23 ms·

Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts (2020)

196 points by bumbledraven 4y ago

ggm 4y ago
Whilst the underlying case is true, I feel what is missing is where scientism has been beneficial net overall. Arguably, vaccination is a good case: the statistics of benefit are huge. the personal experiental outcome tends to negative feedback only: So, underling belief in the statistics of decent testing is important and has a community upside. Or, the truly remarkable advances in materials physics especially in VLSI. actual applications of quantum effects initially misunderstood but actually now designed in (sometimes?)
- version_five 4y ago
  You can cherry pick any religion for good that it has achieved
  - ggm 4y ago
    Your key point is that scientism, rei-ification of science is borderline belief-system behaviour, at the very least. Your pejorative language says you think its pushed well into the space. Fair enough. What I am doing is saying "baby/bathwater" time. Public communications depends on not legitimating anti-vaxx (for example) but if it depends on belief system behaviour rather than being able to apply objective science outcomes to demonstrate the "why" -it's got problems.
    - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
      What you are arguing for is a pro-establishment stance, it is not a pro-science stance. By conflating the two you devalue science, you are muddying the bath water and poisoning the baby, making science politics and destroying its credibility. If you remove nuance from public communications to avoid legitimizing "anti-vaxx" rhetoric, a proposition that I find anti-democratic and self-defeating given that it assumes the public is too dumb to hear nuance, then you cannot use science as a shield because science is nuanced.
      - ggm 4y ago
        I would absolutely prefer what you want. I am unsure in a post truth world how to make it work. Perhaps my view is the other side of the blatant anti scientific posture of the Koch funded right: no amount of reasoned nuance about AGW will stop a coal mine owner claiming its nasa funded lies and no amount of reasoned nuanced argument will make the coal mine worker want to believe science, over his paymasters lies. Not that leftists haven't promulgated antiscienfific crap before now, lysenkoism comes to mind. It's just not the current problem.
      - savingsPossible 4y ago
        > that it assumes the public is too dumb to hear nuance It is! It empirically is! Don't assume it, test it!
        mistermann 4y ago
        While composing this comment, did you consider that the dimension of time is implicit (and hidden from perception) in the version of "is" that you are using here? Also hidden: sub-perceptual heuristics. And culture. And surely many other things beyond my knowledge. The hard problem of consciousness is so poorly understood by science, I wonder if that is why it is simply ~ignored in conversations like this, where it is so fundamentally important.
- andreareina 4y ago
  Experience isn't only first-hand though; those studies count. The correct comparison is what experts say vs what actually happens. For example, various proponents of local realism before experimental confirmation of Bell's Theorem. I do think it's stated a bit strongly though, I'd prefer s/ignorance/fallibility/ for similar reasons to what you're articulating: I grant a higher prior probability to a statement given by a (relevant!) expert. Of course that's relative to the statement itself: an expert might get nonsense from log(-10) to log(-9) but that's still not holding any water.
  - ggm 4y ago
    The problem would be it's the 'argument by appeal to authority' fallacy. True science must always be open to test. The thing is we're on derivative downstream consequences of the science. They come with some caveats to "question everything" But "we don't know how anaesthesia works really" is a big problem. All we've got is observational science (which Feynman hated and analogised to stamp collecting) that "it works"
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  The physics behind modern VLSI was known to something like 8 sigmas of certainty before it was designed into devices. A lot of medical science, on the other hand, comes from one study with a p-value of 0.05 that didn't replicate when another lab tried it. Science is having confidence in the former. Scientism is having confidence in the latter.
  - ggm 4y ago
    Thats a very good take on things. A nice simple way of putting it.
  - rcxdude 4y ago
    It's worth pointing out that the standards for evidence in particle physics are so high because they have to be: particle physics experiments create so much data that you can find a huge number of correlations with high confidence without much difficulty. Biology and medical science are completely unlike that: there is comparitively very little data to draw any conclusions from so standards of evidence are necessarily low, and yet still useful (that said, the lower standards also allow a lot of junk to appear which is difficult to filter from the rest if you are not very familiar with the subject).
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      I think we should point out that part of that 8-sigma confidence I am quoting isn't just the initial experiment (which may have had as little as 3-4 sigma confidence intervals for quantum tunneling), but also that there are further experiments that re-confirm quantum tunneling by relying on it to observe some other effect. That is something that is also lacking in the social sciences, medical science, and even some parts of modern physics: experiments that confirm other results by taking those results as fact and finding new effects.
- Sapere_Aude 4y ago
  Utilitarianistic approaches are really bad... Scientism falls flat on its face, since it's a self refuting philosophy(!). It's truth cannot be demonstrated according to its own principles, (i.e. hard sciences are the best / superiour or even only source of genuine knowledge of the world). The truth of scientism is philosophical in nature and not the result of a scientific experiment. We shouldn't adhere to untruth just because it "serves" our ends in some ways or another.* By the way, how do you arrive at your value judgements of "good" and "bad", "serving" something vs. the opposite? How do you determine "the benefits" in a relativistic worldview, most modern people, as well as you seem to adhere to (see "post truth world"). For whom was it "net beneficial"? Doing science and producing results is not necessarily a result or proof of the philosophy the scientist adheres to. One could believe all sorts of things and get scientific results, so I don't see scientism as beneficial in any sense. It is wrong as a theory and it undermines science itself in a major way. Scientism undermines the presuppositions science philosophically rests on*and which cannot be proven by science itself. Therefore if Scientism believes that you can only believe "truths" that are the result of scientific experiments and you have to rely on presuppositions that cannot categorically be proven by science itself, you cannot do science anymore. Scientism is the enemy of science, logically speaking. * I still believe that "the Good" and "Truth" are directly entangled and necessary. * a) belief in an external world, independent of mind, languagy or theory, b) the nature of the world is orderly, especially its "deep structure" that lies under and beyond the manifest world of ordinary perception c) objective truth exists d) our sensory and cognitive faculties are reliable for gaining truth and knowledge of the world, and tehy are able to grasp the world's deep structure that lies beyond the sense-perceptible world, e) various types of values and "oughts" exist f) the laws of logic and mathematics exist
- halfjoking 4y ago
  Most people are still not aware of the extent of the corruption of clinical research, and the manipulation of statistical data by “health authorities.” This article clearly lays it all out and is probably the most important article written this year: https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/californias-misinformation-epidemic https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/californias-misinformation... So I disagree vaccination is a good case… the mRNA vaccines kill more than they save, yet 80% of the population was still convinced to take it.
barbariangrunge 4y ago
On a pedantic note, you are believing in the expertise of those who told you to be skeptical. Socrates strikes again! Edit: Not sure why all the downvotes. The point I’m making is that even “don’t just trust peoples ideas” is itself an idea, and that almost all ideas are inherited from prior generations in some form or another. Socrates is the person most famous for popularizing skepticism - we didn’t invent this concept recently, and we believe in it mostly because those we respect told us to (somewhat ironically)
- js8 4y ago
  I don't think you have to be an expert on anything to value skepticism (e.g. an encyclopedia editor), and vice versa (e.g. an astrologist). They are independent. However, most scientists are both.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Yeah, I heard positivists were pretty dismayed when they realized that their "positive program" was actually a philosophical statement.
mudrockbestgirl 4y ago
> We collectively changed our mind because younger geologists adopted the continental drift theory. I like this quote by Max Planck, which applies not only to science but also politics and technology: > a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it As for the original argument in the article, the problem is where to draw the boundary. If you want to e.g. get to the bleeding edge of Physics research you can't question everything people have discovered along the way or you wouldn't get anywhere in your lifetime. Believing in experts is not necessarily bug, it's also a feature. Because that's how we transmit knowledge across generations in an efficient way. The hard part is not the questioning, it's figuring out what's worth questioning and what's not.
- keiferski 4y ago
  Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions makes a similar point and is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic.
  - coolhand2120 4y ago
    This book is so important to the conversation. Kuhn goes into detail on how everyone believed in Phlogiston until the adherents died and only then did the science progress into modern thermodynamics. He gives example after example of this pattern. He coined the phrase "paradigm shift" in the book to describe the pattern. I think the great mistake every current generation of scientists makes is that they believe that this generation is fundamentally "right" and cannot undergo any further revolutions - at least on domains they "know" about. All other domains are up for grabs of course, and silly dogmatic them for believing otherwise! Only when someone goes against the "scientific consensus" does any progress get made in any field. It's too bad we are humans with egos and cannot let go of ideas that we hold too close to our hearts. Perhaps it's an evolutionary trait that we are so short lived? Without such short lives dogma might win the day!
    - RandomLensman 4y ago
EdwardDiego 4y ago
They're experts until we know they're not. And science, as a whole, only gets better at explaining phenomena, I'm not aware of anything that's had to be walked back, unlike claims made by actual religions like "Native Americans are a tribe of Israelites who were punished for their sins by God, by giving them a different skin colour", which didn't survive the event of genetics. There's skepticism, and then there's contrarianism, and a lot of people mired in the latter think they're practicing the former. On an unrelated note I hardly ever hear "scientism" outside of Young Earth Creation apologetics...
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >And science, as a whole, only gets better at explaining phenomena, I'm not aware of anything that's had to be walked back Ignaz Semmelweis, Rosemary Kennedy, Galileo and countless others would like to have a chat.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    About what? Yes, they were opposed in their time, but their findings eventually became the accepted facts. When I said "walk backwards", I meant exactly that - we haven't been washing our hands for a 170 years and had to say "actually, scientific evidence has shown that we were completely wrong, the people who considered Semmelweiz a loonie were actually right." Science has a definite tendency to go forwards, not backwards. Because scientists like to replicate results, and tend to reject things that don't properly explain the observed facts. Unlike statements of faith from, well, actual faiths, as opposed to "scientism".
    - mdp2021 4y ago
      Your model needs a definition of what is a "«finding»", destined to become an «accepted fact», and a "«have[-]been» idea", for which «scientific evidence [will] show[] that we were completely wrong». Because they are not easily distinguishable. Others have recommended Kuhn; I am partial for Imre Lakatos, and recommend the reading of at least the transcripts of his lessons at the London School of Economics. -- Edit: I do not know what meaning you intend to be giving to 'scientism', but partisan cheering is not sport, nor science, nor religion.
reshie 4y ago
in other words science is a method of inquiry. the problem is most people do not have the expertise and/or time it takes; some trust in so called experts is ok to a degree.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >the problem is most people do not have the expertise and/or time it takes; some trust in so called experts is ok to a degree. I think the issue is that far too many people have blind trust in "experts". It is okay to admit to yourself that you just don't know enough about something to make an informed decision. You can hazard a guess on how likely something is to be true based on the opinions of "experts", but your confidence in that guess should never be very high for something you don't understand. Unfortunately people like to be confident, and are very susceptible to suggestion and social pressure, and therefore routinely place blind trust in a variety of "experts" in every field from medicine to government to finance. Very often these experts are either partly wrong, completely wrong and/or or spreading misinformation/disinformation due to some hidden agenda (political, economic, social). The end result is large masses of people who are very confident about things which are wrong and/or distorted (which ends up being directly reflected in the quality of our elected leaders and society as a whole).
  - IIAOPSW 4y ago
    I think there is a significant fraction of people for whom their system of reasoning about the world fundamentally follows the same design patterns as religion and the best we can hope for is that they "convert to the church of trusting the experts". Covid really exposed the thought process. Basically, as I surmise was happening in their mind, the distancing / mask guidelines became the sins, anyone who forgot or followed it imperfectly even once was a bad person, anyone who did get it must have sinned (or someone near to them did), and so long as you never sin it won't happen to you. Implicitly anyone who got it did something to deserve it, as there's no such thing as bad things happening to good people randomly.
js8 4y ago
I think science is primarily attempting to externalize the expertise (the way the experts do inference), to formalize it, so it can be independently scrutinized, and reproduced. Of course, this is based on belief that experts can be fallible (as stated in the article), but also on belief that opaque expert's intuition is not as valuable as clear understanding of the inference process. Of course, this doesn't make the experts useless. The expert intuition is still mostly right, even if it lacks explainability. It is also a useful shortcut.
woolion 4y ago
This is probably an evergreen observation, but it is worth repeating. Because when you are yourself becoming yourself an enthusiastic scientist (so, by doing science) you would dismiss entirely any parallel between religion and science. However, this is fundamentally how the current system is designed, and no matter what field you look at. From the most basic inquiry such as diet to the most abstract mathematics, it is almost impossible to find a correct scientific approach, especially in popular culture. The first thing an inquiring scientific mind would have to do would be, each time the word science is uttered, to ask "what is 'science' supposed to designate here? The current published consensus? The scientific community? Leading experts on the state of the art, or experts in public recommendations? The scientific method?". These are just a subset of what 'science' is used to designate, but lead to very different conclusions.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
  Not to distract from your point, but I have found there was nothing more destructive to my trust in science than becoming a scientist. I think once you see how the sausage is made you start to see science for what it is: just another complicated, fallible process built by many fallible people with a wide set of perverse incentives that produce a lot of good things and a lot of garbage.
  - blackbear_ 4y ago
    What is not like that, in the end? The world is just messy and full of unknowns
  - raydiatian 4y ago
    I love seeing Sabine Fassbender whenever she comes around to pants the theoretical physicists for not having figured out quantum gravity
  - arinlen 4y ago
    > I think once you see how the sausage is made you start to see science for what it is: just another complicated, fallible process built by many fallible people with a wide set of perverse incentives that produce a lot of good things and a lot of garbage. To me this sounds like a major misconception of what science is. Scientists aren't expected to be infallible, let alone right at the first try. Science is an iterative process of building knowledge and understanding of how things work, which by definition means there's always stuff that is not known and misconceptions on how things work. The output of science is progress, hut the bleeding edge is often riddled with swing-and-misses. As a clear example, see how the plate tectonics theory was addressed initially by the scientific community.
raydiatian 4y ago
Where is Rob McElhenney with his posterboards lambasting Galileo for being a dumb science nerd
throwaway0asd 4y ago
Science only comes in two flavors: * Experiments (comparisons) * Research (evidence gathering) Fortunately science is simply defined by a single approach: the Scientific Method.
- mellosouls 4y ago
  Unfortunately, it is practiced by human beings, who are susceptible to all the flaws - psychological, social, political, cultural etc - we are all constrained by.
air7 4y ago
I used to be an avid advocate of this notion, but I've become somewhat disillusioned about the idea of encouraging people to think for themselves. The whole Covid vaccine debacle was the latest example of the frustrating truth that "thinking for yourself" just isn't trivial. People that advocate for it (like me) just wishfully assume that their listeners, if they just try, will reach the same conclusions they did. But that just isn't true. I've met many people that held (what I consider to be) debunked beliefs which they proclaimed to have reached through "doing their own research". In a way these people are harder to sway than those that "just feel it's true". They are armed with research papers, lecturing experts (self proclaimed perhaps), and logical constructs. They hold their ground in an argument. And perhaps they are not at fault. The truth can be non-intuitive on several levels, and distilling it from truckloads of data, papers, and experts really isn't easy. Take for example the seemingly simple question of whether or not climate change is man-made or not. It is not at all an easy matter for someone to reach their own conclusion about this. Any argument, how ever sound it may seem, may be wrong in some subtle non-intuitive way that would more digging and learning to figure out. I've come to realize that in this question (and many others) I can't justify trusting my own judgement and the best heuristic I could come up with is "trusting the expert consensus". Sure it can be wrong, but I hold the belief that it tends to self correct eventually, and in many cases (especially when many people need to form an option) it's the best we can do.
- insickness 4y ago
  > I've become somewhat disillusioned about the idea of encouraging people to think for themselves. If the average person shouldn't think for themselves, who do you think should think for themselves? Only someone with a degree? Only someone who can do the math? > the best heuristic I could come up with is "trusting the expert consensus". How do you decide which experts to trust? Do you leave that up to the government to choose for you?
  - nverno 4y ago
    You rarely hear the average person questioning consensus beliefs from experts in the 'hard' science / engineering fields (with notable exceptions, eg. climate science/evolution, but there are obvious incentives involved). Social sciences and economics seem to be the exact opposition, where there are rarely notable consensus opinions, and 'experts' are routinely questioned. It makes sense, though, since expert opinion from the social sciences often relates directly to how people implement their lives. If the average person relied on the expert advice from physicists, they'd probably question that as well. So, the more directly relevant an 'expert's advice, the more it is questioned, as a matter of course.
bravura 4y ago
My NLP/ML PhD advisor always said: "If a more senior person tells you that something can be done, they are almost definitely correct. If they tell you that something cannot be done, they are probably wrong."
- Karellen 4y ago
  If they didn't attribute that, they totally ripped off Arthur C. Clarke's first law: > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Clarke's_Three_Laws,_et_al_(1962;_1973%E2%80%A6) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Clarke's_Thre...
  - 317070 4y ago
    Maybe that was the lesson to be learned all along? When a distinguished but elderly scientist is almost certainly right, he probably heard it somewhere else first.
  - bravura 4y ago
    Thank you for the citation. I don’t remember if the source was cited or if it was shared as received wisdom. Ps ripped off is quite harsh. Much of what I learned as a doctoral student was the biases absorbed and transmitted by my advisor, it was only specific academic contributions that he claimed as original.
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cb321 4y ago
Elaborated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem
tu7001 4y ago
>Science may sound irrational when you spell it out as a doctrine of doubt. It's not true, when considering vaccines, that's the knowledge we, for some reasons cannot doubt.
- Sapere_Aude 4y ago
  [dead]
lapcat 4y ago
(2020)
Sapere_Aude 4y ago
[dead]
- savingsPossible 4y ago
  > We should all be aware of the limitations of science. That is empirically testable if you spell it out in any detail. What do you mean by should? That we'd be better off? And I bet it is false
- savingsPossible 4y ago
  > Science is NOT the end all be all determinator of what is true or right. > for which we don't have a justification, Science can be used to self justify. Try it! You can split into groups, try to settle questions with science and without it, and see which group succeeds the best. You can even use more than a binary split! Why is this invalid for science, but valid for philosophy (or even "reason")?
  - P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
    There's a certain type of person on HN that, for whatever reason, believes nothing is truly knowable. They won't say it like that, but you can see it in the way they interact and argue. In many ways its the fallacy of the compromise rearing it's head, they have an underlying belief that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Of course, if you ask them if sexual relations with a 5 year old is acceptable they'll suddenly find something that is truly knowable, but it typically takes such extremes to get them to admit that yes, some things in this world are actually knowable. It's the modern form of nihilism.
andyjohnson0 4y ago
The author makes some good points, although it seems ironic to me that he invokes the authority of The Great Feynman to re-enforce them. A couple of thoughts: > Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts It seems a stretch to use this to justify "nobody knows anything". Its seems to me that Feynman wasn't saying that he believed that experts are ignorant, but that part of his belief system included the possibility that experts are fallible. > Receive science as a set of facts. We are sometimes given advice and told that it comes from “the science”, as if it settled anything. In principle yes, but in practice you often just have to learn some stuff and accept it. Almost no-one can verify a scientific domain from first principles - there just isn't time in a person's career or life. Instead you understand things to a certain level of abstraction and trust that the stuff below that is well-founded. But yes, good scientists stay curious and sceptical about the stuff they don't know. There was a lot "follow the science" during the pandemic w/r/t vaccination and masks and, while in principle I appreciate the author's point, attempting to create a more facts-based public policy will necessitate trusting that some facts are true without demonstrating the validity of the stuff upon which they rest. > Paul Graham puts it well: To be a successful scientist it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can’t do that. I'd argue that pg's definition of "successful" here is something like "famous" or "paradigm breaking". But there are very, very many scientists who are being successful by grinding away at expanding the frontiers of knowledge, piece by piece. They're not being "right when everyone else is wrong", but they're doing successful science.
- mistermann 4y ago
  > There was a lot "follow the science" during the pandemic w/r/t vaccination and masks and, while in principle I appreciate the author's point, attempting to create a more facts-based public policy will necessitate trusting that some facts are true without demonstrating the validity of the stuff upon which they rest. I'm curious how you came to believe that this is necessarily true. > Paul Graham puts it well: To be a successful scientist it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can’t do that. I suspect the definition of "conventional-minded" in this phrase is a tautology, since Paul does not have knowledge of all people's minds, despite how "clearly" it may seem to him that he does.
chiefalchemist 4y ago
> The experts who are leading you may be wrong. (…) It's not that the experts are wrong per se. It's understanding and embacing that they* and their employers have plenty of conflicting interests. Money and ego being at the top of the list. These people - even Bill Nye and NdT - are not above the rest of us. Full stop. They shit too. The fact that they are collectively so fond of promoting otherwise is a key tell / signal. They'd do a lot better in the trust dept if they found some humility. The Scientific Method can be trusted. However, the humans that implement and execute it cannot. To believe otherwise is naive, and anti-history. * and their reviewing peers.
api 4y ago
Science is the rejection of argument from authority, which I think is a better way of saying it because it also includes political and religious authority. That being said there's a nuance here: if I am not well versed in an area of science, I am probably going to defer to people who are... not because they have some special claim to truth, but because unless I have some evidence that they're deceptive or incompetent they are probably more likely to be right in their given field of expertise. This is no different from, say, having a certified heart surgeon do your heart surgery instead of your buddy who's a vet but has never done an operation on a human being.
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
  > Science is the rejection of argument from authority, which I think is a better way of saying it because it also includes political and religious authority. I agree with the rest of your comment, but this part doesn't really fit with the rest of your thinking. "Science is superficially the rejection of argument from authority" or "Science is the narrow rejection of argument from authority" are probably closer to the truth.
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fleddr 4y ago
Yes, one should be skeptical of "the science says so" or "one specific expert says so". It's very much a mindset to embrace. But it doesn't really work that way, the cost of good faith skepticism is so high as to not be in reach of most people. For example, a lot of people are skeptical of climate change and reject the scientific consensus. This starting point of skepticism is to be encouraged, if only it would be done in the way the article describes. You can't challenge the consensus without becoming an expert on the matter yourself. At the absolute very least it would require some hundreds of hours of reading and analysis. Most people do not have the time, will or expertise/education level required to seriously and in good faith provide any type of challenge at all, other than outright denial. And it obviously doesn't help that there's many rabbit holes encouraging lazy skepticism: denial, conspiracy theorists, it's a business model to be anti-science. In the end though, the general population doesn't care about science or the pursuit of "real truth". Only about its outcomes. When science invents a better battery, that's great. Yay science. When science tells me to eat less meat, that's bad science, has to be false.
- j_m_b 4y ago
  The problem is when legitimate challengers DO arise, the "scientific consensus" is very quick to gate keep their little subfield. I know how "the scientific consensus" is used to suppress new scientific research. So when I hear it used in popular science conversation, often used to push a political narrative, I just cringe.
  - Mezzie 4y ago
    This is also a problem when experts from different fields disagree. For example, I have no epidemiological credentials, but I am an expert in information/media literacy as well as digital information dissemination and retrieval. So watching many aspects of the US's COVID response was like watching a train wreck. But in a lot of places, disagreeing with the/a government response meant you were a scientifically illiterate rightoid(TM) anti-vaxxer. "I respect epidemiologists but most of them are terrible science communicators and our institutions are making tactical and strategic errors because our current information system is not suited to what they're doing," wasn't really seen as a viable opinion. The Overton Window did not allow it. That's less than ideal.
simple-thoughts 4y ago
The institution of Science is not the same as the process of science. Their functions are not the same. Science as an institution is a mechanism of social control with all the features the author describes in the article such as the memorizable facts. Grant writing itself is no longer about science but is entirely political. Only rarely can institutional Scientists thread the needle of researching real scientific interests while also identifying ways to meet political goals set in grant requirements. The scientific process is decoupled from Scientific institutions.
in3d 4y ago
There was another fun example of how you can’t rely on supposed experts when a University of Nebraska professor Ana-Rhodes Short embarrassed herself by weighing in on the poker cheating controversy. She created a whole game tree assuming that the player who claims that he got cheated could only have one possible hand instead of a range of hands and also somehow thought that running it twice would change the odds. She also claimed that she used it as a lesson for her unfortunate students. Then she got extremely defensive, blaming toxic men, etc. when poker players pointed out her errors. (For the record I’m leaning towards no cheating and extremely poor handling of the case by the player who claims he got cheated).
- Acutulus 4y ago
  Could I trouble you to a link to Rhodes's statement if it's still available/if you have one? I wanted to see her claims myself, but I couldn't turn up anything after a few minutes of googling or looking at her twitter. I appreciate it either way.
  - in3d 4y ago
    The original tweet appears to be deleted. But her backlash at the responses is still there: https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/1576991730171187201 https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/157699173017118720... https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/1577301985811996674 https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/157730198581199667... https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/1577297851238998022 https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/157729785123899802... https://twitter.com/ScientistMel/status/1577017326901215233 https://twitter.com/ScientistMel/status/1577017326901215233 "I literally study rational and irrational decision making in the face of risk? My math model is correct The game tree is correct The discrete math is correct" I see that now she thinks she can exploit game theory optimal solvers https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/1577872222290599936 https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/157787222229059993... :) I'm sure John Nash would be impressed.
einpoklum 4y ago
> For science… It does not matter whether you are young, old. You can be rich or poor. You can be schooled or not. For "science", maybe. For being able to pursue science at a university or research institute, that's not quite the case.
muaytimbo 4y ago
One thing that grates on me is when people say science "proves" X. Or and A/B test "proves" Y. Science never proves anything, it provides evidence for the existence of some phenomenon or relationship. People need to repeat this to themselves whenever they are tempted to say the word "prove": Some arbitrarily complex hypothesis can also explain all of my evidence. Said in plain language, there is always another possibility.
- fasterik 4y ago
  You're being prescriptive that we always treat "prove" as if it has the meaning as we use it in math and logic. That's not how language works. Words have different meanings in different contexts. Top definition of "prove" according to Google: "demonstrate the truth or existence of (something) by evidence or argument." According to that definition, it seems completely reasonable to me to say that science can prove things.
  - muaytimbo 4y ago
    I think colloquially, lay people may not know the ontological origins of the word but when they use the word "proof" they mean it as some indisputable fact. At least most people I know use it in that manner.
    - fasterik 4y ago
      Evidence? The dictionary disagrees with you. Dictionaries are compiled from the ways that people actually use language in the real world. Also, the etymology of "prove" has nothing to do with indisputable facts: Middle English: from Old French prover, from Latin probare ‘test, approve, demonstrate’, from probus ‘good’. Edit: I feel I was being a bit forceful with my replies here. You airing your pet peeve triggered my pet peeve with linguistic prescriptivism. Sorry about that.
IIAOPSW 4y ago
Its not about belief in the ignorance of experts, but rather the principle that truth does not derive from authority. I don't believe experts are ignorant, I'll even go so far as to sometimes accept their claims as authoritative, but on demand they must be able to demonstrate where that authority derives from and it damn well better not the word of yet some other authority.
vannevar 4y ago
It would be much better to say that the belief in the ignorance of experts is a prerequisite to science. Science itself is the process of proving a hypothesis to some degree of certainty. It is not mere skepticism. If you have no plan to put in the work necessary to prove your hypothesis, then statistically speaking, you generally are better off listening to the experts and textbooks. Science is the difference between healthy skepticism and mindless armchair contrarianism.

196 points by bumbledraven 4y ago

ggm 4y ago

Whilst the underlying case is true, I feel what is missing is where scientism has been beneficial net overall. Arguably, vaccination is a good case: the statistics of benefit are huge. the personal experiental outcome tends to negative feedback only: So, underling belief in the statistics of decent testing is important and has a community upside. Or, the truly remarkable advances in materials physics especially in VLSI. actual applications of quantum effects initially misunderstood but actually now designed in (sometimes?)

version_five 4y ago
You can cherry pick any religion for good that it has achieved
- ggm 4y ago
  Your key point is that scientism, rei-ification of science is borderline belief-system behaviour, at the very least. Your pejorative language says you think its pushed well into the space. Fair enough. What I am doing is saying "baby/bathwater" time. Public communications depends on not legitimating anti-vaxx (for example) but if it depends on belief system behaviour rather than being able to apply objective science outcomes to demonstrate the "why" -it's got problems.
  - ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
    What you are arguing for is a pro-establishment stance, it is not a pro-science stance. By conflating the two you devalue science, you are muddying the bath water and poisoning the baby, making science politics and destroying its credibility. If you remove nuance from public communications to avoid legitimizing "anti-vaxx" rhetoric, a proposition that I find anti-democratic and self-defeating given that it assumes the public is too dumb to hear nuance, then you cannot use science as a shield because science is nuanced.
    - ggm 4y ago
      I would absolutely prefer what you want. I am unsure in a post truth world how to make it work. Perhaps my view is the other side of the blatant anti scientific posture of the Koch funded right: no amount of reasoned nuance about AGW will stop a coal mine owner claiming its nasa funded lies and no amount of reasoned nuanced argument will make the coal mine worker want to believe science, over his paymasters lies. Not that leftists haven't promulgated antiscienfific crap before now, lysenkoism comes to mind. It's just not the current problem.
    - savingsPossible 4y ago
      > that it assumes the public is too dumb to hear nuance It is! It empirically is! Don't assume it, test it!
      - mistermann 4y ago
        While composing this comment, did you consider that the dimension of time is implicit (and hidden from perception) in the version of "is" that you are using here? Also hidden: sub-perceptual heuristics. And culture. And surely many other things beyond my knowledge. The hard problem of consciousness is so poorly understood by science, I wonder if that is why it is simply ~ignored in conversations like this, where it is so fundamentally important.
andreareina 4y ago
Experience isn't only first-hand though; those studies count. The correct comparison is what experts say vs what actually happens. For example, various proponents of local realism before experimental confirmation of Bell's Theorem. I do think it's stated a bit strongly though, I'd prefer s/ignorance/fallibility/ for similar reasons to what you're articulating: I grant a higher prior probability to a statement given by a (relevant!) expert. Of course that's relative to the statement itself: an expert might get nonsense from log(-10) to log(-9) but that's still not holding any water.
- ggm 4y ago
  The problem would be it's the 'argument by appeal to authority' fallacy. True science must always be open to test. The thing is we're on derivative downstream consequences of the science. They come with some caveats to "question everything" But "we don't know how anaesthesia works really" is a big problem. All we've got is observational science (which Feynman hated and analogised to stamp collecting) that "it works"
pclmulqdq 4y ago
The physics behind modern VLSI was known to something like 8 sigmas of certainty before it was designed into devices. A lot of medical science, on the other hand, comes from one study with a p-value of 0.05 that didn't replicate when another lab tried it. Science is having confidence in the former. Scientism is having confidence in the latter.
- ggm 4y ago
  Thats a very good take on things. A nice simple way of putting it.
- rcxdude 4y ago
  It's worth pointing out that the standards for evidence in particle physics are so high because they have to be: particle physics experiments create so much data that you can find a huge number of correlations with high confidence without much difficulty. Biology and medical science are completely unlike that: there is comparitively very little data to draw any conclusions from so standards of evidence are necessarily low, and yet still useful (that said, the lower standards also allow a lot of junk to appear which is difficult to filter from the rest if you are not very familiar with the subject).
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    I think we should point out that part of that 8-sigma confidence I am quoting isn't just the initial experiment (which may have had as little as 3-4 sigma confidence intervals for quantum tunneling), but also that there are further experiments that re-confirm quantum tunneling by relying on it to observe some other effect. That is something that is also lacking in the social sciences, medical science, and even some parts of modern physics: experiments that confirm other results by taking those results as fact and finding new effects.
Sapere_Aude 4y ago
Utilitarianistic approaches are really bad... Scientism falls flat on its face, since it's a self refuting philosophy(!). It's truth cannot be demonstrated according to its own principles, (i.e. hard sciences are the best / superiour or even only source of genuine knowledge of the world). The truth of scientism is philosophical in nature and not the result of a scientific experiment. We shouldn't adhere to untruth just because it "serves" our ends in some ways or another.* By the way, how do you arrive at your value judgements of "good" and "bad", "serving" something vs. the opposite? How do you determine "the benefits" in a relativistic worldview, most modern people, as well as you seem to adhere to (see "post truth world"). For whom was it "net beneficial"? Doing science and producing results is not necessarily a result or proof of the philosophy the scientist adheres to. One could believe all sorts of things and get scientific results, so I don't see scientism as beneficial in any sense. It is wrong as a theory and it undermines science itself in a major way. Scientism undermines the presuppositions science philosophically rests on*and which cannot be proven by science itself. Therefore if Scientism believes that you can only believe "truths" that are the result of scientific experiments and you have to rely on presuppositions that cannot categorically be proven by science itself, you cannot do science anymore. Scientism is the enemy of science, logically speaking. * I still believe that "the Good" and "Truth" are directly entangled and necessary. * a) belief in an external world, independent of mind, languagy or theory, b) the nature of the world is orderly, especially its "deep structure" that lies under and beyond the manifest world of ordinary perception c) objective truth exists d) our sensory and cognitive faculties are reliable for gaining truth and knowledge of the world, and tehy are able to grasp the world's deep structure that lies beyond the sense-perceptible world, e) various types of values and "oughts" exist f) the laws of logic and mathematics exist
halfjoking 4y ago
Most people are still not aware of the extent of the corruption of clinical research, and the manipulation of statistical data by “health authorities.” This article clearly lays it all out and is probably the most important article written this year: https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/californias-misinformation-epidemic https://pierrekory.substack.com/p/californias-misinformation... So I disagree vaccination is a good case… the mRNA vaccines kill more than they save, yet 80% of the population was still convinced to take it.

barbariangrunge 4y ago

On a pedantic note, you are believing in the expertise of those who told you to be skeptical. Socrates strikes again! Edit: Not sure why all the downvotes. The point I’m making is that even “don’t just trust peoples ideas” is itself an idea, and that almost all ideas are inherited from prior generations in some form or another. Socrates is the person most famous for popularizing skepticism - we didn’t invent this concept recently, and we believe in it mostly because those we respect told us to (somewhat ironically)

js8 4y ago
I don't think you have to be an expert on anything to value skepticism (e.g. an encyclopedia editor), and vice versa (e.g. an astrologist). They are independent. However, most scientists are both.
Joker_vD 4y ago
Yeah, I heard positivists were pretty dismayed when they realized that their "positive program" was actually a philosophical statement.

mudrockbestgirl 4y ago

> We collectively changed our mind because younger geologists adopted the continental drift theory. I like this quote by Max Planck, which applies not only to science but also politics and technology: > a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it As for the original argument in the article, the problem is where to draw the boundary. If you want to e.g. get to the bleeding edge of Physics research you can't question everything people have discovered along the way or you wouldn't get anywhere in your lifetime. Believing in experts is not necessarily bug, it's also a feature. Because that's how we transmit knowledge across generations in an efficient way. The hard part is not the questioning, it's figuring out what's worth questioning and what's not.

keiferski 4y ago
Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions makes a similar point and is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic.
- coolhand2120 4y ago
  This book is so important to the conversation. Kuhn goes into detail on how everyone believed in Phlogiston until the adherents died and only then did the science progress into modern thermodynamics. He gives example after example of this pattern. He coined the phrase "paradigm shift" in the book to describe the pattern. I think the great mistake every current generation of scientists makes is that they believe that this generation is fundamentally "right" and cannot undergo any further revolutions - at least on domains they "know" about. All other domains are up for grabs of course, and silly dogmatic them for believing otherwise! Only when someone goes against the "scientific consensus" does any progress get made in any field. It's too bad we are humans with egos and cannot let go of ideas that we hold too close to our hearts. Perhaps it's an evolutionary trait that we are so short lived? Without such short lives dogma might win the day!
  - RandomLensman 4y ago

EdwardDiego 4y ago

They're experts until we know they're not. And science, as a whole, only gets better at explaining phenomena, I'm not aware of anything that's had to be walked back, unlike claims made by actual religions like "Native Americans are a tribe of Israelites who were punished for their sins by God, by giving them a different skin colour", which didn't survive the event of genetics. There's skepticism, and then there's contrarianism, and a lot of people mired in the latter think they're practicing the former. On an unrelated note I hardly ever hear "scientism" outside of Young Earth Creation apologetics...

StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>And science, as a whole, only gets better at explaining phenomena, I'm not aware of anything that's had to be walked back Ignaz Semmelweis, Rosemary Kennedy, Galileo and countless others would like to have a chat.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  About what? Yes, they were opposed in their time, but their findings eventually became the accepted facts. When I said "walk backwards", I meant exactly that - we haven't been washing our hands for a 170 years and had to say "actually, scientific evidence has shown that we were completely wrong, the people who considered Semmelweiz a loonie were actually right." Science has a definite tendency to go forwards, not backwards. Because scientists like to replicate results, and tend to reject things that don't properly explain the observed facts. Unlike statements of faith from, well, actual faiths, as opposed to "scientism".
  - mdp2021 4y ago
    Your model needs a definition of what is a "«finding»", destined to become an «accepted fact», and a "«have[-]been» idea", for which «scientific evidence [will] show[] that we were completely wrong». Because they are not easily distinguishable. Others have recommended Kuhn; I am partial for Imre Lakatos, and recommend the reading of at least the transcripts of his lessons at the London School of Economics. -- Edit: I do not know what meaning you intend to be giving to 'scientism', but partisan cheering is not sport, nor science, nor religion.

reshie 4y ago

in other words science is a method of inquiry. the problem is most people do not have the expertise and/or time it takes; some trust in so called experts is ok to a degree.

StanislavPetrov 4y ago
>the problem is most people do not have the expertise and/or time it takes; some trust in so called experts is ok to a degree. I think the issue is that far too many people have blind trust in "experts". It is okay to admit to yourself that you just don't know enough about something to make an informed decision. You can hazard a guess on how likely something is to be true based on the opinions of "experts", but your confidence in that guess should never be very high for something you don't understand. Unfortunately people like to be confident, and are very susceptible to suggestion and social pressure, and therefore routinely place blind trust in a variety of "experts" in every field from medicine to government to finance. Very often these experts are either partly wrong, completely wrong and/or or spreading misinformation/disinformation due to some hidden agenda (political, economic, social). The end result is large masses of people who are very confident about things which are wrong and/or distorted (which ends up being directly reflected in the quality of our elected leaders and society as a whole).
- IIAOPSW 4y ago
  I think there is a significant fraction of people for whom their system of reasoning about the world fundamentally follows the same design patterns as religion and the best we can hope for is that they "convert to the church of trusting the experts". Covid really exposed the thought process. Basically, as I surmise was happening in their mind, the distancing / mask guidelines became the sins, anyone who forgot or followed it imperfectly even once was a bad person, anyone who did get it must have sinned (or someone near to them did), and so long as you never sin it won't happen to you. Implicitly anyone who got it did something to deserve it, as there's no such thing as bad things happening to good people randomly.

js8 4y ago

I think science is primarily attempting to externalize the expertise (the way the experts do inference), to formalize it, so it can be independently scrutinized, and reproduced. Of course, this is based on belief that experts can be fallible (as stated in the article), but also on belief that opaque expert's intuition is not as valuable as clear understanding of the inference process. Of course, this doesn't make the experts useless. The expert intuition is still mostly right, even if it lacks explainability. It is also a useful shortcut.

woolion 4y ago

This is probably an evergreen observation, but it is worth repeating. Because when you are yourself becoming yourself an enthusiastic scientist (so, by doing science) you would dismiss entirely any parallel between religion and science. However, this is fundamentally how the current system is designed, and no matter what field you look at. From the most basic inquiry such as diet to the most abstract mathematics, it is almost impossible to find a correct scientific approach, especially in popular culture. The first thing an inquiring scientific mind would have to do would be, each time the word science is uttered, to ask "what is 'science' supposed to designate here? The current published consensus? The scientific community? Leading experts on the state of the art, or experts in public recommendations? The scientific method?". These are just a subset of what 'science' is used to designate, but lead to very different conclusions.

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
Not to distract from your point, but I have found there was nothing more destructive to my trust in science than becoming a scientist. I think once you see how the sausage is made you start to see science for what it is: just another complicated, fallible process built by many fallible people with a wide set of perverse incentives that produce a lot of good things and a lot of garbage.
- blackbear_ 4y ago
  What is not like that, in the end? The world is just messy and full of unknowns
- raydiatian 4y ago
  I love seeing Sabine Fassbender whenever she comes around to pants the theoretical physicists for not having figured out quantum gravity
- arinlen 4y ago
  > I think once you see how the sausage is made you start to see science for what it is: just another complicated, fallible process built by many fallible people with a wide set of perverse incentives that produce a lot of good things and a lot of garbage. To me this sounds like a major misconception of what science is. Scientists aren't expected to be infallible, let alone right at the first try. Science is an iterative process of building knowledge and understanding of how things work, which by definition means there's always stuff that is not known and misconceptions on how things work. The output of science is progress, hut the bleeding edge is often riddled with swing-and-misses. As a clear example, see how the plate tectonics theory was addressed initially by the scientific community.

raydiatian 4y ago

Where is Rob McElhenney with his posterboards lambasting Galileo for being a dumb science nerd

throwaway0asd 4y ago

Science only comes in two flavors: * Experiments (comparisons) * Research (evidence gathering) Fortunately science is simply defined by a single approach: the Scientific Method.

mellosouls 4y ago
Unfortunately, it is practiced by human beings, who are susceptible to all the flaws - psychological, social, political, cultural etc - we are all constrained by.

air7 4y ago

I used to be an avid advocate of this notion, but I've become somewhat disillusioned about the idea of encouraging people to think for themselves. The whole Covid vaccine debacle was the latest example of the frustrating truth that "thinking for yourself" just isn't trivial. People that advocate for it (like me) just wishfully assume that their listeners, if they just try, will reach the same conclusions they did. But that just isn't true. I've met many people that held (what I consider to be) debunked beliefs which they proclaimed to have reached through "doing their own research". In a way these people are harder to sway than those that "just feel it's true". They are armed with research papers, lecturing experts (self proclaimed perhaps), and logical constructs. They hold their ground in an argument. And perhaps they are not at fault. The truth can be non-intuitive on several levels, and distilling it from truckloads of data, papers, and experts really isn't easy. Take for example the seemingly simple question of whether or not climate change is man-made or not. It is not at all an easy matter for someone to reach their own conclusion about this. Any argument, how ever sound it may seem, may be wrong in some subtle non-intuitive way that would more digging and learning to figure out. I've come to realize that in this question (and many others) I can't justify trusting my own judgement and the best heuristic I could come up with is "trusting the expert consensus". Sure it can be wrong, but I hold the belief that it tends to self correct eventually, and in many cases (especially when many people need to form an option) it's the best we can do.

insickness 4y ago
> I've become somewhat disillusioned about the idea of encouraging people to think for themselves. If the average person shouldn't think for themselves, who do you think should think for themselves? Only someone with a degree? Only someone who can do the math? > the best heuristic I could come up with is "trusting the expert consensus". How do you decide which experts to trust? Do you leave that up to the government to choose for you?
- nverno 4y ago
  You rarely hear the average person questioning consensus beliefs from experts in the 'hard' science / engineering fields (with notable exceptions, eg. climate science/evolution, but there are obvious incentives involved). Social sciences and economics seem to be the exact opposition, where there are rarely notable consensus opinions, and 'experts' are routinely questioned. It makes sense, though, since expert opinion from the social sciences often relates directly to how people implement their lives. If the average person relied on the expert advice from physicists, they'd probably question that as well. So, the more directly relevant an 'expert's advice, the more it is questioned, as a matter of course.

bravura 4y ago

My NLP/ML PhD advisor always said: "If a more senior person tells you that something can be done, they are almost definitely correct. If they tell you that something cannot be done, they are probably wrong."

Karellen 4y ago
If they didn't attribute that, they totally ripped off Arthur C. Clarke's first law: > When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. -- Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future, 1962 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Clarke's_Three_Laws,_et_al_(1962;_1973%E2%80%A6) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke#Clarke's_Thre...
- 317070 4y ago
  Maybe that was the lesson to be learned all along? When a distinguished but elderly scientist is almost certainly right, he probably heard it somewhere else first.
- bravura 4y ago
  Thank you for the citation. I don’t remember if the source was cited or if it was shared as received wisdom. Ps ripped off is quite harsh. Much of what I learned as a doctoral student was the biases absorbed and transmitted by my advisor, it was only specific academic contributions that he claimed as original.

deleted 4y ago

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cb321 4y ago

Elaborated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demarcation_problem

tu7001 4y ago

>Science may sound irrational when you spell it out as a doctrine of doubt. It's not true, when considering vaccines, that's the knowledge we, for some reasons cannot doubt.

Sapere_Aude 4y ago
[dead]

lapcat 4y ago

(2020)

Sapere_Aude 4y ago

[dead]

savingsPossible 4y ago
> We should all be aware of the limitations of science. That is empirically testable if you spell it out in any detail. What do you mean by should? That we'd be better off? And I bet it is false
savingsPossible 4y ago
> Science is NOT the end all be all determinator of what is true or right. > for which we don't have a justification, Science can be used to self justify. Try it! You can split into groups, try to settle questions with science and without it, and see which group succeeds the best. You can even use more than a binary split! Why is this invalid for science, but valid for philosophy (or even "reason")?
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  There's a certain type of person on HN that, for whatever reason, believes nothing is truly knowable. They won't say it like that, but you can see it in the way they interact and argue. In many ways its the fallacy of the compromise rearing it's head, they have an underlying belief that the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Of course, if you ask them if sexual relations with a 5 year old is acceptable they'll suddenly find something that is truly knowable, but it typically takes such extremes to get them to admit that yes, some things in this world are actually knowable. It's the modern form of nihilism.

andyjohnson0 4y ago

The author makes some good points, although it seems ironic to me that he invokes the authority of The Great Feynman to re-enforce them. A couple of thoughts: > Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts It seems a stretch to use this to justify "nobody knows anything". Its seems to me that Feynman wasn't saying that he believed that experts are ignorant, but that part of his belief system included the possibility that experts are fallible. > Receive science as a set of facts. We are sometimes given advice and told that it comes from “the science”, as if it settled anything. In principle yes, but in practice you often just have to learn some stuff and accept it. Almost no-one can verify a scientific domain from first principles - there just isn't time in a person's career or life. Instead you understand things to a certain level of abstraction and trust that the stuff below that is well-founded. But yes, good scientists stay curious and sceptical about the stuff they don't know. There was a lot "follow the science" during the pandemic w/r/t vaccination and masks and, while in principle I appreciate the author's point, attempting to create a more facts-based public policy will necessitate trusting that some facts are true without demonstrating the validity of the stuff upon which they rest. > Paul Graham puts it well: To be a successful scientist it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can’t do that. I'd argue that pg's definition of "successful" here is something like "famous" or "paradigm breaking". But there are very, very many scientists who are being successful by grinding away at expanding the frontiers of knowledge, piece by piece. They're not being "right when everyone else is wrong", but they're doing successful science.

mistermann 4y ago
> There was a lot "follow the science" during the pandemic w/r/t vaccination and masks and, while in principle I appreciate the author's point, attempting to create a more facts-based public policy will necessitate trusting that some facts are true without demonstrating the validity of the stuff upon which they rest. I'm curious how you came to believe that this is necessarily true. > Paul Graham puts it well: To be a successful scientist it’s not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can’t do that. I suspect the definition of "conventional-minded" in this phrase is a tautology, since Paul does not have knowledge of all people's minds, despite how "clearly" it may seem to him that he does.

chiefalchemist 4y ago

> The experts who are leading you may be wrong. (…) It's not that the experts are wrong per se. It's understanding and embacing that they* and their employers have plenty of conflicting interests. Money and ego being at the top of the list. These people - even Bill Nye and NdT - are not above the rest of us. Full stop. They shit too. The fact that they are collectively so fond of promoting otherwise is a key tell / signal. They'd do a lot better in the trust dept if they found some humility. The Scientific Method can be trusted. However, the humans that implement and execute it cannot. To believe otherwise is naive, and anti-history. * and their reviewing peers.

api 4y ago

Science is the rejection of argument from authority, which I think is a better way of saying it because it also includes political and religious authority. That being said there's a nuance here: if I am not well versed in an area of science, I am probably going to defer to people who are... not because they have some special claim to truth, but because unless I have some evidence that they're deceptive or incompetent they are probably more likely to be right in their given field of expertise. This is no different from, say, having a certified heart surgeon do your heart surgery instead of your buddy who's a vet but has never done an operation on a human being.

ARandomerDude 4y ago
> Science is the rejection of argument from authority, which I think is a better way of saying it because it also includes political and religious authority. I agree with the rest of your comment, but this part doesn't really fit with the rest of your thinking. "Science is superficially the rejection of argument from authority" or "Science is the narrow rejection of argument from authority" are probably closer to the truth.

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fleddr 4y ago

Yes, one should be skeptical of "the science says so" or "one specific expert says so". It's very much a mindset to embrace. But it doesn't really work that way, the cost of good faith skepticism is so high as to not be in reach of most people. For example, a lot of people are skeptical of climate change and reject the scientific consensus. This starting point of skepticism is to be encouraged, if only it would be done in the way the article describes. You can't challenge the consensus without becoming an expert on the matter yourself. At the absolute very least it would require some hundreds of hours of reading and analysis. Most people do not have the time, will or expertise/education level required to seriously and in good faith provide any type of challenge at all, other than outright denial. And it obviously doesn't help that there's many rabbit holes encouraging lazy skepticism: denial, conspiracy theorists, it's a business model to be anti-science. In the end though, the general population doesn't care about science or the pursuit of "real truth". Only about its outcomes. When science invents a better battery, that's great. Yay science. When science tells me to eat less meat, that's bad science, has to be false.

j_m_b 4y ago
The problem is when legitimate challengers DO arise, the "scientific consensus" is very quick to gate keep their little subfield. I know how "the scientific consensus" is used to suppress new scientific research. So when I hear it used in popular science conversation, often used to push a political narrative, I just cringe.
- Mezzie 4y ago
  This is also a problem when experts from different fields disagree. For example, I have no epidemiological credentials, but I am an expert in information/media literacy as well as digital information dissemination and retrieval. So watching many aspects of the US's COVID response was like watching a train wreck. But in a lot of places, disagreeing with the/a government response meant you were a scientifically illiterate rightoid(TM) anti-vaxxer. "I respect epidemiologists but most of them are terrible science communicators and our institutions are making tactical and strategic errors because our current information system is not suited to what they're doing," wasn't really seen as a viable opinion. The Overton Window did not allow it. That's less than ideal.

simple-thoughts 4y ago

The institution of Science is not the same as the process of science. Their functions are not the same. Science as an institution is a mechanism of social control with all the features the author describes in the article such as the memorizable facts. Grant writing itself is no longer about science but is entirely political. Only rarely can institutional Scientists thread the needle of researching real scientific interests while also identifying ways to meet political goals set in grant requirements. The scientific process is decoupled from Scientific institutions.

in3d 4y ago

There was another fun example of how you can’t rely on supposed experts when a University of Nebraska professor Ana-Rhodes Short embarrassed herself by weighing in on the poker cheating controversy. She created a whole game tree assuming that the player who claims that he got cheated could only have one possible hand instead of a range of hands and also somehow thought that running it twice would change the odds. She also claimed that she used it as a lesson for her unfortunate students. Then she got extremely defensive, blaming toxic men, etc. when poker players pointed out her errors. (For the record I’m leaning towards no cheating and extremely poor handling of the case by the player who claims he got cheated).

Acutulus 4y ago
Could I trouble you to a link to Rhodes's statement if it's still available/if you have one? I wanted to see her claims myself, but I couldn't turn up anything after a few minutes of googling or looking at her twitter. I appreciate it either way.
- in3d 4y ago
  The original tweet appears to be deleted. But her backlash at the responses is still there: https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/1576991730171187201 https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/157699173017118720... https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/1577301985811996674 https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/157730198581199667... https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/1577297851238998022 https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/157729785123899802... https://twitter.com/ScientistMel/status/1577017326901215233 https://twitter.com/ScientistMel/status/1577017326901215233 "I literally study rational and irrational decision making in the face of risk? My math model is correct The game tree is correct The discrete math is correct" I see that now she thinks she can exploit game theory optimal solvers https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/1577872222290599936 https://twitter.com/The_Ada_Rhodes/status/157787222229059993... :) I'm sure John Nash would be impressed.

einpoklum 4y ago

> For science… It does not matter whether you are young, old. You can be rich or poor. You can be schooled or not. For "science", maybe. For being able to pursue science at a university or research institute, that's not quite the case.

muaytimbo 4y ago

One thing that grates on me is when people say science "proves" X. Or and A/B test "proves" Y. Science never proves anything, it provides evidence for the existence of some phenomenon or relationship. People need to repeat this to themselves whenever they are tempted to say the word "prove": Some arbitrarily complex hypothesis can also explain all of my evidence. Said in plain language, there is always another possibility.

fasterik 4y ago
You're being prescriptive that we always treat "prove" as if it has the meaning as we use it in math and logic. That's not how language works. Words have different meanings in different contexts. Top definition of "prove" according to Google: "demonstrate the truth or existence of (something) by evidence or argument." According to that definition, it seems completely reasonable to me to say that science can prove things.
- muaytimbo 4y ago
  I think colloquially, lay people may not know the ontological origins of the word but when they use the word "proof" they mean it as some indisputable fact. At least most people I know use it in that manner.
  - fasterik 4y ago
    Evidence? The dictionary disagrees with you. Dictionaries are compiled from the ways that people actually use language in the real world. Also, the etymology of "prove" has nothing to do with indisputable facts: Middle English: from Old French prover, from Latin probare ‘test, approve, demonstrate’, from probus ‘good’. Edit: I feel I was being a bit forceful with my replies here. You airing your pet peeve triggered my pet peeve with linguistic prescriptivism. Sorry about that.

IIAOPSW 4y ago

Its not about belief in the ignorance of experts, but rather the principle that truth does not derive from authority. I don't believe experts are ignorant, I'll even go so far as to sometimes accept their claims as authoritative, but on demand they must be able to demonstrate where that authority derives from and it damn well better not the word of yet some other authority.

vannevar 4y ago

It would be much better to say that the belief in the ignorance of experts is a prerequisite to science. Science itself is the process of proving a hypothesis to some degree of certainty. It is not mere skepticism. If you have no plan to put in the work necessary to prove your hypothesis, then statistically speaking, you generally are better off listening to the experts and textbooks. Science is the difference between healthy skepticism and mindless armchair contrarianism.