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Science is a process, a way to find truth. It is not in itself truth. It is subject to all the same human flaws and venality as any other human endeavor. Jus

by efitz 5y ago

Science is a process, a way to find truth. It is not in itself truth. It is subject to all the same human flaws and venality as any other human endeavor. Just because something is published in a paper doesn’t make it true. Just because the paper was peer reviewed doesn’t make it true. Just because there is a “consensus” doesn’t make it true. I’m sick and tired of people saying “the science is settled” or “trust the science”. These statements indicate a fundamental misunderstanding of what science is and how it works (or fails) in the modern world. The modern scientific method is still, in my opinion, the most powerful way we have of learning how things work, but it is not without flaws. This is just another cautionary tale.

jollybean 5y ago
We need some new language over this because some science is 'settled' or at least 'strongly indicative'. I wonder if 'Social Sciences' and 'Psychology' - sine we know so little about it and don't necessarily have a foundation from which to work on ... if they should be called 'Social Philosophy' that happens to use applied scientific methods. And when the news talks about published papers and scientific results, we can agree on a language like simply the term 'Unverified' or 'Not Fully Verified' to effectively mean 'Not peer reviewed or duplicated'. That way, when the first Ivermectin trial comes out we can say 'Unverified Ivermectin Study' and that 'Verification' is in progress etc..
fastaguy88 5y ago
This seems like a generalization that needs to limited in scope. I think the science is settled about Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s equations, Avogadro’s number, and DNA as the genetic material in bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. For pretty much anything taught in a 100 level science course, the science is largely settled. There are controversies in science, and those controversies make for good popular science press, but there is a lot of science that is settled.
- Sebb767 5y ago
  > I think the science is settled about Newton’s laws Except it isn't. These laws have been extended once by general relativity already and there's a non-zero chance that the dark matter problematic will prove them insufficient once again. I don't know enough about the other fields, but it's not unlikely that they have similar problems. The point is, things are really complex and surg edge cases. And if you make final statements like this to someone who is doubting the current consensus anyway, you'll only make yourself vulnerable without convincing them.
  - fastaguy88 5y ago
    Different people may have different ideas about what “the science is settled” means. In many political discussions, the phrase actually is used to argue for or against the quality of the data. Often, when discussing climate change, or perhaps even evolution, the phase is used to say the data is clear, the earth is warming, or all living organisms share a common ancestor. Likewise, I think the science is settled that vaccines save lives. And the science is certainly settled that heavy and light objects fall at the same rate in a vacuum. Being skeptical that “the science is settled” because of some poorly understood edge case makes it very difficult communicate where there is uncertainty, and where there isn’t (because the data is clear and the science well understood).
miketery 5y ago
Great take. What I find most difficult is how humans naturally want certainty one way or the other, or an opinion either on this side or this side. Side with us or against us. As opposed to reality, which has nuances, probabilities, and pros and cons depending on the stakeholder / perspective.
andi999 5y ago
It is more nuanced. A lot of science is settled and e. g. moved over to technology. All semiconductor devices rely on what was groundbreaking science (as well as simple electricity on even earlier groundbreaking science). The latest when it became technology that part is settled (because it is then reproduced million of times). Problem is some fields which do not systematically reproduce findings, or that it is even discouraged to reproduce results are not in a good shape and encourage (not deliberately) p value hacking at the one end and fraud at the other.
- portpecos 5y ago
  "A major cause of low reproducibility is the publication bias and the selection bias..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Causes
kibwen 5y ago
> people saying “the science is settled” or “trust the science” These two are not of the same level of severity. The first statement should usually raise eyebrows, as science is almost never "settled". The first and second laws of thermodynamics are pretty solid. For most other things we can entertain some skepticism. But the second statement raises the question: trust relative to what? If your options are to trust something that appears to follow the scientific method vs. something that does not appear to follow the scientific method, then it's completely fair to favor the first. Sometimes you'll be wrong, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean that science is inherently undeserving of trust.
- User23 5y ago
  > The first statement should usually raise eyebrows, as science is almost never "settled". The first and second laws of thermodynamics are pretty solid. For most other things we can entertain some skepticism. One of my good friends is a particle physicist and he assures me that he and his peers very much hope the science isn't settled, despite agreeing pretty well with experiment, because the Standard Model is a hideous kludge. The heuristic I use is judging based on my estimate of the statement's Shannon entropy. And most of the time the "follow the science" crowd's statements contain absolutely no entropy. I've already heard it verbatim from CNN or some other usually low expertise source. Furthermore, it's annoying to have people lecture me about PCR tests when they don't even know what a restriction endonuclease is. Note that high entropy doesn't mean correct, but to me it does mean more interesting. Now there are plenty of people out there who demonstrably do not want me to have access to high entropy sources, because they believe them to be wrong. They're certainly entitled to their beliefs, but I dislike the idea of someone else deciding what I'm allowed to read. On the subject of Shannon entropy, I've observed that on technical subjects that readers here have expertise in, like programming, the high entropy comments tend to get upvoted. On the other hand any topic where the crowd here believes "the science is settled" you see the exact opposite effect: high entropy comments are consistently massively disapproved of, while clever restatements of the conventional wisdom with minimal entropy get voted to the top.
- ummwhat 5y ago
  Ironically, you picked the one "law" in physics which is technically a statistical statement rather than a law per se.
Revenant-15 5y ago
I'm more concerned about people who doubt science as a default point of view more than the people who trust the science. If you don't trust science as a process, then you're just putting your faith in random crap that gets through your arbitrary filters. That's how we get stupid stuff like Qanon and Pizzagate. We're always putting our trust in one thing or another. Personally, I'd prefer if we put our trust in a method that, over the long-term, strives towards some sense of "real" truth as opposed to some contrarian anti-science, anti-intellectual bull. Yes, be critical. No, don't reject science just because it suits you or because it might be uncomfortable. The best thing about science? It's falsifiable. If climate change suddenly turns out to be wrong tomorrow, I don't have to cling to "oh, but yesterday the consensus was that it was real". It's "oh, these smart people are discovering new things that are giving us a new/deeper understanding of something we didn't quite understand correctly, time to update my understanding of the world". If your point of view is dependent on your not understanding something, then it doesn't matter. You'll cling to your beliefs, which become a part of your identity, no matter what evidence is presented.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  Climate science isn't falsifiable though. We cannot go back to the year 1600 and rerun the last 400 years without human industrial activity but keeping everything else the same and observe how the climate differs.
  - cm2187 5y ago
    Not sure why you are getting downvoted. It is a fundamental challenge of climate science. You can backtest a model all you want, but anyone familiar with confronting backtested models to reality knows that this gives you very little comfort. Climate science fundamentally deals with untested mathematical models. It is not the only domain of science that has this problem. Medecine is a big one. You can experiment to some extent but for obvious ethical reasons, there are lots of stuff you can't experiment on, and as a result we keep getting contradictory studies on issues that should be purely factual.
  - fastaguy88 5y ago
jahnu 5y ago
While I agree abuse occurs I think this view is overly strict in the other direction. The phrase "the science is settled" is perfectly valid to use in many contexts and is useful shorthand for something like "if you want to deny this scientific consensus you would need to have amazing evidence, therefore it's more productive and expedient to move on and discuss something else". This can be different depending on context but the point is the same. As an example; the science is settled, human activities are responsible for the most of what we observe as climate change. This does not forbid anyone from coming along and proving the settled science wrong but it does prove useful for indicating our very high confidence.
vegetablepotpie 5y ago
> I’m sick and tired of people saying “the science is settled” or “trust the science”. You’re right, but also, there’s more to it. There is a difference between what people say and what people mean and context is important. When I’ve heard people say “trust the science” it is always directed to people who have demonstrated that they do not understand the scientific method and the meaning of the word “healthy skepticism”. In that case what you are doing is an appeal to authority, which is completely unscientific, and necessary for building consensus. So when we hear “trust the science”, it’s really a political statement more than anything, and it intends to replace a person in a robe, or a person in a uniform with a person in a lab coat. Certainly it would be better to have an informed and well educated citizenry. But for people who live in the real world and do not want to have their society steered by people who have incompatible views with a modern society, saying “trust the science” is a shorthand for “we don’t think you have what it takes to contribute to a conversation in a meaningful way.”
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  > When I’ve heard people say “trust the science” it is always directed to people who have demonstrated that they do not understand the scientific method I think "always" is too strong. With regards to COVID vaccines I have heard that line thrown at people who say "this conclusion is too new, it has not stood the test of time" and now lo and behold we are seeing that the early "95% effective" rates are not holding up. In fact I would say that many of the people who say "trust the science" (politicians, etc) have no scientific background themselves and are not people we would otherwise look to for scientific opinions on anything.
  - paulryanrogers 5y ago
    What evidence do you see that the effectiveness reducing hospitalization risk has decreased?
  - enkid 5y ago
    The 95% effectiveness was based on the version of COVID that was circulating at the time. No one said it would be 95% effective against every possible mutation. Claiming the results of those studies are wrong instead of a result of a changing environment is itself a misunderstanding of science.
peterthehacker 5y ago
While you’re right in a broad sense your points are irrelevant here. This is about fraudulent data (apparently created with a random number generator) being used. This is not and should not be something we expect from scientists. If this story was solely about the replication crisis in behavioral economics, then your comment would be relevant.
- pigeonhole123 5y ago
  There are other ways in which a study can be worthless than simply making up the data.
indymike 5y ago
> Science is a process, a way to find truth. It is not in itself truth. It is subject to all the same human flaws and venality as any other human endeavor. This is probably the most insightful comment on the subject I've ever read.
jpeloquin 5y ago
Trust comes in degrees, so I think the question is how much to trust. Of the scientists I've worked with for long enough to estimate their character, I outright distrust only ~ 10%. That's consistent with [0], which reports that 8% of surveyed researchers admitted to falsifying data, but [1] reports 2% falsification and [2] reports only 0.5%. So if a finding is only reported by one group, whom you don't know personally, I would be only 50–70% confident in it. Once a finding is reported by at least two genuinely independent groups (no strong social or professional connections between the groups) it's appropriate to accept the facts reported but not necessarily the interpretation. As independent confirmations accumulate, idle skepticism becomes less credible. Active skepticism—doing experiments or collecting data to test the status quo—is always helpful though and should be welcomed. [0] https://www.proquest.com/openview/e1af57060d9d8f628417ce3b7d1f7a7b/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=48061 https://www.proquest.com/openview/e1af57060d9d8f628417ce3b7d... [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005738 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/435737a https://www.nature.com/articles/435737a
cm2187 5y ago
Though applying the word "science" to refer to psychology is a very liberal use of the term.
jollybean 5y ago
"Science is a process, a way to find truth. It is not in itself truth." We mostly all know this. The issue is populism and communications. When we use 'Science' as a basis of infallible credibility in some areas, then it's understandable that some are 'shocked' when that infallibility is obviously not true, and then people become jaded and lose confidence. There's no language to differentiate between the murky greyness of some things (i.e. memory and recall), and the relatively unambiguous results of other bits of research (i.e. acetaminophen is safe). Why should the non-scientific public, even sometimes, have confidence in a system that is so often very wrong? How are they supposed to know which bits are 'effectively true' and which are 'grey'? From the outside, it looks like Science is being simultaneously authoritative (to the point of moralizing) and in other areas totally wrong but lacking in self awareness while saying 'Oh, that was wrong, bu Science is a process of discovery, it's not always right' etc.. Given that Science is constantly 'changing it's mind' it's perfectly reasonable for regular people to doubt Climate Change science: the 'authorities are often wrong, ergo, they may very well be wrong here'. If Science doesn't have a way of effectively (and by that I mean simply and clearly) communicating the degree of confidence in something, then we're playing a very dangerous game with credibility of the institution.
spookthesunset 5y ago
> I’m sick and tired of people saying “the science is settled” or “trust the science”. Or "I follow the science". Nope, that's not how this works. Science doesn't tell people what to do. It isn't a book of instructions or a fixed set of truths. It's a process to learn how things work. What you do with those learnings is a squishy human meatspace thing involving values, politics, social norms, traditions, emotions, etc. Anybody who says they "follow the science" is not doing any such thing.

by efitz 5y ago

jollybean 5y ago

We need some new language over this because some science is 'settled' or at least 'strongly indicative'. I wonder if 'Social Sciences' and 'Psychology' - sine we know so little about it and don't necessarily have a foundation from which to work on ... if they should be called 'Social Philosophy' that happens to use applied scientific methods. And when the news talks about published papers and scientific results, we can agree on a language like simply the term 'Unverified' or 'Not Fully Verified' to effectively mean 'Not peer reviewed or duplicated'. That way, when the first Ivermectin trial comes out we can say 'Unverified Ivermectin Study' and that 'Verification' is in progress etc..

fastaguy88 5y ago

This seems like a generalization that needs to limited in scope. I think the science is settled about Newton’s laws, Maxwell’s equations, Avogadro’s number, and DNA as the genetic material in bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. For pretty much anything taught in a 100 level science course, the science is largely settled. There are controversies in science, and those controversies make for good popular science press, but there is a lot of science that is settled.

Sebb767 5y ago
> I think the science is settled about Newton’s laws Except it isn't. These laws have been extended once by general relativity already and there's a non-zero chance that the dark matter problematic will prove them insufficient once again. I don't know enough about the other fields, but it's not unlikely that they have similar problems. The point is, things are really complex and surg edge cases. And if you make final statements like this to someone who is doubting the current consensus anyway, you'll only make yourself vulnerable without convincing them.
- fastaguy88 5y ago
  Different people may have different ideas about what “the science is settled” means. In many political discussions, the phrase actually is used to argue for or against the quality of the data. Often, when discussing climate change, or perhaps even evolution, the phase is used to say the data is clear, the earth is warming, or all living organisms share a common ancestor. Likewise, I think the science is settled that vaccines save lives. And the science is certainly settled that heavy and light objects fall at the same rate in a vacuum. Being skeptical that “the science is settled” because of some poorly understood edge case makes it very difficult communicate where there is uncertainty, and where there isn’t (because the data is clear and the science well understood).

miketery 5y ago

Great take. What I find most difficult is how humans naturally want certainty one way or the other, or an opinion either on this side or this side. Side with us or against us. As opposed to reality, which has nuances, probabilities, and pros and cons depending on the stakeholder / perspective.

andi999 5y ago

It is more nuanced. A lot of science is settled and e. g. moved over to technology. All semiconductor devices rely on what was groundbreaking science (as well as simple electricity on even earlier groundbreaking science). The latest when it became technology that part is settled (because it is then reproduced million of times). Problem is some fields which do not systematically reproduce findings, or that it is even discouraged to reproduce results are not in a good shape and encourage (not deliberately) p value hacking at the one end and fraud at the other.

portpecos 5y ago
"A major cause of low reproducibility is the publication bias and the selection bias..." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Causes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Causes

kibwen 5y ago

> people saying “the science is settled” or “trust the science” These two are not of the same level of severity. The first statement should usually raise eyebrows, as science is almost never "settled". The first and second laws of thermodynamics are pretty solid. For most other things we can entertain some skepticism. But the second statement raises the question: trust relative to what? If your options are to trust something that appears to follow the scientific method vs. something that does not appear to follow the scientific method, then it's completely fair to favor the first. Sometimes you'll be wrong, and that's fine, but that doesn't mean that science is inherently undeserving of trust.

User23 5y ago
> The first statement should usually raise eyebrows, as science is almost never "settled". The first and second laws of thermodynamics are pretty solid. For most other things we can entertain some skepticism. One of my good friends is a particle physicist and he assures me that he and his peers very much hope the science isn't settled, despite agreeing pretty well with experiment, because the Standard Model is a hideous kludge. The heuristic I use is judging based on my estimate of the statement's Shannon entropy. And most of the time the "follow the science" crowd's statements contain absolutely no entropy. I've already heard it verbatim from CNN or some other usually low expertise source. Furthermore, it's annoying to have people lecture me about PCR tests when they don't even know what a restriction endonuclease is. Note that high entropy doesn't mean correct, but to me it does mean more interesting. Now there are plenty of people out there who demonstrably do not want me to have access to high entropy sources, because they believe them to be wrong. They're certainly entitled to their beliefs, but I dislike the idea of someone else deciding what I'm allowed to read. On the subject of Shannon entropy, I've observed that on technical subjects that readers here have expertise in, like programming, the high entropy comments tend to get upvoted. On the other hand any topic where the crowd here believes "the science is settled" you see the exact opposite effect: high entropy comments are consistently massively disapproved of, while clever restatements of the conventional wisdom with minimal entropy get voted to the top.
ummwhat 5y ago
Ironically, you picked the one "law" in physics which is technically a statistical statement rather than a law per se.

Revenant-15 5y ago

I'm more concerned about people who doubt science as a default point of view more than the people who trust the science. If you don't trust science as a process, then you're just putting your faith in random crap that gets through your arbitrary filters. That's how we get stupid stuff like Qanon and Pizzagate. We're always putting our trust in one thing or another. Personally, I'd prefer if we put our trust in a method that, over the long-term, strives towards some sense of "real" truth as opposed to some contrarian anti-science, anti-intellectual bull. Yes, be critical. No, don't reject science just because it suits you or because it might be uncomfortable. The best thing about science? It's falsifiable. If climate change suddenly turns out to be wrong tomorrow, I don't have to cling to "oh, but yesterday the consensus was that it was real". It's "oh, these smart people are discovering new things that are giving us a new/deeper understanding of something we didn't quite understand correctly, time to update my understanding of the world". If your point of view is dependent on your not understanding something, then it doesn't matter. You'll cling to your beliefs, which become a part of your identity, no matter what evidence is presented.

throwawayboise 5y ago
Climate science isn't falsifiable though. We cannot go back to the year 1600 and rerun the last 400 years without human industrial activity but keeping everything else the same and observe how the climate differs.
- cm2187 5y ago
  Not sure why you are getting downvoted. It is a fundamental challenge of climate science. You can backtest a model all you want, but anyone familiar with confronting backtested models to reality knows that this gives you very little comfort. Climate science fundamentally deals with untested mathematical models. It is not the only domain of science that has this problem. Medecine is a big one. You can experiment to some extent but for obvious ethical reasons, there are lots of stuff you can't experiment on, and as a result we keep getting contradictory studies on issues that should be purely factual.
- fastaguy88 5y ago

jahnu 5y ago

While I agree abuse occurs I think this view is overly strict in the other direction. The phrase "the science is settled" is perfectly valid to use in many contexts and is useful shorthand for something like "if you want to deny this scientific consensus you would need to have amazing evidence, therefore it's more productive and expedient to move on and discuss something else". This can be different depending on context but the point is the same. As an example; the science is settled, human activities are responsible for the most of what we observe as climate change. This does not forbid anyone from coming along and proving the settled science wrong but it does prove useful for indicating our very high confidence.

vegetablepotpie 5y ago

> I’m sick and tired of people saying “the science is settled” or “trust the science”. You’re right, but also, there’s more to it. There is a difference between what people say and what people mean and context is important. When I’ve heard people say “trust the science” it is always directed to people who have demonstrated that they do not understand the scientific method and the meaning of the word “healthy skepticism”. In that case what you are doing is an appeal to authority, which is completely unscientific, and necessary for building consensus. So when we hear “trust the science”, it’s really a political statement more than anything, and it intends to replace a person in a robe, or a person in a uniform with a person in a lab coat. Certainly it would be better to have an informed and well educated citizenry. But for people who live in the real world and do not want to have their society steered by people who have incompatible views with a modern society, saying “trust the science” is a shorthand for “we don’t think you have what it takes to contribute to a conversation in a meaningful way.”

throwawayboise 5y ago
> When I’ve heard people say “trust the science” it is always directed to people who have demonstrated that they do not understand the scientific method I think "always" is too strong. With regards to COVID vaccines I have heard that line thrown at people who say "this conclusion is too new, it has not stood the test of time" and now lo and behold we are seeing that the early "95% effective" rates are not holding up. In fact I would say that many of the people who say "trust the science" (politicians, etc) have no scientific background themselves and are not people we would otherwise look to for scientific opinions on anything.
- paulryanrogers 5y ago
  What evidence do you see that the effectiveness reducing hospitalization risk has decreased?
- enkid 5y ago
  The 95% effectiveness was based on the version of COVID that was circulating at the time. No one said it would be 95% effective against every possible mutation. Claiming the results of those studies are wrong instead of a result of a changing environment is itself a misunderstanding of science.

peterthehacker 5y ago

While you’re right in a broad sense your points are irrelevant here. This is about fraudulent data (apparently created with a random number generator) being used. This is not and should not be something we expect from scientists. If this story was solely about the replication crisis in behavioral economics, then your comment would be relevant.

pigeonhole123 5y ago
There are other ways in which a study can be worthless than simply making up the data.

indymike 5y ago

> Science is a process, a way to find truth. It is not in itself truth. It is subject to all the same human flaws and venality as any other human endeavor. This is probably the most insightful comment on the subject I've ever read.

jpeloquin 5y ago

Trust comes in degrees, so I think the question is how much to trust. Of the scientists I've worked with for long enough to estimate their character, I outright distrust only ~ 10%. That's consistent with [0], which reports that 8% of surveyed researchers admitted to falsifying data, but [1] reports 2% falsification and [2] reports only 0.5%. So if a finding is only reported by one group, whom you don't know personally, I would be only 50–70% confident in it. Once a finding is reported by at least two genuinely independent groups (no strong social or professional connections between the groups) it's appropriate to accept the facts reported but not necessarily the interpretation. As independent confirmations accumulate, idle skepticism becomes less credible. Active skepticism—doing experiments or collecting data to test the status quo—is always helpful though and should be welcomed. [0] https://www.proquest.com/openview/e1af57060d9d8f628417ce3b7d1f7a7b/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=48061 https://www.proquest.com/openview/e1af57060d9d8f628417ce3b7d... [1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0005738 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/435737a https://www.nature.com/articles/435737a

cm2187 5y ago

Though applying the word "science" to refer to psychology is a very liberal use of the term.

jollybean 5y ago

"Science is a process, a way to find truth. It is not in itself truth." We mostly all know this. The issue is populism and communications. When we use 'Science' as a basis of infallible credibility in some areas, then it's understandable that some are 'shocked' when that infallibility is obviously not true, and then people become jaded and lose confidence. There's no language to differentiate between the murky greyness of some things (i.e. memory and recall), and the relatively unambiguous results of other bits of research (i.e. acetaminophen is safe). Why should the non-scientific public, even sometimes, have confidence in a system that is so often very wrong? How are they supposed to know which bits are 'effectively true' and which are 'grey'? From the outside, it looks like Science is being simultaneously authoritative (to the point of moralizing) and in other areas totally wrong but lacking in self awareness while saying 'Oh, that was wrong, bu Science is a process of discovery, it's not always right' etc.. Given that Science is constantly 'changing it's mind' it's perfectly reasonable for regular people to doubt Climate Change science: the 'authorities are often wrong, ergo, they may very well be wrong here'. If Science doesn't have a way of effectively (and by that I mean simply and clearly) communicating the degree of confidence in something, then we're playing a very dangerous game with credibility of the institution.

spookthesunset 5y ago

> I’m sick and tired of people saying “the science is settled” or “trust the science”. Or "I follow the science". Nope, that's not how this works. Science doesn't tell people what to do. It isn't a book of instructions or a fixed set of truths. It's a process to learn how things work. What you do with those learnings is a squishy human meatspace thing involving values, politics, social norms, traditions, emotions, etc. Anybody who says they "follow the science" is not doing any such thing.