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Dude, scientists (in my experience) handle dissent just fine. The idea that scientists have problems with dissenting opinions is mostly propagated by assholes w

Dude, scientists (in my experience) handle dissent just fine. The idea that scientists have problems with dissenting opinions is mostly propagated by assholes with some other agenda, whose scientific ideas have already had a fair hearing, who are just trying to prolong the public discussion for reasons typically unmotivated by genuine scientific interest. I've spent most of my career around scientists of one stripe or another and I've literally never met a scientist committed to even their pet ideas at some kind of ideological level. Are scientists perfect? Hardly. Have their been scientific paradigms or ideas that have persisted longer than they should have? Definitely. Scientists are human beings. There are limits to how rational they can be, especially in groups, but to suggest that science is somehow intolerant of dissent is a straw man cartoon ass argument.

noam_compsci 3y ago
Covid debunks all your claims. I’ve taken all my covid jabs and boosters so I’m not coming at this as some alt right antivaxxer, but the systemic and systematic shut down of any dissent against mainstream science and scientific organisations was/is disgusting.
- rusk 3y ago
  In my jurisdiction at least it was hijacked for business purposes. I believe that all the lockdown stuff was necessary but after a while certain actors started to take advantage of it, for instance supermarkets selling a broad range of stuff while all regular stores had to stay shut. Hurdur supply chain. Then there was the stockpiling of PPE, hand sanitizer. The dismissal of masks unless they were “very good” (totally ignoring collective benefit vs individual) and self testing (again ignoring aggregate benefit vs individual). As soon as particular commercial interests got their positions covered these things all of a sudden became “okay”. Again, like I say the Covid outbreak was real. We did need to do what we could not least to safeguard medical services. But boy did the schemers go to town once they figured out a way to get rich from it. Still waiting for that windfall tax on the supermarkets.
- chrisan 3y ago
  > Covid debunks all your claims. No it doesn't. Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients. There were routine talking about alternate therapies among the scientists/doctors/researchers about these topics. You can search for the UCSF Covid Grand Rounds on youtube and watch the history of their open discussions as research was routinely presented from all over the globe on the various items. I code for a living and have no idea about this stuff, but my wife's goal is to make patients better and she would watch the grand rounds (or similar) every time and I'd listen from another room. Not a single alternate treatment wasn't discussed and evaluated.
  - felipeerias 3y ago
    I’ll give you an example. Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time. People who thought otherwise (i.e. Asia) were routinely dismissed as unscientific dunces following some weird cultural habit. Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief. It was just an old idea that happened to match with their priors, so they kept parroting it to one another and to the public until the dead started piling in.
    - melagonster 3y ago
      >It was just an old idea but it is from the experience of another Corona virus outbreak last time. Asia just know wearing mask is helpful anyway.
      - felipeerias 3y ago
        But the health authorities in the West did not update their knowledge in view of that evidence. I am familiar with the case of Spain: when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the public healthcare guidelines in Spain still classified coronaviruses as mild viruses, not more severe than the flu.
- lol768 3y ago
  I think this is a tricky one. Certainly I wasn't particularly impressed with how the science was communicated in a few areas: - The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics - The WHO's position on airborne transmission of Covid-19, and the way in which understanding in this area was misrepresented to the public I took part in a vaccine clinical trial myself, and there was a much more in-depth discussion as to what was known about the candidate vaccination, its side effect profile - and, more importantly, the limits of our knowledge given the small population it had been tested in when I volunteered. We didn't see much of that nuance during the height of the pandemic. At the same time though, some may argue that trying to combat misinformation requires over-simplifying some things, such that they can be effectively communicated to the public. Ref: https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898 https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7
  - kuhewa 3y ago
    > The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics This is more of a matter of public health than science though. It would be nice if they were the same thing but it's like asking for people to be perfectly rational and well-informed actors like in those economics models
- RandomLensman 3y ago
  Not sure the claim is true in the strong form, but that aside: was the approach wrong as far as policies and social outcome are concerned? Would a more nuanced approach have worked better and by what metric? Just being unhappy about what happened isn't enough for things social.
TotalCrackpot 3y ago
There is a bunch of examples of extremely influential theories that were dismisses because of authority figures, I don't know if you count math as science, but for example set theory was extremely controversial.
- nathan_compton 3y ago
  And yet set theory is now regularly employed. It used to take humans hundreds of years to adjust major ideas. Now dummies complain if an idea takes a decade to gain acceptance. Science is still probably the most flexible and adaptive social milieu in the history of the human race.
- DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
  Every one of the CoVID examples given there is obviously wrong, even with hindsight: * The "Great Barrington Declaration," if followed, would have likely doubled America's already extremely high death toll. Which countries did the best in the pandemic? The dreaded zero-CoVID countries, which got all the way to vaccines with extremely low death tolls, often with a much greater level of normalcy in everyday life than the US (see: Taiwan, China, Singapore, New Zealand, etc.). The idea of letting all controls on viral spread drop (which is what the GBD effectively was) before vaccines were developed was just a plan for everyone to get the virus without the benefits of vaccination, with the ensuing high death toll. * Mask mandates supposedly useless: challenging the idea that proper masks (N-95s or equivalent) do not dramatically reduce spread of the virus is like challenging the idea that parachutes break falls. They do, for very simple mechanistic reasons. * Young people being vaccinated: The risks of vaccination are far lower than the risks of CoVID in all age groups. The worst side-effects of the vaccine (which are extrememly rare) are actually far more prevalent after infection than after vaccination.
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    All of your examples hinge on the idea that killing or infecting people is bad. You have to broaden your mindset to consider that some groups and people see those outcomes as okay.
  - 3y ago
jpk 3y ago
I don't think the problem here is the actual scientists. The problem is the "I Follow The Science™" laypersons. A scientist can speak on a subject with some degree of authority, and be perfectly open to dissent if it's followed with sufficient rigor. However, their layperson followers may go on to parrot a claim made by said scientist, proclaim it to be an absolute truth, and shun anyone who might casually question it. A situation not unlike religious zealotry. In general, science is great; scientism isn't.
- notahacker 3y ago
  They're wrong an awful lot less often than the "The Science Conflicts With My Strongly Held Opinions So I Reject It" laypersons though.
  - MightyBuzzard 3y ago
    [dead]
  - advael 3y ago
    I really seldom ever see them though. Like the vast overwhelming majority of people who reject what may be the broad scientific consensus these days will not outwardly claim to be rejecting "the science", they'll say they believe some alternate source who also claims to be doing "the science"
    - notahacker 3y ago
      There are a whole lot of rants about "scientific establishments", "naturopaths" etc that suggest otherwise. Whether "the science" is the correct label for broad scientific consensus is something of a moot, semantic point anyway. Either way you have a bunch of laypeople largely ignorant of the details saying they trust the scientific consensus and a bunch of ignorant laypeople largely ignorant of the details saying they don't agree with the scientific consensus [because someone else who may or may not be a researcher says some other thing]... but unless the evidential value of the weight of research that results in "scientific consensus" is on average worthless, the "trust the science" blind followers of scientific consensus followers have the better heuristic than the blind rejectors of scientific consensus.
thumbuddy 3y ago
Uhm... It depends on the scientist. I've met a more then a handful of the "it has to be this way" types. The kind who thinks that being correct and being a brute are interchangeable words. Maybe the real problem is they feel the need to be correct about the unknown? Unclear. Good scientists are what you describe. But they seem to be becoming more rare.
- didibus 3y ago
  Scientists or professionals? Like I've found a lot of people thinks medical doctors are scientist. A doctor has learned the knowledge at the time they were in school. Now practices medicine, maybe keeps themselves up to date a little, but can often be very biased in their ways, because they're used to some practice and will use their anecdotal experience during their practice as truth. You could say they are "experts" or "professionals", but they'd not be actively applying the scientific method or even keeping themselves up to date on all the relevant and related studies about a subject.
  - jhbadger 3y ago
    I would be a bit cautious with that statement. Sure, your local general practitioner may not be a scientist, but quite a lot of medical doctors attached to major research hospitals and medical schools are both physicians and scientists who not only treat patients but also conduct research on the efficacy of treatment and publish papers on this.
samuell 3y ago
Not all scientists are equal. For sure, most of the ones I know are pretty honest with a high degree of integrity. But it's also not hard to see there's an increasingly lot of politics involved in "science", the further up you go in the hierarchies, not to mention among public figures.
keepamovin 3y ago
I agree with both of you, and I think a distinction is to be made around the "genre" of the dissent. The reason I have to pick a somewhat awkward word is because awareness to the level of discussion and labeling of this concept does not yet widely exist, so I have to invent it here. Is the dissent something which reinforces the money, power and people of my field (which, wherever in said field I am placed, I benefit from and aspire to ascend) or is it something that undermines (or is perceived to undermine) these vital field pillars? TL;DR - Is the genre of dissent something the field can roll with, or does it threaten (or seem to threaten) to upend it? To paraphrase Michael Douglas, scientists are like horses: easily spooked. If something smells like bad news for the field, then...woosh (sound of scientists galloping towards stability). The reason it appears both as if: "dude, scientists handle dissent just fine" and "[scientists have] this inability to tolerate dissent" is because in case of each, the genre of the dissent differs (for that field). Now would be a good point to chime in with some concrete examples, but you need to be an expert to really do that, and I'm not, so I'll probably get the example that supports my thesis wrong. My example: In particle physics, it's fine to dissent over whether this or that fundamental force carrier may be the cause of the latest round of measurement discrepancies (analysis: because that reinforces dynamics in the field that channel funding and personnel to making new measurements and theories), but it's unfine to dissent over whether we should chuck the entirety of the theoretical edifice (depending on where you come down, you may read the preceding as "dogma") of dark energy down the drain (analysis: because, while not very explanatory, it safely does not challenge (nor threaten to challenge) everything else we are busy doing). In conclusion, I think scientists handle one genre of dissent (including but not limited to specific technical dissent), just fine, and in so doing are performing the normative work of their field: interrogating theories through measurements; but, I think they have an inability to handle another genre of dissent (including but not limited to field-upending dissent), which makes step-change field-evolving progress glacial slow. Depending upon which side you come down you will likely declare: "Well, that's as it should be!" or "That's exactly the problem I'm talking about!" Perhaps that's why scientists, like horses, need some form of management, that is--well...--"unscientific". They do the work, but "management" (comprised of non-scientists) sets the priorities. I know, I know, awful...just unspeakably awful: But unless we can "train" scientists to embrace what threatens their daily bread, the ideal of science will be chomping at the bit of the restraints of its implementation structures for the foreseeable future... Main criticism: "but the daily bread of science is constantly interrogating through measurement field upending dissent, that's literally science!"--I agree, but science as 'it should be', not, how 'it is'. Second criticism: "well maybe in other fields, but not in my field". Fair enough! Maybe you can teach the rest of us how you manage it so well!

noam_compsci 3y ago

Covid debunks all your claims. I’ve taken all my covid jabs and boosters so I’m not coming at this as some alt right antivaxxer, but the systemic and systematic shut down of any dissent against mainstream science and scientific organisations was/is disgusting.

rusk 3y ago
In my jurisdiction at least it was hijacked for business purposes. I believe that all the lockdown stuff was necessary but after a while certain actors started to take advantage of it, for instance supermarkets selling a broad range of stuff while all regular stores had to stay shut. Hurdur supply chain. Then there was the stockpiling of PPE, hand sanitizer. The dismissal of masks unless they were “very good” (totally ignoring collective benefit vs individual) and self testing (again ignoring aggregate benefit vs individual). As soon as particular commercial interests got their positions covered these things all of a sudden became “okay”. Again, like I say the Covid outbreak was real. We did need to do what we could not least to safeguard medical services. But boy did the schemers go to town once they figured out a way to get rich from it. Still waiting for that windfall tax on the supermarkets.
chrisan 3y ago
> Covid debunks all your claims. No it doesn't. Maybe something on social media but not a single one of my wife's colleagues at the hospital nor any other scientist would have turned down ivermectin (as an example, there were many other theories besides that one drug) if it had shown any sign of doing good for their patients. There were routine talking about alternate therapies among the scientists/doctors/researchers about these topics. You can search for the UCSF Covid Grand Rounds on youtube and watch the history of their open discussions as research was routinely presented from all over the globe on the various items. I code for a living and have no idea about this stuff, but my wife's goal is to make patients better and she would watch the grand rounds (or similar) every time and I'd listen from another room. Not a single alternate treatment wasn't discussed and evaluated.
- felipeerias 3y ago
  I’ll give you an example. Until 2020, healthcare authorities in the Western world were were certain that viruses could never remain airborne for extended periods of time. People who thought otherwise (i.e. Asia) were routinely dismissed as unscientific dunces following some weird cultural habit. Eventually it turned out that the Western scientists didn’t really have any hard evidence for that belief. It was just an old idea that happened to match with their priors, so they kept parroting it to one another and to the public until the dead started piling in.
  - melagonster 3y ago
    >It was just an old idea but it is from the experience of another Corona virus outbreak last time. Asia just know wearing mask is helpful anyway.
    - felipeerias 3y ago
      But the health authorities in the West did not update their knowledge in view of that evidence. I am familiar with the case of Spain: when the COVID-19 pandemic started, the public healthcare guidelines in Spain still classified coronaviruses as mild viruses, not more severe than the flu.
lol768 3y ago
I think this is a tricky one. Certainly I wasn't particularly impressed with how the science was communicated in a few areas: - The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics - The WHO's position on airborne transmission of Covid-19, and the way in which understanding in this area was misrepresented to the public I took part in a vaccine clinical trial myself, and there was a much more in-depth discussion as to what was known about the candidate vaccination, its side effect profile - and, more importantly, the limits of our knowledge given the small population it had been tested in when I volunteered. We didn't see much of that nuance during the height of the pandemic. At the same time though, some may argue that trying to combat misinformation requires over-simplifying some things, such that they can be effectively communicated to the public. Ref: https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898 https://twitter.com/who/status/1243972193169616898 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-00925-7
- kuhewa 3y ago
  > The AstraZeneca/Oxford vaccine, and the risk/benefit analysis, particular in younger adult demographics This is more of a matter of public health than science though. It would be nice if they were the same thing but it's like asking for people to be perfectly rational and well-informed actors like in those economics models
RandomLensman 3y ago
Not sure the claim is true in the strong form, but that aside: was the approach wrong as far as policies and social outcome are concerned? Would a more nuanced approach have worked better and by what metric? Just being unhappy about what happened isn't enough for things social.

TotalCrackpot 3y ago

There is a bunch of examples of extremely influential theories that were dismisses because of authority figures, I don't know if you count math as science, but for example set theory was extremely controversial.

nathan_compton 3y ago
And yet set theory is now regularly employed. It used to take humans hundreds of years to adjust major ideas. Now dummies complain if an idea takes a decade to gain acceptance. Science is still probably the most flexible and adaptive social milieu in the history of the human race.
DiogenesKynikos 3y ago
Every one of the CoVID examples given there is obviously wrong, even with hindsight: * The "Great Barrington Declaration," if followed, would have likely doubled America's already extremely high death toll. Which countries did the best in the pandemic? The dreaded zero-CoVID countries, which got all the way to vaccines with extremely low death tolls, often with a much greater level of normalcy in everyday life than the US (see: Taiwan, China, Singapore, New Zealand, etc.). The idea of letting all controls on viral spread drop (which is what the GBD effectively was) before vaccines were developed was just a plan for everyone to get the virus without the benefits of vaccination, with the ensuing high death toll. * Mask mandates supposedly useless: challenging the idea that proper masks (N-95s or equivalent) do not dramatically reduce spread of the virus is like challenging the idea that parachutes break falls. They do, for very simple mechanistic reasons. * Young people being vaccinated: The risks of vaccination are far lower than the risks of CoVID in all age groups. The worst side-effects of the vaccine (which are extrememly rare) are actually far more prevalent after infection than after vaccination.
- ModernMech 3y ago
  All of your examples hinge on the idea that killing or infecting people is bad. You have to broaden your mindset to consider that some groups and people see those outcomes as okay.
- 3y ago

jpk 3y ago

I don't think the problem here is the actual scientists. The problem is the "I Follow The Science™" laypersons. A scientist can speak on a subject with some degree of authority, and be perfectly open to dissent if it's followed with sufficient rigor. However, their layperson followers may go on to parrot a claim made by said scientist, proclaim it to be an absolute truth, and shun anyone who might casually question it. A situation not unlike religious zealotry. In general, science is great; scientism isn't.

notahacker 3y ago
They're wrong an awful lot less often than the "The Science Conflicts With My Strongly Held Opinions So I Reject It" laypersons though.
- MightyBuzzard 3y ago
  [dead]
- advael 3y ago
  I really seldom ever see them though. Like the vast overwhelming majority of people who reject what may be the broad scientific consensus these days will not outwardly claim to be rejecting "the science", they'll say they believe some alternate source who also claims to be doing "the science"
  - notahacker 3y ago
    There are a whole lot of rants about "scientific establishments", "naturopaths" etc that suggest otherwise. Whether "the science" is the correct label for broad scientific consensus is something of a moot, semantic point anyway. Either way you have a bunch of laypeople largely ignorant of the details saying they trust the scientific consensus and a bunch of ignorant laypeople largely ignorant of the details saying they don't agree with the scientific consensus [because someone else who may or may not be a researcher says some other thing]... but unless the evidential value of the weight of research that results in "scientific consensus" is on average worthless, the "trust the science" blind followers of scientific consensus followers have the better heuristic than the blind rejectors of scientific consensus.

thumbuddy 3y ago

Uhm... It depends on the scientist. I've met a more then a handful of the "it has to be this way" types. The kind who thinks that being correct and being a brute are interchangeable words. Maybe the real problem is they feel the need to be correct about the unknown? Unclear. Good scientists are what you describe. But they seem to be becoming more rare.

didibus 3y ago
Scientists or professionals? Like I've found a lot of people thinks medical doctors are scientist. A doctor has learned the knowledge at the time they were in school. Now practices medicine, maybe keeps themselves up to date a little, but can often be very biased in their ways, because they're used to some practice and will use their anecdotal experience during their practice as truth. You could say they are "experts" or "professionals", but they'd not be actively applying the scientific method or even keeping themselves up to date on all the relevant and related studies about a subject.
- jhbadger 3y ago
  I would be a bit cautious with that statement. Sure, your local general practitioner may not be a scientist, but quite a lot of medical doctors attached to major research hospitals and medical schools are both physicians and scientists who not only treat patients but also conduct research on the efficacy of treatment and publish papers on this.

samuell 3y ago

Not all scientists are equal. For sure, most of the ones I know are pretty honest with a high degree of integrity. But it's also not hard to see there's an increasingly lot of politics involved in "science", the further up you go in the hierarchies, not to mention among public figures.

keepamovin 3y ago

I agree with both of you, and I think a distinction is to be made around the "genre" of the dissent. The reason I have to pick a somewhat awkward word is because awareness to the level of discussion and labeling of this concept does not yet widely exist, so I have to invent it here. Is the dissent something which reinforces the money, power and people of my field (which, wherever in said field I am placed, I benefit from and aspire to ascend) or is it something that undermines (or is perceived to undermine) these vital field pillars? TL;DR - Is the genre of dissent something the field can roll with, or does it threaten (or seem to threaten) to upend it? To paraphrase Michael Douglas, scientists are like horses: easily spooked. If something smells like bad news for the field, then...woosh (sound of scientists galloping towards stability). The reason it appears both as if: "dude, scientists handle dissent just fine" and "[scientists have] this inability to tolerate dissent" is because in case of each, the genre of the dissent differs (for that field). Now would be a good point to chime in with some concrete examples, but you need to be an expert to really do that, and I'm not, so I'll probably get the example that supports my thesis wrong. My example: In particle physics, it's fine to dissent over whether this or that fundamental force carrier may be the cause of the latest round of measurement discrepancies (analysis: because that reinforces dynamics in the field that channel funding and personnel to making new measurements and theories), but it's unfine to dissent over whether we should chuck the entirety of the theoretical edifice (depending on where you come down, you may read the preceding as "dogma") of dark energy down the drain (analysis: because, while not very explanatory, it safely does not challenge (nor threaten to challenge) everything else we are busy doing). In conclusion, I think scientists handle one genre of dissent (including but not limited to specific technical dissent), just fine, and in so doing are performing the normative work of their field: interrogating theories through measurements; but, I think they have an inability to handle another genre of dissent (including but not limited to field-upending dissent), which makes step-change field-evolving progress glacial slow. Depending upon which side you come down you will likely declare: "Well, that's as it should be!" or "That's exactly the problem I'm talking about!" Perhaps that's why scientists, like horses, need some form of management, that is--well...--"unscientific". They do the work, but "management" (comprised of non-scientists) sets the priorities. I know, I know, awful...just unspeakably awful: But unless we can "train" scientists to embrace what threatens their daily bread, the ideal of science will be chomping at the bit of the restraints of its implementation structures for the foreseeable future... Main criticism: "but the daily bread of science is constantly interrogating through measurement field upending dissent, that's literally science!"--I agree, but science as 'it should be', not, how 'it is'. Second criticism: "well maybe in other fields, but not in my field". Fair enough! Maybe you can teach the rest of us how you manage it so well!