7 ms·

Scientists: Don’t Feed the Doubt Machine

37 points by mgd 5y ago

matthewmorgan 5y ago
I seem to remember reading somewhere that science was based on doubt
- bobthechef 5y ago
  This article aside, it isn't. This idea stems from Cartesian methodological doubt which is the death knell for all knowledge. Methodological doubt is irrational. It is not rational to doubt things for no reason. You must have a reason for doubting something just as you must have a reason for believing something. Irrational doubt cannot be overcome through reason precisely because its genesis is not in the intellect, but in the will. It is arbitrarily assigned to something and so you cannot rationally resolve the cause of the doubt one way or another because there is no rational cause to resolve. Rational doubt is the result of coming to know something credible that contradicts or undermines something you take to be true. This casts doubt on your prior belief. To resolve it, you must verify your prior belief and/or the new information.
PaulHoule 5y ago
I noticed that the people who were spamming HN about Ivermectin didn't care if the article was positive or negative. They just wanted to "get the party started" with a discussion. It's central to anti-vax discourse to find some small detail and amplify it to something big, then repeat the process with another detail again and again. It reminds me of the web site "The Motley Fool" that would post an article such as "Should you buy AAPL?" that would always hem and haw and come to no real conclusion. Perhaps the reader felt they were being diligent by considering so much contradictory information.
- vanattab 5y ago
  >It reminds me of the web site "The Motley Fool" that would post an article such as "Should you buy AAPL?" that would always hem and haw and come to no real conclusion. Perhaps the reader felt they were being diligent by considering so much contradictory information. Yeah I also hate it when articles give me the arguments for and against some issue and let me come to my own conclusions instead of just telling me what I should think. /s
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    See https://depts.washington.edu/fammed/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/3d-HANDOUT.pdf https://depts.washington.edu/fammed/wp-content/uploads/2018/... there is such a thing as reviewing the information about a topic, but then there is a "debate" which is a pernicious game people play in high school (e.g. arguing for and against positions that they don't believe in just to have an argument.) When adults have a "debate" usually the goal is to take an absurd position like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision or the idea that God is an old man who sits on a throne and created the world in six days and legitimize it by comparing it to a real scientific or theological theory.
    - timr 5y ago
      That document is incredibly ironic, if you know anything about actual debate. The common move of the experienced debater is to re-define terms to confuse the issue, then boldly advance a claim based on those bizarro-world definitions. That's exactly what is happening here...but, hilariously, being used to disparage debate. Someone defines "debate" to mean a bunch of things that aren't actually true, then proceeds to make a document where the tenet is that there's something "better" than debate. > Debate assumes that there is a right answer and that someone has it This isn't true at all. It's a socratic game to gain a better understanding of the truth. > Debate calls for investing wholeheartedly in one’s beliefs. Any good debater can take either side of an issue with equal facility. > Debate defends one’s own positions as the best solution and excludes other solutions. Not a requirement of a debate. A good debater, in fact, often expands the playing field to win the debate. > Debate defends assumptions as truth No, and in fact, if you do this in a debate and are caught, you lose the debate.
    - vanattab 5y ago
      >When adults have a "debate" usually the goal is to take an absurd position Not so. Most debates are about mundane things like, Should we invest our limited RD budget on X or Y?, or should we send our kids to public or private school? Or is GoT or LotR a better series. That table you linked is total nonsense trying to redefine fussy terms like debate, dialouge, discussion and artificially place them on a linear scale. T Debate is a from of dialouge which is in turn a form of discussion.
- davesque 5y ago
  Yep. Also related and relevant is how the brain works with regard to encoding falsehood; essentially, there's no delete button. Once a statement of possible fact has been discovered, it takes more energy and reinforcement for the brain to remember that it's false as opposed to just assuming it's true.
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    There's no evidence, at least as far as I am aware, for that proposition outside of fear-inducing lessons. It takes a lot of mental effort to unlearn "all snakes are dangerous" and not nearly as much effort to unlearn "giraffe necks got longer due to inherited individual adaptation."
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      It's not "doubt" that is harmful, but "doubt" that ties into people's feelings of anxiety. Long after a person is exposed to this kind of propaganda, the false "facts" will be forgotten but the emotional effect of the anxiety will remain. That's the goal of the merchants of chaos.
Fidelix 5y ago
"Second, scientists should consider what kinds of argument the data and conclusions serve. How might these shape public opinion? What policy decisions might they affect?" Peachy.
readflaggedcomm 5y ago
>This has a key role in whether individual decisions are cast as a matter of ‘freedom’ versus ‘solidarity’, and regulations as restriction or protection. A scientist with this type of filter is foremost an activist.
- samuelizdat 5y ago
  Less activist, more puritan priest trained as a new institutional clergy.
throwawayay02 5y ago
A new meaning for "political science".
petermcneeley 5y ago
Related discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29065806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29065806
ankushnarula 5y ago
Summary: defenestrate the pagans and apostates along with their dangerously corrupting ideas
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > Summary: defenestrate the pagans and apostates along with their dangerously corrupting ideas Huh? From the OP: > Much of my own work focuses on how industry exploits scientific credentials to bolster false claims that undermine breastfeeding to increase sales of formula milk and, ultimately, damage health. The strategies and patterns recur across industries: they have been documented in tobacco, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, food and more. This influence is so powerful that public-health researchers consider it a distinct area of study: ‘commercial determinants of health’. > Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been saddened at how science has been hijacked. Arguments around herd immunity exemplify this: proponents claimed that acquiring immunity by infection was fine for most people and also that communities were well on their way to achieving herd immunity. The messages downplayed dangers for those with high risks of exposure or severe illness. Technical arguments over infection rates silently cemented the assumption that disabled or immunocompromised people did not merit collective protective action; nor did the workers whose jobs required dangerous public contact.... > The scientists who gum up the doubt machine do so by constantly pointing to the broader context, by acknowledging genuine scientific debate, by being alert to researchers’ political and commercial connections, and by staying educated on how denialism works. If more scientists did the same, these distorting strategies would be stymied. It seems the problem this article is trying to solve is the one where scientists behave in such a way to allow people to misunderstand or misconstrue their work in order to support false or unscientific conclusions.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
f154hfds 5y ago
It's hard to overstate how poor this take is. > [1.] researchers must learn to identify authors of research, and their relationships with industry and with non-profit groups that have specialized agendas. So research is not allowed to be respected by scientists if done with underlying business interests? > [2.] scientists should consider what kinds of argument the data and conclusions serve. So you should intentionally bias your results if they don't fit the narrative you wanted? > [3.] scientists can consistently highlight correct information and avoid serving as inadvertent amplifiers of flawed information This gets to the core of the problem. It assumes scientists know the truth and the 'correct' studies. In my experience, my friends with unwise and problematic takes on Covid are almost 100% in the camp that scientists are trying to do the very things this article says they should do! What we need is scientists who have backbone, who have an unwaivering unaltering desire to get to the truth at all costs. Anything less is both not scientific and not someone you should trust. You won't get the clear answers you want from this individual though.
- avocad 5y ago
  "What we need is scientists who have backbone, who have an unwaivering unaltering desire to get to the truth at all costs. " Well, they also need to eat. So you'll have to pay them for it, as directly as possible.
  - adolph 5y ago
    Agreed. The call is honored by time but not execution. The story is used to teach the wisdom of evaluating a plan on not only how desirable the outcome would be but also how it can be executed. It provides a moral lesson about the fundamental difference between ideas and their feasibility, and how this affects the value of a given plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat
- xg15 5y ago
  Yes, scientists must absolutely be aware what ties authors have if those authors are arguing in bad faith to push an agenda: > First, researchers must learn to identify authors of research, and their relationships with industry and with non-profit groups that have specialized agendas. How the tobacco industry paid scientists and physicians to serve as advisers and consultants to undermine the body of evidence pointing to the harms of tobacco is extensively documented. More recent examples abound. For instance, the non-profit International Life Sciences Institute, based in Washington DC and funded by leading companies in the food and chemical industries, promotes doubt about science that links ultraprocessed foods with health concerns, and provides experts to promote personal responsibility rather than regulations on junk food in policies to combat obesity. Edit: > What we need is scientists who have backbone, who have an unwaivering unaltering desire to get to the truth at all costs. This is one part of what this article is demanding. It's arguing against efforts of entrenched interests - often businesses - to obscure the truth or make it harder for the general public to tell truth from untruth. The second part is about taking action. Informing is one part, but at some point courses of action have to be decided - and for many problems, it's not enough to delegate this to individuals, the decision has to be taken on a collective level. Because we will never have 100% knowledge, a certain amount of uncertainty has to be tolerated when deciding on a course. What this article also argues against is tactics that specifically target this unavoidable amount of uncertainty with the interest of delaying action.
lordnacho 5y ago
The underlying problem is that everyone is familiar with the primitives of ordinary, day-to-day doubt: honesty, conflicting interests, status. We all practice it every day as part of our evolutionary programming, and some of us even like to watch the odd soap opera to keep scratching that itch. Almost nobody really spends much time with that other kind of doubt, epistemological skepticism. Theories, hypotheses, observations. Dense articles, years of reading. So what happens when someone brings up climate change, or covid, or anything else? You can be sure they look at the former. They want to know who said what, and they want to know the interests behind it. Is this or that person a liar? What motivations might they have?
timr 5y ago
[flagged]
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  Well... when we get to herd immunity isn't a purely scientific number, because it depends on peoples' behavior, and peoples' behavior changes to some degree depending on what public health officials are telling them (or depending on what the media is saying that public health officials are saying). So you're kind of right in your criticism (what we need from scientists is science, not what they think we need to hear). And yet, there is also an element of validity in what they're saying here too - matters of science are not just matters of science. They change peoples' behavior, in ways that the scientists may not have taken into account.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > matters of science are not just matters of science. They change peoples' behavior, in ways that the scientists may not have taken into account. And given this, the only defensible position for the scientist to take is to tell the truth as best they know it, including the truth about what we don't know or don't understand, as well as about what we do know and do understand. That way the responsibility for other people's behavior is on the other people--they were told the truth as best the scientists knew it, and if they made a bad judgment based on that truth, it's their responsibility. Whereas, if a scientist tries to twist or filter the truth because of some belief they have about how it might change other people's behavior, now it's their responsibility if those other people end up doing something harmful, because they didn't just tell the truth as best they knew it, they tried to judge what they wanted other people to do and filtered what they said based on that. And that's not their job.
    - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
      I agree, but I will go one step further: It is also the responsibility of the science reporters to not filter out the truth about what we don't know and don't understand. That part's important. Don't skip it to make the story sexier or more viral. In fact, I wonder if more of the responsibility for the recent problems is on the reporters, rather than the scientists.
oxymoran 5y ago
We are so fucked.
tomp 5y ago
Everyone wants to use science to promote their own political agenda. I hope they all fail.
twirlock 5y ago
Yeah just double down on pretending you know shit you obviously don't really know; that will fix the credibility gap.
bstockton 5y ago
>Suppose [a person] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others? -Descartes Science is done by clearly and logically addressing doubt. Sweeping doubt under the rug and showing prejudice in which evidence is presented is antithetical to the impetus of science (a disimpassioned search for unwavering truth). I'm surprised this is published in nature. Edit: tried to format the quote, didn't work.
- cogman10 5y ago
  What's the solution to Gish Gallopers? The issue this article is talking about is you can very quickly generate hundreds of bad studies and outright lies that take decades to discredit. And even after all that effort, those studies will STILL be cited not because of the validity, but the narrative. For example, vaccines an autism. We have so many high quality studies proving with as much certainty as you can in medicine that vaccines do not cause autism. Yet that's a claim that hasn't died off yet (And Mr. Wakefield's fraud study with the initial lie is STILL cited as if there were some sort of conspiracy to cover it up). So what's the solution? It's easier to quickly lie than it is to experiment and prove. It's easier to falsify data than it is to prove data was falsified. What other choice is there but to lean on consensus and reputation?
  - bstockton 5y ago
    Well, one strategy would be to preemptively rebut common misrepresentations and meaningless critiques, I do agree scientists could benefit from this technique. And if it's just misinformation with no merit, use Hitchen's Razor. However, established science has been wrong before about things there was a consensus on. We should investigate evidence that casts doubt on consensus if there is some merit, even if it is painstaking. It's one of the less sexy and tedious aspects of science, nevertheless important.
tgbugs 5y ago
Said another way, don't get nerd snipped by people who are trying to weaponize your professional scepticism for ulterior motives. This means that most of the time when dealing with adversaries you have to go against your usual scientific instincts, assume your position is correct, and reframe the conversation at a higher level about power, money, etc. Controlling where attention goes in these conversations is critical. Refusing to engage adversaries at the technical level seems wrong, but is the only way to defend against the fact that science operates by default at a level of doubt that the normal population simply cannot sustain without being driven to apathy (which is the objective of the adversaries).
- quantified 5y ago
  Part of the issue is recognizing adversaries and bad faith. In much of science, disagreements are still in good faith. But engaging bad-faith actors with the same tactics as good-faith ones, and engaging with the journalling public in the same way that you engage with other good-faith scientists, leads to losing the game that they’re playing.
  - tgbugs 5y ago
    Heh, yeah. We need to add another class to the ethics courses. "How to interact with parties who would be politically or economically impacted by the results of your research."
- allemagne 5y ago
  How much do we really want scientists writ large trying to optimize for the job of ensuring that the public is properly educated at the appropriate level of doubt? The adversaries we're trying to defend against will only have something else to point to and say "they have an explicit goal of manipulating public opinion to downplay climate/covid/round-earth skepticism", which isn't really that far off from what you're describing. Trying to properly gauge how new information is processed among hundreds of millions of people just seems like an expertise that is totally orthogonal to having a deep understanding of a scientific discipline. What you're talking about not only seems wrong, but just doesn't seem like the best way to go about solving the problem.
adolph 5y ago
This letter reads similarly to the Lancet correspondence "Science, not speculation, is essential to determine how SARS-CoV-2 reached humans" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01419-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... "The field of agnotology (the study of deliberate spreading of confusion) shows how ignorance and doubt can be purposefully manufactured." Tomori suggests that untruth is asymmetric between corporate and government interests.

37 points by mgd 5y ago

matthewmorgan 5y ago

I seem to remember reading somewhere that science was based on doubt

bobthechef 5y ago
This article aside, it isn't. This idea stems from Cartesian methodological doubt which is the death knell for all knowledge. Methodological doubt is irrational. It is not rational to doubt things for no reason. You must have a reason for doubting something just as you must have a reason for believing something. Irrational doubt cannot be overcome through reason precisely because its genesis is not in the intellect, but in the will. It is arbitrarily assigned to something and so you cannot rationally resolve the cause of the doubt one way or another because there is no rational cause to resolve. Rational doubt is the result of coming to know something credible that contradicts or undermines something you take to be true. This casts doubt on your prior belief. To resolve it, you must verify your prior belief and/or the new information.

PaulHoule 5y ago

I noticed that the people who were spamming HN about Ivermectin didn't care if the article was positive or negative. They just wanted to "get the party started" with a discussion. It's central to anti-vax discourse to find some small detail and amplify it to something big, then repeat the process with another detail again and again. It reminds me of the web site "The Motley Fool" that would post an article such as "Should you buy AAPL?" that would always hem and haw and come to no real conclusion. Perhaps the reader felt they were being diligent by considering so much contradictory information.

vanattab 5y ago
>It reminds me of the web site "The Motley Fool" that would post an article such as "Should you buy AAPL?" that would always hem and haw and come to no real conclusion. Perhaps the reader felt they were being diligent by considering so much contradictory information. Yeah I also hate it when articles give me the arguments for and against some issue and let me come to my own conclusions instead of just telling me what I should think. /s
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  See https://depts.washington.edu/fammed/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/3d-HANDOUT.pdf https://depts.washington.edu/fammed/wp-content/uploads/2018/... there is such a thing as reviewing the information about a topic, but then there is a "debate" which is a pernicious game people play in high school (e.g. arguing for and against positions that they don't believe in just to have an argument.) When adults have a "debate" usually the goal is to take an absurd position like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worlds_in_Collision or the idea that God is an old man who sits on a throne and created the world in six days and legitimize it by comparing it to a real scientific or theological theory.
  - timr 5y ago
    That document is incredibly ironic, if you know anything about actual debate. The common move of the experienced debater is to re-define terms to confuse the issue, then boldly advance a claim based on those bizarro-world definitions. That's exactly what is happening here...but, hilariously, being used to disparage debate. Someone defines "debate" to mean a bunch of things that aren't actually true, then proceeds to make a document where the tenet is that there's something "better" than debate. > Debate assumes that there is a right answer and that someone has it This isn't true at all. It's a socratic game to gain a better understanding of the truth. > Debate calls for investing wholeheartedly in one’s beliefs. Any good debater can take either side of an issue with equal facility. > Debate defends one’s own positions as the best solution and excludes other solutions. Not a requirement of a debate. A good debater, in fact, often expands the playing field to win the debate. > Debate defends assumptions as truth No, and in fact, if you do this in a debate and are caught, you lose the debate.
  - vanattab 5y ago
    >When adults have a "debate" usually the goal is to take an absurd position Not so. Most debates are about mundane things like, Should we invest our limited RD budget on X or Y?, or should we send our kids to public or private school? Or is GoT or LotR a better series. That table you linked is total nonsense trying to redefine fussy terms like debate, dialouge, discussion and artificially place them on a linear scale. T Debate is a from of dialouge which is in turn a form of discussion.
davesque 5y ago
Yep. Also related and relevant is how the brain works with regard to encoding falsehood; essentially, there's no delete button. Once a statement of possible fact has been discovered, it takes more energy and reinforcement for the brain to remember that it's false as opposed to just assuming it's true.
- torstenvl 5y ago
  There's no evidence, at least as far as I am aware, for that proposition outside of fear-inducing lessons. It takes a lot of mental effort to unlearn "all snakes are dangerous" and not nearly as much effort to unlearn "giraffe necks got longer due to inherited individual adaptation."
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    It's not "doubt" that is harmful, but "doubt" that ties into people's feelings of anxiety. Long after a person is exposed to this kind of propaganda, the false "facts" will be forgotten but the emotional effect of the anxiety will remain. That's the goal of the merchants of chaos.

Fidelix 5y ago

"Second, scientists should consider what kinds of argument the data and conclusions serve. How might these shape public opinion? What policy decisions might they affect?" Peachy.

readflaggedcomm 5y ago

>This has a key role in whether individual decisions are cast as a matter of ‘freedom’ versus ‘solidarity’, and regulations as restriction or protection. A scientist with this type of filter is foremost an activist.

samuelizdat 5y ago
Less activist, more puritan priest trained as a new institutional clergy.

throwawayay02 5y ago

A new meaning for "political science".

petermcneeley 5y ago

Related discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29065806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29065806

ankushnarula 5y ago

Summary: defenestrate the pagans and apostates along with their dangerously corrupting ideas

tablespoon 5y ago
> Summary: defenestrate the pagans and apostates along with their dangerously corrupting ideas Huh? From the OP: > Much of my own work focuses on how industry exploits scientific credentials to bolster false claims that undermine breastfeeding to increase sales of formula milk and, ultimately, damage health. The strategies and patterns recur across industries: they have been documented in tobacco, fossil fuels, pharmaceuticals, food and more. This influence is so powerful that public-health researchers consider it a distinct area of study: ‘commercial determinants of health’. > Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been saddened at how science has been hijacked. Arguments around herd immunity exemplify this: proponents claimed that acquiring immunity by infection was fine for most people and also that communities were well on their way to achieving herd immunity. The messages downplayed dangers for those with high risks of exposure or severe illness. Technical arguments over infection rates silently cemented the assumption that disabled or immunocompromised people did not merit collective protective action; nor did the workers whose jobs required dangerous public contact.... > The scientists who gum up the doubt machine do so by constantly pointing to the broader context, by acknowledging genuine scientific debate, by being alert to researchers’ political and commercial connections, and by staying educated on how denialism works. If more scientists did the same, these distorting strategies would be stymied. It seems the problem this article is trying to solve is the one where scientists behave in such a way to allow people to misunderstand or misconstrue their work in order to support false or unscientific conclusions.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

f154hfds 5y ago

It's hard to overstate how poor this take is. > [1.] researchers must learn to identify authors of research, and their relationships with industry and with non-profit groups that have specialized agendas. So research is not allowed to be respected by scientists if done with underlying business interests? > [2.] scientists should consider what kinds of argument the data and conclusions serve. So you should intentionally bias your results if they don't fit the narrative you wanted? > [3.] scientists can consistently highlight correct information and avoid serving as inadvertent amplifiers of flawed information This gets to the core of the problem. It assumes scientists know the truth and the 'correct' studies. In my experience, my friends with unwise and problematic takes on Covid are almost 100% in the camp that scientists are trying to do the very things this article says they should do! What we need is scientists who have backbone, who have an unwaivering unaltering desire to get to the truth at all costs. Anything less is both not scientific and not someone you should trust. You won't get the clear answers you want from this individual though.

avocad 5y ago
"What we need is scientists who have backbone, who have an unwaivering unaltering desire to get to the truth at all costs. " Well, they also need to eat. So you'll have to pay them for it, as directly as possible.
- adolph 5y ago
  Agreed. The call is honored by time but not execution. The story is used to teach the wisdom of evaluating a plan on not only how desirable the outcome would be but also how it can be executed. It provides a moral lesson about the fundamental difference between ideas and their feasibility, and how this affects the value of a given plan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belling_the_Cat
xg15 5y ago
Yes, scientists must absolutely be aware what ties authors have if those authors are arguing in bad faith to push an agenda: > First, researchers must learn to identify authors of research, and their relationships with industry and with non-profit groups that have specialized agendas. How the tobacco industry paid scientists and physicians to serve as advisers and consultants to undermine the body of evidence pointing to the harms of tobacco is extensively documented. More recent examples abound. For instance, the non-profit International Life Sciences Institute, based in Washington DC and funded by leading companies in the food and chemical industries, promotes doubt about science that links ultraprocessed foods with health concerns, and provides experts to promote personal responsibility rather than regulations on junk food in policies to combat obesity. Edit: > What we need is scientists who have backbone, who have an unwaivering unaltering desire to get to the truth at all costs. This is one part of what this article is demanding. It's arguing against efforts of entrenched interests - often businesses - to obscure the truth or make it harder for the general public to tell truth from untruth. The second part is about taking action. Informing is one part, but at some point courses of action have to be decided - and for many problems, it's not enough to delegate this to individuals, the decision has to be taken on a collective level. Because we will never have 100% knowledge, a certain amount of uncertainty has to be tolerated when deciding on a course. What this article also argues against is tactics that specifically target this unavoidable amount of uncertainty with the interest of delaying action.

lordnacho 5y ago

The underlying problem is that everyone is familiar with the primitives of ordinary, day-to-day doubt: honesty, conflicting interests, status. We all practice it every day as part of our evolutionary programming, and some of us even like to watch the odd soap opera to keep scratching that itch. Almost nobody really spends much time with that other kind of doubt, epistemological skepticism. Theories, hypotheses, observations. Dense articles, years of reading. So what happens when someone brings up climate change, or covid, or anything else? You can be sure they look at the former. They want to know who said what, and they want to know the interests behind it. Is this or that person a liar? What motivations might they have?

timr 5y ago

[flagged]

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
Well... when we get to herd immunity isn't a purely scientific number, because it depends on peoples' behavior, and peoples' behavior changes to some degree depending on what public health officials are telling them (or depending on what the media is saying that public health officials are saying). So you're kind of right in your criticism (what we need from scientists is science, not what they think we need to hear). And yet, there is also an element of validity in what they're saying here too - matters of science are not just matters of science. They change peoples' behavior, in ways that the scientists may not have taken into account.
- pdonis 5y ago
  > matters of science are not just matters of science. They change peoples' behavior, in ways that the scientists may not have taken into account. And given this, the only defensible position for the scientist to take is to tell the truth as best they know it, including the truth about what we don't know or don't understand, as well as about what we do know and do understand. That way the responsibility for other people's behavior is on the other people--they were told the truth as best the scientists knew it, and if they made a bad judgment based on that truth, it's their responsibility. Whereas, if a scientist tries to twist or filter the truth because of some belief they have about how it might change other people's behavior, now it's their responsibility if those other people end up doing something harmful, because they didn't just tell the truth as best they knew it, they tried to judge what they wanted other people to do and filtered what they said based on that. And that's not their job.
  - AnimalMuppet 5y ago
    I agree, but I will go one step further: It is also the responsibility of the science reporters to not filter out the truth about what we don't know and don't understand. That part's important. Don't skip it to make the story sexier or more viral. In fact, I wonder if more of the responsibility for the recent problems is on the reporters, rather than the scientists.

oxymoran 5y ago

We are so fucked.

tomp 5y ago

Everyone wants to use science to promote their own political agenda. I hope they all fail.

twirlock 5y ago

Yeah just double down on pretending you know shit you obviously don't really know; that will fix the credibility gap.

bstockton 5y ago

>Suppose [a person] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others? -Descartes Science is done by clearly and logically addressing doubt. Sweeping doubt under the rug and showing prejudice in which evidence is presented is antithetical to the impetus of science (a disimpassioned search for unwavering truth). I'm surprised this is published in nature. Edit: tried to format the quote, didn't work.

cogman10 5y ago
What's the solution to Gish Gallopers? The issue this article is talking about is you can very quickly generate hundreds of bad studies and outright lies that take decades to discredit. And even after all that effort, those studies will STILL be cited not because of the validity, but the narrative. For example, vaccines an autism. We have so many high quality studies proving with as much certainty as you can in medicine that vaccines do not cause autism. Yet that's a claim that hasn't died off yet (And Mr. Wakefield's fraud study with the initial lie is STILL cited as if there were some sort of conspiracy to cover it up). So what's the solution? It's easier to quickly lie than it is to experiment and prove. It's easier to falsify data than it is to prove data was falsified. What other choice is there but to lean on consensus and reputation?
- bstockton 5y ago
  Well, one strategy would be to preemptively rebut common misrepresentations and meaningless critiques, I do agree scientists could benefit from this technique. And if it's just misinformation with no merit, use Hitchen's Razor. However, established science has been wrong before about things there was a consensus on. We should investigate evidence that casts doubt on consensus if there is some merit, even if it is painstaking. It's one of the less sexy and tedious aspects of science, nevertheless important.

tgbugs 5y ago

Said another way, don't get nerd snipped by people who are trying to weaponize your professional scepticism for ulterior motives. This means that most of the time when dealing with adversaries you have to go against your usual scientific instincts, assume your position is correct, and reframe the conversation at a higher level about power, money, etc. Controlling where attention goes in these conversations is critical. Refusing to engage adversaries at the technical level seems wrong, but is the only way to defend against the fact that science operates by default at a level of doubt that the normal population simply cannot sustain without being driven to apathy (which is the objective of the adversaries).

quantified 5y ago
Part of the issue is recognizing adversaries and bad faith. In much of science, disagreements are still in good faith. But engaging bad-faith actors with the same tactics as good-faith ones, and engaging with the journalling public in the same way that you engage with other good-faith scientists, leads to losing the game that they’re playing.
- tgbugs 5y ago
  Heh, yeah. We need to add another class to the ethics courses. "How to interact with parties who would be politically or economically impacted by the results of your research."
allemagne 5y ago
How much do we really want scientists writ large trying to optimize for the job of ensuring that the public is properly educated at the appropriate level of doubt? The adversaries we're trying to defend against will only have something else to point to and say "they have an explicit goal of manipulating public opinion to downplay climate/covid/round-earth skepticism", which isn't really that far off from what you're describing. Trying to properly gauge how new information is processed among hundreds of millions of people just seems like an expertise that is totally orthogonal to having a deep understanding of a scientific discipline. What you're talking about not only seems wrong, but just doesn't seem like the best way to go about solving the problem.

adolph 5y ago

This letter reads similarly to the Lancet correspondence "Science, not speculation, is essential to determine how SARS-CoV-2 reached humans" https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)01419-7/fulltext https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... "The field of agnotology (the study of deliberate spreading of confusion) shows how ignorance and doubt can be purposefully manufactured." Tomori suggests that untruth is asymmetric between corporate and government interests.