10 ms·

How trust undermines science

• pphysch 5y ago
  Is it a matter of "trust" or a matter of misaligned interests & incentives? Person A approves Person B's manuscript/grant/etc. They do it because it's good for them and their careers, not because it's "good for science" (whatever that means nowadays).
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• jimsimmons 5y ago
  We should respect people questioning science as long as they are doing it in good faith and are showing willingness to learn. We should even respect flat earthers and climate change deniers. They improve rigour and identify blindspots.
  • amelius 5y ago
    I would respect flat earthers if they published in peer-reviewed journals.
    • fuzzfactor 5y ago
      >I would respect flat earthers if they published in peer-reviewed journals. Except their peers would reinforce the anti-scientific superstitions rather than reject them. Not altogether differently than the way some recognized journals publish less-scientifically-sound output due to the credentials of the contributors rather than any conclusive results to report. Or more commonly than ever, complete non-progress being wildly exaggerated as if it was an actual finding. Even though there's more PhDs each year, you have to be more careful than ever what you want to regard as a science any more.
  • mmastrac 5y ago
    > We should even respect flat earthers You lost me here. Basic literacy is a requirement for any fruitful debate
    • thethirdone 5y ago
      Literacy does not imply believing in the round earth. Proving the earth is round to yourself without trusting outside influences is not a trivial pursuit.
      • nitwit005 5y ago
        It's much harder to prove the Earth is flat. You run into really basic questions like, where is the edge, and why does no one find it? The theory only "holds together", with the assumption that everyone that works in any field even vaguely related to travel or communication is part of a conspiracy to hide the truth.
      • mhh__ 5y ago
        These days all you need is someone with a phone and a stick in another country to perform Erastosthenes's experiment, right?
        • 0x7E3 5y ago
          Doesn't Erastosthenes's experiment merely allow you to calculate the size of the earth if you already accept that it is spherical? As I understand the experiment it does not (nor was it meant to) prove that the earth is a sphere.
          • mhh__ 5y ago
            Can flat earth explain the phenomenon in a parsimonious way?
            • 0x7E3 5y ago
              It's probably going to depend on what you mean by 'the phenomenon'. Do you mean that the sun casts shadows at different angles at the same time of day based on your location? Then yes, it absolutely does. In fact some believers in the flat earth theory use the experiment to establish the distance of the sun from the earth. If you mean something else, then I have no idea. I'm not a proponent of the flat earth theory, nor am I a mind reader. The experiment you proposed does not disprove the theory of a flat earth though, parsimoniously or otherwise. It sounds like you may have rejected the notion of a flat earth purely on faith after all?
  • hhs 5y ago
    Maybe, but many times media groups take advantage of this to create a false balance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
    • kodah 5y ago
      I think the major hurdle to that statement is that false balances are hard to quantify in the moment. Worse, when "false balance" is claimed and it turns out that the popular belief at the time was both wrong and influenced in some way it damages public trust even further.
  • raziel2701 5y ago
    > We should even respect flat earthers No those people need mental healthcare. They have a very debilitating dysfunction, an inability to see reality.
    • edgyquant 5y ago
      I’m with the other poster, I don’t see how flat Earth is inherently crazier to believe than any of the large number of religions that people identify with.
    • YEwSdObPQT 5y ago
    • golergka 5y ago
      Those people are obviously less smart and educated than any rational man who seriously pondered whether the Earth's flat and could be bothered to do a couple of simple experiments. But at the same time they're step ahead of majority of the population that just believed what they were told as kids and never, once in their life, expressed any doubt in it, or thought about how it was proven, or how they would be able to check that proof themselves.
      • tempestn 5y ago
        Strongly disagree. Rational people do not feel the need to prove every fact independently for themselves. Instead, they develop a rational system of qualified trust. You don't blindly trust expert consensus, but you do weigh likelihood based on the source. Flat Earthers would be better off if they simply accepted the consensus rather than being mislead into believing they're coming to their own conclusions based on evidence.
        • DarylZero 5y ago
          But most people aren't rational and don't prove any fact independently for themselves, or have the capability to do so. They believe in what they're told. They were told god and heaven are real so they believe it. Their scientific beliefs are similarly founded.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • mhh__ 5y ago
    Climate Change "deniers" like Richard Mueller was, are useful, flat earthers and climate change grifters solely confuse the public and distract (usually extremely overworked and underpaid) scientists.
  • nitwit005 5y ago
    The problem with the flat earthers, and the more conspiratorial portion of the climate deniers, is it's not clear even the people making the claims believe it. They don't seem to mind ideas that contradict theirs, so long as the central belief that there is some sort of vast conspiracy is upheld. You can't really engage with people who aren't all that interested in what's actually true.
    • hammock 5y ago
      Assuming your premise is true, is a strongly held belief a prerequisite to conduct a scientific inquiry? Or couldn't it just be any hypothesis, however crazy? It seems to me you are imposing a constraint that doesn't need to be there, and parent is arguing it doesn't deserve to be there, either.
      • nitwit005 5y ago
        The assertion I was responding to was not about the general possibility of using science to test these ideas.
    • woolion 5y ago
      >it's not clear even the people making the claims believe it. They don't seem to mind ideas that contradict theirs, so long as the central belief that there is some sort of vast conspiracy is upheld. That seems like a truly bizarre statement, how would that make sense? Some people would embrace ideas they would not believe in, to further the public's perception that there is an ongoing conspiracy? That seems perfectly lunatic. Wouldn't it make more sense for them to try to tie in that the conspiracy peddlers are incentivized to push completely insane theories in order to cover for other, true, conspiracy theories (e.g. the NSA's surveillance pre-Snowden leak). Some have mental issues, that is a given, but that is not generally seen as a valid way to discredit or validate a theory (e.g. cleaning OCD is not seen as proof that hygiene is bad).
      • nitwit005 5y ago
        https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235449075_Dead_and_Alive_Beliefs_in_Contradictory_Conspiracy_Theories https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235449075_Dead_and_...
  • watwut 5y ago
    > We should even respect flat earthers and climate change deniers. They improve rigour and identify blindspots. They don't. They add lies and manipulations into the mix. They force everyone to either step up their popular convincing political game or just drop out of discussion . These people don't improve rigor, they kill it.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• paulsutter 5y ago
  Cached from Google: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bU7J5R70YI0J:https://www.worksinprogress.co/issue/how-trust-undermines-science/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-b-1-d https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:bU7J5R...
• hirundo 5y ago
  "To me, the phenomenon of widespread trust in goofy claims is much more interesting than the fact of goofy claims not being real. What does it mean to trust science?" Science is a system to distinguish between a fact and a shibboleth. That process is at the core of epistemology, and it is always non-trivial, because goofy is in the eye of the beholder. Whatever your politics or religion, you can easily see these shibboleths in other tribes, but they are usually invisible in your own. To apply science to your own tribe's shibboleths is an act of distrust.
• einpoklum 5y ago
  The "science" derived from ultra-skewed samples collected by grad students or even tenured academics for social scenario experimentation is inherently shaky and does not merit much trust.
• aaron695 5y ago
  We've just had a far reaching tsunami from the Hunga Tonga eruption and no one will explain why. That is a trust issue. Do they know how volcanos work or not? Can they get that knowledge to the public or not? The mathematics is high school level in many cases to disprove possible causes of the tsunami. The reality is people do know how volcanoes work but the field is so full of charlatans that info can't get out. This is every field of science now. [And the idea the info doesn't need to get out quickly is BS, it shows structural problems in the field, on top of that in this case Tonga and aid orgs needs to know what might be possible in the next few weeks and the truth helps with that]
  • jmeister 5y ago
    This is interesting. Why is “Volcano Studies” full of charlatans? Is it politicized from implications for climate change?
  • r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
    I don't understand what you mean by "We've just had a far reaching tsunami from the Hunga Tonga eruption and no one will explain why." Surely the answer is there was a huge eruption of the Hunga Tonga volcano that destroyed 1/3 of the island? What more do you want?
• CivBase 5y ago
  It's not just replication that's the problem. It's poorly designed studies, intended from the start to support a narrative, whose results are poorly interpreted by members of the media for their own benefit.
• gumby 5y ago
  Part of the problem is how people learn what science is. Science, despite the name, is really all about doubt. Unfortunately in school it’s taught as certainty. In school you do “experiments” and if the answer doesn’t match what is in the book you are marked down. Often you have to memorize a bunch of assertions or even simply names, without any epistemic context. Then in the real world you discover that scientists contradict each other or even themselves. They don’t say things straight out but are always hedging (“high probability”) or even admitting they don’t know!
  • krapp 5y ago
    >In school you do “experiments” and if the answer doesn’t match what is in the book you are marked down. Often you have to memorize a bunch of assertions or even simply names, without any epistemic context. I don't know what school you went to, but this doesn't match my experience.
    • MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
      There's the desire to teach the scientific method, and also the desire to convey the established literature in preparation for the (standardized) exams. So, you design "labs" where the students "experiment." This is my experience at a high school in Florida.
      • neutronicus 5y ago
        It might behoove you to think of these as exercises in "measurement" rather than "experiment"
        • gumby 5y ago
          The point is that’s now how it is framed by the school. So people grow up thinking there’s an absolute, precise, and “correct” answer and anything else is “wrong”
          • 5y ago
• 0xbadcafebee 5y ago
  Group dynamics in humans lead them to think and act in a cohesive way. The cohesion of the group depends on trusting a set of beliefs. Science is supposed to re-test assumptions and resist trust indefinitely. But questioning a group's assumptions is antithetical to group cohesion. So we fudge the results. We say something is scientific fact if it's been replicated a bunch of times and has the same outcome. But we don't mention that the replication is subject to the group dynamics, ensuring it conforms to the group's assumptions. Since human groups require trust, and all scientific results must be distrusted to function correctly, humans cannot practice science correctly. We need a new science that works with group dynamics, or we need something other than groups of humans to practice science.
• karaterobot 5y ago
  One of the things she talks about is the problem of scientists trusting other scientists. I wonder whether trust is the right way to put it, or if a lot of the time it's that they're afraid to speak out against colleagues for fear of reprisal. So many of these domains are small enough that everybody knows everybody else, and bad blood can poison people's careers.
• DoreenMichele 5y ago
  At some point, this article uses the phrase the inexact sciences. I have traditionally heard the phrase soft sciences for things like psychology. Human psychology and social phenomenon are inherently hard to study well for myriad reasons and much of this article is about psychology. The bits about outright fraud and problematic medical studies are more worthwhile things to be concerned about, but if your primary conclusion or concern is "human psychology is hard to study scientifically" (ie with exactness and ready replicability) then I'm going to be all "Well, duh!"
  • kodah 5y ago
    > if your primary conclusion or concern is "human psychology is hard to study scientifically" (ie with exactness and ready replicability) then I'm going to be all "Well, duh!" The way that I read the "inexact sciences" critique is one that takes aim at the certainty of their rhetoric. An uncertain and "hard to study" science should use words that reflect that rather than an inappropriate level of determinism which seems to be what the article is actually discussing.
    • DoreenMichele 5y ago
      There are more ways to come up with firmer conclusions. They do exist. They just have something of a tendency to not fall under the love that so many seem to have of treating people like lab rats. Someone found that when men decide a female celebrity is hot, they google up nude photos. When women decide a male celebrity is hot, their first search is to determine "Is he currently married?" So when someone wants to deal privately with their own feelings of attraction or sexual desire, men and women have different initial impetuses when no one is looking, when they have no expectation that anyone is judging them, etc. This suggests a distinct gender difference. Whether that's somehow socially influenced or biological, I don't know. But it seems significant. And it's not the kind of thing you are likely to find in most so-called studies because people like to ask questions of people who volunteered for your study. So when they do studies that find that "everyone" is secretly having threesomes and orgies, that's probably selection bias. Because folks who actually value their privacy and don't casually sleep around probably aren't part of your pool of volunteers wanting to blab about their sex life to a total stranger. Duh.
• js8 5y ago
  Trust is a shortcut. You could verify everything diligently, but it takes time, so you rely on others, hence trust. Scientists' job is to verify as much as possible (not to take the shortcut). Laymen can take the shortcut and trust the scientists. If a layman wants not to trust the scientists, which is OK, then they should understand that trust is a BIG timesaver, and they have to put lot of effort into educating themselves about WHY scientists say what they say. Too often, we see laymen questioning the scientific conclusions without putting up the work needed to educate themselves (at the very least, understanding the theories they disagree with). This has worse outcomes than lack of due diligence among scientists. (And that's why argument from authority is a fallacy among scientists, but is not wrong to apply among general public, where it is a useful heuristic based on trust.)
  • lonecom 5y ago
    > they should understand that trust is a BIG timesaver As well as a BIG risk!
    • js8 5y ago
      In any decent society, not really. This risk can be greatly mitigated by regulations, occasional independent review and transparency. For example, I can rely that I won't get food poisoning in a restaurant. This is because we have rules of how to handle food (designed by expert consensus), and the restaurants are inspected from time to time if they follow these practices.
      • lonecom 5y ago
        > decent society We don't live in one.
  • fuzzfactor 5y ago
    Trust, but verify.
• LaundroMat 5y ago
  Unrelated, but I saw this same article pass by twice here. The first time the headline was: "How trust undermines science" and I didn't care for it. The second time, the headline was "Trust undermines science" and thát made me want to read the article. There is such a thing as a mental clickbait filter.
• guerrilla 5y ago
  We should really start teaching basic epistemology in elememtary school and then expanding upon that in secondary schoool.