5 ms·

this is a really well written summary. Thank you! It’s sad that as an electorate, as a people, (even the democrats), show a lowering of “confidence” in higher

this is a really well written summary. Thank you! It’s sad that as an electorate, as a people, (even the democrats), show a lowering of “confidence” in higher ed. It means experts and scientists get ridiculed. It’s disgusting and sad. Is this a harbinger of a failing empire? I think so.

WalterBright 2y ago
> It means experts and scientists get ridiculed Given the shameless plague of fraudulent papers, and the gaming of citations, my faith in experts and scientists has been damaged. Then there was the "trust the science" fiasco around covid. Trust is like glass - easy to break, and very hard to restore.
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Most of the “fraudulent citations” stories you’ve seen were by non-US researchers. But nobody leads with that detail, because the goal is to cherry-pick bad behavior from across the goal in order to convince people that US higher education is entirely corrupt. It’s the same phenomenon that has half the country convinced that violent crime in US cities is out of control, when in fact a detailed analysis shows that it’s at historically low levels.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    > Most doesn't mean there isn't a lot of local fraud. Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind. Let's not forget that fraudulent Alzheimer's paper that misdirected Alzheimer's research for decades. The Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion fraud? Does it matter if most come from foreign scientists, when prestigious journals publish them? What are we supposed to do, reject papers with foreign sounding names? Why aren't the journals doing proper vetting? Attempts to suppress any counterclaims to the official scientific opinions during covid would make anyone skeptical. Then there's this: https://www.oaklandreport.org/p/the-misrepresentation-of-oakland https://www.oaklandreport.org/p/the-misrepresentation-of-oak... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-say-crime-is-going-down-dont-believe-it-e5b07784 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-say-crime-is-going-do... One should be careful about statistics reported by an entity that has a strong self-interest in the outcomes.
    - matthewdgreen 2y ago
      Imagine I told you the US was overrun by violent crime and murder, and when asked for examples I listed: * A single horrible murder took place decades ago * A second (possibly less terrible) manslaughter case that took place in the 1980s * A variety of violent acts in dangerous areas in developing countries, today I’m not even going to dispute that there is academic fraud. Just that your examples tend to illustrate how relatively rare it is when one filters for reputable researchers, journals and institutions, and also takes into account the denominator (which is enormous) rather than highlighting some spectacular examples and making broad claims about the world falling apart.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        I provided two cites of manipulation of aggregate statistics. I've also seen articles (didn't keep cites) about the "replication crisis" of large numbers of research papers with results that nobody can replicate. > making broad claims about the world falling apart More like claims of losing trust in "trust us, because we're scientists!"
      - bumby 2y ago
        Do we have good data to the contrary, though? Is there evidence that most science is good? The replicability crisis has certainly given some evidence that much of published research could be classified as 'not good' in some domains. (And maybe there is an important distinction to make between 'bad' science and 'fraudulent' science). If there isn't good evidence to show that most science is good, the best we can probably claim is that we don't know.
        matthewdgreen 2y ago
        I don’t think “there is an important distinction between ‘bad’ science and ‘fraudulent’ science” should have the word “maybe” attached to it. Of course there is a difference, just as there is a huge distinction between premeditated murder and accidental deaths. The correct level of both should be zero, but one is vastly more damaging and also more rare than the other. As an aside: the problem I have with the OP is that it isn’t arguing about scientific quality, it’s arguing that science is rife with actual fraud. Typically in the midst of such conversations the conversation switches from actual accusations of fraud to the replication crisis in small-effect-size social science experimental work, which seems to be more an issue of people being careless than malicious —- and importantly, is an issue that the scientific community is addressing through improved standards. With respect to your question: “is there evidence that most science is good”, I’m not even sure how you would answer that question. All I know is that if you compare the world of my grandmother to the world of today, the two are so different as to be unrecognizable, and scientific advances are responsible for most of the difference. That progress continues every single day, and we’re both alive because of science was at least good enough to make our continued existence possible.
- gigatexal 2y ago
  Covid was such an outlier event things were changing daily as they tried new things. I never understood why people got so upset over policies around Covid they were just figuring stuff out as new info came in. Folks expected people to have all the answers to everything but the scientific method is to try something test the results and confirm with further experiment no?
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    That's true, but when we find out that the "trusted scientist" was pushing his opinion as "scientific fact" when he knew otherwise, it's really hard to rebuild trust. Like Fauci with the masks. He knew he was wrong. I'm old enough to remember when the government confidently asserted that butter was bad, eat margarine instead. I ate margarine for decades. Then it turned out the hydrogenated oil is more or less poison. Back to butter for me. We were told eggs were bad, meat was bad, grain is good. All wrong.
    - amy-petrik-214 2y ago
      My pet hypothesis is Fauci saw an infectious disease / epidemiologists dream thought experiment. What if every human on the planet self-isolated for XX weeks? If most illnesses (e.g. cold, flu, airbone) die out after X days without a host, presumably a large chunk of communicable transient diseases that have been around forever.. would suddenly no longer exist. My thought is there was a sort of power-drunkness, mix of anxiety, and the blissful joy of doing this naughty experiment on 350 million people. With the best of intentions of course. Of course the problem with it all is one general of medicine. The infectious disease specialist stays in their lane and devises an infectious disease solution. I don't think psychiatrists or economists had much of a say in it. I would speculate there are particular populations such as healthy teenagers, who mostly handle COVID easily with near-zero death rate( HEALTHY teenagers).. where these COVID restrictions caused more damage, psychological and suicide, then the COVID precautions themselves... in order to save the boomer population which did benefit. The other problem, obvious now, is it didn't work. You can't bottle up people, particularly not muricans, a very individualistic culture. The goal was to knock out COVID in a week or two and look how it went.

WalterBright 2y ago

> It means experts and scientists get ridiculed Given the shameless plague of fraudulent papers, and the gaming of citations, my faith in experts and scientists has been damaged. Then there was the "trust the science" fiasco around covid. Trust is like glass - easy to break, and very hard to restore.

matthewdgreen 2y ago
Most of the “fraudulent citations” stories you’ve seen were by non-US researchers. But nobody leads with that detail, because the goal is to cherry-pick bad behavior from across the goal in order to convince people that US higher education is entirely corrupt. It’s the same phenomenon that has half the country convinced that violent crime in US cities is out of control, when in fact a detailed analysis shows that it’s at historically low levels.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  > Most doesn't mean there isn't a lot of local fraud. Elizabeth Holmes comes to mind. Let's not forget that fraudulent Alzheimer's paper that misdirected Alzheimer's research for decades. The Pons and Fleischmann cold fusion fraud? Does it matter if most come from foreign scientists, when prestigious journals publish them? What are we supposed to do, reject papers with foreign sounding names? Why aren't the journals doing proper vetting? Attempts to suppress any counterclaims to the official scientific opinions during covid would make anyone skeptical. Then there's this: https://www.oaklandreport.org/p/the-misrepresentation-of-oakland https://www.oaklandreport.org/p/the-misrepresentation-of-oak... https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-say-crime-is-going-down-dont-believe-it-e5b07784 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-media-say-crime-is-going-do... One should be careful about statistics reported by an entity that has a strong self-interest in the outcomes.
  - matthewdgreen 2y ago
    Imagine I told you the US was overrun by violent crime and murder, and when asked for examples I listed: * A single horrible murder took place decades ago * A second (possibly less terrible) manslaughter case that took place in the 1980s * A variety of violent acts in dangerous areas in developing countries, today I’m not even going to dispute that there is academic fraud. Just that your examples tend to illustrate how relatively rare it is when one filters for reputable researchers, journals and institutions, and also takes into account the denominator (which is enormous) rather than highlighting some spectacular examples and making broad claims about the world falling apart.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      I provided two cites of manipulation of aggregate statistics. I've also seen articles (didn't keep cites) about the "replication crisis" of large numbers of research papers with results that nobody can replicate. > making broad claims about the world falling apart More like claims of losing trust in "trust us, because we're scientists!"
    - bumby 2y ago
      Do we have good data to the contrary, though? Is there evidence that most science is good? The replicability crisis has certainly given some evidence that much of published research could be classified as 'not good' in some domains. (And maybe there is an important distinction to make between 'bad' science and 'fraudulent' science). If there isn't good evidence to show that most science is good, the best we can probably claim is that we don't know.
      - matthewdgreen 2y ago
        I don’t think “there is an important distinction between ‘bad’ science and ‘fraudulent’ science” should have the word “maybe” attached to it. Of course there is a difference, just as there is a huge distinction between premeditated murder and accidental deaths. The correct level of both should be zero, but one is vastly more damaging and also more rare than the other. As an aside: the problem I have with the OP is that it isn’t arguing about scientific quality, it’s arguing that science is rife with actual fraud. Typically in the midst of such conversations the conversation switches from actual accusations of fraud to the replication crisis in small-effect-size social science experimental work, which seems to be more an issue of people being careless than malicious —- and importantly, is an issue that the scientific community is addressing through improved standards. With respect to your question: “is there evidence that most science is good”, I’m not even sure how you would answer that question. All I know is that if you compare the world of my grandmother to the world of today, the two are so different as to be unrecognizable, and scientific advances are responsible for most of the difference. That progress continues every single day, and we’re both alive because of science was at least good enough to make our continued existence possible.
gigatexal 2y ago
Covid was such an outlier event things were changing daily as they tried new things. I never understood why people got so upset over policies around Covid they were just figuring stuff out as new info came in. Folks expected people to have all the answers to everything but the scientific method is to try something test the results and confirm with further experiment no?
- WalterBright 2y ago
  That's true, but when we find out that the "trusted scientist" was pushing his opinion as "scientific fact" when he knew otherwise, it's really hard to rebuild trust. Like Fauci with the masks. He knew he was wrong. I'm old enough to remember when the government confidently asserted that butter was bad, eat margarine instead. I ate margarine for decades. Then it turned out the hydrogenated oil is more or less poison. Back to butter for me. We were told eggs were bad, meat was bad, grain is good. All wrong.
  - amy-petrik-214 2y ago
    My pet hypothesis is Fauci saw an infectious disease / epidemiologists dream thought experiment. What if every human on the planet self-isolated for XX weeks? If most illnesses (e.g. cold, flu, airbone) die out after X days without a host, presumably a large chunk of communicable transient diseases that have been around forever.. would suddenly no longer exist. My thought is there was a sort of power-drunkness, mix of anxiety, and the blissful joy of doing this naughty experiment on 350 million people. With the best of intentions of course. Of course the problem with it all is one general of medicine. The infectious disease specialist stays in their lane and devises an infectious disease solution. I don't think psychiatrists or economists had much of a say in it. I would speculate there are particular populations such as healthy teenagers, who mostly handle COVID easily with near-zero death rate( HEALTHY teenagers).. where these COVID restrictions caused more damage, psychological and suicide, then the COVID precautions themselves... in order to save the boomer population which did benefit. The other problem, obvious now, is it didn't work. You can't bottle up people, particularly not muricans, a very individualistic culture. The goal was to knock out COVID in a week or two and look how it went.