15 ms·

Trusting science leaves people vulnerable to believing pseudoscience

• marshallbananas 5y ago
  Another way I noticed that makes "smart" people believe in bullshit is using very scientific language and vague science concepts. I noticed one of my friends (college educated and an ex FAANG executive) reading a book about astrology that basically tried to explain it with science. She made me read a chapter to prove that it's not bullshit. And it really didn't "sound" bullshit, and the author used many scientific terms and quoting papers on quantum mechanics and referring to astronomy. But once you actually tried to process the gist of it it was complete nonsense, literally zero information or stated facts. A horoscope dressed in scientific language.
  • kzrdude 5y ago
    Some people go through school life the same way, and that is probably partly the cause. They never really understood the subject, just went through learning about it and accepting it - without deeper understanding(?). This shapes people to basically believing anything - if it comes from a source with enough sheen of authority.
    • meheleventyone 5y ago
      This is literally everyone, look at experts trying their hand outside of their field of expertise. The issue isn’t that we need to take some things on trust it’s how to work out who to trust. Even scientifically literate people find this hard, you’ll often find people arguing something quite general by linking a paper that is very specific (or actually says the opposite!). Less honest people will outright lie and link to a source in the hopes you won’t read it and trust them to be diligent. Just the other day a user here stated some facts and linked to a wiki page that immediately and outright refuted them. We’re not just in an environment where we need to make sure people aren’t making mistakes. It’s also highly adversarial.
      • kzrdude 5y ago
        It's about something else than just having to work out who to trust - that just sounds like a restatement of the relativization. Not everyone can be scientifically literate. And I agree, there are many things masquerading as scientific literacy - including picking out single papers while being clueless of the wider stream of knowledge in that field. Yes, it really is much better to ask someone in the field - for example - what does this paper mean when you see it in context, and so on. That's what the good science journalists use to do. But, we can't just give up. We can't be perfectionists in the sense that - "either you're an expert and know the field or you just don't know anything". We can all be curious and humble about what we don't know, while still trying to understand things in their context and fit them into our model of the world. > We’re not just an environment where we need to make sure people aren’t making mistakes. It’s also highly adversarial. Here I'm a bit unsure what you mean. Maybe, if I do: I don't think 0 mistakes is the goal. Mistakes are allowed. The differentiator is always, how we handle and correct our mistakes.
        • meheleventyone 5y ago
          I’m not advocating giving up. By the last bit I mean people are not just making mistakes they are also deliberately lying by making things that lead people to making mistakes.
          • pas 5y ago
            I think it's worse than that. Sure there are intentional liars, but they are the easy to spot bullshit factory managers. What's harder is dealing with the true believers, who lie to save their own world view, who need that thing to be true.
    • datavirtue 5y ago
      Bingo. You figured out public school.
      • beckman466 5y ago
        > Bingo. You figured out public school. what do you see as alternatives?
        • sk2020 5y ago
          Mandatory, universal indoctrination of the youth by the state long into adulthood wasn’t even normal until about a century ago. I suppose the Ottoman Janissary Corps is the only older example I can think of. Outside of knowledge-based fields, most adults I know obtained all of their practical knowledge in the course of their careers.
  • londgine 5y ago
    Out of curiosity, what book was it? I might get it as an April fool's joke for my astronomer friend of mine.
    • marshallbananas 5y ago
      Sorry, I don't remember. But it was definitely written by a Prof. Something Something, PhD. And of course it had a mesmerizing rendering of some cosmic occurrence on the cover.
  • donw 5y ago
    I recall a video where a biologist talked about how students from prestigious universities had become completely incapable of doing science. He would take them in the field, and they were utterly unable to study the real world. To make predictions, observe the world, challenge their assumptions. All they could do was fall back on peer-reviewed papers. If it wasn't in a peer-reviewed paper, it simply didn't exist.
    • elihu 5y ago
      There's a saying that goes something like "sometimes half an hour in the library can save you two weeks in the lab". I think that's true, but at the same time, sometimes half an hour in the lab can save you two weeks in the library.
  • hutzlibu 5y ago
    In my experience, all of the latest esoteric scene tries this. Using a pseudo science language to impress the simple minded and if more elaborate, also the more clever ones. Some of the more funny ones explained why the dna nucleous of the new vaccines change the energy field of the receiver. Meaning you loose your soul, if you get vaccinated. Very hilarious are the scientific explanations around the flat earth society. They try in all seriousness to work out physics modells that work with a flat earth. Deep shit it seems.
  • jacquesm 5y ago
    Or just using complicated language to say something simple in the first place. Annoyingly, science is sometimes also guilty of this - as is the medical profession. It's a form of gatekeeping. It would be better if we all just used the simplest set of words to communicate a concept. There are valid reasons for using more complex terms, they serve as some kind of data compression mechanism, but more often than not they are simply obfuscation.
    • howaboutnope 5y ago
      Ain't HN the king of that.. "you are being disingenuous": 110 results "you are being stupid": 4 results
      • meheleventyone 5y ago
        I get your point but disingenuous doesn’t mean remotely the same thing as stupid.
        • howaboutnope 5y ago
          Oh, you're right. But still: "you are being deceitful" 1 result "you are being dishonest" 42 results ... if I tried them all they might add up to over 100, but still. It's hard to make the case with a few searches, maybe I shouldn't have started this ^^ It's just something I notice constantly. E.g. half of the time, "I'm not entirely sure I agree" is a sincere statement, the other half it's just "I disagree" in more words that are supposed to give an impression of depth that isn't there.
          • jobigoud 5y ago
            But "dishonest" is simpler language register than "deceitful". Doesn't that weakens your argument?
            • howaboutnope 5y ago
              I didn't mean to contrast the two with each other, but both with "disingenuous", of which they're synonyms.
  • Blikkentrekker 5y ago
    The Bogdanov Affair happened, where papers that were later concluded to be devoid of any real meaning but full of jargon were published in physics journals, and most likely it was not a troll attempt but the auctor's were actually serious. “zero information” was a common criticism on these papers when they were later more heavily scrutinized, that they had a tendency to use paragraphs of jargon to say the obvious and nothing new.
    • MattPalmer1086 5y ago
      I recall during my first degree, I once rewrote an essay, making the essential points clearer. I still believe it was my best essay, but I got the lowest mark with a comment that it was "too simple". I got the highest mark for an essay I wrote the night before it was due with no knowledge of the subject. Just used a bunch of clever sounding words and threw in a fake bibliography at 8am in the library.
  • dorkwood 5y ago
    I think there's a logical explanation for why being born at a particular time of year might have an effect on how your personality develops, and that's that the time of year you're born determines where you are placed within your cohort at school. Only just old enough for this year's intake? You're more likely to be shorter and weaker than everyone else on the sports team. Almost too old, but just squeaked in? You have both a physical and mental advantage over everyone else. While 'horoscopes' might not have any basis in reality, it's not unimaginable to me that groups of personalities might arise who all share a particular birth month.
    • jkhdigital 5y ago
      In general I agree with you, but the more I consider topics like this the more I see it as a problem of correlation strength vs. effect size. That is, at the population level there may very well be a strong correlation between birthday and certain personality traits, but the effect size is likely to be infinitesimal compared to everything else we know about what shapes a person’s psychology. I actually think this is one of the ways that published science tends to distort rather than clarify our view of reality, as the strength of correlation tends to be overly emphasized as measure of quality or relevance.
    • marshallbananas 5y ago
      That's most definitely true. But describing one's character or predicting behavior based on that is simply random stereotyping. And even if we could make some use of it, the astrology crowd would never embrace it.
    • api 5y ago
      That's exactly the sort of thought I've always had about astrology: if there's any truth at all to it, it's because all the astrology BS is just being used as a clock. The effect is the result of other factors that are periodic such as seasons, social factors as you say, etc.
    • maccolgan 5y ago
      Any such effect would be infinitesmally small at a city, state or nation level, not to mention such effects will not be self-repeating, defeating the purpose of such a book
  • jkhdigital 5y ago
    My sister, who is sharp but not highly educated, gave me a book on numerology once. I read the first chapter at least, just to humor her, and came away with the exact same feeling: zero information. She’s a very “intuitive” kind of person, if you know what I mean. I do my best to stay curious and avoid judging her narratives about her personal experience; even if her explanations seem nonsensical I can’t deny the phenomenology of it. However, I definitely draw a firm line with her on numerology. When you’re talking up theories about historical events and real people and organizations, you’re in the realm of falsifiability and you’d better bring evidence.
  • inglor_cz 5y ago
    So true. I studied algebra and I am fairly acquainted with modern cryptography. Sometimes I meet "seriously looking" texts that mix cryptographic and information theoretic expressions ("code", "one time pad", "asymmetric", "stream cipher", "entropy", "quantum") in a hodgepodge that does not make any sense, but looks convincing to the amateur reader. I suppose it is the same with, say, immunology. People can cook up a Sokal-like text that throws all the buzzwords around and look knowledgeable on Facebook, without actually saying anything of value.
    • kzzzznot 5y ago
      It’s quite alarming how much misunderstanding I find in articles the mainstream media channels in my country write about about anything I have professional/deep knowledge in. I wonder how much nonsense I’m reading and perhaps blindly accepting about subjects in which I am not as knowledgeable.
      • datavirtue 5y ago
        Same. I take raw video with a grain of salt.
      • msrenee 5y ago
        I run into that all the time. I've got a solid grasp of biology and have a lot of knowledge about animals. It's pretty rare that I find an article that draws the conclusions I feel should be drawn from the information. I had to stop reading an article posted on this site the other day, as early in the article, they claimed that no one knows why plants produce latex. Obviously, that's not true so I went to see how hard the info would be to find and it's right there in the Wikipedia article on natural latex. I can forgive not knowing, but I can't forgive making a claim like that when the information is so accessible. So what am I being told about economics or international relations that's just completely untrue? I don't even know enough to know what's an obvious lie, so how do I know what to read up on to verify the claims? How do I know that the source I'm using to verify the article isn't complete bunk itself? It's kind of terrifying.
      • UncleMeat 5y ago
  • andi999 5y ago
    Or one exaggerates results. Anybody read wisdom of crowds? Went back to the original nature paper (was it from 1904? Not sure) and I think the book made cited the result with ten times higher precision as in the paper.
  • maccolgan 5y ago
    Wonder if she peer reviewed some Sokal-esque papers some day
  • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    I like to express the same point with something like "new age is when you take someone with zero understanding of quantum mechanics and even less understanding of vedantic philosophy and then combine the vocabulary of both"
• hannob 5y ago
  I feel they have a big confounder in their study that I wonder may spoil their results. They only used two examples of scientific stories, and one of them is an issue around the health effects of GMOs. Here's the thing: I think you'll likely find more people on the left/liberal (US-meaning of the word liberal) spectrum that will say they trust in science. You'll also find more people on the left being skeptical about GMOs. In fact, if you'd if there's one issue where you'll have views disagreeing with science on the left, it's probably GMOs. It's simply the classic and most prominent example for that. So I wonder if that study didn't tell much more than "People tend to believe what they believed before, even if they say they trust in science".
  • sharikous 5y ago
    Also nuclear power is a big taboo for the European left, often spoken of in fear-mongering/puritan language, even if most scientists support it.
    • antod 5y ago
      It's also possible that objections from some left leaning people to (for example) GMOs or nuclear power aren't scientific objections as such. They may very well believe that those things work the way "science" says they work, but have downstream fears about the corporations that control them, or people implementing them properly, or taking long term care into the future, greed, shortcuts etc Well, in my head that is one way someone could still generally agree with "science", but be against some of those things and stay somewhat consistent.
      • sharikous 5y ago
        Sure. At the end we are speaking of political decisions. One thing is measuring how much energy you can get from 1 g of uranium (science), another thing is building a nuclear plant with safety constraints (engineering) but deciding whether to build a nuclear plant or not is a political decision. It's just that in my experience some people in this camp make objections that are very emotional and the gist is that this is the vibe that dominates the discussion. Of course there are concerns with GMO and nuclear power and you can trust science and still object to them on the grounds you cite. It's just that there are many people who behave, actually, inconsistently in that topic. At least from what I experienced.
• entropyneur 5y ago
  I've recently noticed that pseudoscientific claims are now often accompanied with references to supposedly credentialed and authoritative scientists. Basically the inventors of the fakes are adopting to public's growing literacy. And I don't think this is going to stop or slow down with people getting more "methodologicaly literate". The fakes will just get more sophisticated.
  • _Wintermute 5y ago
    I've experienced this first-hand. I'm an author on a fairly big-impact SARS-CoV-2 paper and made the mistake of looking what people were tweeting about it. People are referencing it as evidence that vaccines are weakening the immune system and posting links to the paper to make it appear like a legitimate scientific claim, despite the paper saying nothing of the sort (pretty much the opposite actually). I don't know if it's malicious and they're relying on the typical anti-vax twitter user not reading or understanding the article, or just lack of scientific-literacy and they've genuinely misinterpreted it.
    • amitport 5y ago
      It's mostly stupidity and blind faith IMO. Most of those posts are reshares and its hard to find who actually was the first to refer to a paper. I once saw such a claim from antivaxers on Facebook and decided to try and read the paper although I'm not an epidemiologist... So first of all the paper was behind a paywall, second, it was written in Spanish (which I and the poster do not read), third, already in the abstract it said the opposite of what the Facebook poster claimed... It's all just a waste of energy really. They just search for titles that sound like they support them and do not bother considering who wrote it, where was it published, or even what does it say in the abstract. It seems that no one is even close to actually reading a paper and evaluating its merits.
    • dgb23 5y ago
      People get a kind of power and influence over others when they achieve to create an aura of credibility. Typically this is paired with strong, oversimplified or even false claims. People want to hear it and believe it, so abusers get to reign. This is very typical and likely most problematic in politics. Cults are a smaller but often more extreme instance. The root of the problem is three headed: For one, there is simply not enough respect for education. It’s seen as a cost center and the best education is reserved for a small elite and education is too rigid overall, when it should be a flexible part of our lives through a much larger era. Secondly, there are perverse incentives and little accountability. Abusers are rewarded with power and very rarely do they take real responsibility. Third, there are many who feel disconnected, because they are. They get lied to, manipulated and exploited from all sides. Seen as resources instead of real human beings.
• Havoc 5y ago
  Not trusting it isn't exactly a great option either though
• lovemenot 5y ago
  This article talked a lot about an experiment's results and how this may affect public policy. The experiment being discussed was about the behaviour of people who apply scepticism to scientific results. It is ironic then that the article barely gave any account of the experiment itself. Just its findings. Readers are given no opportunity to critically evaluate the experiment.
  • _lazlo 5y ago
    Right. The whole purpose of science is for others to repeat the experiment and verify it’s result. Never trust a scientist! “Scientists” these days are really more modern day priests.
    • lovemenot 5y ago
      I cannot tell whether your comment is sincere or facetious. And its first word is unwarranted as your comment does not actually follow on from its parent. I didn't read the paper on which this article is based. But I understand it's not so much about why to distrust scientists, as it is about the benefit of employing critical thinking to scientific results. My earlier comment wasn't about the experiment per se. Rather, the way the article was written.
      • _lazlo 5y ago
        It was sincere. The scientific method is based on not trusting a scientist. Record your result, explain the experiment so others can repeat it. Why? Because you shouldn’t trust what someone says. The scientific process is the collective work of all those experiments and results. Trust the collective body of work produced by people. Not what someone says because they are a scientist. Scientists were given the ring of power in political culture because it seemed the natural move and they would be the most cautious with its corrupting nature. Sadly much of science now is not real science and people are trusting them as once did priests. In my opinion.
    • datavirtue 5y ago
      I don't know about "priests." I have recently seen crowds of rock dumb idiots gathered outside of scientists' homes threatening their life and their family's lives. I don't think priests ever had to worry about the rock dumb laiety showing up with pitch forks.
• htjglhktbrn 5y ago
  > The researchers note their findings conflict with ongoing campaigns to promote trust in science as a way to fight misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing and COVID-19 vaccines. Interesting they bring up mask-wearing, because it was the scientists who were telling us in the beginning that we should not be wearing masks.
• elihu 5y ago
  This is a hard problem. At some level, all people have to rely on experts to interpret scientific results for them. In science, the standard of truth is experimental repeatability, and most results that are interesting enough to get published require quite a lot of effort to actually run the experiments. And at some level you either have to run the experiment for yourself or trust somebody's word that they got the result they got and didn't make any mistakes. So, since replicating results is hard we rely on reputation and authority instead. Is this paper peer reviewed and accepted to a respected journal or conference? Are respectable journalists writing about it? Are government officials saying things that match what the paper seems to be saying? And so on. There are shortcuts. If an article is claiming that scientists have created a perpetual motion machine, they haven't. If an article was plainly written by someone who doesn't understand the difference between a kilowatt and a kilowatt-hour, it can safely be ignored. And so on. Science literacy is helpful at spotting obviously wrong articles, but I think there's a danger that it can lull one into overconfidence in one's own abilities to spot falsehoods. Sometimes the things we're told are just plain wrong, and some of those things aren't obviously nonsense. Some of them come from seemingly reputable sources and could plausibly be true, and the only way to know for sure is to see if other reputable scientists are getting the same results.
  • AmericanChopper 5y ago
    It’s a problem that’s been solved for hundreds of years, and depending on the way you look at it, it’s not even a problem at all. For starters, it depends on what you’re supposed to be trusting science to do. If you’re trusting science to provide you with a collection of knowledge that is definitely true, then you’ve misplaced your trust. Because that’s not what science is. Science is simply a methodology for refining knowledge, on its best day, science will provide you with the best understanding that we have currently achieved on a particular topic, and no more than that. Are you trusting science to be a pure discipline, motivated only by the search of the truth? Because it’s not that either. Science and academia just as infested with politics, and ideology, and perverse incentives, and corruption as any other human institution. Are you trusting the knowledge provided by science to be particularly sophisticated? Because depending on the field it might not be that either. If you require science to be capable of making repeatable predictions, then there’s entire scientific fields that are not capable of that. Psychology for instance has failed to reliably predict anything other than some rather broad trends, by some standards the entire field would be considered pseudoscience. In any case, the solution we came up with for dealing with this issue was democracy. I think the real question that’s being asked here is “why are technocratic policies often not popular?”, there’s lots of reasons you could postulate for any particular policy, but in all cases democracy is doing its job properly by acting as a safeguard against unpopular technocratic policies.
• FinanceAnon 5y ago
  People believe what they want to believe. For some people, any scientists whose words can be twisted to agree with their worldview are the "real scientists", while others are just "bribed scientists" who just write what they are told to write. If there is one dodgy study made against GMO, people who are against GMO will just focus on that one, and will completely ignore 100s of studies which contradict it.
• Nevermark 5y ago
  For accuracy I would prefer the title had been: > Trusting science [without understanding the scientific method] leaves people vulnerable to believing pseudoscience But it was already a wordy title.
  • Blikkentrekker 5y ago
    “the scientific method” is incredibly easy to understand and on top of that comes in many different forms and standards. Understanding the design of a particular experiment and the theories and values it attempts to put to the test is quite another matter. Scientists and laymen in completely different fields all understand “the scientific method”, but they often cannot even begin to read or understand each other's work or experiments. Luckily, the convenient thing is that the experiments that are used to support very policalized claims are often quite easy to understand to the lay man with some rudimentary knowledge, and it's the experiments in things such as particle physics or quantum chemistry that have almost no political influence that are incomprehensible without at least a 8 years of formal education in the specific field.
    • Nevermark 5y ago
      I don't think the scientific method is actually that easy for most people to grasp. For a layperson, simply talking about experiments and repeatability doesn't really convey the reality of how science works. The way I describe the scientific method to regular people is its purpose: It is simply the growing and improving collection of methods we have found for separating fact, from fiction, illusion, bias, wishful thinking, tradition, coincidence, and every other form of misconception or non-predictive source. It is the only system of knowledge, that is based on relentlessly weeding out any false or unproven conjectures we have about reality. This conforms to actual practice: actual scientific activity includes falsifiable predictions, experiments, reviews and repeatability, but also math (a biggie obviously), statistics, revealed conflicts of interest, regular meta-studies of active areas, tests for data bias, simulations for exploring implications, discussion groups vetting and encouraging each other's ideas, cataloging of fruitful concepts for guiding inquiry such as symmetry, ... and on and on and on. And as new tests, methods or ideas are found useful, the scientific method accumulates them. What all these activities have in common is they decrease the chance that something incorrect will be accepted. And given all that testing and vetting and care, science holds itself to a higher standard than any other search for knowledge except pure math. And given that science is an inherently decentralized activity, carried out with experts in numerous overlapping fields, organizations, and areas of research, and the fact that nature itself contains no contradictions, it is very difficult for errors to stick around unnoticed in any area attracting much attention. Another practical part of science many people don't get, is most scientists are actively working at the intersection of the known and unknown, so are very aware of sciences limitations, and also the destructive danger to their own progress and credibility if they unwittingly or strategically choose to accept false premises, for political, economic or other reasons. Not that bad science is never done, but it is very risky for the scientists own credibility and ability to make any meaningful discovery. Coalitions to intentionally push false narratives would know they were severely handicapping themselves from further discovery, and sabotaging their own relevance to downstream scientific discovery and technological applications. Those of us familiar with science tend to take all this context for how and why science works for granted.
• Kenji 5y ago
  > The researchers note their findings conflict with ongoing campaigns to promote trust in science as a way to fight misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic, mask-wearing and COVID-19 vaccines. If you trust in science, you know that ordinary surgeon's masks and cloths cannot protect you from viruses. You also know that the COVID vaccines are experimental and have no long-term studies done on them. You also know that the risk of dying from COVID below an age of 40 is about as high as winning a large sum of money in the lottery. You also know that highly vaccinated countries like Israel had COVID cases explode, making you wonder how exactly the vaccine protects the people. Trusting the science means trusting the scientific method, not trusting some random authorities who have every financial and political incentive on the planet to claim what they claim.
• boxed 5y ago
  "Trusting astrology leaves people vulnerable to pseudoastrology." It think this made up sentence makes it pretty clear why this isn't actually a problem.
• GDC7 5y ago
  Richard Feynman on pseudoscience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWr39Q9vBgo
• montalbano 5y ago
  The concept of 'trusting science' is utterly absurd. We may choose to trust certain scientists because no one has the time or inclination to critically assess all primary literature, but the nebulous idea of 'trusting science' should be thrown in the dustbin. No matter what side of the political spectrum you live on. Edit: to add, I'm certain that a large majority of good scientists would agree with the above.
• tomp 5y ago
  The fundamental principle of science is doubt, not trust. “Believe in science” is just a new religion for the intellectual class. Obviously, knee-jerk doubt is no better than knee-jerk trust, but there needs to be a balance, and recently the marketers & manipulators (even those employed by governments, corporations, international organisations, …) have caught up on the fact that labelling misinformation as “science” makes it much more viral…
  • aww_dang 5y ago
    Scientismic appeals commonly appear in relation to political agendas. In popular discourse "trusting science" can be better understood as an appeal for conformity of thought. Scientists naturally disagree about a great many things. When people are asked to "trust The Science", the speaker is asking for unquestioning faith in the experts they feel are truthful. Scientism is just another way denigrate dissent as dangerous heresy. The core of the issue revolves around the lack of trust in government and media institutions. It is a poor substitute for reflecting upon how the trust deficit came about and attempting to address those issues. The process would undoubtedly involve addressing past misdeeds, accepting responsibility and attempting to make amends. Understandably, this is not palatable. In lieu of this we are offered more divisive finger pointing and comically inept generalizations of the heathen unbelievers as "flat-earthers". The end result is a doubling down on the trust deficit, digging us deeper with further divisiveness. At a certain point this approach and the institutions advancing it must be recognized as bankrupt.
  • goto11 5y ago
    > “Believe in science” is just a new religion for the intellectual class. What does that even mean? If I believe the earth is round, then science is my religion? If I believe it is flat, then I am an atheist?
    • Kenji 5y ago
      If you haven't confirmed it yourself (it's quite simple, there are various experiments you can do) then yes it is belief. You simply believe that the evidence is persuasive. That is good enough for most things, but for things of great importance, you wanna dig down deeper, do your own research. If you just trust whatever the current scientific authorities say, then yes, this behavior is indistinguishable from religion. Completely indistinguishable.
• mike_hearn 5y ago
  I feel like this study is missing the forest for the trees. Which section of society has the highest trust in scientists? Probably it's other scientists, closely followed by science journalists. Yet this article is set in the paradigm in which people are divided into "the public" and "scientists", with the latter being universally correct and the former in need of education by the latter. Over the past few years I've read a lot of scientific papers outside my normal field of reading (computer science/cryptography). My guess is over 100 in the past two years alone, or more if you count scan reading or checking only particular sections to follow up on a citation. The overwhelming impression this left is that many research fields are actually overrun with pseudo-science and that the institutions cannot detect this (or can but prefer not to). This new study is especially ironic because social psychology is one of the biggest offenders when it comes to spreading misinformation. The entire field is rightly seen as junk due to the prevalence of non-replicable studies on 35 undergrads being generalized to the entire world, which are often then used to demand major political change. This particular study probably will replicate, because the claim it's making is so obvious as to be near tautological, but that is hardly better. A good example of academic pseudo-science is claims about bots that subtly manipulate people's politics via Twitter. There are around 10,000 published papers on this phenomenon, which actually does not exist at all [1]. Claims it does are mostly derived from an academic "bot detector" that is claimed to be 95% accurate, but which actually has FP rates of around 30%-40% i.e. it looks and sounds like science, but is actually pseudo-science. The people writing these papers know their claims are junk (for example they almost never give lists of claimed bot accounts), but don't care because it lets them manipulate governments. California and Germany have both passed laws based on these claims. Moreover, the study claims to have relevance to "COVID-19 misinformation". The formal COVID literature is a disaster zone. It's absolutely overrun with pseudo-science to an unbelievable degree. If you'd tried to tell me about the scale of the problem two years ago I'd never have believed you, so I won't be surprised if you don't believe me now. The sheer extent of pseudo-science in public health is a bit like the Matrix. Nobody can be told about it: really, you have to see it for yourself. Nonetheless, here are a few examples. In [2] the very first sentence of the paper is a claim about public statistics that's factually false. Nobody seems to have noticed this despite that the entire paper is premised on the false claim, comes from Imperial College London, has 19 authors and was peer reviewed and then published in Nature. Having started with misinformation the paper goes downhill from there and makes several other pseudo-scientific claims. In [3] the same team presents a model that is used to "prove" that lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives. The methodology is circular: the model by construction could not conclude anything else because it took as axiomatic that only government interventions can end epidemics (i.e. it assumed all epidemics have a single wave). The authors know that isn't true: the paper itself explains that it is "illustrative only" and that "in reality even in the absence of government interventions we would expect Rt to decrease and therefore [we] would overestimate deaths in the no-intervention model", i.e. the authors admit that it's a fictional illustration of a world that isn't real and that its conclusions are wrong by an uncharacterized amount. Yet scientists don't care: this pseudo-scientific paper has been cited over 1300 times. In [4] the authors claim that that model is "validated", which they define as: the model outputs roughly match the results from other models, not reality. This is a circular, pseudo-scientific definition of validity. It's not hugely surprising that this stuff happens. There are strong social conventions in science that you always assume good faith on the part of other scientists, often to an absurd degree. In [5] an obviously Photoshopped/airbrushed image got peer reviewed and published in a medical journal. When someone pointed it out, the authors claimed that the patient merely wore the same shirt six months later, and the journal accepted this explanation! Anyone with their brain switched on can see it's the same image, but until the journal was mocked and embarrassed in public "science" was defending an obvious fraud. So before social psychologists start lecturing the public on how they should be better at detecting pseudo-science, how about they clean up their own house first? Once academics are reliably detecting and flagging pseudo-scientific papers in their own journals, then and only then should they expound on the dangers of misinformation. [1] https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-not-c66129e5e3f5 https://blog.plan99.net/fake-science-part-ii-bots-that-are-n... [2] https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-paper-from-imperial-college-london/ https://dailysceptic.org/2021/08/24/examining-the-latest-pap... [3] https://nicholaslewis.org/did-lockdowns-really-save-3-million-covid-19-deaths-as-flaxman-et-al-claim/ https://nicholaslewis.org/did-lockdowns-really-save-3-millio... [4] https://github.com/ptti/ptti/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/ptti/ptti/blob/master/README.md [5] https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2019/11/11/photoshop-as-a-management-modality/ https://scienceintegritydigest.com/2019/11/11/photoshop-as-a...
• robomartin 5y ago
  Science, in political hands, has become a religion, a sledge hammer, a means of dividing populations in order to get votes, and more. When I was a kid my late grandfather always said: Never believe politics or religion, at the core, they are the same, dirty, manipulative, dishonest extremes of the human experience. When politicians use "believe science" there's also the reality that some (most?) don't actually practice what they preach. This weeks our Vice President handed anti-vaxers and vaccine doubters some of the most powerful ammunition they could have ever hoped for. For those who don't know, Harris was scheduled for an in-person interview at a popular TV show in the US called "The View". Moments before she was to join the hosts live on set, two of the four hosts tested positive for COVID-19. What did they do? Believe the science? No, of course not. The two hosts were removed from the set. Harris conducted the interview remotely from another room in the building. They squandered an opportunity to "believe science". She is vaccinated. Everyone in her circle is vaccinated. Everyone in the TV studio is vaccinated. And yet, she, effectively, ran away and hid. Believe science? Any doubter watching this can rightly ask: You ask us to believe what you say, get vaccinated, and you don't even trust the vaccine yourself? And masks? You tell us to use masks, you are vaccinated and you didn't even trust the science enough to put on a mask and hold the interview? My entire family is vaccinated. I have no problem at all walking into a location where someone tests positive. At all. For me it isn't about belief --that's religious-- it's about intellectually understanding what's going on and, yes, trusting the system, methods and scientific process to deliver scientific truth to the extent possible. This is where these politicians come of as the fake manipulators they actually are, all of them. Every time I hear one of them use "believe the science" as some high and mighty pedestal on which they stand I want to barf.
  • u801e 5y ago
    The key fact that's missing from your argument is that no vaccine is 100% effective, and that efficacy relies in part on herd immunity. For example, several years ago, there were several instances of outbreaks of measles because the percentage of vaccinated individuals dropped below the threshold required to maintain herd immunity.
    • robomartin 5y ago
• destitude 5y ago
  Also news media making blanket statements like "increased 400%" and never tell you the real data is highly misleading.. Was it 1 to 5? which is a lot different than 1000 to 5000.
• beckman466 5y ago
  It's great to see a lot of comments with an awareness that many in today's society aren't verifying (or able to verify?) the science they come across. Yet I'm not seeing much talk yet of theories and frameworks that take this reality as a starting point. That takes this widespread scientific non-competence as a starting point to then chart a path forward to a competent society. In other words, what are some strategies to support and guide people into becoming competent? How do we prevent this non-competence from showing up in the next generations? As someone who has a shoddy base when it comes to science, I am still often missing the societal acknowledgement that 1.) it is hard to find patient, compassionate teachers and suitable material if you didn't do well early on (e.g. my sister did, I didn't), and 2.) that acknowledge the reality of both a.) having to untangle existing miseducation (shoddy, neglected base), while b.) giving enough time and space for the right scientific theories to fall into place (i.e. for competence or 'mastery' to start occurring). In other words: many of you here agree that people aren't able to derive or verify their own scientific explorations, yet what are the best learning frameworks for these adults to re-base their scientific/critical thinking skills? As I said before, I currently have quite a shoddy base (to my great sorrow), how and where do i start remedying this? How do I rebuild my base, starting from where I am at now? Who has done this before? Who has achieved this? What was their path like? Personally I currently believe the big intellectual 'gap' between the intellectually competent and less-than competent is a combination of 1.) artificial scarcity of learning material and opportunities caused by the profit-motive in academia/sciences, together with the criminalization of cooperation due to intellectual property laws (the propertied class enclosing and monopolizing knowledge) [1], and 2.) the knock on effect this causes on the non-propertied class (those who do not own the black box (intellectual) property they create, and who receive wages to work on this property for a firm), as they are forced to focus on their own skillset and position [2], over fostering widespread peer learning (e.g. passing on their knowledge) and the shared building and emergence of a rich network/web of collective intelligence [3]. Added on top of this brew are the psychological effects on society of a small group of people who believe they are innately intellectually superior (because they have been told throughout their lives that they are, and they have been put on a pedestal: 'rewarded' [4]), while living and working in today's black box society. That small group does not believe it is possible to get a 'second chance' at building a scientific base because they unconsciously believe that the current economic system (the bourgeois property system and it's profit motive) hands out work to the 'right' people, every time. [4] Essentially they have come to completely attach their identity and self-worth to their professional and technical strengths/skills. [5] In my experience there is unfortunately no talking with most of these people. Until they personally witness the miraculous intellectual growth of another human being who emerged from a place different than they have, or in an area they didn't expect, their ego will protect them. This ego-protection is is not necessarily a bad thing in our current dog-eat-dog world, yet it does mean that a new groundbreaking compassionate learning framework is less than likely to emerge from their circles. So to summarize, and to spell out what the above reality means for me: to today's society I am 'not worth spending time nurturing' because I am seen as a 'very late bloomer' (worst framing: I am a lost cause because I was lazy and I supposedly didn't 'get with the program' early enough [6]). In many areas I do not yet have the competences to actively contribute to a specific scientific or technological endeavor, yet also very few places to turn to to properly, sustainably and affordably 'skill up'. Both the 1.) curse of knowledge [7] and 2.) the lack of time and patience experienced by existing many knowledge workers, due to the stress and they experience, means that finding allies for growth is made nearly impossible. To conclude, and to emphasize my aforementioned arguments: the underlying challenge seems to me to be how we remove the profit motive from science and from technological research and development. "The profit motive, in conjunction with competition among capitalists, is responsible for an instability in the accumulation and utilization of capital which leads to increasingly severe depressions. Unlimited competition leads to a huge waste of labor, and to that crippling of the social consciousness of individuals which I mentioned before. This crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career. I am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils, namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to every man, woman, and child. The education of the individual, in addition to promoting his own innate abilities, would attempt to develop in him a sense of responsibility for his fellow men in place of the glorification of power and success in our present society." — Albert Einstein, Why Socialism? [8] So anyway, what beautiful frameworks do what I described above (and earlier) [9]? What will help me become scientifically competent? Who has gone there before (from my starting point); who should I talk to? - [1] Marianna Mazzucato, https://web.archive.org/web/20160204223931/https://nybooks.com/articles/2014/04/24/innovation-government-was-crucial-after-all/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160204223931/https://nybooks.c... [2] Wendy Liu, Gatekeeping in the tech industry: https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50 https://dellsystem.me/posts/fragments-50 [3] Aaron Swartz, Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... [4] Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/541132.Punished_by_Rewards https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/541132.Punished_by_Rewar... [5] Discussion on 'The Role of Jargon in Left Politics?': https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/l49hci/the_role_of_jargon_in_left_politics/ https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/l49hci/the_... [6] Devon Price, Laziness Does Not Exist - But unseen barriers do: https://archive.is/s4Dn0 https://archive.is/s4Dn0 / https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01 https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e... [7] Wikipedia, Curse of knowledge: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge [8] Albert Einstein, Why Socialism?: https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/ https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/ [9] Me on a new distributed rhizomatic education system: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25753856
• akvadrako 5y ago
  > Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts. When someone says ‘science teaches such and such’, he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach it; experience teaches it -- Richard Feynman Feynman is an expert on science; so if you believe you should trust experts, you should trust him, and hence, distrust experts. It's a self-contradictory position to take.
• Jensson 5y ago
  The main problem is that science and philosophy have gotten muddled. Philosophers like to call themselves scientists today even though they just write down their thoughts on a subject rather than trying to create new testable theories or test old theories. In general scientists tends to agree with each other on most things. Philosophers however have little basis in reality and create political camps fighting against each other. When scientists disagree it is about the best methods to move the field forward, not the state the field is in right now. If scientists disagree they just look or run experiments and see who was right. If they disagree about the interpretation of the experiment they are philosophers and not scientists, making so bad experiments that people can't even agree on what it shows means the experiment wasn't good enough to be science. But those experiments will still pass the peer review from people of the same faction since to them everything is obviously correct. Yes, this means that most "science" today isn't really science but instead a ton of philosophers bickering about whose beliefs should be seen as correct. All this bickering generates a lot of papers and citations, but since none of it is rooted in well designed experiments they suffer from the same problems as the old Greek philosophers did.