everybody thought it had to be proteins, and the mainstream worked hard to ignore the entirely factual and reproducible findings until they couldn't any longer (basically, the period before Avery's experiment, and between it and Hershey/Chase). The same happened with ribosomes: the community insisted ribosomes were protein machines with some RNA decoration, even though experiments done in the 60s and 70s showed that RNA was the active element. Similarly, with ribozymes- RNA that folds up into structures and carries out specific enzymatic reactions. People worked really hard to avoid changing their mind that only proteins could be enzymes. Interstingly, the best example I've seen is the opposite: prions. When I was in grad school, the professor who was the expert on prions was at my institution, and had just about managed to run the experiments fully supporting his hypothesis (that prions are infection proteins and the replication process is distinct from that of bacterial or viral replication). The only way you could get the virologists to stop complaining was to point out that it wasn't theoretically impossible that proteins could catalyze other proteins to change shape in a chain reaction, and that Prusiner had reduced everything to a working system in mice that could be reproduced by anybody willing to wait the 60 days a single experiment took.
kristopolous 5y ago
All human institutions centered on thought and theory are susceptible to the same social illnesses. Science, religion, politics, programming... I've been working on a book about this for a while. The framework makes me sound like a bastard but I truly believe the comparison can withstand legitimate scrutiny. It's not that these institutions at their best are the same, it's that the same shams, grifters, cults and hoodwinkers exist in all of them. The same arguments from popularity, deceptions through marketing and pack animal mentalities. At their worst they are all the same. At their best, they are of course quite different. It's always worth remembering that even the most noble human project also has all the grotesque qualities of the human spirit buried within it. Diligence is always required.
- Mountain_Skies 5y ago
  They're the opposite of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
- 6510 5y ago
  The idea/theory/plan to dismiss things using poor methods is it self an idea worth dismissing that some how escaped sufficient scrutiny. But when it is removed (as it should be) there is the challenge preventing the opposite from happening. I suspect we are capable of getting both wrong at the same time. Like 2 shit storms making a poop tornado.
- bobthechef 5y ago
  Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
  - lioeters 5y ago
    From Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
  - ttonkytonk 5y ago
    Not all curves are straight lines.
analog31 5y ago
>>> Those who refuse to consider an unconventional idea in science are disturbingly similar to those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope While that's a headline and not the text of the article (hence possibly added by an editor), it is worth clarifying the history. When Galileo reported his telescopic observations, the Vatican astronomers went so far as to buy a telescope from him, and after some initial difficulty with it, confirmed his observations. The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened. As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved. An odd issue that we face with extraterrestrials, or non-earthly beings in general, is that they can be introduced as an explanation for anything, and have been for 5000+ years. We don't have a good way of scientifically investigating extraterrestrial hypotheses.
- TravelnSalesman 5y ago
  Ok, why did Inquisitor Bellarmine have the Copernican follower Giordano Bruno burned at the stake?
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't take HN threads further into religious, er, flamewar. Not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - analog31 5y ago
    As I understand it, Bruno was accused of heresy. The same fate would have awaited Galileo, but the Church stopped one step short of accusing Galileo of heresy. The words that I recall reading was that he was "vehemently suspected of heresy."
emmelaich 5y ago
Curious that he quotes "The Road not Taken" which may be "the most misread poem in America" https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misr...
arduinomancer 5y ago
This feels like the PG situation where people don't like the Mighty browser idea so he publishes an essay saying "Yeah well...look at the history of crazy ideas in science" Getting a little tired of people making this argument. It can be applied to literally any idea so its pretty meaningless to say.
Blikkentrekker 5y ago
The examples listed seem to be cases of broken clocks being right, which does happen, and it looks spectacular in history when they are, but it ignores how many broken clocks were rightly ignored. For the most part, exact scientists are willing to listen if radical ideas are backed up by evidence. — Einstein's ideas were quite radical at the time, but they were backed up by convincing mathematical reasoning and were accepted, however absurd it might have sounded that nonmassive light is influenced by gravity, or that such things as time dilation occur, and they were not actually observed until decades later. That being said, — there are definitely entire fields of science where the “mainstream consensus” seems to be based quite a bit on convention and simply things “truths that became repeated” but were never well substantiated, and when empirically justified by some experiments, sometimes later found to not be reproducible, or perhaps not occuring in the wild, and only in lab conditions.
ac42 5y ago
> Finding extraordinary evidence requires a commitment of extraordinary funds I would suggest that he answers to his own complaints. There is a great deal of prioritisation going on in science and fringe ideas require too large steps away from where we are today. The real break-throughs in science are ideas that massively reduce the size of the backlog. My guess is that these ideas will receive proper treatment them when the time is right.
8note 5y ago
The conclusion of the article, > The most important task before us as a civilization is to find freethinking actors from exoplanets and learn whether they have a better sense of what the play is all about. Does not at all match the arguments presented.
cozzyd 5y ago
I had a good guess as to what the byline would be from the title and I was right...
allemagne 5y ago
Unironically comparing yourself to Galileo is painful to read. It makes me feel embarrassed for the author. What is the point of this comparison? Actually persuading whatever fraction of a percentage of your readers who literally believe "scientists can NEVER be wrong"? The actual point of making such a comparison really just seems to be reassurance to your side of the argument, all while sneaking in an ad hominem against anyone who disagrees with you by comparing them to the Inquisition. Extraordinary claims do not simply require other extraordinary claims to have been true before. The author is apparently cognizant of this, so he should drop this self-aggrandizing cliche.
doctoboggan 5y ago
Matt O'Dowd at PBS Spacetime did a recent video[0] discussing how a certain Harvard Astronomer (the same author of this piece) has too quickly jumped toward claiming aliens as the answer. It's worth a watch. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sq658Okvao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sq658Okvao
DemocracyFTW 5y ago
"without bothering to look through Galileo Galilei’s telescope, philosophers overwhelmingly agreed on the incorrect notion that the sun moves around the Earth"—this is ridiculous, as if a look through Galileo's (not very powerful, by later century's standards) could tell you that the Earth circles around the sun. What it does show you is that the moon has mountains and is not a flat disk but a sphere (the latter already deducible from its shadows), that there are tiny specks that circle Jupiter, and that Saturn has handlebars (Galileo, for lack of his telescope's resolution, couldn't tell those were rings).
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
For one Galileo, there are thousands, if not millions, weirdos and fraudsters. So, statistically speaking, it is a rational decision to reject all unorthodox ideas and let authors walk the walk proving it.
achenatx 5y ago
most science is too complex for people to understand the data (e.g. climate change). Therefore science is almost always reduced to religion for the lay public. Ultimately whether you believe is based on if you have faith in the scientists.

116 points by version_five 5y ago

api 5y ago

That's just human beings acting like human beings. Every orthodoxy behaves the same way up to a point because this is how primate power hierarchies behave. The thing that makes science different isn't that scientists are more rational than everyone else but that it's possible to challenge a scientific finding with evidence. Even with evidence some people will still resist, but if you publish your experiment and your findings and it gets replicated you at least have a chance of changing enough minds to change overall opinion quickly. Other kinds of dogmas such as religious or (most) political ideologies are untestable and therefore impossible to challenge in any way other than through force or sophistry (force of mental gymnastics?). Opinions in those spheres therefore change very, very slowly and usually more in response to unrelated events such as demographic shifts or wars than in response to anything relevant to the topic.

skissane 5y ago
> The thing that makes science different isn't that scientists are more rational than everyone else but that it's possible to challenge a scientific finding with evidence. Even with evidence some people will still resist, but if you publish your experiment and your findings and it gets replicated you at least have a chance of changing enough minds to change overall opinion quickly. I don't know. I'm quite a fan of Lynn Waterhouse's 2013 book Rethinking Autism: Variation and Complexity. Waterhouse argues that there has never been any good scientific evidence to support the existence of autism or ASD, that what evidence has accumulated undermines rather than supports the theory that it exists, and that it is past time that researchers abandoned the concept and moved on to something else. (At the end of her book, she tentatively proposes replacing the concept of autism/ASD with "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment".) But I very much get the impression that few want to take her argument seriously, not due to the quality of her arguments, but because people have so much invested into the concept of autism/ASD – there is a whole community of people who identify with the concept as a diagnosis for themselves and their family members, there are many professionals who have built their entire career on the concept, entire institutions, billions of dollars of funding (both for research and for support services), and Waterhouse's ideas are just too threatening to all of that for many people to seriously consider them. The social, cultural, political and economic/financial factors supporting the theory are more important than the question of its scientific truth. (To be clear, Waterhouse doesn't deny that the symptoms of autism/ASD, in their immense variety, actually exist. She has spent much of her career working with children who suffer from these symptoms, and she knows how disabling they can be for individuals and their families. But she argues that autism/ASD is a scientific dead-end in terms of actually finding effective treatments for these symptoms, that abandoning the concept is necessary to move the research forward to discovering their real causes, which will hopefully lead in turn to effective treatments for them.)
- threatofrain 5y ago
  But researchers and clinicians don't believe that ASD is a single disorder. No professional assumes that clinical classification implies only a single underlying etiology, and a cluster of phenotypes for clinical distress is precisely what a classification is for.
  - skissane 5y ago
    In Waterhouse's book, she isn't simply assuming that "ASD is a single disorder". (Although she does argue that if you study the history of ASD research, a lot of it has been based on that assumption, and that even in recent years people still get funding for research projects which effectively presume that.) One of her arguments in particular is that the tying of the two symptom domains of social impairments and repetitive behaviours into a single disorder – or group of related disorders, or spectrum – (she doesn't think those three different framings of "ASD" ultimately change the conclusion) lacks good scientific justification. But, that was one of Kanner's most basic assumptions, and if you break that link what you have isn't autism anymore – you've actually got something much closer to her own proposal of "phenotypes of neurodevelopmental social impairment" (or, DSM-5 social pragmatic communication disorder with the repetitive behaviour exclusion removed)
- clairity 5y ago
  my working hypothesis on spectrums of all sorts is that we inevitably misrepresent the extremes as separate phenomena (because, strong esteem boost for the “discoverer”), rather than the ends of a continuous distribution, and that causes us to misunderstand all sorts of as-yet-unexplained phenomena as problems. severe autism certainly looks like something different, but we’ve let the label, and the stigmatization that inevitably follows, to trickle down the distribution until it butts unnaturally right up against “normal” (asperger’s, in this example), creating cognitive dissonances we can’t reconcile. you also see this with adhd, introversion/extroversion, and all sorts of psychosocial categorizations.
  - skissane 5y ago
    > severe autism certainly looks like something different Some authors [0] have criticised that idea though. Severe ASD very often (but not always) co-occurs with intellectual disability, but intellectual disability with and without ASD don't actually look that different from each other, and we really have to ask how useful it is to distinguish ASD from non-ASD in cases of intellectual disability. Added to that, in many jurisdictions people with an ASD diagnosis get better services, so there is continuing pressure to reclassify people from ID without ASD to ID with ASD, not justified on any scientific grounds, but simply because they'll get better supports with the ASD label than without it. That has driven a lot of diagnostic substitution from pure ID to ID+ASD, and lends support to the argument that the whole thing is more about society and culture than actual science [0] see for example Graham Collins, "Does a Diagnosis of ASD Help Us to Help a Person with Intellectual Disabilities?" in Katherine Runswick-Cole, Rebecca Mallett, Sami Timimi (editors). Re-Thinking Autism: Diagnosis, Identity and Equality. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2016. pp. 204–220

threatofrain 5y ago

> The only requirement is for ideas to be popular within a large community that finds them legitimate. We live in a community and aren’t individually capable of mastering all these modern competencies. The healthy way to manage these burdens is to share them with community members and to trade on faith or credibility. We can’t all be empiricists. Unfortunately communities can vary drastically in the number of lawyers, doctors, dentists, and scientists made available, and some have become thoroughly infected with misinformation, such as anti-COVID folks.

rgrieselhuber 5y ago

I can’t count the number of times I’ve had people tell me “I don’t think it’s appropriate to question science.” I’m always left speechless.

rejectedandsad 5y ago
Not going to defend that phrasing, but I do think that a lay person questioning *scientific consensus is generally of zero usefulness. Loeb's assertions are generally rejected by the scientific mainstream precisely because they are questioned. If they weren't questioned (if he wasn't a domain expert), they'd be ignored.
- bawolff 5y ago
  I think they usually don't get anywhere, but i think its important that the general public realizes that science is a process, and one that can be argued about using evidence. I think a lot of harm comes from treating scientists like priests who reveal divine infalliable wisdom to the mere mortals - in a certain way it even promotes the crazies, since once people start treating science as Truth capital T, beyond questioning, its just as logical for them to switch to some other Truth, whether it be flat earth or whatever.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    I really don't think most people are confused about this - most understand science is a process backed by evidence. When people say "trust the science" they aren't pointing to an immutable conclusion. Generally, at the level of lay people the science being discussed isn't even complicated enough where the process of inquiry is even terribly relevant - there's lots to learn about the origins of the Earth, but "trusting the science" on the fact that the solar system is heliocentric is perfectly valid outside of doing your own experiments. > since once people start treating science as Truth capital T, Woo backed by "science" (see every invocation of "quantum physics" in New Age shit) isn't new, and is not the same as the overwhelming consensus on the efficacy of the Pfizer vaccine, for instance.
5y ago

tomlockwood 5y ago

What amazes me is that so many people, including our venerable PG, are so good at identifying groupthink and orthodoxies, are sure they aren't part of those things, and yet see orthodoxies and groupthink threateningly hovering everywhere. And, the articles keep getting upvoted, by popular demand. So clearly a lot of people also think this way!

schleiss 5y ago

Galileo didn't have it easy either. The more push back, the more likely you'll write history. Even it means you have to face the inquisition or whatever name it has at the time...

galaxyLogic 5y ago
Galileo didn't have it easy he was tortured. Current day academics do have it easy at least in the democratic countries. They might face criticism but not torture. Reminds me of a recent incident where a right-wing politician compared having to wear a Covid-mask to the Holocaust.

ahwvd37js 5y ago

I did my PhD in astrophysics, and I can tell you that the author's name has become synonymous with, shall we say, fringe ideas. I won't say crack pot because he is a legit tenured astronomer at Harvard, but I have seen his papers roundly critiqued on the merits at too many journal clubs to count. (Eg, life could have evolved in interstellar space https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.0613 ) Its a bit outrageous to claim he's Galileo and the rest of the community is the Church when he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the weakness, and untestability, of his ideas.

xqcgrek 5y ago
Avi Loeb has become a punch line in my circles too
toomim 5y ago
Perhaps you're not aware that "fringe idea" is precisely the type of research that can turn out to usurp the mainstream and disrupt old paradigms. The idea that the earth travels around the sun was once a "fringe idea." > he is so clearly using his tenure as a defense against the ... untestability, of his ideas. The idea of the earth going around the sun was untestable until Tycho Brahe got enough data and Kepler put it together in a way that could more parsimoniously and accurate predict planetary motion. In other words, the experience that you describe perfectly fits into his argument. You might want to read Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" to get the full picture.
- dekhn 5y ago
  The person you're criticizing got a PhD in astrophysics. They definitely would be familiar with all the situations you describe. They've probably also read the wikipedia page for Kuhn's book. The reality is that Loeb made a claim that is not inconsistent with evidence, but is very fanciful. And the alternative hypotheses are all simpler, and explain the observations well enough that I think either Occam's razor or common sense would say that unless Loeb can somehow conjure up some unquestionable data, it's unlikely his claim will ever be verified or falsified and the mainstream will continue to believe (rightly, I think) that we didn't just see an alien corvette. Hoofbeats mean horses, not zebras, unless you're on the African savannah, or something like that.

chunky1994 5y ago

While I appreciate why Avi Loeb would author an article like this (for those unfamiliar he posited that Oumuamua was of an intelligent alien origin and hence garnered some pushback), it seems a bit ungenerous in spirit to how science is done these days. He states that extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence so the thesis that skepticism is healthy is still embedded here, however I think he's unwilling to consider (or unconcerned about the idea) that the alien origin claim could very well be misinterpreted/lead credence to a lot of crackpot claims in the lay public which is the source of most of the pushback. While we do not currently have an explanation for Oumuamua and I cannot intelligently speak on which of the four possibilities mentioned in the article is more likely, communicating science to the lay public is often better done once a theory has been absorbed into the general underpinnings of the larger scientific body of evidence at hand rather than when it is at the precipice to avoid inadvertently misleading people.

gameswithgo 5y ago
I heard him talk to, I think Joe Rogan, about Oumuamua, and he presented the case that the unexplained acceleration could not be outgassing because no tail was observed. He also said it was weird that the velocity of the object was effectively stationary compared to the average velocity of this area of the galaxy, as if it was a kind of lighthouse/beacon. This seemed pretty compelling to me. Eventually after digging deeper on both these topics I learned that it is absolutely possible to have outgassing that doesn't leave a tail, that could cause the observed acceleration. And that something being stationary relative to the other objects in this area of the galaxy is not at all unusual. This kind of made me feel he was either being disingenuous or was just too emotionally invested in it being aliens to think clearly. Sure, it could still be aliens, nonetheless, so could every rock and spot we see in the sky, though.

beervirus 5y ago

The scientific orthodoxy rejected the Covid-19 “lab leak conspiracy theory” as crazy, based on no evidence whatsoever. Trump supported it, therefore it must be wrong. It’s not looking so crazy anymore.

epgui 5y ago
Oftentimes the best we can do is make "educated guesses". Most domain experts, myself included, think it less likely that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab. This is not a unanimous position, and most scientists probably don't have a "dogmatic" view of this. Rather, we seek first to find and understand the consensus position, and then to test it. That you or anyone else might disagree, or might not be able to imagine what type of mental model would lead to such an "educated guess", neither reverses the burden of the proof, nor eliminates the presumption of good faith, nor Occam's razor. Taking the position that it came from a lab requires more assumptions and more unsubstantiated beliefs than not taking this position. It's just like Russel's teapot.
- Gustomaximus 5y ago
  > Taking the position that it came from a lab requires more assumptions and more unsubstantiated beliefs than not taking this position. Does it? One view is it came from a lab. The other common view is it came from a wet market. There seems to be evidence the lab was studying covid. While the wet market was seafood focused and I'm yet to see anything showing wildlife meat, let alone bats, while respecting media not showing this doesn't mean they weren't there. Both are possible but it seems to me more likely a lab studying COVID (confirmed or likely?) plus has a history of multiple virus escapes has as good likelyhood and assumptions as an unproven a bat meat section at a seafood market from a bat that would have been likely had to have been transported over 1500km to reach the market if taken from the wild. Personally, I dont think we will ever know the truth and don't claim any answer is correct, but there seems less of a leap of faith on the lab than the wet market to me.
- Mindless2112 5y ago
  "lab leak" does not necessarily imply "originated in a lab". The lab can bring in a virus from the wild to study and then have a leak.

segfault720 5y ago

The author of this article has been on several podcasts including Lex Fridman's, where he has discussed these issues further: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plcc6E-E1uU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plcc6E-E1uU .

stephc_int13 5y ago

Dogma, religious or otherwise, is nothing else than a by-product of the gregarious characteristics of our nature. The use of logic does not help much as long as emotions are strong, we can only reason by stepping back and be as detached as possible.

dekhn 5y ago

I've written before about this: there has long been a "protein orthodoxy" which always defaults to the hypothesis that if something interesting happened, protein did it. For example when people finally reached the interesting question "what is the molecule which confers heredity", almost everybody thought it had to be proteins, and the mainstream worked hard to ignore the entirely factual and reproducible findings until they couldn't any longer (basically, the period before Avery's experiment, and between it and Hershey/Chase). The same happened with ribosomes: the community insisted ribosomes were protein machines with some RNA decoration, even though experiments done in the 60s and 70s showed that RNA was the active element. Similarly, with ribozymes- RNA that folds up into structures and carries out specific enzymatic reactions. People worked really hard to avoid changing their mind that only proteins could be enzymes. Interstingly, the best example I've seen is the opposite: prions. When I was in grad school, the professor who was the expert on prions was at my institution, and had just about managed to run the experiments fully supporting his hypothesis (that prions are infection proteins and the replication process is distinct from that of bacterial or viral replication). The only way you could get the virologists to stop complaining was to point out that it wasn't theoretically impossible that proteins could catalyze other proteins to change shape in a chain reaction, and that Prusiner had reduced everything to a working system in mice that could be reproduced by anybody willing to wait the 60 days a single experiment took.

kristopolous 5y ago

All human institutions centered on thought and theory are susceptible to the same social illnesses. Science, religion, politics, programming... I've been working on a book about this for a while. The framework makes me sound like a bastard but I truly believe the comparison can withstand legitimate scrutiny. It's not that these institutions at their best are the same, it's that the same shams, grifters, cults and hoodwinkers exist in all of them. The same arguments from popularity, deceptions through marketing and pack animal mentalities. At their worst they are all the same. At their best, they are of course quite different. It's always worth remembering that even the most noble human project also has all the grotesque qualities of the human spirit buried within it. Diligence is always required.

Mountain_Skies 5y ago
They're the opposite of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
6510 5y ago
The idea/theory/plan to dismiss things using poor methods is it self an idea worth dismissing that some how escaped sufficient scrutiny. But when it is removed (as it should be) there is the challenge preventing the opposite from happening. I suspect we are capable of getting both wrong at the same time. Like 2 shit storms making a poop tornado.
bobthechef 5y ago
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
- lioeters 5y ago
  From Immanuel Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784)
- ttonkytonk 5y ago
  Not all curves are straight lines.

analog31 5y ago

>>> Those who refuse to consider an unconventional idea in science are disturbingly similar to those who refused to look through Galileo’s telescope While that's a headline and not the text of the article (hence possibly added by an editor), it is worth clarifying the history. When Galileo reported his telescopic observations, the Vatican astronomers went so far as to buy a telescope from him, and after some initial difficulty with it, confirmed his observations. The idea of refusing to look through the telescope was raised as a rhetorical point in debate over the subject matter, but contradicts what actually happened. As I understand it, the Church was willing to let go of the Ptolemaic model in favor of a model of Tycho Brahe, which supposed that the sun revolved around the earth, and the planets around the sun, which preserved the apparent lack of motion experienced on earth. They also told Galileo that if he could furnish empirical evidence to support his model, they would have to re-think their interpretation of the Bible. The letter from Bellarmine to Galileo is preserved. An odd issue that we face with extraterrestrials, or non-earthly beings in general, is that they can be introduced as an explanation for anything, and have been for 5000+ years. We don't have a good way of scientifically investigating extraterrestrial hypotheses.

TravelnSalesman 5y ago
Ok, why did Inquisitor Bellarmine have the Copernican follower Giordano Bruno burned at the stake?
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into religious, er, flamewar. Not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- analog31 5y ago
  As I understand it, Bruno was accused of heresy. The same fate would have awaited Galileo, but the Church stopped one step short of accusing Galileo of heresy. The words that I recall reading was that he was "vehemently suspected of heresy."

emmelaich 5y ago

Curious that he quotes "The Road not Taken" which may be "the most misread poem in America" https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misread-poem-in-america/ https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/09/11/the-most-misr...

arduinomancer 5y ago

This feels like the PG situation where people don't like the Mighty browser idea so he publishes an essay saying "Yeah well...look at the history of crazy ideas in science" Getting a little tired of people making this argument. It can be applied to literally any idea so its pretty meaningless to say.

Blikkentrekker 5y ago

The examples listed seem to be cases of broken clocks being right, which does happen, and it looks spectacular in history when they are, but it ignores how many broken clocks were rightly ignored. For the most part, exact scientists are willing to listen if radical ideas are backed up by evidence. — Einstein's ideas were quite radical at the time, but they were backed up by convincing mathematical reasoning and were accepted, however absurd it might have sounded that nonmassive light is influenced by gravity, or that such things as time dilation occur, and they were not actually observed until decades later. That being said, — there are definitely entire fields of science where the “mainstream consensus” seems to be based quite a bit on convention and simply things “truths that became repeated” but were never well substantiated, and when empirically justified by some experiments, sometimes later found to not be reproducible, or perhaps not occuring in the wild, and only in lab conditions.

ac42 5y ago

> Finding extraordinary evidence requires a commitment of extraordinary funds I would suggest that he answers to his own complaints. There is a great deal of prioritisation going on in science and fringe ideas require too large steps away from where we are today. The real break-throughs in science are ideas that massively reduce the size of the backlog. My guess is that these ideas will receive proper treatment them when the time is right.

8note 5y ago

The conclusion of the article, > The most important task before us as a civilization is to find freethinking actors from exoplanets and learn whether they have a better sense of what the play is all about. Does not at all match the arguments presented.

cozzyd 5y ago

I had a good guess as to what the byline would be from the title and I was right...

allemagne 5y ago

Unironically comparing yourself to Galileo is painful to read. It makes me feel embarrassed for the author. What is the point of this comparison? Actually persuading whatever fraction of a percentage of your readers who literally believe "scientists can NEVER be wrong"? The actual point of making such a comparison really just seems to be reassurance to your side of the argument, all while sneaking in an ad hominem against anyone who disagrees with you by comparing them to the Inquisition. Extraordinary claims do not simply require other extraordinary claims to have been true before. The author is apparently cognizant of this, so he should drop this self-aggrandizing cliche.

doctoboggan 5y ago

Matt O'Dowd at PBS Spacetime did a recent video[0] discussing how a certain Harvard Astronomer (the same author of this piece) has too quickly jumped toward claiming aliens as the answer. It's worth a watch. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sq658Okvao https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sq658Okvao

DemocracyFTW 5y ago

"without bothering to look through Galileo Galilei’s telescope, philosophers overwhelmingly agreed on the incorrect notion that the sun moves around the Earth"—this is ridiculous, as if a look through Galileo's (not very powerful, by later century's standards) could tell you that the Earth circles around the sun. What it does show you is that the moon has mountains and is not a flat disk but a sphere (the latter already deducible from its shadows), that there are tiny specks that circle Jupiter, and that Saturn has handlebars (Galileo, for lack of his telescope's resolution, couldn't tell those were rings).

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

For one Galileo, there are thousands, if not millions, weirdos and fraudsters. So, statistically speaking, it is a rational decision to reject all unorthodox ideas and let authors walk the walk proving it.

achenatx 5y ago

most science is too complex for people to understand the data (e.g. climate change). Therefore science is almost always reduced to religion for the lay public. Ultimately whether you believe is based on if you have faith in the scientists.