Stop Equating “Science” with Truth

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2017/08/evolutionary_psychology_is_the_most_obvious_example_of_how_science_is_flawed.html

by alphonsegaston • 9 years ago

25 14 9 years ago

slate.com

averagewall• 9 years ago

Eliminate structural biases in education, health care, housing, and salaries that favor white men and see if we fail. Run the experiment. Be a scientist about it.

That experiment's been done and "we failed". India has greater structural biases against women than the US but a higher percentage of women in tech. And it's a pretty consistent correlation between bias and women's involvement across countries.

TheLilHipster• 9 years ago

Citations would be more convincing.

xaa4• 9 years ago

Take a look at this:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exagger...

Apparently, and paradoxically, greater eqalitarianism in a society can result in higher amounts of individual choice, which can actually exacerbate inherent differences between groups (if you believe they exist).

xaa4• 9 years ago

Oh, boy. Yes, it is true, no one knows better than we scientists that science is flawed and bias-prone.

You can say science is flawed but the best available source of truth we can have, or you can say science is too fallible to be more privileged than any other source of knowledge/belief. What you cannot do is have it both ways, to pretend science is infallible when you agree with it, and biased or problematic when you don't. This seems to be what many on the left are trying to do.

peatmoss2• 9 years ago

A thousand times this.

There is absolutely an institutionalist argument to be made against how science is practiced by fallible and biased humans. However, I've never heard of any method I'd trust more.

Science seems to be the only fair process for adjudicating when factual claims are at odds. I'd hate to rely on rhetoric, as that certainly isn't less subject to human fallibility.

At the same time, we need to be thoughtful about what are scientific questions and which are normative/ value questions.

Science could help us figure out whether ground up humans make good plant fertilizer. Humans need to make a value judgement on whether or not to fertilize plants with ground up humans.

Believing in the scientific method, recognizing the institutional ways that we can systematically fall short of its lofty platonic ideal, and understanding the limitations of science to tell us the "right" social policy is what I want.

geoffpado• 9 years ago

I was going to deride Slate for presumably being on the side of the people equating "Science" with truth at the March for Science just a few months ago, but it turns out they had the exact same issue then: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

I figure if I was going to smear Slate for assumed hypocrisy, I should do the right thing and praise them for their (IMO, correct) consistency when I was wrong.

gizmo6863• 9 years ago

Yes, our institutions of science are flawed and subject to human biases. However, what alternative to we have? At the end of the day, we need to have some notion of what is "true". We could go with taking the dominate ideology as being "true", but this is literally political correctness. We could go back to using religion to tell us what is true [0]. Or we could realize that science is the best method we have invented to find truth.

The question then becomes how much we trust our current scientific institutions. I will agree that the general public tends to put too much trust in any given finding (and often misunderstands the finding itself), but, in general, our scientific institutions are still doing some of the best science in our society. They are certainly doing better science than our political institutions are. [1]

So what do we do when our scientific institutions findings do not align with our political findings? One option is to ignore the science entirely; but without the science, we will proceed along with an ideology that becomes increasingly divorced from reality.

In the case of the Google memo, we have a disagreement about facts [2]. The question here is how to resolve this disagreement. I have seen two proposals: 1) Science and 2) Ideology and mob rule.

Both sides can play in the science debate. There is a lot of science to support the "pro (gender) diversity" side, and we can have a discussion where both sides try to use science to arrive closer to the truth. In fact, if we look at the two sides of the broader diversity debate, the pro diversity side is far more represented in our scientific institutions [3].

[0] Although it is worth noting that, even if we accept religion as the correct arbiter of truth, our religious institutions also have a record of reaching a truth that supports the biases of the time.

[1] Which is not a criticism of our political institutions; their job is not to do science. It is, however, a criticism of deferring to our political institutions for factual judgements.

[2] Actually, in my opinion, most of the disagreement is about words; specifically one side not understanding what the other side is trying to say moreso than disagreeing with it. However, for the sake of arguement, I will assume that both sides understand what the other is saying and have a factual disagreement.

[3] Again, talking about populations, not individuals.

peatmoss2• 9 years ago

This is almost exactly my opinion. Where I'd differ on the Google case, is that I don't think science can ultimately tell us what is the correct level of diversity to strive for.

That's a values question to be slugged out in society. Certainly science (especially if it's well-executed science with broad consensus) can help to inform how we might achieve our desired ends. There's no "right" level of diversity, and I can think of at least several incompatible standards of "fair."

gizmo6863• 9 years ago

I agree that there is a value discussion to be had; but, practically speaking, we might be able to push it off for a while. If the pro diversity camp would actually engage with the science, I believe they will find that most of the disparity we see between the genders is due to societal influences. Further, we would likely find that portions of our society are unnecessarily optimized for males [0]. If the pro diversity camp would spend there efforts dealing with those issues, we could kick the value discussion decades (or possibly generations) down the road. In the mean time, we will get relatively uncontroversial social progress faster.

[0] Or, almost equivalently, there exists additional optimizations to better accommodate females that we have not done, giving males an unnecessary advantage.

xaa4• 9 years ago

I don't think the disagreement in the case of the memo is about facts. Few outlets that reported on this controversy even seem to have read the memo, nor are the criticisms of it I have read based on facts (or on words).

They seem to be based on the idea that the writer has drawn the wrong conclusion. The facts or lack thereof seem to be irrelevant: if he had cited the same papers but made the opposite argument, he would have been fine.

The idea of scientists being some kind of arbiters of truth makes me very uncomfortable. The process of science is really messy. People want to publish surprising and extraordinary findings (which often turn out to be false, and the more extraordinary, the more likely this is). We have to publish or perish. And many other problems.

Over the long term, science finds truth. In the short term, it is quite unreliable. Scientists are tired of having their work used to support agendas, when in reality we only observe, and usually the observations don't even support the agendas they're being used for.

At this point, I think more and more scientists would prefer that science just be left out of politics. Politics appears to be a lost cause, far beyond any ability for facts or reason to be useful, and we have always done our best to leave politics out of science. To the left and right, I would just plead: leave us out of your petty squabbles and let us get on with advancing humanity's future. But I must admit there are some publicity-seeking members of this profession who undercut this hope.

To more directly respond to your post, there is an awful lot of confusion between what science says, and the value judgments derived from a combination of scientific observations and some ideology. I do not think the public, left or right, is generally capable of disentangling facts from their interpretations of the consequences of those facts.

gizmo6863• 9 years ago

I don't think the disagreement in the case of the memo is about facts.

Neither do I, see footnote 2. However, the article this thread is responding to was talking about factual decisions, so I stuck with that assumption.

At this point, I think more and more scientists would prefer that science just be left out of politics.

By all means, leave politics out of science [0], but we need science to inform are politics. Otherwise, we just get more of the raw ideology that is the very reason you don't like politics.

Science should not be left to just the scientists. They do the hard work of collecting data and running experiments. But mostly, they end up answering very specific questions with varying degrees of confidence. Once they have those answers, they guess at broader implications. These are informed guesses, based on their knowledge of other highly specific results and thinking that others have done. However, this latter part of science is far more accessible than most people realize. So, instead of actually engaging with the science, they simply appeal to the scientists. This is made even worse because they are attempting to understand the conclusion without the argument, and so will tend to misunderstand. Further, since the general public almost never engages with the actual science, politicians and activists have near free reign to misrepresent the results.

[0] Mostly, the question of what to study should be a political one, but politics is so corrupting that I see no problem giving scientists a lot of insulation from it.

kazinator• 9 years ago

Science aligns (or at least should, ideally) rather more with "honesty". "honesty" isn't "truth", so ...

ryebit• 9 years ago

One mistake that (easily) gets made is thinking science is a product, a body of knowledge. Science is a process, that (through repeated application) can take a body of knowledge, and improve it's depth and accuracy.

You want to get close to "the full truth, and all the truth"? It'll take asymptotically more man-hours.

At any point, there will be gaps and mistakes; but the nice thing about the process of "science" is that it's an algorithm, and exists as part of the body of knowledge it's acting on. So it can itself be improved, using it's own rules.

That's the difference between a process, and a static set of facts, when even it the core tenets permit for the possibility of mistakes, and allow for their own replacement.

Stop Equating “Science” with Truth

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