Stop Equating “Science” with Truth (2017)

https://slate.com/technology/2017/08/evolutionary-psychology-is-the-most-obvious-example-of-how-science-is-flawed.html

by Tomte • 5 years ago

108 122 5 years ago

H8crilA• 5 years ago

What's funny about p-values and effect sizes is that the "good science", like physics, would routinely score 10^-6 or lower p-values, with models that explain nearly or even exactly 100% of the variance.

Having a p-value of 0.05 is incredibly weak, even if nobody is cheating. It's just a garbage process that's guaranteed to produce high % of falsehoods, where the exact % depends on the prior probability of starting with true hypotheses.

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/

I mean think about the Newtonian mechanics, there really isn't almost any room for error. And once the model was pushed into more and more extreme applications and errors were eventually spotted the theory was refined into new mechanics.

dangle1• 5 years ago

Science is an amazing but frustrating tool. Amazing in the sense that it is the only way to reliably learn more about what is happening around us. Frustrating because it is much slower than we'd like in providing reliable answers in many situations (pandemics, perhaps even climate change). And the gap between gathering observations and reaching agreed upon conclusions gets filled with normal but unhelpful human behaviors.

It's especially frustrating in medicine, perhaps most in behavioral medicine, because there are so many degrees of freedom in human behavior and value judgments assigned to behaviors.

clairity• 5 years ago

despite the sophisticated math required, physics is also orders of magnitude simpler than biology, chemistry, or the social sciences, which is why physics models can reach that level of certainty and other sciences haven’t yet.

_3u103• 5 years ago

We just expect different things from those sciences. Physical simulations go equally awry on the large scale, like predicting the weather a week out.

avalys2• 5 years ago

If you want the truth, talk to an engineer, not a scientist.

lbriner2• 5 years ago

How would that help? Engineering is probably even more polarised than general science because engineers are all about the black-and-white.

The difficult part is that life is much more nuanced. Even if a woman's brain is objectively different than a man's, there might be a social or environmental reason, it might or might not have an effect on their abilities in different areas. Maybe if women and people of colour were given 500 years of time like white men, then maybe their brains would be the same as men. Who knows?

The danger is probably not science per-se but the pressure to find nice summaries to difficult problems. You would get a PhD on "women aren't as clever as men" much more easily than "the differences between mens and womens brains are really complicated and hard to understand"

avalys2• 5 years ago

That's kind of my point. Engineers are about black and white because that's what's required to make decisions, to ship things, to actually make something work.

Actionable truths are black and white.

Anyone can say "Oh, it's nuanced, it's complicated, it's hard to say for sure." The challenge is in penetrating that nuance and identifying what it is possible to make definitive, black-and-white statements about (i.e., to find the truth). To the extent that any group in society does this for a living, it's engineers.

rvense2• 5 years ago

Actually, you should talk to a couple of them, because each will have their own version of the absolute, obvious truth (and a long list of reasons why everyone else is wrong and dumb) and then you can just pick the truth you like the most.

SquibblesRedux3• 5 years ago

Regarding truth, I would prefer the counsel of a mathematician over that of an engineer. That said, I would prefer an engineer over a mathematician when my car breaks down.

jimmaswell• 5 years ago

This sounds like "some science has said things I don't like, so you shouldn't refer to science as a point in an argument."

CoastalCoder• 5 years ago

I understood the author to be making a different point.

I don't think she was saying that the conclusions of science-like processes are worthless. Just that they shouldn't be treated as inscrutable fact, for the reasons stated in the article.

exporectomy2• 5 years ago

Considering the entire content is aligned with a popular political ideology, it's clear that she's just using it as an argument for her ideology.

She even implied that a straw-man claim she attributed to science was wrong for no other reason that that it was the year 2017. The very first sentence is critical of the fact that people are trying to understand something scientific!

jpeloquin• 5 years ago

Yeah. I think a key sentence is, "It is impossible to consider this field of science without grappling with the flaws of the institution—and of the deification—of science itself."

The process of science, that is, actually checking to see if one's beliefs are consistent with reality, is essential to distinguish truth from falsity. Scientific institutions can and have done terrible things though. TFA references scientific racism; the eugenics movement is related to it and still-existing scientific institutions had a significant role in promoting eugenics. See [0] for a self-critical overview. That's the "flaws of the institution" part.

The "deification of science" part refers to how the effectiveness of science as a problem-solving tool gives a sort of halo effect (truthiness) to anything that adopts the semblance of science. That's kind of unavoidable; if something works, it gets status, and people will try to have some of that status rub off on them.

I sort of disagree with the article's statement that "pseudoscience has always been a core feature of post-Enlightenment scientific knowledge and it remains that way because scientists refuse to integrate contemporary science, technology, and society studies research into university curricula." Scientists are critical of themselves and their fields and teach and discuss the material covered in TFA. The author was trained as a scientist, and their critiques mirror those expressed within science; again, see [0] for an example. If you do human subjects research as a professional scientist, you receive an intensive education in the ways science (and medicine) has failed to treat people as people, and accept strong limitations and oversight on your own research activities. I also sort of agree with the author though because the same level of education is not generally provided with regards to science's role in sexism or racism, at least not to the same rigor as human subjects research.

[0] U.S. Scientists' Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907–1939): A Contemporary Biologist's Perspective https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2757926/

DiggyJohnson• 5 years ago

Not at all. In fact, I think your comment supports the point made in the article. This is about how we think about science, and how we communicate between the scientific community and the public, and how we communicate between one another.

Consider two possible perspectives, both "science-positive": 1. Scientific consensus is true. New findings add to our understanding of the topic and relates to the literature in that space. 2. Scientific consensus represents our best understanding of the evidence. New findings add to our understanding of the topic and relates to the literature in that space.

We don't need to say that science is True to conduct meaningful research. In fact, doing so may hide paths of inquiry that question fundamental components of scientific literature, to give one example that comes to mind.

lbriner2• 5 years ago

True! Also, not everything can be described as right or wrong, true or false.

Does current flow positive to negative or the other way round? Well electroncs flow negative to positive but current flow can be however you define it. If we all decided to change current flow to a different direction and invert a load of maths, it wouldn't be wrong, just another way to be right.

I think the missing piece is education of philosophy to people so that they understand how to evaluate, how to disagree, how to define terms, how to communicate what they know, what they think and what they don't know.

Is a window still a window if the glass is painted black?

_3u103• 5 years ago

I think the scientific consensus is what the article is taking shots at. Rather than the scientific method.

The scientific consensus is largely political whereas the scientific method produces many results which are politically inconvenient.

agumonkey3• 5 years ago

Reading the history of science is a good reminder too. The amount of mistakes and struck of luck.

Science is a quest in models. With a somehow high degree of self consistency (poetically so). But that's it.

swayvil• 5 years ago

Most of us prefer to live inside a game. The rules of the game are what we call "truth".

Truth is nice because it's simple. No thinking about it required. No energy spent puzzling. It's just truth. No how, why, who or anything about it. It's just truth.

The best truths are gotten from authorities. They're the best because the truth comes preformatted in statement form. Thus it's ez to consume. And the truth clicks nicely into your fantasy like a lego into a bunch of other legos.

jes3• 5 years ago

Most of us prefer to live inside a game.

I am interested in hearing about how you escaped the game, should you wish to say more.

JasonFruit• 5 years ago

Microdosing LSD, duh. This is HN.

_3u103• 5 years ago

The only way to win is not to play.

jes3• 5 years ago

For whatever reason, I always seem to hit a mental speed-bump when someone mentions "the truth."

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (the SEP) has a long article [1] on the subject of Truth. There are multiple competing claims as to what is meant when we say that something is true.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth

goatlover• 5 years ago

On a deflationary account of truth, scientific statements can be true if they meet the standard of empirical verification. It’s raining diamonds on Saturn is true if we can detect diamond rain on Saturn right now.

bawolff5• 5 years ago

Was it also "true" in 1877 when Giovanni Schiaparelli detected canals on mars that there were canals on mars?

SquibblesRedux3• 5 years ago

Observations and subsequent inferences should always come with probabilities. No matter how beautiful the math, the measurement is never perfect.

mithr2• 5 years ago

I think this is kind of a reductive, attention-grabbing headline. The real intention is "stop equating 'the scientific process' with 'the entire body of knowledge that has ever been produced by people calling themselves scientists'".

The body of knowledge produced by scientists includes real truths, but also a lot of work produced by people without good methodology, and a lot of things that were thought to be correct at the time but were later disproved. And as the author mentioned, none of this is exempt from whatever society-level base assumptions were thought to be indisputable at the time.

For all that, the scientific process, while imperfect in many ways, is still the best way the human race has so far discovered to learn and advance. You could say that the pursuit of science is, by definition, the pursuit of truth.

moonchrome2• 5 years ago

is still the best way the human race has so far discovered to learn and advance

The way I see it - it's really successful in some domains and is worse than useless in others - because it rides on credibility it acquired in the domains it is effective in, it creates false confidence in results it produces in domains it doesn't fit.

rlewkov• 5 years ago

In which domains do you believe it's ineffective?

korla3• 5 years ago

What alternative methods do you suggest for the "domains it doesn't fit"?

didibus3• 5 years ago

it creates false confidence in results it produces in domains it doesn't fit

I don't think that's correct, people simply love to extrapolate beyond the evidence. You do a study where you take 6 grad student and tell them to push a button that sends electricity (supposedly) to a subject. You measure their behavior in that context. Okay, you've got a pretty small sample of something.

Now here comes the non-scientific part, a professor looking for fame and glory, a bunch of news site looking for clicks and views, and you get an article: "Science proves that people are willing to hurt others on command if told it is for an experiment."

See, the thing is that science is about slowly acquiring more knowledge and understanding and updating our mental models and understanding of things as more information shows up.

Here the experiment wasn't useless, it tells us one small extra bit of info we didn't have before. Doing experiments, testing hypothesis, those are still valuable. Extrapolating the result of those to mean more than they demonstrate is just a follow up hypothesis that then itself needs an experiment, etc.

crdrost• 5 years ago

Oh I mean, you can say "its body of knowledge" instead of "truth" but the punchy headline still works. Indeed, be careful calling it "body of knowledge" -- this can imply a level of truth, and this is what the article is attempting to dissuade you from: the scare-quote-unquote "science" is standing in for science's body-of-narrative, which we should not mistake for truth.

As a physicist the headline has an air of truth but this interpretation does not go far enough. Science is not even "about" the narratives it generated! Go to a science museum with your little one. There's no science on display. There's technology, sometimes discussions of what was done, very rarely you even get to peek inside how it was done. Even that isn't science, but it gets closer.

What you miss is setting the child up for certain expectations only for them to be subverted. The process of starting to develop a test that would really discriminate between two options so that you can ensure your guesses are on the right track. The process of sticking with a problem for months. The process of doing something an absurdly hard way that you know works but will be very very tedious, then looking at the final solution and finding out why that solution would have "made sense all along," then using what you know to find a simpler way to do it.

The kid never comes out of a science museum with new heuristics to use to evaluate how they fool themselves and what might be done about it. They hardly even will come out with new technologies to see the world from a different perspective.

So the narratives that were generated by science were substituted for science itself, just as much as when you watch Sabine Hossenfelder you don't learn how to solve the Schrodinger equation. Nothing wrong with her work, mind, pop-science just is this way. People are interested on what the latest theory is because that's something that you can recite at a dinner-party. To learn actual science would require more than the 3-minutes standing in front of an exhibit that feels "natural" at a science museum, more than a 10-minute YouTube video. What is at stake is no less than a conversion from the passive to the active attitude.

Stop equating Science [active, transformative, bubbling, at-hand] with Truth [passive, informative, cold and still, inaccessible], indeed.

13415• 5 years ago

The article seems to be wrong, though, and is strongly colored by the author's views about her own discipline. Many STEM fields have amassed a large body of knowledge, and there has been a qualitative shift in the 20th Century that needs to be taken into account. Philosophical criticisms tend to be narrowly focused on the fact that theories are superseded, forgetting that many of those older theories constitute a vast body of knowledge and continue to do so. Newtonian mechanics is a typical example. It's not wrong at all, just more limited than previously thought (not suitable for very small or very fast "objects").

With all the fancy criticisms and reminders that science is about the method, being skeptical, etc., people sometimes forget that the results of scientific progress are often tangible and there has been an undeniable increase in knowledge which has accelerated during past century. It's ironic to hear from people how science is not about knowledge while relying in daily life on phones, airplanes, nuclear power, new types of batteries, new construction materials, satelites, minimal invasive surgery, and so on and so forth.

mithr2• 5 years ago

Your point about the museum is interesting... but I think you may be slightly missing the point of a museum :)

An art museum isn't about teaching kids about the process behind making art -- the brush strokes, the dedication, the frustrations, the frequent failures, the occasional successes. It's about showing "this is what some artists that we consider 'great' have produced". Similarly, science museums are about showing some stuff that we've learned using (very broadly) science. So high-level overviews of engines, and tesla coils, and pop-science illustrations of how some math principles work, are all perfectly within the goals. I think that optimistically, a kid might come out of a science museum thinking "look at all the cool things that science has led to -- maybe if I'm a scientist, I can contribute to something like that one day too!", and that could be a different perspective than they otherwise would've had. They can learn what it actually means to "do science" later on in life.

And I think your point about "body of knowledge" implying "level of truth" is also interesting, but I take perhaps the opposite view. The scientific process does produce what we consider truth -- it's just that a deeper understanding of it is that anything we understand today comes with a degree of uncertainty, even if that degree is pretty small. But this is a perspective that's hard for a lot of people to grasp, and this article was written for a pop-science audience, which doesn't generally have a solid understanding of this principle ("What do you mean, we can't really be sure? I know lots of things for sure. Science is stupid."). Given this caveat, I think it's actually dangerous to say to this audience "the scientific body of knowledge is never truth", because while this is technically true, it leads the pop-science reader to think "huh, well in that case, my totally unfounded opinion is just as good".

azth• 5 years ago

You could say that the pursuit of science is, by definition, the pursuit of truth.

I don't disagree, but it has to also be pointed out that this does not imply that science is the only way to the truth, or that truth can only be reached strictly by science.

hackbinary• 5 years ago

This article sets up a strawman argument and then attempts whataboutry to prove her thesis.

She is neither an expert in the philosophy of science, philosophy, or any of the fields she is critiquing.

She also fails represent what science actually is: a way to organise the best set of information we have collected thus far.

Science has never claimed to be the absolute truth on anything, and that an implied assertion the author is attempting to make.

In the end, the author is only able to prove that science, like all human endeavours, is imperfect. She let all of us down by failing to say what she would replace it with, or simply articulate reasonable boundaries through which science ought to be seen.

exporectomy2• 5 years ago

She makes a clear implication that she would replace it with her own cultural ideologies.

nicodjimenez• 5 years ago

Science if: if X happens, then Y happens. The truth is asking what is X and is a mostly philosophical exercise, but the truth becomes pragmatic when belief in X lead to Y outcomes. Eg belief in God can lead to good outcomes even if God itself is unverifiable in a scientific sense. The truth can be a self fulfilling prophesy.

paulpauper• 5 years ago

"trust the science" used to be spoken unironically.

I think the pro-science side during Covid shot themselves in the foot with zealotry and false sense of certainty. Science , unlike religion, should be amendable. It's supposed to be provisional. A major part of science is debate, the inquiry of knowledge, not just being told to shut-up for the sake of science.

ajsnigrutin7• 5 years ago

Yep...

"There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.

This was science not that long ago [0]... Then whoops, mandatory masks... "but trust science now, we're surely 100% correct now!".

[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-mas...

chowells• 5 years ago

What you are seeing is science in action. We started with some guesses and a lack of on-point evidence. And even some common misunderstandings of historical evidence. More evidence was gathered. Guesses turned out to be wrong. Contradictions were found. Recommendations were updated.

This what doing science looks like. This is working correctly. You haven't pointed out any flaws, you've pointed out a success case.

ethanbond3• 5 years ago

Note how the actual quote is filled with qualifiers and suspicion and references to evidence but to no concrete conclusion.

Then notice that the made up straw man quote, which no one actually said despite being between quotation marks, you say "trust science now, we're surely 100% correct now."

You choose to read "maybe X, maybe Y, we recommend Z" as "we're surely 100% correct now." That's on you.

someone7x• 5 years ago

This was science not that long ago [0]... Then whoops, mandatory masks... "but trust science now, we're surely 100% correct now!".

The findings from the scientific method are not infallible, just better in every way than the findings from any other method. Better than the words of charlatans, better even than the words of the wisest humans to ever live.

It's not perfect and it's not magic. It's just significantly better than anything else by leaps and bounds.

I think it's fucking amazing and I wish you could see that too.

burnished• 5 years ago

How many other times have you seen a public reversal on policy because of new information?

ravi-delia2• 5 years ago

To be clear, neither statement is contradictory. The problem is that "there is no specific evidence for x" and "x is not true" are taken to mean the same thing when they really aren't. Was there much evidence at the beginning of the pandemic? No. Should that have overridden putting a little bit of thought into the problem? Also no.

korla3• 5 years ago

I think you're equating the pro-mask side with some pro-science side. None of which has to do with the validity of science, or what truth is. You're talking about politics.

Mountain_Skies• 5 years ago

The "trust the science" people are using science to justify their political positions, which come with them the force of law backed up by government threats of violence.

umvi• 5 years ago

A major part of science is debate, the inquiry of knowledge, not just being told to shut-up for the sake of science.

Well that's the problem... during an emergency (like a pandemic) there are extreme time pressures to get results. Things like debates, inquiry of knowledge, peer review, etc. take time (and taking time = deaths). I believe that is why people were being told to "shut up". Not saying bludgeoning the masses to blindly accept the bleeding edge consensus was the right route to go, just trying to understand why that was the route chosen in the USA.

zdragnar• 5 years ago

Behavioral changes were compelled on false premises. That generated the vast majority of the push-back and acrimony.

Closing borders was racist. Fauci admitted he intentionally misled people [1]. It was totally natural and totally not even conceivable that it had been engineered or part of a program that intentionally makes viruses more infectious. Masks don't work. Masks do work (even though we now know it to be aerosol, not droplet like the flu). So on and so forth.

It is hard to maintain an air of credibility when you are consistently proving to not be credible.

[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90445 (the source NYT article was paywalled)

karmakaze• 5 years ago

There was too much trying to 'being right' rather than saying things that are easy to amend. The prime example is masks. Sure leave the N91 for healthcare. But don't hem and haw on whether people should use masks, if they're effective, and how so. Say we don't know for certain, but to be safe use them to protect yourself or others. Consider the upside vs down. What no one wanted to say was "we don't know, so..." Most of these problems came from upkeeping appearances. Science should not be based on appearance. On that occasion science == politics.

LanceH• 5 years ago

The same people were simultaneously saying to trust he science, telling lies because it is what we needed to hear, and ignoring the very laws they were passing.

It is no wonder that people took a position opposite this.

Personally, I was vaccinated the moment it was available to me and I encourage people to be vaccinated. But we're at the point where people are being told to trust the science on vaccinations by the same people lying at each previous step along the way.

The naked power grab under the name of "emergency" has been going on for a year and a half now. A lot of places are just trying to increase their emergency powers where a significant portion of the people have just had enough.

Then there is the matter of preferred treatment for certain groups. Kids in California will be required to vaccinate -- but not the big union prison guards. The major league sports require all their employees to vaccinate -- except the players. BLM gets a pass on gathering, but just living one's life and being able to pay your bills isn't sufficient.

nomel• 5 years ago

Science comes with some measure of confidence. The problem has been that this confidence has been purposefully and completely left out of all discussions.

frebord• 5 years ago

"Trust the science"

Feels to me like an oxymoron.

ccn0p4• 5 years ago

Agreed, but even the term "pro-science" might seem innocuous but has been politically weaponized... like the "I believe in Science, decency, human rights for all, blah blah" signs on people's lawns. There's such a desire in today's culture to categorize each other as binary camps that must think one way. Maybe this is a product of political exploitation for votes combined with social media's polarization for profits.

seba_dos1• 5 years ago

Science , unlike religion, should be amendable. It's supposed to be provisional. A major part of science is debate, the inquiry of knowledge

That's exactly why I trust the science and try to shut-up in discussions on topics that I have no idea about (with varying results, I'm only a human).

I trust that people who spend their lifes doing research can and do have productive debate (to certain limits - they're also just humans).

native_samples3• 5 years ago

The problem is, this assumption doesn't seem to be true. Rather than engaging in productive debate, what we've actually seen is lots of dubious attacks and attempted "cancellations" of any scientists who disagrees with the maximally totalitarian position, lots of opaque groupthink and an absolute refusal to do cross-discipline research or debate of any kind.

A good example of how badly wrong COVID science can go was the discovery at the start of the pandemic that the most influential epidemiological model had lots of programming bugs in it that made its predictions wildly vary from run to run. The cause was a mix of thread safety bugs, out of bounds reads, floating point error accumulation, mixing up variables due to horrible coding style in a 15,000 line C file with hardly any comments and almost all variables being single letter/globally scoped etc. They'd never teamed up with computer scientists even though their simulations were big complex programs, their code had never been peer reviewed because scientists don't do that, and when programmers pointed out their bugs, they tried to claim scientific models don't need to be reproducible anyway.

https://dailysceptic.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/

https://dailysceptic.org/how-replicable-is-the-imperial-coll...

There was no inquiry of knowledge or productive debate. There was a bunch of amateurs, out of their depth, desperately trying to cover up how inadequate their own research was - and mostly succeeding. The institutions turned out to have no interest in the question of whether their scientists can actually program the models they're proposing, and nothing happened to Ferguson or his team.

That's what science is actually like, in the 21st century. Look too closely and it falls apart.

rob74• 5 years ago

While it is important to reaffirm that science != truth, it is even more important to reaffirm that (proper) science most of the time is considerably closer to the truth than "the stuff some random wacko posts on YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/whatever", even if that stuff offers easier explanations for the problems of the world...

systemvoltage• 5 years ago

True, and most of these wackos range from home-remedy moms to yogi babas.

The worrying trend without a counter force is authorities like Big Tech and institutions masquerading imperfect science as truth.

Just look at the Covid shit show we’ve seen. Makes you wonder if these people should hold any power whatsoever.

We should strive to be transparent. Whether that’s debunking bad science or doubling down on good science.

badRNG• 5 years ago

The worrying trend without a counter force is authorities like Big Tech and institutions masquerading imperfect science as truth.

I think it's a matter of triaging problems. The situation we are in is that thousands of potentially preventable deaths are happening every week because a significant portion of the public trusts polemicists and Facebook memes for medical information more than their own doctors (this isn't intended to be hyperbolic or to strawman that position, I believe that to be a fair assessment of the situation.)

Is so-called Big Tech really being too tough on misinformation? And even if it is, is that an issue we should prioritize ahead of other measurable harms caused by that same misinformation?

darepublic• 5 years ago

rails on science while throwing out social sciences theories left and right as undeniable truth, all unironically.

molbioguy2• 5 years ago

We should stop making Science a religion. Science is a powerful tool for generating and validating models of how things work. But it often works slowly and is certainly fallible (at least in the short run). Science as a methodology and persuit should be praised and supported, but shouldn't be followed blindly based on the views of a subset of scientists. Scientists often disagree about the details of models -- more than people outside the field would believe.

agumonkey3• 5 years ago

Problem today is that rapid access to text made people think they could integrate and digest the whole thing.

drewcoo• 5 years ago

rapid access to text made people think they could integrate and digest the whole thing

Are you talking about the Internet or the bible?

rvense2• 5 years ago

We should stop making Science a religion.

Unfortunately, we appear to be quite fundamentally, in the vaguest sense of the word, religious beings...

molbioguy2• 5 years ago

I agree, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. But skepticism isn't usually a big tenet of religions. Science depends on healthy skepticism to move forward and not get stuck in an incorrect model.

darth_avocado• 5 years ago

From Wikipedia: Science (from Latin scientia 'knowledge')[1] is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the world.

Science can be equated with Truth, but not what passes as science these days. All the author talks about are papers, peer reviews and academia, which at this point everyone is aware, is full of fabrication. Countless peer reviewed papers don't have findings that can be reproduced, a lot of them are just summaries of other questionable studies. I think it's important to define what is considered science and what is not science before we get into the discussion of whether science is the Truth or not.

BitwiseFool2• 5 years ago

I believe that "Science" is not a monolith and our language/culture currently lacks the model necessary to distinguish between "significant and unlikely to change" versus "specific, moment in time" science.

I'm actually struggling to articulate this concept myself because I'm having trouble picking two existing words to describe it. When I say "significant and unlikely to change" I'm referring to thinks like physical laws, kinematics, chemistry, that sort of thing. The "science" of these fields is essentially "settled" and there is not a reproducibility crisis in this domain. There is a high level of trust in this kind of scientific knowledge.

Contrast this to "specific, moment in time" studies, with things like nutrition, social sciences, economics, policy, etc. You could call these soft sciences, but I don't think that concept does it justice. We deal with this domain constantly when arguing via back-and-forth citations online. You can find dozens of studies that assert X is true and dozens of others that assert X is false. A paper might have been published in a reputable journal but that does not mean it is now the "Truth" in the same way that we ascribe studies in the first category. For instance, a paper published about evolutionary psychology is not as true as evolution itself. Yet, we bucket both into the same category of "Science". There is a massive reproducibility crisis in this domain and it really does seem like many studies are only "true" in the confines of that study when it happened. When people cite this kind of science they piggyback off of the reputation of the first kind. I think that is the crux of the issue mentioned in the article.

mikkergp• 5 years ago

Part of the problem is that medicine, with its life and death implications, is more like the second than the first.

BitwiseFool2• 5 years ago

Absolutely, and some really weird effects show up because of human behavior and expectations during treatment. Did you know that patients think older drugs are less effective than newer ones? This is almost like a placebo effect, but people will literally not respond as well if they are being told they're getting an older drug than a newer one. How bizarre is that? You would think the efficacy would be objective since the molecules haven't changed. But I doubt any study could control for the introduction of some new treatment decades later.

scoofy2• 5 years ago

I read articles like this and once again realize that there are many trained scientists that have never read a bit of philosophy. The underlying theory of why the scientific method is so successful is there, and it's often ignored.

There is a reason why we use the scientific method, and why we know that our knowledge is inherently limited, and presents itself as a dance between inductive model-building, and deductive model extrapolation.

Science-as-truth should generally be always thought of as nonsense. Well done, falsifiable, repeatable, science-as-really-good-prediction is a much better model.

It's important to remember that even in the standard model of physics, behemoth of human achievement, is both incomplete and limited in scope.

trutannus• 5 years ago

there are many trained scientists that have never read a bit of philosophy

Not only not read a bit of philosophy, but it's almost as common to find trained scientists who scoff at the field as a whole. Of the trained scientists I've met, only two didn't immediately respond with condescension when I brought up philosophy as a subject worth paying attention to. Several have actually tried to tell me that science and philosophy are "opposites", or went with the the tired line of "philosophy is just science that does not have any proof for it". That last one there fundamentally misunderstands the point of it all. An ignorance philosophy in general I think is a problem right now.

logicalmonster• 5 years ago

Science qua science can provide humans with (close to) objectively accurate information, obviously constrained by the limits of human understanding of the natural world and the technology we have to measure phenomena.

What science can't do is the following:

* Science cannot make risk-management decisions for people. Weighing the known and unknown rewards and risks of some human decision and choosing what human action to take based on objective information is outside of the realm of science. No, the science cannot make choices for humans. Rational and smart people, when presented with the same scientific evidence, can make different choices. For instance, there have been many times in the past when the European Medicines Agency and the US Food and Drug Administration have had differing opinions on whether or not some drug ought to be approved. Risk management is a different topic than science, yet they get wrongly conflated every day on TV these days.

* Science cannot make value judgements or ethical decisions for humans. There are some hills that humans find to be important enough to be worth taking some risk for. Science cannot decide whether "freedom" is important enough to risk dying for, yet rational humans have made and will continue to choose freedom as long as free will exists.

didibus3• 5 years ago

I agree on the second part, science cannot decide what we humans want for ourselves and value and prioritize. Science is a means to an end, the end is what we have to decide for ourselves.

But when it comes to risk-management, I think science plays a big role, it can allow you to assess risk and predict probability of outcomes. That's super important in risk-management. What science cannot do is decide your risk appetite, risk tolerance as well as risk preferences.

You also need to choose which scientific model you also believe in the most, and when limited experimentation has occurred, science cannot help you choose, though more scientific research could give you comparative data between two scientific models that can help you choose. But all this takes time. And when time is limited, science can't take its normal course, that's where human judgement is necessary.

jjmorrison• 5 years ago

This person either did not read that memo or read what they wanted from it. It makes no claim of individual inferiority or superiority.

dekhn2• 5 years ago

Large areas of psychology research are nonscientific. They simply don't qualify as producing testable models that, when tested repeatedly, hold up. This is one of the mistakes that the Damore memo made: the author attempted to justify his claims based on shaky science, which didn't help his argument.

Now, let's talk about another area of science. The structure of DNA, or whether electron spin exists or what the shape of the earth is. There are no questions in my mind (beyond the normal ones I have about Descartes' Great Deceiver) that the structure of DNA in aqueous solution at room temperature with 15mM Mg is B-form, very close to what was described by Watson and Crick, or that electron spin exists and that we can use it to do NMR to determine molecular structures. And the planet Earth is an oblate spheroid.

All three of those are so true that if you were able to disprove either, massive areas of science would fall. I cannot imagine any set of data which could falsify any of those three hypotheses in a way that didn't completely tank science.

bloaf2• 5 years ago

Stereotypes are often better predictors of human behavior than actual psychological research. [0] Would Damore been more justified in his memo if he simply cited common stereotypes rather than psychology research?

Throwing out psychology, as the author of the original piece wants to do, is a double edged sword. You may knock the legs out from under Damore's stool, but you have no evidence left to use to argue against him. Indeed, quite a few people's "gut feelings" are going to be aligned with his argument.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/2016-jussim.pdf

dekhn2• 5 years ago

I don't see the need to use evidence to argue against (or for Damore). Everything he said is just opinion, not an actual argument. If instead you want to have an interesting argument, people shoudl start with Larry Summers, who articulated the same question but in a much more intelligent way (and was still cancelled because of it!): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b...

https://web.archive.org/web/20080130023006/http://www.presid...

Anybody who cares about Damore's message one way or the other should go back and read what Larry said, and internalize it. A brilliant leader was cancelled because he spoke what is the most likely hypothesis to explain the observed data.

meroes• 5 years ago

Sellars, "Sellars thinks that science’s aperspectival description of the empirical world is the measure of reality", and Carnap, "Since science in principle can say all that can be said, there is no unanswerable question left", would disagree.

Or at least we'd have to distinguish what we call science.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-bebecome/

bawolff5• 5 years ago

I feel like truth is the limit (in a calculus sense) of science. We can never get there. Sometimes we're close, and sometimes we're far away. Science allows us to approximate "truth" better and better, putting bounds on it.

To take it a religious way, science is the lantern in this story from babylon 5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts .

AdrianB12• 5 years ago

I think the article is misguided; there are, at least in my languages, 2 very clear definitions for science: "exact sciences" and the others. They all have in common the use of scientific methods, but that's it: one set is precise, the likes on "1+1=2" math or engineering and the others that are very imprecise like phycology, for example. Anyone using non-precise sciences to make a point against all "science" is malevolent, in my opinion.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

There are no such things as “exact sciences”; if it is exact, its pure logic, not empirical science. If it deals with the real world rather than pure abstractions, it is inexact and science is a continuous effort of refinement of approximation. Some fields of science offer easier opportunity for controls and more clarity of results, but even the clearest is not exact.

AdrianB12• 5 years ago

It is not a term I invented, just told about it; in the universities in my country the use of the term is the norm, so don't shoot the messenger.

A quick check shows me we have several universities with this name, one example is here: https://stiinteexacte.uav.ro/prezentare/prezentare

scoofy2• 5 years ago

I mean, I feel that this take is by far the most misguided. There are no "exact sciences." Even suggesting as much shows a deep misunderstanding of what science is.

Mathematics is not a science, it is a deductive framework based on axioms that are effectively arbitrary. Engineering is a exercise in applied use of physics, chemistry, and other sciences. Wide of margins for error are employed in most engineering exactly because most engineers know what variables they don't know, and even still there are engineering failures that regularly occur.

antisthenes• 5 years ago

Far worse than equating science with truth is equating expert opinions with layman opinions.

The latter is toxic to the very fabric of society and erodes the value of expertise in all fields and stifles useful and informed public discourse.

bloaf2• 5 years ago

This is dangerous reasoning; the google memo incident shows science walks a narrow path, and there are pitfalls all around.

Science is the best sword we have to separate truth from falsehood; to say that science is wrong and biased whenever it doesn't say what we like is to commit the exact same sin against scholarship as Damore. Damore didn't like what he was hearing from the diversity experts so he went and cherry picked the studies that supported his gut feeling. Cherry picking is still cherry picking even when you're doing it in defense of diversity.

I think one of the under-discussed aspects of the whole debacle was the is-ought problem [0], i.e. the gap between statements about "what is" and statements about what "ought to be."

Science works very well on "what is" questions. It can tell us that the earth is warming. It can tell us all the things that will happen as the earth warms, and all the things we could do that that would stop the earth from warming. But when it comes time to decide what temperature the earth "ought" to be, we can't ask science; we have to first decide what our goals are. If our goal is to maximize short term profit, we will get a different answer than if we want to maximize long term sustainability.

In the same way, science can't tell us what the gender ratio "should" be. Its on us to decide what our priorities are. If our goal is short term profit, we will undoubtedly prefer a different ratio than if we are trying to achieve a more egalitarian society in the long term.

So that is why the author's assertion "In fact, science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias, and refusing to do anything about the fact that the data says something’s wrong." is a misrepresentation of science. Science tells us "the earth is warming", we are the ones who have to add "and that is wrong." Science tells us "there is bias", we are the ones who have to add "and that is wrong." That scientists in the past have failed to add that last bit (or even added "and that is good!") is not adequate justification for the author to simply dismiss science.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Is%E2%80%93ought_problem

sudorook• 5 years ago

I hadn't thought of the Damore fiasco in a while. I'm not particularly pleased to revisit it. To me, it was a strong indicator to those in industry that a good-faith attempt at discussion on potentially controversial topics can blow up _badly_. One is better off to keep silent and not stick one's neck out. Since then, I've seen worrying trends in academia that suggest it will follow suit...

In the years since 2017, there has been a strong push for scientists to take upon themselves the responsibility for not just conducting research but also for the way the public discussion unfolds. To so do, they collaborate to create uniform messaging so that bad actors cannot find disagreements over details and implications and use them to sow divisions among the general public or, at worst, inflict harm on populations deemed vulnerable.

This creates problems in that scientists are pressured to be silent with their own disagreements. (e.g. One should not value one's individuality over solidarity.) This is particularly acute if one is in the minority of opinion. My concern is that over time, this pressure will diminish variance in opinion on any given topic. Variance will become invariance, and that invariance will then be misinterpreted as proof of Truth. Any research or even opinion at odds with it become outrageous.

As this unfolds, more and more people will fall into the same trap as the author --- dismissing unpalatable albeit tendentiously backed arguments as unscientific and reflective of deep, un-measurable cultural evils while accepting extrapolations from similarly tendentious research that backs a more acceptable narrative, e.g. "because the authors of the paper are women, ... we can expect 10 percent fewer citations."

I find all of this deeply dispiriting. The capacity for science to produce models that reflect the natural world depends on the free dissemination and interrogation of all ideas. Though John Stuart Mill wrote on free speech, his works are even more important in science. If people cannot freely question broadly and deeply held beliefs, they risk losing the knowledge of _why_ they are so deeply held by so many. If that ever happens, we will have lost something truly precious.

ccn0p4• 5 years ago

Very well said. I don't have any insider knowledge on the way "Science" happens, but I can say from personal experience that this is exactly how politics in the US seems to be trending. You're allowed a certain range of thought, and if you go outside that range, there's some level of social/communal ostracizing that happens. Dispiriting is a great description.

I feel like this leads to further separation of actual physical communities as well with subsequent separation of governance styles, further polarizing the country in a fly-wheel effect.

pcvarmint• 5 years ago

See "Scientism and Values", by Helmut Schoeck and James Wiggins [1].

[1] https://mises.org/library/scientism-and-values

Stop Equating “Science” with Truth (2017)

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