Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Science Works

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/hast.1227

by XzetaU8 • 5 years ago

200 236 5 years ago

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

rmrfrmrf3• 5 years ago

No mention of funding of scientific studies and the ongoing replication crisis?

wegs2• 5 years ago

This was not what I expected. I expected the standard line about how the general public should trust scientists, and a fight for a greater role of scientists in decision-making.

It was a good read.

I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of the flaws of scientific processes:

* Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes

* Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines

* Impact over integrity in hiring

* Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone)

... and so on.

As well as a clearer understanding of how we go from hypothesis to fact. In many policy discussions, I see individual scientific papers cited which is a nonsense way to use science. One can find a paper which says anything and most results are false. That's still part of the process. Once a result has been poked at from enough directions, it becomes a theory and then an fact. Connecting the hypothetical process to empirical process would be awesome to see in schools.

nvahalik4• 5 years ago

Science is seeing full-well the problem that many religions (at least, those with Scriptures) have been having for centuries. (s/hypothesis/belief/ and s/fact/creed/).

* I see individual scripture references cited (out of context). (Called "proof texting"... "See, here's the proof!")

* One can find a verse which says anything (if you ignore the context).

* Once an idea has been poked at from enough directions, it becomes a belief and then a creed (or a part of one).

Science, like religion also has a method: exegesis vs. the scientific method. A source: scripture vs. creation. Etc. etc.

Sadly, this is not a problem which can be "fixed". You can have your die-hard zealots on either side. The evidence can be placed before them. You can show them that their error (heresy) has been denounced for a thousand years. But yet erroneous beliefs are still rampant.

gspr3• 5 years ago

I'll bite: examples, please.

kspacewalk22• 5 years ago

I have a somewhat less charitable take on the whole "context incorporation"/exegesis process. It's simply a process of reconciling an ancient, mostly irrelevant religious text to the modern-day economic, social and political realities. What do you need the Bible to do for you, dear leader/dear society? A la carte options available with a little exegesis.

- Need the Bible to justify slavery? With a little judicious exegesis, here you go! Oh, society realized slavery is an abhorrent crime? Time to dust off your trusty exegesis experts.

- Is homosexuality a horrible sin punishable by death, or is that now an anachronistic view which is making us bleed subscribers... scratch, the faithful? Religion Has A Method to correct this!

- etc., etc.

brightball• 5 years ago

If you ever take the time to read the studies being cited, they also rarely say what people think they say when citing them.

lotsofpulp9• 5 years ago

I think the pieces I would add are a clear understanding of the flaws of scientific processes:
* Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes
* Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines
* Impact over integrity in hiring
* Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone)

None of these are part of the scientific process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

thereddaikon4• 5 years ago

They didn't at any point say the scientific method. And I'm pretty sure that's intentional because there is nothing inherently wrong with the scientific method. The problem is with the processes we have built around modern academia which leads to a system that does not give an ideal or intended outcome.

neonological17• 5 years ago

These are political flaws and flaws with human systems.

You are missing the logical flaw buried within the scientific method itself.

Nothing in science and therefore reality can be proven to be true. We can only falsify things in science.

What this means is every claim ever made by anyone or any scientist from now to eternity can never be proven to be true.

We can only make repeated attempts at falsifying things. After we fail to falsify a thing enough times we can say, hey this theory is maybe true. That is the best science can do and that is what nobody, including most of the people on hacker news do NOT understand.

There is literally no such thing as an actual “fact” in science and therefore in reality as we know it.

This flaw is the origin of most of the distrust in science it is also the reason why blind trust of the scientific method itself is wrong. No claim made by a scientist has actually ever been proven.

kbelder• 5 years ago

Why do you see it as a flaw? Constantly shedding false beliefs equates to constant improvement.

We all want to get closer to the truth; science is one technique for doing so, and since there's no direct line to God, it's the most efficient one. It has the best corrective feedback loops.

jp5553• 5 years ago

People should be more aware... of the collapse of science

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

analog314• 5 years ago

The replication crisis is serious, but it's not the collapse of science. Maxwell's equations still stand, for example. You can still identify chemical elements from their spectra. And so forth.

That is not to diminish the problem. Over-reliance in purely statistical methods has gotten us in trouble -- in some fields more than others. Probably the main issue is that the fields affected are ones that happen to the biggest right now, with potential impact on quality of life and public policy.

Fields that are doing a better job of weathering the storm, such as physics, have tended to have a larger tool belt, and the use of statistics is kept in check by other methods such as the development of theory, and the ability to study problems from multiple vantage points. Also, physicists can choose our battles, and only look at problems where more robust statistics can be used.

jrumbut3• 5 years ago

Even in the fields most affected, I'm not aware of any knowledge generation efforts outside of science that are going better.

It might just be that the social sciences and medicine are really hard, and our best efforts fail often.

Edit: I mean the best effort we could reasonably make as a society, naturally there have been individuals and groups who have been doing things they knew or should have known were wrong for their own reasons.

jp5553• 5 years ago

Watching a friend go through the process of attaining tenured position in Economics recently has taught me to never listen to Economists. They are all focused on impressing each other MUCH more than progressing Economics. And that's not even considering the Ergodicity crisis there.

Once you see the sausage being made, you realize "peer review" is a way to project power in academia, it is not about science.

Eric Weinstein has been talking about this lately, something he calls DISC "The Distributed Idea Suppression Complex". Some of his first hand stories are shocking, but are exactly the kind of thing those I know in academia tell me they face every day.

thereddaikon4• 5 years ago

Calling it the collapse of science is definitely hyperbole, science is a method of falsification, it can't "collapse".

What is at risk is established academia and society's trust in the institution. The replication crisis is not well known outside of academic or technical circles for now. But eventually it will become a major scandal and you can't blame people for losing their trust at that point. And I think the worst part about it all is you can watch academia make the issue worse in real time. I see discussions about how to fix things but everyone ignores the gorilla in the room. They stop short of the truth, that academia is fraught with fraud and the system has set up in such a way as to promote it for anyone who actually wants to have a stable and successful career.

I've seen it myself first hand, when someone has been caught unequivocally committing research fraud they are fired and blacklisted from the community at large but are always treated as an isolated incident. The degree to which research cannot be reproduced means we have a serious fraud problem.

Academia needs to start cleaning house.

throwaway3699• 5 years ago

Science is also more accessible now. There are more academics and universities pumping out papers than ever before, whereas in the past only the best were able to get into academia.

lotsofpulp9• 5 years ago

That’s not a collapse of science, or the scientific method. It’s simply demonstrating how hard it is to do perform the science method given our boundary conditions and other incentives in life.

jp5553• 5 years ago

Most things we think come from the scientific process in fact are the result of trial & error and tinkering, and then back-filled with the scientific process and so only appears historically as if they came from theory.

Galileo would never of survived peer review.

"Science progresses one funeral at a time" - Max Planck

avsteele• 5 years ago

As a working physicist I think the authors suggestions are not likely to improve education.

Discussions of Kuhn are just not appropriate for secondary school science education. These classes are for teaching the bare basic of bio, chem, and physics to see if the kids enjoy them. As it stands they can barely do this. They aren't there to teach 'how science works' except in the most rudimentary sense, and its hard for me to think science education would be improved by removing core material in favor of a discussion of the peer review process!

The author's suggestion might be appropriate for social studies, or a a special, AP level class where logical positivism, Karl popper, and Kuhn might be discussed.

I refer the interested reader here to:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2975230-scientific-metho...

krona• 5 years ago

I know half a dozen or so PhD's in microbiology at one of the leading research institutions. They don't understand the philosophy of science beyond what I was taught aged 10-11.

I don't think the basics of Karl Popper and Kuhn are beyond the grasp of a secondary school student, considering their importance not just in science but in the world we now live in.

ta9882• 5 years ago

Thats because many PhD are just glorified technicians (same technicians we purged out of our labs doing one of the worst mistake of the last decades I believe). So we get all those PhD learning 3d printing, microcontrollers, programming for creating new devices, tools and whatever else. Where for technicians it would have been a much shorter turnaround. Of course the individuals learn new (basic level) skills. But it also impedes discovery and leaves a whole category of people out of the door. In PhD I was once told I couldn't put the technician on the authors list because he was paid to do his job...

konjin3• 5 years ago

I got half way through a physics phd and the only time anyone quoted Khun was as what happens when you read science books without understanding mathematics.

watwut• 5 years ago

Philosophy of science and doing science are two much different things.

mncharity2• 5 years ago

Years back, I went to a couple-of-day conference/seminar that was microbiology outreach to humanities and public. There were some in the audience who really wanted to find a Kuhnian narrative for the transformational progress in microbiology over the last few decades, and were very unhappy with an answer of no, sorry, driver was technology dropping costs by many orders of magnitude, transformationally changing the experiments and questions that were affordable to pursue. So perhaps microbiology is not the best context for suggesting Kuhn as useful?

Nav_Panel• 5 years ago

At my high school we had a small "science research" program, where students would read lots of papers and write a review, and also try to get a part time position at a local lab.

I'm thankful for that program even though I don't work in Science currently. Many of my peers are terrified of reading journal articles, but I'll dive right in.

In terms of philosophy, a big portion of the Kantian/Enlightenment project was about grounding or justifying Science as epistemological practice. But that's not really what the Public needs, because "Science" now is not "Natural Philosophy" reaching for the things-in-themselves, but an institution with norms, financial and political incentives, etc. Better to read Lyotard ("Postmodern Condition") than early Wittgenstein for this kind of thing.

SamBam• 5 years ago

Hard disagree. The nature of "science" should be woven into all of these courses. That will be what all students can take away from the science classes, not just the students who decide to stick with them after seeing if they "enjoy" them. (And do we teach English or history simply to see if kids will "enjoy" them later?)

Most good schools actually already do this as part of their standards-based curriculum. The Next Generation Science Standards [1] has "Practices" as one of its three key strands, which focuses on how to ask questions like a scientist, what evidence is, how you design an experiment, etc. The nature of "inquiry" is applicable to all future understanding of what scientists do, more so than memorizing whether mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell.

1. https://www.nextgenscience.org/

konjin3• 5 years ago

We need more science literacy, not humanities trying to stay relevant by dragging science down.

Teaching students sentential and first order logic would be a much better start since they would at least know what they are trying to prove, then some probability so they know what a 5% chance actually means and casual inference if you're feeling overly ambitious to realize why correlation might (or might not) be correlation.

jonathanstrange• 5 years ago

As a working philosopher, I agree. More specifically, the following passage in the article seems inconclusive to me and based on a common misrepresentation of Kuhn's work (I've heard things like that many times):

At least since Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", historians and philosophers of science have been aware that the traditional methods of science—as described in “science as inquiry”—do not give a complete picture of how scientists develop, test, refine, and replace scientific theories. That ideologies, peer pressure, confirmation bias, and a host of other "biasing factors" play an ineliminable role in the process of doing science is now widely acknowledged. Yet "science as inquiry" has not adjusted to these findings. It continues to regard any bias as bad for science and to insist on the overall neutrality, “logicality,” and objectivity of science. As a result, there is much about the history of science, as well as about contemporary science, that “science as inquiry” misrepresents.

The problem is that from the fact that various biases cannot be avoided in science it is concluded that it is somehow desirable to "adjust to these findings" and stop regarding bias as bad. Instead of continuing to strive for elimination of bias and lessen the impact of biasing factors, the author instead insinuates at various places that biases should somehow be embraced, even emphasized in historical examples. But it doesn't follow from the fact that there will always be bias in one form or another that it's not methodologically advisable to attempt to eliminate it as much as possible.

"When scientific disagreement arises, it is interpreted as likely showing that one or more scientists have bias."

That is rarely claimed. Isn't it way more more likely that the experiments are not decisive enough or the theories not yet developed well enough, that more data has to be collected or more theoretical advances have to be made?

Other points in the article are fine. Of course, consensus is not the point of science. But I have to say I've become rather dismissive about articles who build up "logical empiricism" as a straw man and then come with Kuhn. There have never been such trivial logical positivists. The Vienna Circle had quite elaborate and diverse views, and, as one may add, logical positivism was a large reductionist philosophical programme that failed for a vast variety of reasons that have nothing to do with Kuhn's theses and how work in science is actually conducted. Those reasons were, for example, that there was no logical way to generalize from 1st person to 3rd statements, the inadequacy of crude verificationism, the lack of a logic of theory discovery, Quine's work on analyticity and ontological relativity, problems with counterfactual reasoning and theoretical notions, problems with making reductionism credible in light of apparently emergent properties, and the failure of operationalism.

svara• 5 years ago

I think there's an issue that sometimes the dynamics of scientific progress that Kuhn described are misinterpreted as basically meaning that, oh look, scientists are just human like the rest of us, so scientific thought isn't somehow privileged over any other point of view.

However, Kuhn's dynamics are ultimately a consequence of reasoning in the face of uncertainty. Simply applying logic to experimental results is not what scientists actually do, instead, they have to develop a sort of taste in reasoning, in order to apply appropriate prior beliefs in the Bayesian sense and in order to apply appropriate weights when new evidence becomes available.

This can lead to scientific thinking getting stuck in local optima of sorts, until evidence comes along (at the right time, potentially) that shakes people up sufficiently to force a new approach.

Still, that isn't equally true for every subfield; some subfields will have proven their worth to greater degrees than others by consistently making good predictions or consistently offering elegant explanations for phenomena.

I guess the difficulty in science communication comes to a large degree from the difficulty in communicating that last point, particularly since scientists themselves may disagree about how mature a given subfield really is.

zepto9• 5 years ago

This is an awesome comment.

Is there any book you’d recommend that covers the general topics you just touched on (I mean dismantling the straw-man of logical empiricism), or is this only visible after reading widely on philosophy?

kinghtown• 5 years ago

I think society could use an extra hour of school, at least twice a week. This sort of thing would be a great class which has no homework or exam pressure. You get credits for being there and participating in discussions.

zepto9• 5 years ago

A lot of private schools pride themselves on having this kind of thing.

mhh__• 5 years ago

On the subject of enjoying science and mathematics, I know that if I had gone the usual route through school there is absolutely no way I would be studying anything remotely scientific a few years down the line. I took a liking to physics over a summer, almost purely by chance. That's it. The way (this is UK specific) we teach science and mathematics is so detached from anything you'd see at university I'm genuinely amazed the Universities haven't started trying to strangle the exam boards.

Brace Yourself: The UK Physics A-level does not require any calculus at all. None - no scientific method, no discussion of any quantum mechanics etc. etc.

Balgair• 5 years ago

These classes are for teaching the bare basic of bio, chem, and physics to see if the kids enjoy them. As it stands they can barely do this.

My SO was a HS science teacher, so I have some second-hand experience, whatever that is worth.

This very much tracks with my SO's experience in both very poor schools and in 'good' schools. It would be amazing to have the time, money, and resources to teach kiddos about the philosophy of science. But just getting through the facts is hard enough. I'll save you the belly-aching about home environments, intra-classroom management, funding, pay, snow-days, etc. Even if/when we get back to all in-person teaching and then get the kids back up to grade level, adding in the philosophy of science to uninterested teenagers isn't likely to produce any measurable results.

My iota of advice: Just vote to increase any school funding you possibly can (bonds, liens, mill-levies, etc). As many parents found out this last year, teachers don't get paid nearly enough for this. The rest will get sorted on it's own.

mncharity2• 5 years ago

These classes are for teaching the bare basic of bio, chem, and physics to see if the kids enjoy them. As it stands they can barely do this.

Has anyone heard of a setting for discussing doing transformatively better than this?

Not in PER sense of "if only we could teach intro physics classes successfully", or bio's "if only undergraduates had a firmer grasp of central dogma", but more like Larimore's[1] suggestion, in the context of preK science education, that students have a human right to make sense of their world, now. Big hairy audacious goal. And the heavy lifting for it, would have to come from the science community.

As in, kindergarten students have a right to be told the Sun isn't yellow, to not be given popular intro astronomy college textbooks which have that wrong, and to not grow up to be first-tier astronomy and physical sciences graduate students who are still confused about that, and about color in general. Students have a right to chemistry education content which chemistry education research doesn't describe using adjectives like incoherent. A right to content which reflects current insight and understanding of the physical world, not "it's traditional to teach it this way" wretchedness.

Consider a dedicated professional teacher, in a hypothetical country, whose education system is focused on call-and-response rote memorize-and-regurgitate, who argues the implausibility of teaching US-style intro-physics problem solving. That can be both individually correct, and still reflect a profound collective failure of their community and society. Now consider a system focused on plug-and-chug toy problem solving, with no feel for reasonable values, narrow scopes, and topical descriptions divorced from current understanding. That can be both a professionally-pursued local maxima, and still reflect a profound collective failure. Including a failure to explore how to do transformatively better.

Imagine a speculative early-primary atoms-up progression, one emphasizing atoms as nucleons, and building from nucleosynthesis, through a sense of physical size/scale, to a broad grasp of modern material science. Insane amount of interdisciplinary work. But I even found ways to explore it, sort of kind of, and explorations like it - mainly conversations with "the usual suspects" before/after research talks around MIT and Harvard. Then covid. Now... has anyone heard of an online setting for discussing transformative improvement of science and engineering content? Even if we're back to normal next year, I'd appreciate finding a less ad hoc and restricted setting. Thanks.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=Lar...

amelius• 5 years ago

I can't blame people for being sceptical about science given all the crap that is in our food these days, all the fake nutrition science, fad diets, and the inability of governments to fix it.

JuliusPullo• 5 years ago

Science is always inconclusive. Theories are not theorems; everything is open to questioning, no matter how much sense it seems to make. That is why science advances, to begin with. And yet, people are told (mostly by politicians with agendas) that they are supposed to "believe" science, which of course means to believe the latest a scientist said.

No, don't teach the young that they need to believe science. Teach them to question it, always. And to question it in a formal, disciplined and rational way, even if they agree with what is being said. Especially on issues like anthropogenic climate change, where the implied solution is to surrender individual freedoms to a omni-powerful faceless government that is supposed to protect us all.

neonological17• 5 years ago

In a sense yes. Science cannot prove things to be true, but falsification is conclusive. If observations are 100% accurate you can definitively falsify things and conclude that something is false.

The same cannot be said for proving something to be true.

peter_retief• 5 years ago

There are a lot of people who claim science in defence of an opinion. IMHO science has got to bad place and has become very political.

calebm• 5 years ago

After things like the food pyramid, it's hard to imagine why people would ever question what scientists say. /s

rmah2• 5 years ago

Given that scientists had essentially zero say in the food pyramid, I fail to see how it's relevant here.

frockington13• 5 years ago

The government advertised the food pyramid as a scientific fact. About a year ago the government advertised the general population should not wear masks as a scientific fact as well

kertoip_1• 5 years ago

Are you referencing some specific event? Never heard of controversies linked to food pyramid

trey-jones• 5 years ago

I think it's natural for an expert in any field to be frustrated by the general public's lack of expertise. Indeed, as true expertise seems to become less and less common, I don't think it's unusual for this frustration to increase. I think this is the reason for the absurd notion that "everybody should learn to code" that was fairly pervasive on Hacker News a few years back. Thankfully that seems to have died down...

As far as trusting the actual experts to make good decisions and tell the truth, that's tough. It seems to me that so many people are just out to get a quick buck. Often that means exaggerating and/or twisting the truth to suit a particular narrative. I'm not anti-capitalist, but there is clearly room for improvement to the system.

breck5• 5 years ago

No mention of git. If it's not on the global information tracker, it ain't science. There's no excuse anymore.

Let me repeat because this is important. If you aren't putting your research in Git, and publishing the repo, and are instead doing things like PDFs and Docs and private datasets, please don't call yourself scientist (exception: "bench" folks who are grinding out the data and not too involved in the analysis/publishing process). That was acceptable 50 years ago, but the environment has changed. That is not acceptable anymore. I don't care if that's not how academia does it. It's so obviously the right thing to do.

vngzs• 5 years ago

You have the right idea, but an unhelpful perspective. Certainly not everyone who isn't a software developer is a "phony scientist!"

If you'd like to convince scientists to come around to your line of thinking, explain the problems with current research papers. Tell them about the problems with publishing papers only, how others struggle to reproduce their research, and how it leaves much bad research that would be invalidated far sooner except that the information to recreate their trial was absent.

Then explain how sharing the code and data with Git (or similar) can solve this problem. You'll find that you are much more persuasive.

breck5• 5 years ago

I agree with you that this isn't a persuasive approach. But I'm cutting to the chase.

If anyone is working on this—helping onboard academics and non-programmers to git—this is an idea I'm looking to support (as an investor, donor, or whatever).

the_snooze• 5 years ago

The reality is much more nuanced than that, especially when you're dealing with sensitive human-subjects data. Confidentiality and consent are important factors to consider. Let's say you're doing work on how abusive romantic partners use technology to keep tabs on their victims [1]. Would it be reasonable to expect the raw recordings, transcripts, and recruitment process be made publicly available?

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3173574.3174241

breck5• 5 years ago

Synthetic data. Very easy.

This example is a little clunky, bc was ~2 years ago, but for a GWAS study we did on Early-Onset Preeclampsia where we had clinical and genomic data for 109 pregnant woman in Hawai'i, we put everything on GitHub.

[1] We created a grammar for the schema, which not only allowed us to double check the type safety of our data but then also synthesize a CSV [2] with one click and stick that in the repo so that reviewers/researchers could `git clone` the repo and reproduce everything without any permissions bottlenecks (obviously the results are gibberish with the synth data, and you have to contact us to get the real data, but this way you can get the code working and then it's just a simple file move to reproduce the full results). This is the way.

[1] https://github.com/breckuh/eopegwas/blob/master/eopClinicalS...

[2] https://github.com/breckuh/eopegwas/blob/master/mockData/cli...

imwillofficial• 5 years ago

The need for the public? There is a need for scientists to know how science works.

pdamoc2• 5 years ago

The University of Medicine where I got my Bachelor of Science in Biomedical Engineering is now teaching a course in Homeopathy. So, yeah.... there is also a need for "scientists" to know how science works.

endisneigh• 5 years ago

I question the premise of this article - what evidence is there that the general population doesn’t understand how science works?

I think they know perfectly well how it works - and that like everything else it’s been corrupted by politics and money. Arguably the only fields of science free from this corruption are physics and chemistry, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I was wrong about that.

hannasanarion2• 5 years ago

How often have you heard the phrase "gravity/evolution/sedimentation/cosmology is just a theory".

Maybe some of the people who are using that are rhetorical, but as somebody who was very invested in the Evangelical Christian community in Arizona for the better part of a decade, there are a lot of people who believe it genuinely, that when scientists use the word "theory", it should be understood to mean "guess".

rmrfrmrf3• 5 years ago

But that's what "theory" means. It is, in fact, a guess; a guess that could be flat-out wrong the second a piece of contradictory evidence comes to light.

But, instead of acknowledging that, for some reason a large group of Science Defenders have chosen this hill to die on where actually theory means infallible truth that mustn't be challenged, especially not from the likes of the common man.

There is such a drive to prove the religious wrong that we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater and created some kind of anti-religion where all skepticism is immediately put down and skeptics are excommunicated.

TheRealDunkirk• 5 years ago

I read the headline and thought, hey, isn't this the web site where I've read all those articles about how the BUSINESS of science has been completely perverted by the weird interplay between universities, funding, and journals?

The blinders came off when the majority of people finally saw that you could pay doctors and university researchers -- two of the most respected types of people in the post-war world -- to produce "studies" to show that, say, smoking was GOOD for you, against all data on the subject.

I'm 50. I can't tell you how many headlines I've read over my adult life that flip-flop between eggs being good for you, versus that they're killing you.

In my 4th-grade science textbook, I was told that we were entering a new mini ice age, and that we'd be completely out of oil by the year 2000. (Which kind of sucked, because I was going to be driving by then.)

We all know where the climate thing is now, and I don't hear ANYONE making noises about "peak oil" any more.

THIS is precisely why it's so hard to sell the public on the dangers of climate change. The BUSINESS of science has destroyed their credibility, and they only have themselves to blame.

cygx• 5 years ago

I don't hear ANYONE making noises about "peak oil" any more.

As far as I'm aware, conventional oil production did in fact peak more than a decade ago. And while the Hubbert model failed to predict global oil production, in the absence of disruptions, it can work well (see eg Norway[1], or the lower-48 US states[2], where Hubbert's predictions made in '56 held true for 4 decades).

However, there's still unconventional oil[3] aplenty, hence the lack of panic. We should keep as much of it in the ground as we can.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Norway_Hubbert.svg

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hubbert_Upper-Bound_Peak_...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconventional_oil

leetcrew• 5 years ago

skepticism is good. people should be skeptical of science, especially by the time it reaches popular media. but skepticism isn't very useful unless you can evaluate roughly how skeptical to be about a particular finding. five sigma physics finding replicated by multiple studies? probably good, but there's always some chance of systemic error. n=10 psychology study never replicated and all the subjects were white male college students? let's take that one with a big grain of salt.

hef19898• 5 years ago

Understanding this is probably the best lesson I took away from my Six Sigma Black Belt training.

neonological17• 5 years ago

Most people on hacker news don’t understand science.

Probably you don’t either. Did you know it is axiomatically impossible to prove anything to be true in science?

Every claim made by every scientist from the beginning of science to eternity has never ever been proven true. In science you can only falsify things.

If you don’t know this or don’t logically understand why this is the case then you never truly understood science.

People understand science from a cultural and political perspective. From a logical and axiomatic perspective, in science you cannot actually prove anything to be true.

This flaw within the actual framework of science itself is the origin of much of the misunderstandings and debates in the cultural and political arenas of science. For example no scientist can actually definitively prove global warming is real.

It is literally fundamentally impossible. Hence the politics.

jes• 5 years ago

I found this assertion, near the end of the article, questionable:

“Science as inquiry,” with its focus on evidence and logic, can do no more than communicate the details of a few empirical studies.

To my knowledge, inquiry can be as broad or as narrow as one wishes to make it. The utility of evidence and logic is not limited to narrow domains, is it?

I hope I’m not just cherry picking something to satisfy my own biases.

DanielBMarkham• 5 years ago

I don't think most folks understand the problem, although the essay is getting there. In general, I don't think epistemology can be taught until pupils have enough world experience to map what's being taught with the rest of the body of scientific literature. In general, and I am wildly stereotyping, all people want a quick answer and then to move on. Younger people tend to do this quicker. Older people tend to dwell too long on all of the possibilities. Epistemological understanding of how science actually works encourages us to accept both of these tendencies as being needed. That's a tough thing to get across if people are already predisposed to learning the quick answer and going to the next topic, whether that's in a blog entry, book, or secondary school education. I'm not sure it's possible.

Quite related: I published this a couple of days ago. Been debating whether or not to submit it here. It's a difficult subject. It's extremely important, but sadly simply because it's important doesn't mean people will be able to accept or understand it.

https://danielbmarkham.com/its-time-to-intellectually-grow-u...

tl;dr This is a problem because it's not the kind of thing that people consume well. See HN reactions.

ad404b8a372f2b93• 5 years ago

I was having this exact discussion with a philosophy of science major a few days ago. We were both bothered by the current fetishization of science. It's troubling that otherwise well-educated, logical people have come to elevate science as this god-like authority, and scientific consensus as the source of all truths.

The discussion came to Kuhn and the often touted belief in popular culture that science is not always completely right but in essence it's one big model of nature that keeps getting better and so we should trust it implicitly, while ignoring the concept of paradigm shift that arises specifically from people outside the consensus. Coupled with the fact that dissent gets blurred with denialism, and that the absence of evidence has come to mean "evidence of absence" on the news, it's become really tricky to discuss things critically without being openly mocked.

I wish I had time to read more philosophy, even as a scientist you learn a whole bunch about science, it's really enlightening.

frockington13• 5 years ago

Coupled with the fact that dissent gets blurred with denialism

This is what gives me the biggest headache. When discussing any politically motivated topic you can't ask questions that even remotely disagree with the popular Science opinion of the day. I had a professor scold me for asking if there were any natural phenomenon that may also be contributing to rising CO2 levels

jfengel4• 5 years ago

The professor has without doubt heard the question thousands of times, by those with dishonest intent.

Because the answer is always no. There are no natural phenomena that coincide precisely with the industrial revolution. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere tracks exactly the amount of fossil fuels being dug out of the ground. CO2 levels had been stable for millennia before that, and then they changed sharply. Nothing natural has gone on to change that.

If the question were intended honestly, you wouldn't call it "disagreement". You'd be asking for information and would make your decision after you had it.

If your description is correct, that's why your professor scolded you. The name for disagreeing without knowledge is "denial". The name for asking questions that you don't really intend to listen to the answers is "sea lioning", which is a tactic for wasting time and frustrating people. It's dishonest and rude.

If the situation was as I understood it from your description, I'm not surprised that they spoke sharply to you.

jules• 5 years ago

It's not even just the trust in scientific consensus, but also the trust in particular scientific papers and studies in e.g. pop science articles. Scientists themselves are usually cautious about what conclusions to draw from a single study that has not been replicated in a variety of experimental conditions.

Unfortunately, the popular idea of Kuhnian paradigm shifts is even more wrong than the popular idea that it's one big model of nature that keeps getting better. Paradigm shifts often don't invalidate earlier results; they refine them. Take the prototypical example: classical vs quantum mechanics. The statement "quantum mechanics is a more refined model of the world than classical mechanics" is far more accurate than "quantum mechanics proved that classical mechanics is wrong". Classical mechanics is still taught in universities (in the physics departement not in the history departement), and those courses spend a lot of time showing how classical mechanics arises as a particular limit of quantum mechanics, and how the two relate, and in which range of conditions the two theories give the same answers.

abernard13• 5 years ago

Paradigm shifts often don't invalidate earlier results; they refine them

While I agree with your quantum/relativistic vs classical, I think they're the exception rather than the rule.

Like, phlogiston was remarkably wrong. Aether as well. Alchemical vs chemical. And the all-time classic of geocentric vs heliocentric: how can that be reconciled as a "refinement?"

One of the problems Science has in pedagogy. There's a need to teach the material in a reasonable period of time. Teachers don't want to be spending a lot of time talking about things not true in the current paradigm, so there's a huge selection bias on providing a linear history. This has the effect of whitewashing Science to show definite "progress", as opposed to the more realistic twists and turns of wrongness.

lotsofpulp9• 5 years ago

elevate science as this god-like authority, and scientific consensus as the source of all truths.

Science is simply the process of using of data to come to conclusions. Is there a better method for building a model of the world?

Therefore, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about “science” as an authority. There are people and organizations that claim they used the scientific process to come to this or that conclusion. Maybe they used proper data and the right math. Maybe they didn’t. But their errors in the scientific process doesn’t say anything about the validity of the scientific process, for which there does not seem to be an alternative.

perfmode5• 5 years ago

science is limiting...

precisely because it merely builds models.

dionian2• 5 years ago

He's (or she's) talking about Scientism, which is a reliance in the outcomes and institutions of science, rather than the process of science itself.

ad404b8a372f2b93• 5 years ago

It's not an enditement of science to accept that it is fallible. It's precisely the point of the article that "science as inquiry" as it is taught has led people to acquire a mystical infallible view of the scientific method which holds that people who come to different conclusions than the current consensus are biased. When in fact scientific consensus and scientific authority are social agreements based on trust.

paganel2• 5 years ago

Is there a better method for building a model of the world?

One of the questions should be: Why should we build a model for the world? Is that really possible/doable? And if the real answer is "no", why should we apply that failed model to the real world, affecting (potentially in a negative way) the lives of millions of people?

wwww4all3• 5 years ago

Science is politicized by the establishment elites to further their narratives. It doesn’t matter what the science says or is even true or not.

Science is just euphemism to hide their agenda and further their goals.

SkyBelow2• 5 years ago

Science is simply the process of using of data to come to conclusions. Is there a better method for building a model of the world?

If we go with such a case, then yes, there is a better model. Using data to come to a guess that have yet to be disproven.

The difference is that a conclusion is more final that a guess not yet proven wrong. A scientists steeped in research may read conclusion and automatically conceptualize a notion much closer to guess not yet proven wrong, and maybe include the current winner among countless other guesses that have been proven wrong. They have enough experience to recognize that what we know may be wrong. It may be a little wrong due to some experimental error, it may be complete wrong (but relatively accurate as an approximation in the systems already applied), or some other option.

A layman wouldn't have the same take away. When they see conclusion, they would think it is a settled matter when it isn't. The difference between trusting science because it is best we currently have and trusting science because it is right. One is a trust tempered with caution while the other risks becoming blind faith.

The system could also further be improved by better expanding upon how disagreements to existing guesses are not always equal. A disagreement backed by data is better than one that is not, and a disagreement that fits the current data, though with no unique data supporting it over the existing guess, is better than one that contradicts existing data. Recognizing the possibility that data may be bad, and it is reasonable to be willing to refresh the data from time to time. A tolerance of letting people explore the wrong paths to see what data they may find. Lastly including the issue that all data is done by humans and thus subject to our biases (which is why things like double blind data is better than single blind data which is better than data without any layers of blindness). But that ends up being hard to fit into a few sentence explanation.

laurent92• 5 years ago

Here is one part where the problem comes from:

- Traditionalism: Driving society according to the word of the elders,

- Modernity: Driving society using science.

Leaders understood that. So there are extremely high stakes in fabricating or twisting science, because once you have science on your side, all modern societies will help you.

Example with feminism: It is literally illegal in some countries (ex: France, law for true equality 2014, followed by multiple decrees since Macron) to communicate information that unflatters women (it’s considered demeaning), so even though some figures are extremely false (girls aren’t better at math, it’s only when we put a female name on exams that the sheet has 6% higher mark, this science is considered demeaning towards women therefore illegal to publish – same goes for the wage gap, women work less and less intensively per hour worked, but it is illegal to point it out), everyone still believes wrong things.

And just like this, laws pass. Same goes for immigration or all other science-backed laws where one side is forbidden to speak.

Science works... assuming equal analysis of both sides of each hypothesis. That’s why it only works in democratic cultures, but that assumes the media is balanced.

ampdepolymerase• 5 years ago

The issue is that the language of science is mathematics, and mathematics is a cruel mistress. Conventional ethical boards also makes exploration of these decisions impossible. If a government official makes a decision on an event that lie at the end of two gaussians, the black swan happens and a bunch of people died, who is to blame? The people for not realizing the law of large numbers? Statistical software and Monte-Carlo modeling for claiming things have low probabilities? The government official for deferring to scientific reasoning?

You see this everyday right now during the pandemic. Policy making is very different from say, civil engineering, where failure scenarios can be quantified within tightly defined bounds. At the nation state level every decision may affect everybody. Nobody wants to be told their specific circumstances are the "statistical outliers". But science rarely gives good answers. The only time science has been reliable is when a large amount of resources is dedicated to figuring out answers in a single, specific problem. Unfortunately the life sciences don't have the luxury of physics and the formal sciences. There is no concerted level of effort to cure cancer that is comparable to the Apollo program. The military prefers to buy ten more hellfires than to redo life science ethics. If you quantify the ultimate utilitarian value, the damage ten missiles can do to humanity may be the same as a FDA that focus more on progress than covering their own ass. Yet the former is more acceptable than the latter. Science has failed because it no longer gives useful answers. When somebody's grandmother is lying sick in the hospital, they want a cure that is immediately accessible, not yet another feel-good post on Reddit or Facebook about "Scientists claim experimental cure for cancer found! Appearing in your friendly neighborhood pharmacy in ten years".

gameswithgo• 5 years ago

It's troubling that otherwise well-educated, logical people have come to elevate science as this god-like authority, and scientific consensus as the source of all truths.

Who or where precisely have you ever seen that actually done? Are you perhaps confusing people who are asserting/suggesting that science is our best tool to understand truth, and assuming they believe it is always true, or that it can/has uncovered all truths?

From my point of view science isn't fetishized nearly enough. People reject vaccines for crazy reasons, think the Earth is flat, think the moon landing never happened, basically have no idea how anything works at all.

ironmagma4• 5 years ago

Anywhere people say, "trust the science." Science isn't one thing, so you can't trust it per sé. For a simple discombobulating example, we have the question, "which science?" There is economics and epidemiology, and those often conflict. Who do we listen to?

The only answer is that you have to form an understanding of both sciences in order to synthesize a way that they form a single coherent picture.

ironmagma4• 5 years ago

It's not fetishization, it's religion. Everyone has a need for something supernatural and supreme to believe in. For some it's functional programming, for others it's science, for others, it's conspiracy, and for an increasing minority, it's actual religion. We need to figure out what to do (read: better things to do) to replace the fact that people have lost actual religion and have this deep-seated desire for something ultimate to believe in.

quasirandom• 5 years ago

Feynman's lectures on the character of physical law should be something everyone sees in school.

   In general we look for a new law by the following process: first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess... and then we compare those computation results to experiment.  

   If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.  It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is.  It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is.  If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it.

   Notice however that we never prove it right... In the future there could be a wider range of experiments, or you could compute a wider range of consequences, and you may discover then that the thing is wrong. That's why laws like Newton's laws for the motions of planets last such a long time... It took several hundred years before the slight error in the motion of Mercury was developed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYPapE-3FRw

swayvil2• 5 years ago

Treating the words of authority like scripture is what got us into this mess.

revax• 5 years ago

I like it but in every theory, there is always some edge case where the theory doesn't work. In a sense, every models in natural science are wrong but some are more right than other.

webmaven3• 5 years ago

In general we look for a new law by the following process: first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess... and then we compare those computation results to experiment. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is. It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it.

That elides a lot of complexity, mostly around the validity of the experiment design and execution. Confounding factors, confirmation bias, selection bias, p-hacking, etc. can all skew the results in ways both overt and subtle.

The following quote from the movie 'Thank you for smoking' may illustrate:

"This is where I work, the Academy of Tobacco Studies. It was established by seven gentlemen you may recognize from C-Span. These guys realized quick if they were gonna claim cigarettes were not addictive they better have proof. This is the man they rely on, Erhardt Von Grupten Mundt. They found him in Germany. I won't go into the details. He's been testing the link between nicotine and lung cancer for thirty years, and hasn't found any conclusive results. The man's a genius, he could disprove gravity."

So no, 'if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong' is a gross oversimplification.

Not to mention that there may be very good reasons that an experiment can't (or shouldn't) be done, or that various 'natural experiments' must be relied upon.

neonological17• 5 years ago

The key to the quote above is that nothing is proven right.

That is the fundamental flaw with science, if you understand this, you understand science.

In science and therefore reality as we know it, nothing can ever be proven true. It is fundamentally impossible. Every single claim made by every single scientist since the beginning of science has never ever been proven true.

This “flaw” is what drives most of the debate and misunderstandings about science in the cultural and political arena. For example... No scientist can ever prove global warming to be true... it is fundamentally impossible. Hence the debate rages on endlessly.

guerrilla3• 5 years ago

It seems to me this is exactly the "science as inquiry" model that the OP is arguing against.

SkyBelow2• 5 years ago

I find this is too simple, because it assumes the experiment is correct. Experiments can have errors and being able to doubt experiments, especially when you have disagreements between experiments, is a very important step in science.

This isn't to say that one should hold to a belief without any evidence to back it, only that we consider the possibilities that experiments themselves are flawed and take that into account, such as by designing seemingly unrelated experiments to test a single guess.

To give another Feynman quote.

We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's...

trashtester2• 5 years ago

Then there is the Asimov quote : "John, when people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together."

https://chem.tufts.edu/answersinscience/relativityofwrong.ht...

A good scientific model is less wrong than the one preceeding it.

analog314• 5 years ago

>> I was having this exact discussion with a philosophy of science major a few days ago. We were both bothered by the current fetishization of science. It's troubling that otherwise well-educated, logical people have come to elevate science as this god-like authority, and scientific consensus as the source of all truths.

I live in a neighborhood in the shadow of a big university, where you can't spit without hitting a scientist. I work for a science oriented business. My parents, my siblings, and our spouses, are all scientists.

I don't know a single scientist who treats science as a god-like authority. In fact I believe this is a popular straw man, or a tu quoque fallacy trying to pin the characteristics of religion on science.

guerrilla3• 5 years ago

I may be mistaken but they didn't say scientists did but other educated people, right? And that's what I see anyway.

nerdponx• 5 years ago

I think you're saying the same thing (and I agree with it).

People who actually do science rarely (not never, but rarely) fall into this fallacy. The fallacy takes hold of generally-educated people who lack specific scientific training.

jvanderbot• 5 years ago

Yes. I think this is especially problematic when a legitimate policy idea is defended _only_ with "It's science based". That's not enough. Good policy is agreeable to a majority of people (both in benefit and cost and is therefore usually a tradeoff for all parties). Being grounded in truth, as much as science can provide, is not enough.

You can use truth and facts to form an opinion and propose a policy, but it cannot be made to sound like the only option, or else we end up embittering those who would be put out by the policy, to the point that they have no recourse _but_ to attack the science and facts. You _have_ to be willing to tradeoff and find an imperfect compromise.

Add to that the fact that scientific discoveries and understandings are especially easy to attack _because_ they are evolving.

throwaway894345• 5 years ago

In particular, I suspect science only "works" to the extent that a certain amount of heterodoxy is tolerated. If "science" as an institution becomes very conformist, then you'll only get science that reinforces the biases of the prevailing ideology. The quality of the output that the institution produces depends on the health of the institution, where "health" means something like "ideological diversity" as it does with natural ecosystems.

A lot of pro-conformists make the argue that tolerating ideological diversity means regarding creationism and evolution as equally valid; of course this is untrue--science can (and indeed did) find that evolution is the more valid idea without explicitly persecuting creationists. In other words, normal heterodox science would already prefer evolution to creationism--not only is there no need to (for example) write open letters demanding various creationists' resignation/termination/excommunication/etc, but that sort of persecution actually harms the health (heterodoxy) of science (not because science needs creationists, but because science needs heterodoxy to be able to decide that creationism is the invalid idea in the first place).

13415• 5 years ago

Creationism has nothing to do with science, neither has ideology any place in science, and you've really got to draw the limit somewhere more reasonable. I don't want my taxes to pay "research" in creationism, morphogenetic fields, astrology, or divining rods.

There is plenty of heterodoxy in science as is - or do you really believe everyone agrees about almost everything in almost every discipline? Pretty much the opposite is the case. Pick any discipline you like and there will be plenty of disagreement about the respective issues in the forefront of scientific research.

Chris20485• 5 years ago

we should trust it implicitly, while ignoring the concept of paradigm shift that arises specifically from people outside the consensus

There's a difference in trusting "the scientific process" versus scientists; We can trust scientists so far as they are following that process, which isn't guaranteed.

Also, the two things are not mutually exclusive; While peer review is important in science, it is not strictly the same as consensus; The paradigm shift of the outsider is enabled by this fact. What we really have to fear is that peer review degrades into the consensus-base of typical power structures.

lamename2• 5 years ago

We were both bothered by the current fetishization of science. It's troubling that otherwise well-educated, logical people have come to elevate science as this god-like authority...

I agree. But as you point out this is basically a reaction to the inverse: some loud non-scientists, which are overwhelmingly skeptical of science/medicine for the sake of sowing distrust, rather than being followed up by critical discussion.

I'm not in favor of blind trust of anything. But for "scientism" it's an unfortunate reactionary message against the blind and blanket mistrust of science/medicine that has become popular e.g. on some circles of the internet.

The problem is that many of the "skeptics" in media are more concerned with contrarianism and sowing doubt than healthy debate.

How do you have a rational discussion with someone who comes to the table set on not trusting the scientific process?

tgv• 5 years ago

Moreover, scientific agreement among experts —typically interpreted by logical empiricists as the result of univocal scientific method and as an indicator of truth— should be seen more critically for what it is: social agreement.

Isn't the whole point of science that you can get out of that by trying? Apply your theories in practice, and see if they work. It doesn't matter whether the theory goes with or against general consensus.

That unfortunately doesn't hold for theories that describe only minute, very restricted domains. And that not only includes fields like dark matter, where experimentation is nearly impossible, but also 99.9% of the social sciences, where consensus is the only yard stick for theories that by far outsize the data on which they are based. Fortunately for the discussion, the author kept that thorny problem far away by focusing on the safe area of natural sciences.

Now back to the article: "science education ... should normalize scientific disagreement (distinguishing it from science denialism) and include discussion of the social epistemological institutions and processes by which scientific inquiry proceeds. These include the education of future researchers as graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, the peer review process for grants and publications, the discursive interactions of researchers in laboratory meetings and conferences, diversity and inclusion issues, and the norms of scientific integrity."

While social aspects of practicing science may throw some light on why one theory gets more traction than another, it seems to me putting the cart before the horse. It will not make students appreciate the difference between the competing theories, but will make science education a dull exercise in processes and factoids, to be listed in a test, where you'll get a passing grade if you can keep "epistemological" and "inquiry" apart.

And in the worst case, it will undermine the last bit of trust in science, because it's just an attempt at a centralizing power grab. Who proves that which ideas about these issues are right? I doubt the author has even got the tiniest bit of data to underline her argument.

isolli• 5 years ago

Simplifying a bit, I believe it's important to distinguish between hard, experimental science (physics), not fully experimental science (climate, medicine) and social science (economics). For instance, medicine is not fully experimental in the sense that you cannot take the same person and subject it repeatedly to the same, or a slightly different, experiment.

Hard science has a) better tools at its disposal (repeatable experiments) and b) is not subject to the influence of financial interests. Companies don't care about this or that theory, all they care about are results that work and provide useful technology.

Some companies do, however, have a strong interest in the outcomes of research in climate change, medicine, and economics, so they will exercise influence on research precisely in those domains that are less founded in experimentation and more uncertain.

aww_dang• 5 years ago

Governments have a stake in these fields as well.

frockington13• 5 years ago

This article classifies differing opinions into 2 categories, those I like (disagreement) and those I don't like (deniers). The strategies outlined here will further decrease the publics faith in science.

CA0DA• 5 years ago

This does not address a concern I have had: models are not science. Many models can be created, and then over time one if found to be correct, so we assume that one can predict the future. It cannot.

lettergram2• 5 years ago

Honestly, as someone who spends a significant amount of time reading and attempting to replicate papers... I have very little faith in most papers, though the concepts themselves often appear okay.

My friends and family also doing research have added to my questioning most papers. It’s probably healthy to have a lot of skepticism, the paper itself should convince through the research methods and sample size.

Unfortunately, the incentives align more with skirting the truth than being honest. That’s why each paper, in my opinion, requires a healthy dose of skepticism.

As an example, in January 2021 the PCR protocol to identify covid-19 was finally updated and a warning sent out that there were possible issues. Specifically, issues that would lead to higher false positives. My wife who does PCRs regularly immediately identified the issue in AUGUST 2021. This means it had to have been known prior to that date, yet wasn’t discussed for political reasons

webmaven3• 5 years ago

My wife who does PCRs regularly immediately identified the issue in AUGUST 2021.

Well, heck, predicting the future and pointing out other people's mistakes is dead easy when you have access to a time-machine, isn't it?

lettergram2• 5 years ago

The point I'm making is they knew months prior to announcing it that there was an issue. If we were worried about the "science" it would have been announced right away, instead it was the day after inauguration.

Tycho• 5 years ago

Maybe some billionaire could set up an institution to keep scientists honest. Like it wouldn't try to do any original research, it would be purely dedicated to finding whether published research replicates, verifying the statistical analyses on which published research rests, and busting academic fraud (eg. citation rings). Over time legitimate scientists would crave its stamp of approval and make their research easier to verify (eg. publish the source code). It would be a good training ground and employment scheme too.

swayvil2• 5 years ago

Our society is and always has been primarily authoritarian in its thinking. Merely "explaining how it works" isn't going to change that one speck.

To change it you'd have to change the people in some fundamental way.

pdamoc2• 5 years ago

I think that there really is a need for the general public to know what science IS. How it came about, how it works.

Unfortunately, for that to happen at the level it needs, there needs to be a change in how Education works everywhere.

We are still using a 19th century tool designed for a very different context.

Maria Montessori tried to bring the tool into the 20th century about 100 years ago but who is trying to do the same for the 21st century?

The way I found it explained best was in an Alan Kay presentation where he spoke about the insight Francis Bacon got into the fact that the brain works in a faulty way and what to do about it.

Scientific thinking is how we get around the very well documented [1] array of cognitive biases. Learning about those biases in ways that a) makes them obvious, b) provides ways to compensate might make a person able to detect them early and to approach them in the proper way.

Another wonderful tool I found is Chris Argyris's Ladder of Inference. Trouble is that this kind of tools need to be inculcated at a very early age so they get used and become second nature to the person. Learning them later in life is a heck lot more difficult, especially when they conflict with fundamental aspects of one's identity.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...

ajarmst• 5 years ago

I'd settle for a rough familiarity amongst science journalists and their editors, but I like the aspiration. Couple of questions, though: do we mean how science should work, or how it actually works in practice (and no, not just Kuhn: his conclusions were only surprising to other non-scientists, and primarily seem to have been valuable for Sociologists nursing a discipline-wide inferiority complex and 'scientists' like Andrew Wakefield who want to blame the establishment and not their own sociopathy.) We're coming up on two decades since Ionnidis, and Psychology still seems to be primarily a collection of unconfirmed small population studies of undergraduate psych students. Medical doctors can't explain or apply freshman statistics. Research directions (and, too often, results) are chosen by investors and donors. The modern west has more taboos about what assumptions and received truths it is permissible to question and investigate than the most repressive theocracies. Much of theoretical physics seems to be aimed at exploring untestable hypotheses and frameworks. And, my personal favourite: the phrase 'scientific consensus' is now used so often and without critique and introspection that it's actually become trite.

trashtester2• 5 years ago

From about the 1600s, science gained authority at the expense of theology due to its ability to predict and manipulate the physical world. Physics, chemestry and engineering allowed us to do things that would have been seen as magical a couple of centuries earlier. Those nations and individuals who rejected science became losers.

But as the term "science" gained in authority, other institutions were losing influence, in particular theologians and similar ideologes. Many of these wanted to be seen as having authority similar to what scientists enjoyed.

Since most people realize that "Theology" is not real science, new names and tactics have been invented to help camuflage institutions as "scientific", such as "Intelligent Design", "<insert identity group> studies" where the practitions care more about the idelogical consequences than the ability to predict real world outcomes.

These institutions will both promote science denialism within their own ranks and also cause it within opposing ideologies. Both intelligent design advocates and gender studies advocates will reject findings from science (mostly biology) when they contradict their preferred ideology, even when the findings are as close to scientific facts as it is possible to come. Both do that by presenting bad faith arguments and also labelling non-believers within their ranks as what would in earlier times be labeled "evil heretics".

When even "scientific facts" are attacked like that, other disciplines with varying predictive power, such as climate science, economics or cosmology will suffer even more effective assaults by ideologes.

If we cannot somehow stop this developement, we are heading for another "Dark Age". I honestly dont know how this developement can be stopped at this point. At the very least, it will require cooperation across idelogical boundaries to do so, and this can only happen if the science denial of both sides are simultaneously purged.

WildParser• 5 years ago

I'm not very optimistic about avoiding a "Dark Age".

Rational thinking and the idea to look at data seems to be completely foreign to most people I know. Higher educated people seem to absorb and repeat dogmas and propaganda unfiltered even faster.

Some patterns I have come across:

Alpha-Rational: Claiming that ideas that come from authority (dogma) or self (narcissism) are rational - rejecting to look at any data.

Anti-Rational: Reject the idea to look at data "life is uncertain", "data is garbage", "it's immoral to look at data" - although there is a lot of good data and drawing conclusions is not even difficult.

Malicious rational: Know your science and cherry-pick data for profit to support the highest bidder.

OliverJones• 5 years ago

A long time ago I studied biochem in university. It took me until the third time memorizing the Krebs cycle (energy metabolism) to start asking "how the heck did Krebs et al figure this out?" And I had already read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions when I memorized Krebs for the SECOND time. I, personally, got stuck in received wisdom for too long.

Science is a discipline for confronting mystery. It's about what we don't know. It's also big business, driven by money, prestige, and power (like most human endeavors).

In that sense, it's a lot like religion. Religion, as practiced in the US, has the four pillars of the Wesleyan quadrilateral:

  * Scripture  *  Tradition  *  Reason  *  Experience  *

The Pennsylvania science-teaching guidelines notwithstanding, school science curricula are mostly teaching "scripture." No, I don't mean wakky interpretations of ancient texts. I mean memorizing received wisdom and getting tested on accurate memories. The Krebs cycle is an advanced hunk of that kind of scripture.

Tradition comes into play when, for example, grad students fear to challenge the stuff discovered by the Nobel laureates who run their labs. It's valid to critique the way tradition controls inquiry.

Reason and experience: Those are cognitive tools to use when doing the Karl Popper thing: dreaming up things that can be proven wrong and then trying to prove them wrong. But we need at least some scripture and tradition to apply reason and experience.

Learning science is hard even when it's just "scripture" and "tradition". Embracing the mysteries -- the unknown -- is even harder. Science means accepting that "everything we know might be wrong." We should still try.

noxer• 5 years ago

The media use "the science" not "science" to tell people what is "the truth". That is the problem. People are first told that something is "the truth" then if it later turns out to be wrong it eradicates trust in science. Its backwards. In science if something is proven wrong, it should increase trust because it demonstrates that mistakes if made are found and corrected. It demonstrates that science does accumulates more valid than invalid information over time because invalid stuff is removed.

There is also a fear to accepting that we (humanity or science) dont know something yet. Its better to simply accept that we dont know than to choose or worse let others choose based on no evidence.

neonological17• 5 years ago

yeah that’s true.

Most people are searching for definitive truths. The problem is it doesn’t exist, and science is the closest thing it.

AlwaysRock• 5 years ago

I read Carl Sagan's, "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark" and it really nailed home how many issues are caused by a fundamental lack of understanding and belief in science. It's a great short read.

lavamantis• 5 years ago

It a way science is very similar to free speech. Its can be very harmful when misused, but generally the answer to bad science is not LESS science, but BETTER science.

The proper role of the education system of any given country, and a good predictor of its success, is how well it teaches us to evaluate the difference.

neonological17• 5 years ago

Science has political problems and social problems yes. But many people don’t understand that from a purely logical perspective there is a fundamental flaw with science. Almost no one knows this.

You cannot prove anything to be true with science. Therefore, in other words, you cannot prove anything to be true in reality as we know it.

Even when your observations are 100% accurate it is fundamentally impossible to prove anything in science (and your observations can never be 100% accurate).

If you understand this concept then you fundamentally understand science and you’ll be able to see where all the debate and misunderstandings about science comes from. Every single claim made by a scientist has never ever actually been proven ever. The key is that you need to understand why science can’t prove anything. There is an extremely logical explanation for why proof is impossible in reality. Proof is the domain of logic, not science.

To quote Einstein:

  “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”

Additionally there are two main axiomatic assumptions about the physical world that has to be made that have to be made in order for science to work as a logical consequence. You must assume logic is true (which is recursive and obvious) but you also must assume probability is true. Probability applying to the real world does not arise as a theoretical consequence of axiomatic logic being true. Probability itself must be assumed to be an axiom alongside logic, science works because we assume it works.

motohagiography• 5 years ago

The root of this discussion is about whether science is necessary or suitable for public policy, and we should probably accept that policy is not scientific, and nor should it be. The alleged scientific findings used as a basis for policy justifications today is mostly compromised and irreproducable junk designed to befog, mesmerize, and browbeat average people into submission, while an elite for whom words have no fixed meanings struggle among themselves for control of bureaucracies.

When policymakers say they defer to "the science" it is forfeiting their responsibility to act with wisdom and good judgment.

Democracy predates science by some three millennia, and to say that we can or should create a scientific democracy is nonsense. Democracy is an ideal and a quality, it is not a system that can be engineered from data with scientific findings or processes. Further, if you engineer a society with policies based on data and laws that only a few initiates understand, that is the specific antithesis to democracy. In the west, we use democratic processes to produce our elite classes, but unfortunately we do not produce wise ones, and they're happy to dodge accountability by blaming scientists or the weather.

Science doesn't create trust in authority either, it produces verification, reproducibility, and models for new tools. Science and data are neither sufficient, nor necessary conditions for wise policy that supports life and creates growth, even when it has made some great contributions to our well being. To say that science shows a given policy is good because it has a scientific justification is circular reasoning.

When you say you believe in science, either you practice it, or you trust its institutional practitioners, which basically means you trust the systems of academic administrators to make policy. Again, not democratic at all. We actually don't need a public understanding of how science works, we just need to hold policymakers to a standard of accountability where they can't slither behind binders of gibberish when called to account for their decisions.

rayiner• 5 years ago

This is a really important point--exemplified by COVID. You can't delegate governance to scientific experts. That's not their job and they're not qualified to do it.

Don't get me wrong--public officials should base policies on the scientific consensus, when it exists. But a scientific consensus can't tell you what to do about it. It can't tell you what trade-offs to make, or how to integrate a scientific truth into a social framework. Most important, politicians must deal with the fact that science often doesn't have clear answers on important matters. Something as simple as "should pregnant women get the COVID vaccine?" is the subject of dispute.

6gvONxR4sf7o3• 5 years ago

This article is complaining that people are taught a rigorous form of science that not enough science meets, and asks that it’s replaced by some sociology of science to determine which scientists to trust. It’s not wrong, and maybe I’m too much of an idealist in believing that “science as inquiry” is the right goal to aspire to, and that it’s feasible.

In my mind, we just don’t teach kids science as inquiry well. It’s too much like the heavily complained about way we teach math, where it’s formulas you just plug things into. Kids can plug a, b, and c into a quadratic formula but then can’t handle a word problem. Likewise with science. You’re taught it as a bunch of rote mechanical steps at the expense of teaching to do the “word problems.”

Any science education track that doesn’t include a stats and experimental design course isn’t teaching science as a tool, in my book. It’s just teaching facts.

Maybe I’m wrong and teaching kids more than memorization is too lofty a goal, but I think statistical illiteracy is more of a barrier than “science as inquiry” is.

guscost• 5 years ago

Rant about COVID and the death of (popular/political) science is linked in my bio. You will probably either hate it or love it.

auganov• 5 years ago

“Science as inquiry” education, at its best, teaches students an ideal set of methods for improving scientific knowledge. It suggests that our current scientific knowledge has grown, over the past four centuries since the scientific revolution (when modern science is widely held to have come about), in this ideal way. Even if that were true, there is an implicit dependence on students trusting that what they are taught in the classroom has been discovered and justified in this ideal way.

Very much agree with the author that the social aspect of the industry of science should be taught more. But it's exactly thanks to "'science as inquiry' education" that so many embrace mainstream climate change theories. Many genuinely think there's some undeniable evidence and logic making "climate scientists" believe in cataclysmic runaway warming.

The truth is, we don't even have good temperature measurements. Most "climate scientists" have no expertise in measuring temperatures. They're not that interested in improving temp monitoring tech. They're not embracing satellite temperature monitoring which is superior in almost every way to traditional surface stations. Instead, they tend to ignore it or focus on its (few) flaws. Why? Because satellite data shows no net warming since 1998 which contradicts many mainstream theories. The guy who pioneered satellite temp monitoring happens to be a major skeptic.

GISS, the most widely used temperature dataset is based on simple old-school surface stations. Not that many of them, in fact. It's so bad that they're known to publish errors so blatant that they have been spotted (by "deniers") by checking against local weather websites.

One has to understand negative results are inherently uninteresting to scientists and the broader public. It's not that rouge scientist conspire to dominate a field. When you conclude there's nothing going on or that there are fundamental epistemic limitations to studying a given field, you have much less of an incentive to participate. If you still do, your work is bound to be "against" [what's out there], rather than "for" something. Hard to make a career out of being a hater. Or to even enjoy it.

ascar• 5 years ago

The thing is that the widespread believe in global warming doesn't just stem from temperature measurements, but a multitude of other observable facts that do fit in the theory (i.e. experiments do not invalidate the theory).

But just picking up your satellite argument. A quick google search reveals many articles disputing that satellites show no increase in global temperatures. One article [1] even claims corrected sattelite measurements show a higher increase than surface measurements.

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-da...

bartimus• 5 years ago

The whole concept of "scientific consensus" is unscientific. It's always politically loaded. It also screws up the concept of checks and balances when the reason of existence for certain scientific jobs (and titles) is dependent on the existence of (and payed for by) a certain political issue.

dfilppi• 5 years ago

People dont trust politicians, and they are the ones selectively using science as a justification for increasing their power.

afandian• 5 years ago

Any developers who want to help with the scholarly infrastructure that underpins scholarly publishing workflows (DOIs, scholarly metadata and related things), Crossref have a job opening. Speaking personally, it's one of those rare jobs that feels embedded in an important mission.

https://www.crossref.org/jobs/2021-02-08-senior-software-dev...

(but only open for a couple more days!)

specialist2• 5 years ago

Quoting the OC:

Believing based on trust is a pervasive human practice, not confined to scientific inquiry.

Rationalists ignore the role of identity in beliefs.

My socially awkward brother transmuted from becoming the next Jacques Cousteau to full throated Young Earth Creationist. He had the best schooling. He assisted with biological and sociological research.

Why did my brother flip?

I've been pondering this for decades. In a nutshell, my theory is he traded his beliefs for acceptance. He adopted a completely new identity in order to belong to a group.

The evidence for the centrality of identity as basis of our beliefs, what some LessWrong pundits called Belief As Attire, is slowly accumulating.

No amount of scientific literacy, media literacy, critical thinking, logic will successfully inoculate people from cults.

There's some new research that shows early exposure helps. Such as teaching kids about pseudosciences like cryptozoology.

Similarly, there's some evidence that empathy and community engagement and socialization help protect people from falling prey to cults.

pjettter• 5 years ago

the problem is that in schools, kids learn not science, but examples of science, without understanding what science is. They don't learn biology, but examples of biology, without understanding any context, history, aims. They don't learn about languages, but just an example of a language, and only small parts of it. There is no context, and especially, there is not even an attempt to connect one thing to another, or to provide any context or relation. Sadly, schools don't even teach learning anymore. They just teach succeeding by imitation. So yes, we're in big trouble. Or they, if you're old enough.

carapace• 5 years ago

The whole point of science is that you don't need to trust someone's words, you can repeat the experiment for yourself.

I trust physicists (in re: physics) more than I trust my mother.

But if you can't repeat the experiment, if you can't make precise predictions that can be invalidated, is what you're doing really science?

This is crucial when it comes to fixing policy: economists, sociologist, psychologists and other quasi-scientific folks are the astrologers and numerologists of our current age. They trade on the successes of genuine science to garner political legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. But by doing that they tarnish the public perception of the impartiality of the proper scientist, diminishing their own glamour and polluting the public's appreciation for the value of genuine science.

Science gets respect from pretty much everybody (whether they own it or not. Very few anti-science folks go so far as to deny themselves the benefits of science like electricity and aspirin.)

It's the "soft sciences" that can't make predictions, that can't be tested, and that are used as political leverage that people (rightly IMO) don't trust.

- - - -

Let me throw out a personal example. There's a system of knowledge and practice called "Neurolinguistic Programming" that I know from personal experience works really really well, but if you go look at the Wikipedia page for it it's decried as pseudo-science. I have little respect and no trust for the "scientists" who can't replicate NLP stuff because I've been able to do it as well as tens or hundreds of thousands of other people pretty easily. Now that's bad enough but if these "scientists" managed to persuade legislators to make laws against NLP on the basis of their "science" I would see that as a very serious problem. (Although not a problem with science. Science isn't the problem because science is not what they are doing.)

Yet I am not an anti-vaxxer nor a climate denialist.

- - - -

Bottom line: Science has nothing to prove. Repeat the experiment for yourself. E = mc² for everybody everywhere. That's science.

Chris20485• 5 years ago

The word "science" is the hard end of what should be a gradient.

Sometimes just "truth-seeking", evidence-based, quantitative or numerate are good enough without having to invoke the spectre of "science".

Maybe we need a general term (rational?) for describing appropriate terms, of which "science" is only appropriate to some fields.

madhadron• 5 years ago

I don't think it's so much a public understanding issue, since most of the public doesn't understand much of anything about the world they live in. Rather, it's our inability as a society to deal with those who need facts to go away for their ends.

Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Science Works

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