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I think there's two extremes here. One is the issue covered well above. There is a great deal of junk science that gets published. That is a problem and it does

I think there's two extremes here. One is the issue covered well above. There is a great deal of junk science that gets published. That is a problem and it does erode trust. But in some ways it's also how the sausage gets made, there's going to be room for things to get published they later gets refuted. People rightly so have distrust for results coming out in fields they don't have good knowledge in. Without becoming an expert yourself it's very difficult to know who or what to trust. On the other end there's distrust of broad scientific consensus across different professions, countries, etc. It's the distrust at these levels that is the increasing problem we are facing today.

tsimionescu 5y ago
> People rightly so have distrust for results coming out in fields they don't have good knowledge in. Without becoming an expert yourself it's very difficult to know who or what to trust. A problem here is that there are fields of science that are almost certainly bogus in themselves. One very likely candidate is nutrition, which seems to be fumbling in the dark and has a long history of producing worse recommendations than doing nothing (e.g. replace fat with sugar). More controversially, the entire field of economics is seen by some to be very suspect from a basic foundations view.
- FrenchDevRemote 5y ago
  >A problem here is that there are fields of science that are almost certainly bogus in themselves. One very likely candidate is nutrition, which seems to be fumbling in the dark and has a long history of producing worse recommendations than doing nothing (e.g. replace fat with sugar). It's not the field that is bogus in that case. People were quite literally bribed to push this. This could happen anywhere, anytime, in any field.
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    That was just an example, but we can go into more detail - at every point, nutrition studies are highly questionable. Sample sizes are usually minuscule (you can find important studies with 5-10 subjects, and even the largest studies rarely have more than a few hundred), they are often biased samples (only overweight people, only people with heart disease or diabetes etc.), they often don't account for likely confounding factors (using weight without accounting for muscle mass, no accounting for stress, time in the sun etc.) and on and on. And all of this in a subject where we basically don't have any clear idea about how much metabolism differs from one person to the next, based on what factors (e.g. gut microbiome has only been recently identified as a major component of digestion that can differ significantly between people; psychological effects of diet are even less well understood, even though your food choices are obviously not coming from some pure realm of reason). Basically the digestive system is far too complex for us to understand from first principles at this time. Your diet has a very complex and very slow effect on your body, with some exceptions. Numerous diseases and environmental factors impact how this plays out exactly. So, to do real research in nutrition, the only chance right now would be to conduct massive studies over long periods of time with rigorous controls on subjects' nutrition and activities - which is basically impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive. Instead, we get conclusions drawn from studies of a few dozen people over a few months or at best a year (in "long-term" studies). Or, we get conclusions drawn from comparing diet across huge populations ("the Mediterranean diet", "the Japanese diet", "the American diet" etc) with no possibility to control for obvious differences in nutrients, environmental factors, lifestyle differences, access to healthcare etc. Both of these are worthless conclusions, they don't tell you anything at all. The only successes of nutrition science have been identifying the most basic nutrients we need to survive at a basic level (protein, fat, carbohydrates, and the various vitamins and minerals). Basically nothing beyond that should be trusted. As a fun historical note, after the discovery of the macro-nutrients there was a budding field of nutrition scientists confidently recommending optimal diets using scientific methods. Unfortunately, they had no idea about the existence of micro-nutrients, so actually following some of their diets you could actually end up getting scurvy or other serious malnutrition diseases. The current slew is not that bad, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we will look back similarly at some common diet advice of today.
    - bigfudge 5y ago
      I think commercial operations like Huel and similar supplements will definitely be thought of like that. It just seems crazy, having watched the evolution of "scientific" diet advice over the past 70 years, to now think it's plausible that industrially-produced protein drinks are a suitable food substitute.
lelanthran 5y ago
> I think there's two extremes here. One is the issue covered well above. There is a great deal of junk science that gets published. It's more than that, I think. Sibling-thread poster hit the nail on the head when he complained of politicised science. The social sciences have this dominating and silencing effect on the rest of the sciences. There's always been junk science, and when found out it gets discredited. This is still happening and is a good thing. What's new is that any research that might produce results counter to the what the PC-mob deems acceptable is attacked. Whether or not there is consensus amongst researchers in that field is irrelevant when the mob calls for the firing of any researcher who doesn't toe the current political party-line. Sure, we're not actually in the dark ages, but a trend of silencing voices in the name of purity of thought is particularly troubling, especially as the mob asking for this is unashamedly attempting to implement NewsSpeak[1]. [1] See the argument in yesterdays threads about what "man" and "woman" mean, and should dictionaries be changed, etc.
- pastage 5y ago
  No this is not new. You have always have a direction set by political views, even if we have decided they are wrong they are still hard to kill like: smoking is good, white people are superior. There is still "science" being done to bolster those political views.
  - lelanthran 5y ago
    >> What's new is that any research that might produce results counter to the what the PC-mob deems acceptable is attacked. > No this is not new. I don't recall a PC-mob being used to silence any and all non-supportive voices until quite recently. > You have always have a direction set by political views, even if we have decided they are wrong they are still hard to kill like: smoking is good, white people are superior. There is still "science" being done to bolster those political views. I don't see what that has to do with that I said - that a very vocal bunch of non-science people seem to have successfully lobbied into silencing specific topics.
    - Kye 5y ago
Lutger 5y ago
Exactly this. It's even worse, distrust of broad scientific consensus is purposefully cultivated to further political and economic goals, and the methods to do so increasingly perfected. This damages our ability as societies to function in a healthy way. Our capacity to navigate hard problems is diminished by the ever decreasing influence of hard science on politics and policy.
mike_hearn 5y ago
The reasonable middle ground is, or probably should be, closer to the latter end than the former end unfortunately. Put simply, science is advertised as self-correcting but in reality it's not. Representative experience documented here: http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2021/01/i-tried-to-report-scientific-misconduct.html http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2021/01/i-tried-to-rep... So, the reasons people learn a generalized distrust of science are that often the sausage doesn't get made. Bad science is published, applauded, cited, breathlessly covered in the media and may even be replicated, yet the first time outsiders to the field actually read the paper they realize it's nonsensical. But then they realize nobody cares because careers were made through this stuff, so why would anyone inside the field want to unmake them? The degrading trust doesn't come from bad results per se, but rather the frequent lack of any followup combined with the lack of any institutional mechanisms to detect these problems in the first place beyond peer review, which is presented as a gold standard but is in no way adequate as such. For example, consider how programmers use peer review. We use it, and we use lots of other tools too because peer review is hardly enough on its own to ensure quality. Now imagine you stumbled into a software company that held a cast-iron policy that because patches get reviewed by coworkers you simply don't need a test suite, nor manual testing, nor a bug tracker, code comments, security processes, strong typing, etc. And their promotion process is simply to make a ranking of developers by commit count and promote the top 10% every quarter, and fire the bottom 10%. Moreover they thought you were nuts for suggesting that there was any problem with this. You'd probably want to get out of there pretty fast, but, that's pretty much how (academic) science operates. So of course this degrades trust.
- blue_pants 5y ago
  Maybe I'm missing something, but 'self-correcting' doesn't necessarily mean 'immediately self-correcting'. I guess it's safe to assume, that incorrect studies are not cementing our world view and entirely stopping us from questioning studied topics again. The way I see the self-correcting nature of science: the truthiness of our view about specific set of topics increases over time (in some approximation).
  - mike_hearn 5y ago
roenxi 5y ago
> Without becoming an expert yourself it's very difficult to know who or what to trust. Who says there is anyone who can be trusted? People keep looking for leaders they can trust and it takes only a brief look at history to see that the search won't stop despite the jaw dropping futility of the exercise. The important thing is to check that people have incentives to tell the truth and no conflicts of interest. I'd trust someone untrustworthy if they were making money off my well-being. The only thing to watch out for is them not being forthright about their incentives. We shouldn't trust that skyscrapers stay up because engineers are trustworthy. They stay up because the engineer goes down with the building.

tsimionescu 5y ago

> People rightly so have distrust for results coming out in fields they don't have good knowledge in. Without becoming an expert yourself it's very difficult to know who or what to trust. A problem here is that there are fields of science that are almost certainly bogus in themselves. One very likely candidate is nutrition, which seems to be fumbling in the dark and has a long history of producing worse recommendations than doing nothing (e.g. replace fat with sugar). More controversially, the entire field of economics is seen by some to be very suspect from a basic foundations view.

FrenchDevRemote 5y ago
>A problem here is that there are fields of science that are almost certainly bogus in themselves. One very likely candidate is nutrition, which seems to be fumbling in the dark and has a long history of producing worse recommendations than doing nothing (e.g. replace fat with sugar). It's not the field that is bogus in that case. People were quite literally bribed to push this. This could happen anywhere, anytime, in any field.
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  That was just an example, but we can go into more detail - at every point, nutrition studies are highly questionable. Sample sizes are usually minuscule (you can find important studies with 5-10 subjects, and even the largest studies rarely have more than a few hundred), they are often biased samples (only overweight people, only people with heart disease or diabetes etc.), they often don't account for likely confounding factors (using weight without accounting for muscle mass, no accounting for stress, time in the sun etc.) and on and on. And all of this in a subject where we basically don't have any clear idea about how much metabolism differs from one person to the next, based on what factors (e.g. gut microbiome has only been recently identified as a major component of digestion that can differ significantly between people; psychological effects of diet are even less well understood, even though your food choices are obviously not coming from some pure realm of reason). Basically the digestive system is far too complex for us to understand from first principles at this time. Your diet has a very complex and very slow effect on your body, with some exceptions. Numerous diseases and environmental factors impact how this plays out exactly. So, to do real research in nutrition, the only chance right now would be to conduct massive studies over long periods of time with rigorous controls on subjects' nutrition and activities - which is basically impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive. Instead, we get conclusions drawn from studies of a few dozen people over a few months or at best a year (in "long-term" studies). Or, we get conclusions drawn from comparing diet across huge populations ("the Mediterranean diet", "the Japanese diet", "the American diet" etc) with no possibility to control for obvious differences in nutrients, environmental factors, lifestyle differences, access to healthcare etc. Both of these are worthless conclusions, they don't tell you anything at all. The only successes of nutrition science have been identifying the most basic nutrients we need to survive at a basic level (protein, fat, carbohydrates, and the various vitamins and minerals). Basically nothing beyond that should be trusted. As a fun historical note, after the discovery of the macro-nutrients there was a budding field of nutrition scientists confidently recommending optimal diets using scientific methods. Unfortunately, they had no idea about the existence of micro-nutrients, so actually following some of their diets you could actually end up getting scurvy or other serious malnutrition diseases. The current slew is not that bad, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we will look back similarly at some common diet advice of today.
  - bigfudge 5y ago
    I think commercial operations like Huel and similar supplements will definitely be thought of like that. It just seems crazy, having watched the evolution of "scientific" diet advice over the past 70 years, to now think it's plausible that industrially-produced protein drinks are a suitable food substitute.

lelanthran 5y ago

> I think there's two extremes here. One is the issue covered well above. There is a great deal of junk science that gets published. It's more than that, I think. Sibling-thread poster hit the nail on the head when he complained of politicised science. The social sciences have this dominating and silencing effect on the rest of the sciences. There's always been junk science, and when found out it gets discredited. This is still happening and is a good thing. What's new is that any research that might produce results counter to the what the PC-mob deems acceptable is attacked. Whether or not there is consensus amongst researchers in that field is irrelevant when the mob calls for the firing of any researcher who doesn't toe the current political party-line. Sure, we're not actually in the dark ages, but a trend of silencing voices in the name of purity of thought is particularly troubling, especially as the mob asking for this is unashamedly attempting to implement NewsSpeak[1]. [1] See the argument in yesterdays threads about what "man" and "woman" mean, and should dictionaries be changed, etc.

pastage 5y ago
No this is not new. You have always have a direction set by political views, even if we have decided they are wrong they are still hard to kill like: smoking is good, white people are superior. There is still "science" being done to bolster those political views.
- lelanthran 5y ago
  >> What's new is that any research that might produce results counter to the what the PC-mob deems acceptable is attacked. > No this is not new. I don't recall a PC-mob being used to silence any and all non-supportive voices until quite recently. > You have always have a direction set by political views, even if we have decided they are wrong they are still hard to kill like: smoking is good, white people are superior. There is still "science" being done to bolster those political views. I don't see what that has to do with that I said - that a very vocal bunch of non-science people seem to have successfully lobbied into silencing specific topics.
  - Kye 5y ago

Lutger 5y ago

Exactly this. It's even worse, distrust of broad scientific consensus is purposefully cultivated to further political and economic goals, and the methods to do so increasingly perfected. This damages our ability as societies to function in a healthy way. Our capacity to navigate hard problems is diminished by the ever decreasing influence of hard science on politics and policy.

mike_hearn 5y ago

The reasonable middle ground is, or probably should be, closer to the latter end than the former end unfortunately. Put simply, science is advertised as self-correcting but in reality it's not. Representative experience documented here: http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2021/01/i-tried-to-report-scientific-misconduct.html http://crystalprisonzone.blogspot.com/2021/01/i-tried-to-rep... So, the reasons people learn a generalized distrust of science are that often the sausage doesn't get made. Bad science is published, applauded, cited, breathlessly covered in the media and may even be replicated, yet the first time outsiders to the field actually read the paper they realize it's nonsensical. But then they realize nobody cares because careers were made through this stuff, so why would anyone inside the field want to unmake them? The degrading trust doesn't come from bad results per se, but rather the frequent lack of any followup combined with the lack of any institutional mechanisms to detect these problems in the first place beyond peer review, which is presented as a gold standard but is in no way adequate as such. For example, consider how programmers use peer review. We use it, and we use lots of other tools too because peer review is hardly enough on its own to ensure quality. Now imagine you stumbled into a software company that held a cast-iron policy that because patches get reviewed by coworkers you simply don't need a test suite, nor manual testing, nor a bug tracker, code comments, security processes, strong typing, etc. And their promotion process is simply to make a ranking of developers by commit count and promote the top 10% every quarter, and fire the bottom 10%. Moreover they thought you were nuts for suggesting that there was any problem with this. You'd probably want to get out of there pretty fast, but, that's pretty much how (academic) science operates. So of course this degrades trust.

blue_pants 5y ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but 'self-correcting' doesn't necessarily mean 'immediately self-correcting'. I guess it's safe to assume, that incorrect studies are not cementing our world view and entirely stopping us from questioning studied topics again. The way I see the self-correcting nature of science: the truthiness of our view about specific set of topics increases over time (in some approximation).
- mike_hearn 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago

> Without becoming an expert yourself it's very difficult to know who or what to trust. Who says there is anyone who can be trusted? People keep looking for leaders they can trust and it takes only a brief look at history to see that the search won't stop despite the jaw dropping futility of the exercise. The important thing is to check that people have incentives to tell the truth and no conflicts of interest. I'd trust someone untrustworthy if they were making money off my well-being. The only thing to watch out for is them not being forthright about their incentives. We shouldn't trust that skyscrapers stay up because engineers are trustworthy. They stay up because the engineer goes down with the building.