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> Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret thi

> Similar - when I was younger, I would never have suspected that a scientist was committing fraud. Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science", when in reality science is still the best way to push humanity forward and alleviate human suffering, _despite_ all the fraud and misaligned incentives that may influence it.

momoschili 2y ago
Agree. The fact that we are seeing this kind of discourse within the scientific community is in my opinion a great argument for the scientific method.
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  How's this for scientific method. The response to "not trust science" is the inductive step of a model that is validated by the fucking evidence.
  - momoschili 2y ago
    not sure what you're getting at
- mike_hearn 2y ago
  Why? Some guy writing an op-ed saying how frustrating it is that science is full of fraud is a great argument for the scientific method? There have been people writing articles like this for over 20 years if not much longer about all kinds of fields. Nothing ever happens, nothing ever improves, it never goes beyond people saying "tut tut how terrible". This sort of thing is entirely predictable and will keep happening, over and over again. On the current course, there will be articles just like this one being discussed in another twenty years from now.
  - momoschili 2y ago
    I don't think Derek Lowe is frustrated that "science is full of fraud", this is likely editorialization on your part. It seems that it stems specifically from Masliah, who is common across all papers in the dossier. Granted, Masliah appears to be prolific, so this is admittedly a large issue in the peer review and verification structure in this field. To put this into context though: Let's begin by supposing that fraud exists in all ventures where people stand to gain, which I don't think is controversial at all, especially not in this comment section. In light of this assumption the fact that this all came out in the first place is proof that being a luminary does not make you immune from investigation. That this happens 'over and over again' simply means that eventually we catching this fraud. The fact that the scientific community is constantly trying to reproduce and verify is why these become public in the first place. So on the contrary, it's not that nothing ever happens or nothing ever improves. There will be articles like this one in twenty years because there will still be fraudsters in twenty years, and there will still be scientists working to verify their work.
    - mike_hearn 2y ago
      I don't think it's true that eventually we are catching this fraud :( This keeps happening because so much is out there, it doesn't follow that all or even most of it is being caught. Even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent being caught would yield a constant stream of such stories. I have a collection of articles on my blog dating back years that cover various fraudulent papers in different fields, and even whole fields in which the bulk of all papers are based on fraud (e.g. the literature dealing with misinformation bots on Twitter). None of them have ever been retracted or even had any of the problems be acknowledged outside of the blogosphere. It's really hard to understand the scale of the problem until you wade through it yourself. Fraud is absolutely endemic in science. Dig in and you can easily uncover bogus papers, and none of them will ever be acknowledged or retracted. In particular there's a nasty attitude problem in which reports of fraud from outside the academic institutions will frequently be written off as "right wing" and thus inherently illegitimate. This can happen regardless of the nature of the criticism or whether it's in any way political. Literally, things like bug reports or reports of numbers that don't add up can be discarded this way. Thus they implement an unwritten rule that only academics are allowed to report fraud by academics, and of course, they are strongly incentivized not to do so. So Lowe is correct. It's really a mess.
djfobbz 2y ago
Also science: There are more new cases of cancer in the United States now than there have ever been before.
- worik 2y ago
  > There are more new cases of cancer in the United States now than there have ever been before. Sigh That is because antibiotics, essentially The mechanism by which antibiotics cause cancer is they stop you dying from bacterial infection, once a huge (biggest?) killer. You still have to die of something....
  - jiggawatts 2y ago
    There’s also improved testing: previously old people would die of “unknown natural causes”, now they’re diagnosed as having cancer.
  - consf 2y ago
    [dead]
ksplicer 2y ago
I try to distinguish between "the scientific process" and building scientific consensus. As rigorous as the scientific process may be, building consensus is always a messy and human thing.
throwawaymaths 2y ago
> Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science" Unfortunately many "smart" people insist on telling "dumb" people how to think instead of having the introspection and humility to examine where we've gone wrong and spending a lot of time and effort on fixing it. No, easier to gaslight the idiots
- heironimus 2y ago
  Exactly. “This is bad because dumb people won’t believe us.” Not “This is bad because it undermines science, is lying, and unethical, regardless of what people think.”
- ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
  A lot of people are working to fix the K-12+ educational system which is the root cause of many stupid people, but beyond that, it's objectively hard to fix stupid. Most people, stupid or otherwise, wouldn't take a critical thinking course, for example. Many would have no time for it, to say little of motivation. Fewer are proud of being stupid and will shun anything they consider "intellectual".
  - throwawaymaths 2y ago
    This is a bad take. Because even the craziest of crazies (the flat earthers) are actually doing the scientific method by running experiments to test their crazy conjectures. What makes them crazy is that they have a poor sense of discernment about when it's worth it to trust authorities and when it's not; they're not dumb, and education is not really failing them (in the sense that they "aren't being taught what science is"). They are arguably better scientists than "trust the science" folks because at least they are getting out there and moving atoms to test shit. On the other hand intellectuals have poor discernment too, they overly trust the literature and the interpretation of working scientists. These two phenomena are two sides of the same coin, and the flat earthers/antivaxx etc crazies are directly downstream of the "trust the science" bad behaviour, especially since the education system has taught them what good science is and they are rightly perceiving that good science is not being done.
drevil-v2 2y ago
In defence of the "less bright people" or deplorables as others have called them - they are deeply suspicious of Science(tm) used as a cudgel. They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it's own gain to achieve it's own purposes which run counter to the interests of the people. The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime example of that. The whole system has been corrupted and therefore it is not possible to have a de-facto assumption of good faith of the actors.
- lupire 2y ago
  You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't see a difference between science and religion, except that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team, and they have a preferred color.
  - jonhohle 2y ago
    When the public is told to “trust the science”, it is no longer science and is now religion.
    - chasd00 2y ago
      This happened all day long during Covid. The answer was never “we don’t know yet” which was at least honest but instead it was always “just trust us”. Exactly like i use to hear from preachers growing up.
      - lanstin 2y ago
        The difference between public health and basic research. To stop an epidemic in flight one has to go with ones best guess and that saves lives so they do it.
        dukeofdoom 2y ago
        Even if you still be the fiction of the vaccine saving lives. It was the life of an obese 80 year old with 3 other comorbidities ... for a few months. The lockdowns resulted in inflation, and caused a lot more poverty and deaths worldwide since. And retarded the normal development of many children. And we still don't know what kind of long term damage the vaccine caused. My friend that trusted the science, and took every booster, only stopped when she got myocarditis.
concordDance 2y ago
I'm not sure the two uses of "science" in your post are using the same meanings of the word. Science is the name given to a few different processes, a body of knowledge and statements by designated spokespersons. Each of these have different flaws and failure modes in different environments and domains.
- lupire 2y ago
  Appositive comma, or missing Harvard comma?
gjs4786 2y ago
All science does is show us how to move a whole bunch of piles of shit over into one big pile of shit, off in the corner. Or perhaps on to an unsuspecting group of poor people because, the burden demands to be he held and somebody has to hold the bag of shit. Right? We may interpret this as convenience... But the tragedy of the commons says that we can't even have science if someone isn't holding what it is we don't want to be holding... I'm not saying I didn't love science or not think it's super interesting or anything... Can we really say it alleviates suffering or does it displace it for one group of people until a new problem comes in and takes that one's place? How many people here will be holding the bag of shit tonight? USA numba 1!!!
mike_hearn 2y ago
Already done: https://imagetwin.ai/ https://imagetwin.ai/
jknoepfler 2y ago
I believe the phrase is "trust but verify."
antisthenes 2y ago
Culture of being proud of ignorance is on full display in the replies to my comment, btw. Exactly the kind of less bright people that I inferred about. People so devoid of common sense, that they utterly reject anyone who applies systematic thinking. Unreal.
BlueTemplar 2y ago
The problem is simplifying into the same word "science" both the scientific method (with a pretty good track record, though it does have some blind spots), and groups of people claiming to engage in it (the tendency of which is to become corrupt, the faster the more powerful they are).

momoschili 2y ago

Agree. The fact that we are seeing this kind of discourse within the scientific community is in my opinion a great argument for the scientific method.

throwawaymaths 2y ago
How's this for scientific method. The response to "not trust science" is the inductive step of a model that is validated by the fucking evidence.
- momoschili 2y ago
  not sure what you're getting at
mike_hearn 2y ago
Why? Some guy writing an op-ed saying how frustrating it is that science is full of fraud is a great argument for the scientific method? There have been people writing articles like this for over 20 years if not much longer about all kinds of fields. Nothing ever happens, nothing ever improves, it never goes beyond people saying "tut tut how terrible". This sort of thing is entirely predictable and will keep happening, over and over again. On the current course, there will be articles just like this one being discussed in another twenty years from now.
- momoschili 2y ago
  I don't think Derek Lowe is frustrated that "science is full of fraud", this is likely editorialization on your part. It seems that it stems specifically from Masliah, who is common across all papers in the dossier. Granted, Masliah appears to be prolific, so this is admittedly a large issue in the peer review and verification structure in this field. To put this into context though: Let's begin by supposing that fraud exists in all ventures where people stand to gain, which I don't think is controversial at all, especially not in this comment section. In light of this assumption the fact that this all came out in the first place is proof that being a luminary does not make you immune from investigation. That this happens 'over and over again' simply means that eventually we catching this fraud. The fact that the scientific community is constantly trying to reproduce and verify is why these become public in the first place. So on the contrary, it's not that nothing ever happens or nothing ever improves. There will be articles like this one in twenty years because there will still be fraudsters in twenty years, and there will still be scientists working to verify their work.
  - mike_hearn 2y ago
    I don't think it's true that eventually we are catching this fraud :( This keeps happening because so much is out there, it doesn't follow that all or even most of it is being caught. Even a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent being caught would yield a constant stream of such stories. I have a collection of articles on my blog dating back years that cover various fraudulent papers in different fields, and even whole fields in which the bulk of all papers are based on fraud (e.g. the literature dealing with misinformation bots on Twitter). None of them have ever been retracted or even had any of the problems be acknowledged outside of the blogosphere. It's really hard to understand the scale of the problem until you wade through it yourself. Fraud is absolutely endemic in science. Dig in and you can easily uncover bogus papers, and none of them will ever be acknowledged or retracted. In particular there's a nasty attitude problem in which reports of fraud from outside the academic institutions will frequently be written off as "right wing" and thus inherently illegitimate. This can happen regardless of the nature of the criticism or whether it's in any way political. Literally, things like bug reports or reports of numbers that don't add up can be discarded this way. Thus they implement an unwritten rule that only academics are allowed to report fraud by academics, and of course, they are strongly incentivized not to do so. So Lowe is correct. It's really a mess.

djfobbz 2y ago

Also science: There are more new cases of cancer in the United States now than there have ever been before.

worik 2y ago
> There are more new cases of cancer in the United States now than there have ever been before. Sigh That is because antibiotics, essentially The mechanism by which antibiotics cause cancer is they stop you dying from bacterial infection, once a huge (biggest?) killer. You still have to die of something....
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  There’s also improved testing: previously old people would die of “unknown natural causes”, now they’re diagnosed as having cancer.
- consf 2y ago
  [dead]

ksplicer 2y ago

I try to distinguish between "the scientific process" and building scientific consensus. As rigorous as the scientific process may be, building consensus is always a messy and human thing.

throwawaymaths 2y ago

> Unfortunately many less bright people seem to interpret this as "never trust science" Unfortunately many "smart" people insist on telling "dumb" people how to think instead of having the introspection and humility to examine where we've gone wrong and spending a lot of time and effort on fixing it. No, easier to gaslight the idiots

heironimus 2y ago
Exactly. “This is bad because dumb people won’t believe us.” Not “This is bad because it undermines science, is lying, and unethical, regardless of what people think.”
ImPostingOnHN 2y ago
A lot of people are working to fix the K-12+ educational system which is the root cause of many stupid people, but beyond that, it's objectively hard to fix stupid. Most people, stupid or otherwise, wouldn't take a critical thinking course, for example. Many would have no time for it, to say little of motivation. Fewer are proud of being stupid and will shun anything they consider "intellectual".
- throwawaymaths 2y ago
  This is a bad take. Because even the craziest of crazies (the flat earthers) are actually doing the scientific method by running experiments to test their crazy conjectures. What makes them crazy is that they have a poor sense of discernment about when it's worth it to trust authorities and when it's not; they're not dumb, and education is not really failing them (in the sense that they "aren't being taught what science is"). They are arguably better scientists than "trust the science" folks because at least they are getting out there and moving atoms to test shit. On the other hand intellectuals have poor discernment too, they overly trust the literature and the interpretation of working scientists. These two phenomena are two sides of the same coin, and the flat earthers/antivaxx etc crazies are directly downstream of the "trust the science" bad behaviour, especially since the education system has taught them what good science is and they are rightly perceiving that good science is not being done.

drevil-v2 2y ago

In defence of the "less bright people" or deplorables as others have called them - they are deeply suspicious of Science(tm) used as a cudgel. They intuit that some parasitic entity or entities has latched on to Science and is co-opting it for it's own gain to achieve it's own purposes which run counter to the interests of the people. The heavy handed Covid response and censorship is a prime example of that. The whole system has been corrupted and therefore it is not possible to have a de-facto assumption of good faith of the actors.

lupire 2y ago
You're not wrong, but people who oppose "science as a cudgel" tend to support "religion as a cudgel", and don't see a difference between science and religion, except that one is the Yellow team and one is the Purple team, and they have a preferred color.
- jonhohle 2y ago
  When the public is told to “trust the science”, it is no longer science and is now religion.
  - chasd00 2y ago
    This happened all day long during Covid. The answer was never “we don’t know yet” which was at least honest but instead it was always “just trust us”. Exactly like i use to hear from preachers growing up.
    - lanstin 2y ago
      The difference between public health and basic research. To stop an epidemic in flight one has to go with ones best guess and that saves lives so they do it.
      - dukeofdoom 2y ago
        Even if you still be the fiction of the vaccine saving lives. It was the life of an obese 80 year old with 3 other comorbidities ... for a few months. The lockdowns resulted in inflation, and caused a lot more poverty and deaths worldwide since. And retarded the normal development of many children. And we still don't know what kind of long term damage the vaccine caused. My friend that trusted the science, and took every booster, only stopped when she got myocarditis.

concordDance 2y ago

I'm not sure the two uses of "science" in your post are using the same meanings of the word. Science is the name given to a few different processes, a body of knowledge and statements by designated spokespersons. Each of these have different flaws and failure modes in different environments and domains.

lupire 2y ago
Appositive comma, or missing Harvard comma?

gjs4786 2y ago

All science does is show us how to move a whole bunch of piles of shit over into one big pile of shit, off in the corner. Or perhaps on to an unsuspecting group of poor people because, the burden demands to be he held and somebody has to hold the bag of shit. Right? We may interpret this as convenience... But the tragedy of the commons says that we can't even have science if someone isn't holding what it is we don't want to be holding... I'm not saying I didn't love science or not think it's super interesting or anything... Can we really say it alleviates suffering or does it displace it for one group of people until a new problem comes in and takes that one's place? How many people here will be holding the bag of shit tonight? USA numba 1!!!

mike_hearn 2y ago

Already done: https://imagetwin.ai/ https://imagetwin.ai/

jknoepfler 2y ago

I believe the phrase is "trust but verify."

antisthenes 2y ago

Culture of being proud of ignorance is on full display in the replies to my comment, btw. Exactly the kind of less bright people that I inferred about. People so devoid of common sense, that they utterly reject anyone who applies systematic thinking. Unreal.

BlueTemplar 2y ago

The problem is simplifying into the same word "science" both the scientific method (with a pretty good track record, though it does have some blind spots), and groups of people claiming to engage in it (the tendency of which is to become corrupt, the faster the more powerful they are).