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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
When I studied philosophy, we applied scientific methodology to understand complex topics, categorising them, and evaluating them against each other. The theories of moral philosophy are under scrutiny in a way very similar to the (other) natural sciences.
That works to inform discussion. Having access to the modern knowledge of how the nervous system powers muscle movements helps elevate discussions around the intent to act and the deterministic natures of that intent well beyond what folks digesting the topic in the 1500s could comprehend. But there's a really hard limit with how far it can get you.
Provable things often point us toward certain answers - but provable science has historically shown us that it isn't afraid to pull the rug out from under us and throw a curveball. Physics is highly deterministic and ordered - extremely so - under you get subatomic - then everything goes out the window.
Philosophy obviously needs to not go directly against things we have a high confidence in - but there's still a lot of grey area in there especially where the philosophy of motion and ethics are involved.
A lot of ethics argues that acting in such and such "ethical" way will result is some outcome, like more happiness, less harm to the environment, less harm to workers, less injustice, etc.
It would be great to test those assertions empirically as well. If it is true, devise an experiment, implement your ethical framework, measure outcomes, validate it, prove that it does improve on your claimed metrics.
Just to be clear, there is a place for thinking through first principles in science, that's part of the hypothesis phase. In that phase you can use inductive and abductive reasoning to guide yourself to a likely hypothesis. But science will want you to go further and test the hypothesis, to ascertain more strongly that it is a likely hypothesis.
The only part which isn't really applicable to science is deductive reasoning, because it relies on assuming truths and perfect formal logical rules of derivation. These can hold within a total imaginary setting, mathematics does this all the time for example, and so does a lot of philosophy, but when applied practically (which is where science comes in), you need to show that those assumptions hold in the real world and its current setting, and that the deduction rules do as well, and that brings you back to inductive and abductive reasoning, because you no longer control the range of the domain, it is now dictated by reality or our perception of it.
One helpful thing would be to separate the hard sciences from the soft sciences. Calculating the mass of a hydrogen atom is fundamentally different than determining which factors and how much of each are required to diagnose ADHD. The latter is very important and it deserves an important category that clearly distinguishes it from the former in the common language.
> 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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
> "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!".
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.
Yeah, sure... until someone doesn't want to get vaccinated, until the vaccines are more throughly tested (especially long-term studies). Then they get called many many science-denying names, and practically forced to do it by their governments.
No it wasn't. Mandates were enforced on flimsy evidence that they might work. It was simply security theatre. In some cases many have even admitted that it was done to make people "feel safe".
The Effectiveness (or lack thereof) of specifically the masks has been investigated in many settings with the flu many times before.
Page 44-47 of the PDF goes over in length masks used in a community setting. They specifically talk about compliance, what sort of mask was being worn and whether the mask was fitted and how that may have affected the results of various studies, transmission rates etc. Many studies found that people stopped complying after a certain amount of time, other found it varied on the culture.
What did we see with mask usage during COVID? Many people wore the same mask for days on end, or they put them in their pocket, or just stuck one of the passenger seat of their car (like my neighbour did). Some stopped bothering wearing the mask after a few weeks, and there was differences in compliance dependent on the culture.
A lot of this was known back in 2014.
You can find numerous other studies going back years now on the relative effectiveness of masks and different types of masks and the result for cloth masks (which the types that people were using) weren't great.
Are you telling me that all these medical professionals that had the ear of officials didn't know about any of this?
I would prefer to call recent events science under pressure. One could argue that good science takes time. People need time to think about ideas, time to think about ways to test the ideas, and time to engage in discourse without duress. Both politicians and the media, in my opinion, are a detriment to good science. They may be a necessary evil to provide support for funding, but their short-term goals are antithetical to thoughtful discourse.
He confidently told New Yorkers not to worry and they shouldn't stay at home in march. Pretty sure him saying that increased the deaths by many thousands there. At the time other countries had detected covid cases originating from New York, and New York barely tested but a huge amount of of those tests were positive, everyone who read a bit knew it was bad there but he just ignored it and told them to go on with life as normal. So I don't trust his judgement, at the time it was Democrats position to downplay the disease so that is what he did. Then Democrats switched position and so did he. I really doubt he will always do what is best for people instead of what is best for Democrats. I'd rather listen to scientists who aren't so political.
Edit: I'm from Europe so don't assume I'm a Republican just because I criticise him.
Well, this "science in action" garbage is certainly this week's attempt to save the institutions from self-immolation, but it simply doesn't hold water:
1. The initial statements were not guesses. They were an accurate summary of the state of the scientific literature at the time and were presented as such ("there is no specific evidence", "there is some evidence to suggest the opposite").
2. The later change, which occurred with whiplash-inducing speed, wasn't based on any new evidence or studies. That's why Fauci had to come up with this story about how they'd been engaging in a noble lie: there was no new evidence for him to point at.
3. There is now clear evidence that mask mandates don't work, namely the real world data, yet recommendations have not changed and all this new evidence has been ignored.
Specifically, if large-scale mandates did work then it would be clearly visible in the case curves of each country that introduced them, by definition, because creating clearly visible drops in those curves was the only reason they were introduced. Yet no such drops are visible. You can't look at a country's data and work out when masks were introduced or removed, it's impossible, people have tried. Thus mask mandates failed on their own terms and no further studies or experiments are actually necessary to answer the question of whether they're effective.
I don't really know why you're trying to defend "science" in the abstract like this. COVID science is the work of specific groups of people, it's not an abstraction, and it turns out to fall far short of the lofty standards we were taught to expect at school. COVID science in the real world is riddled with obvious hypocrisy and contradictions, routinely ignores or even rubbishes any evidence that would undermine collectivist social policies or make scientists look bad, and just in general is a sad joke. Arguing that this obvious failure is actually a success, and this is what all science looks like, can only make things worse by harming trust in other groups of scientists with higher standards (e.g. maybe physicists?).
> Specifically, if large-scale mandates did work then it would be clearly visible in the case curves of each country that introduced them, by definition, because creating clearly visible drops in those curves was the only reason they were introduced. Yet no such drops are visible. You can't look at a country's data and work out when masks were introduced or removed, it's impossible, people have tried. Thus mask mandates failed on their own terms and no further studies or experiments are actually necessary to answer the question of whether they're effective.
I am sorry, but this is a BS argument. First of all, COVID-19 (classic variant) had a 7 to 14 days incubation period. Upon infection rate curves it acts as a low-pass filter (aka smoothing filter). You will not see sharp drops even if contagion abruptly stops. The curve will decay over one or two weeks. Also, mask mandates were not introduced at random moments of time. Typically they were enacted or enforced when infection was on the rise. At best the expectation was that masks will slow down the up-trend.
Obviously, masks do not fully protect against inhaling the virus. But they do limit the blast radius from infected people coughing and sneezing. This is why in Asia people are routinely wearing masks during a regular flu season. Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree. Common sense is oftentimes better that shaky science on top of questionable data.
Incubation period was/is definitely not 14 days, more like 3! Two weeks could easily be infection to death at the start. No, mask mandates should have shown a very sharp and artificial drop in every case where they were enacted, but that never happened.
"Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree"
So you assert yet nobody can show it doing so in the real world data. Places geographically next to each other that differed in mask mandates saw no impact. The UK removed its restrictions in the summer and cases immediately fell. Etc etc.
When you impose mask-mandate related events with the case curves this becomes especially obvious:
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.
Well yeah, but science ("expert groups") also said all the vaccines work and are safe. Then they stopped using astrazeneca here, but the others were safe. Then israel said they don't work enough, and mandated a booster shot. Then a girl died due to Janssen vaccine here in slovenia, and they said that only mRNA vaccines should be used for younger people, because they are safe. Then sweden and denmark stopped with the Moderna vaccines, and the only one left is currently Pfeizer,... atleast for now. And all the time, people saying vaccines are unsafe, or that covid vs vaccines dangers are comparable were marked as stupid science deniers (in slovenia, zero deaths for girls under 25 due to covid, one death due to vaccine, where approximately 50% of 2mio total population got infected).
150 Americans die each year from acetaminophen (Tylenol) yet people take it for routine headaches. Some people even take Tylenol for headaches and it doesn’t cure their headache! What’s your point?
Is someone forcing them to take tylenol? I mean.. is there a government mandate, saying you can't go to (eg.) a clothes store if you didn't take a tylenol first? Or did those people take the tylenol and the risks willingly and voluntarily?
There have also been numerous adverse events (including death) from e.g. MMR or influenza vaccines.
That’s because when you put things into millions of people, you are guaranteed to run into an edge case here or there. The fact that you can point to so few significant AEs caused by the COVID vaccines is a pretty incredible achievement given the unprecedented scale of rollout.
The point is that no one with any credibility ever said we could expect zero adverse events from the COVID vaccines, nor 100% efficacy. No one.
Of course, but for slovenia (2 mio population, ~1mio had corona, ~1mio vaccinated, with overlap of course), statistics for girls under 25 show zero deaths due to covid and one death due to vaccine. For men under 25, one death. For both sexes under 35, we have 5 deaths, including that one <25 man.
So basically, covid is less dangerous for young people than swimming (more than 5 people drowned this year) and still, most of the anti-covid measures affect them the most (and old people the least).
If you want to see the alternative, look at Romania now. It seems Delta kills young people too, just less often. We have 450 minors currently in the ICU. If the young population did not vaccinate, it does stand to show that serveral more people than that would have stood to die.
> 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.
It's not a problem with a public reversal of something, it's forcing people to do X, censoring them online (twitter, youtube), and then 'whoops'.
People who were buying masks then were branded as conspiracy theorists, loonatics, got lauged at by commenters everywhere. And our scientists still claim, that the current findings are true, that they won't change, and that everyone not doing as instructed by the expert groups is an idiot again.
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.
Is there specific evidence that vaccines don't cause long-term harm? And if in time, evidence shows that they do cause harm, who will be responsible? (in slovenia, all the vaccines were safe and effective, then we first stopped using astrazeneca due to clots and a woman dying, then israel said they don't work enough, and mandated a third shot, then a girl died in slovenia due to Janssen, and only mrna vaccines were recommended for young people, then sweden and denmark stopped using moderna, so we're down to one safe vaccine).
Even the stupidests little things, like sanitizing the living crap out of stuff, even before the mask mandates, was something that was 'true' back then, then the 'truth' changed, and we still had to pay for all the useless crap... we had mandated sanitizers in elevators, all the high buildings paid a shitton of money for them (because the dispensers were expensive then and hard to get), then someone though about fire codes, and "woops, remove them".
TLDR: the problem is not that science changes, the problem is, that we do very socially and economically dangerous and expensive stuff now by blindly trusting whatever the current scientific idea is, not thinking about "what if the science is wrong?" (eg. if covid is transmitted mostly by air and not by touching infected surfaces).
Here's the problem with that phrasing: masks were known to be effective long before the mandates in Western nations. It was called SARS-CoV-2 and "coronavirus" very early on, and we had plenty of evidence with other viruses of that kind, including the original SARS that you should wear a mask around others to retard transmission.
"No specific evidence" is weasel-wording. I have family in China. Before the spread here in the West, people were buying up N95 masks and sending them to Asia because they knew what was coming.
I'm of the opinion that the advice to not bother with masks early on was intended to address an expected shortfall for medical personnel. That is, it was manipulation.
I think you might be overestimating the amount of 'formal' evidence. Obviously anyone with any amount of common sense worked out that a physical barrier would probably be helpful, but there weren't really the kind of formal studies that the medical establishment pretends to need. Your opinion is, as far as I can tell, broadly accepted fact (ie several officials said as much).
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.
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.
I suppose "it ought to be" that way, in a working system. But it seems that the line between politician and scientist is becoming increasingly blurry (Fauci comes to mind).
A healthy media informs the public so they can decide to act on this knowledge.
At the same time politicians find ways to help or subsidize desired behavior, and lend weight to the media message. Harmful behavior is prosecuted (the word you're looking for is "force"... not violence).
That's how it's supposed to work. It doesn't work that way anymore, but it's supposed to.
I'm not sure that is materially different from what i said when it comes to the role of scientists or politicians.
Yes its regrettable that the media seems to be mucking up its role as the fourth estate (or at least sowing division and acting in ways that seem less than beneficial to the well being of the group). However, that's hardly unique in history, and arguably one of the primary functions of a free press is to spread dissent in order to keep the power of the state in check.
> Harmful behavior is prosecuted (the word you're looking for is "force"... not violence).
Is there a difference? or is it "force" when it happens to other people, "violence" when it happens to you or you disagree with it?
Typically the various methods are just very indirect ways to threaten violence, which if you thumb your nose at strongly enough, eventually ends in you getting arrested (or if you refuse to be arrested and resist, shot).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Science comes with some measure of confidence. The problem has been that this confidence has been purposefully and completely left out of all discussions.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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?
But should it really be big tech's responsibility to triage? If so, based on what information? The CDC? WHO? Then what happens if a doctor on the frontline wants to disagree with one particular aspect of the "authoritative source" information, posts their discoveries on Facebook/Youtube, and is censored because it was classified as misinformation? That would effectively mean the government is suppressing speech.
Sounds fine and dandy as long as you, the consumer of information, is aligned with the authoritative sources, but history has shown time in and time out that regimes change and that power is intoxicating and that those that want suppressed speech can eventually become the suppressed.
Nobody says this better IMO than Ira Glasser who led the ACLU from '78-2001 and defended the rights of Nazi's to march. Check out the documentary Mighty Ira.
>the stuff some random wacko posts on YouTube/Facebook/Twitter/whatever"
The problem is the way that it has become trendy to use such disclaimers to dismiss, in a very handwavy way, the "wacko posts" that are actually sourced from legitimate researchers and/or research which happen to fall on the wrong side of "consensus". And the truth is that the vast majority of people who insist that these are "wacko posts" are just as ignorant as the posters, substituting authoritarian faith in "science" for actual knowledge regarding the subjects that they feel so passionately about.
I doubt the average "pro vaxxer" has read any more scientific literature than the average "anti covid vaxxer" for example. And so this appeal to authority becomes a pure vehicle for dogma. You don't have to prove anybody right or wrong, just associate your opposition with the "facebook wackos" and suddenly you've sneakily convinced vast swaths of followers that a certain opinion or conjecture is false, because duh, you're not listening to those cooky wackos, are you?
In the words of a certain infamous broadcasting station, "this is extremely dangerous to our democracy".
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.
Actually I'm talking about post web 2 era. I've seen increasing amount of people very "knowledgeable" about the "scientific method" but who never made derived one proof in their life or never made up a concept from zero. It's very painful to see sheeps throwing wikipedia paragraphs pavlov style.
Talking about the bible, there was a talk about the printing press and the fact that it made debates a bit saner since people could avoid hearsay. The Bible might not be the most refutable piece but it seems it gave some kind of stable ground for discourse.. (according to the people at that conference)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Obligatory, by now, value signaling in the article looks like customary gestures to ward off evil spirits. I think debating whether women are or are not intellectually inferior should be ON the table. It's widely accepted that women are physically weaker - although I wouldn't necessarily call that "inferior". It's an optimization. The problem is that low intelligence itself has become an insult, not that brain differences (statistical! On average!) might exist.
Think about small skinny guys. Short guys are often perceived as less attractive and less manly, so they often compensate for that by being gym rats or acting hyper masculine, or just trying to project lots of confidence. I've seen enough of them to think there is a trend. If people of one sex are consistently physically weaker, I can imagine it can cause changes in behavior and brain.
I want research to be done even in areas that are considered taboo. No one argues that men are more prone to physical violence, risky behavior and substance abuse. You can get away with saying lots of bad things about men in general, and it's almost fashionable now. I want it to cut both ways. No sex or "race"(skin color) or faith or whatever should be immune to criticism and study.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
After some thought on Larry Summers' hypothesis, there seems to be one major assumption that he's making that needn't be true - that the major culprit for high engineering and academic positions is aptitude. If this is the case, then he may well be correct, as it makes a lot of sense. But it is still a major assumption.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 208 ms ] threadHaving 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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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!
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/
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.
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?
The scientific consensus is largely political whereas the scientific method produces many results which are politically inconvenient.
Science is a quest in models. With a somehow high degree of self consistency (poetically so). But that's it.
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.
I am interested in hearing about how you escaped the game, should you wish to say more.
That being said, I'm down with people exploring psychedelics if they wish to do so.
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
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.
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.
Provable things often point us toward certain answers - but provable science has historically shown us that it isn't afraid to pull the rug out from under us and throw a curveball. Physics is highly deterministic and ordered - extremely so - under you get subatomic - then everything goes out the window.
Philosophy obviously needs to not go directly against things we have a high confidence in - but there's still a lot of grey area in there especially where the philosophy of motion and ethics are involved.
A lot of ethics argues that acting in such and such "ethical" way will result is some outcome, like more happiness, less harm to the environment, less harm to workers, less injustice, etc.
It would be great to test those assertions empirically as well. If it is true, devise an experiment, implement your ethical framework, measure outcomes, validate it, prove that it does improve on your claimed metrics.
Just to be clear, there is a place for thinking through first principles in science, that's part of the hypothesis phase. In that phase you can use inductive and abductive reasoning to guide yourself to a likely hypothesis. But science will want you to go further and test the hypothesis, to ascertain more strongly that it is a likely hypothesis.
The only part which isn't really applicable to science is deductive reasoning, because it relies on assuming truths and perfect formal logical rules of derivation. These can hold within a total imaginary setting, mathematics does this all the time for example, and so does a lot of philosophy, but when applied practically (which is where science comes in), you need to show that those assumptions hold in the real world and its current setting, and that the deduction rules do as well, and that brings you back to inductive and abductive reasoning, because you no longer control the range of the domain, it is now dictated by reality or our perception of it.
I don't really have a problem with people doing this kind of research either, I'm bothered when they try to use these models to prescribe behavior.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
> "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...
This what doing science looks like. This is working correctly. You haven't pointed out any flaws, you've pointed out a success case.
The Effectiveness (or lack thereof) of specifically the masks has been investigated in many settings with the flu many times before.
e.g.
This was published back in 2014:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Page 44-47 of the PDF goes over in length masks used in a community setting. They specifically talk about compliance, what sort of mask was being worn and whether the mask was fitted and how that may have affected the results of various studies, transmission rates etc. Many studies found that people stopped complying after a certain amount of time, other found it varied on the culture.
What did we see with mask usage during COVID? Many people wore the same mask for days on end, or they put them in their pocket, or just stuck one of the passenger seat of their car (like my neighbour did). Some stopped bothering wearing the mask after a few weeks, and there was differences in compliance dependent on the culture.
A lot of this was known back in 2014.
You can find numerous other studies going back years now on the relative effectiveness of masks and different types of masks and the result for cloth masks (which the types that people were using) weren't great.
Are you telling me that all these medical professionals that had the ear of officials didn't know about any of this?
Edit: I'm from Europe so don't assume I'm a Republican just because I criticise him.
1. The initial statements were not guesses. They were an accurate summary of the state of the scientific literature at the time and were presented as such ("there is no specific evidence", "there is some evidence to suggest the opposite").
2. The later change, which occurred with whiplash-inducing speed, wasn't based on any new evidence or studies. That's why Fauci had to come up with this story about how they'd been engaging in a noble lie: there was no new evidence for him to point at.
3. There is now clear evidence that mask mandates don't work, namely the real world data, yet recommendations have not changed and all this new evidence has been ignored.
Specifically, if large-scale mandates did work then it would be clearly visible in the case curves of each country that introduced them, by definition, because creating clearly visible drops in those curves was the only reason they were introduced. Yet no such drops are visible. You can't look at a country's data and work out when masks were introduced or removed, it's impossible, people have tried. Thus mask mandates failed on their own terms and no further studies or experiments are actually necessary to answer the question of whether they're effective.
I don't really know why you're trying to defend "science" in the abstract like this. COVID science is the work of specific groups of people, it's not an abstraction, and it turns out to fall far short of the lofty standards we were taught to expect at school. COVID science in the real world is riddled with obvious hypocrisy and contradictions, routinely ignores or even rubbishes any evidence that would undermine collectivist social policies or make scientists look bad, and just in general is a sad joke. Arguing that this obvious failure is actually a success, and this is what all science looks like, can only make things worse by harming trust in other groups of scientists with higher standards (e.g. maybe physicists?).
I am sorry, but this is a BS argument. First of all, COVID-19 (classic variant) had a 7 to 14 days incubation period. Upon infection rate curves it acts as a low-pass filter (aka smoothing filter). You will not see sharp drops even if contagion abruptly stops. The curve will decay over one or two weeks. Also, mask mandates were not introduced at random moments of time. Typically they were enacted or enforced when infection was on the rise. At best the expectation was that masks will slow down the up-trend.
Obviously, masks do not fully protect against inhaling the virus. But they do limit the blast radius from infected people coughing and sneezing. This is why in Asia people are routinely wearing masks during a regular flu season. Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree. Common sense is oftentimes better that shaky science on top of questionable data.
"Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree"
So you assert yet nobody can show it doing so in the real world data. Places geographically next to each other that differed in mask mandates saw no impact. The UK removed its restrictions in the summer and cases immediately fell. Etc etc.
When you impose mask-mandate related events with the case curves this becomes especially obvious:
https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...
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.
That’s because when you put things into millions of people, you are guaranteed to run into an edge case here or there. The fact that you can point to so few significant AEs caused by the COVID vaccines is a pretty incredible achievement given the unprecedented scale of rollout.
The point is that no one with any credibility ever said we could expect zero adverse events from the COVID vaccines, nor 100% efficacy. No one.
So basically, covid is less dangerous for young people than swimming (more than 5 people drowned this year) and still, most of the anti-covid measures affect them the most (and old people the least).
Way to go Romania, standing for the test group.
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.
People who were buying masks then were branded as conspiracy theorists, loonatics, got lauged at by commenters everywhere. And our scientists still claim, that the current findings are true, that they won't change, and that everyone not doing as instructed by the expert groups is an idiot again.
Is there specific evidence that vaccines don't cause long-term harm? And if in time, evidence shows that they do cause harm, who will be responsible? (in slovenia, all the vaccines were safe and effective, then we first stopped using astrazeneca due to clots and a woman dying, then israel said they don't work enough, and mandated a third shot, then a girl died in slovenia due to Janssen, and only mrna vaccines were recommended for young people, then sweden and denmark stopped using moderna, so we're down to one safe vaccine).
Even the stupidests little things, like sanitizing the living crap out of stuff, even before the mask mandates, was something that was 'true' back then, then the 'truth' changed, and we still had to pay for all the useless crap... we had mandated sanitizers in elevators, all the high buildings paid a shitton of money for them (because the dispensers were expensive then and hard to get), then someone though about fire codes, and "woops, remove them".
TLDR: the problem is not that science changes, the problem is, that we do very socially and economically dangerous and expensive stuff now by blindly trusting whatever the current scientific idea is, not thinking about "what if the science is wrong?" (eg. if covid is transmitted mostly by air and not by touching infected surfaces).
"No specific evidence" is weasel-wording. I have family in China. Before the spread here in the West, people were buying up N95 masks and sending them to Asia because they knew what was coming.
I'm of the opinion that the advice to not bother with masks early on was intended to address an expected shortfall for medical personnel. That is, it was manipulation.
Scientists discover what they can (falliable as they may be).
Politicians take scientist's best understanding at the time, balance the concerns of various groups, and make a decision.
Politicians decisions are backed up with violence (always, not just for this) because states having a monoply on violence is just how states work.
Scientists discover what they can.
A healthy media informs the public so they can decide to act on this knowledge.
At the same time politicians find ways to help or subsidize desired behavior, and lend weight to the media message. Harmful behavior is prosecuted (the word you're looking for is "force"... not violence).
That's how it's supposed to work. It doesn't work that way anymore, but it's supposed to.
Yes its regrettable that the media seems to be mucking up its role as the fourth estate (or at least sowing division and acting in ways that seem less than beneficial to the well being of the group). However, that's hardly unique in history, and arguably one of the primary functions of a free press is to spread dissent in order to keep the power of the state in check.
> Harmful behavior is prosecuted (the word you're looking for is "force"... not violence).
Is there a difference? or is it "force" when it happens to other people, "violence" when it happens to you or you disagree with it?
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.
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)
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.
Feels to me like an oxymoron.
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).
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.
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.
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?
Sounds fine and dandy as long as you, the consumer of information, is aligned with the authoritative sources, but history has shown time in and time out that regimes change and that power is intoxicating and that those that want suppressed speech can eventually become the suppressed.
Nobody says this better IMO than Ira Glasser who led the ACLU from '78-2001 and defended the rights of Nazi's to march. Check out the documentary Mighty Ira.
The problem is the way that it has become trendy to use such disclaimers to dismiss, in a very handwavy way, the "wacko posts" that are actually sourced from legitimate researchers and/or research which happen to fall on the wrong side of "consensus". And the truth is that the vast majority of people who insist that these are "wacko posts" are just as ignorant as the posters, substituting authoritarian faith in "science" for actual knowledge regarding the subjects that they feel so passionately about.
I doubt the average "pro vaxxer" has read any more scientific literature than the average "anti covid vaxxer" for example. And so this appeal to authority becomes a pure vehicle for dogma. You don't have to prove anybody right or wrong, just associate your opposition with the "facebook wackos" and suddenly you've sneakily convinced vast swaths of followers that a certain opinion or conjecture is false, because duh, you're not listening to those cooky wackos, are you?
In the words of a certain infamous broadcasting station, "this is extremely dangerous to our democracy".
Are you talking about the Internet or the bible?
Actually I'm talking about post web 2 era. I've seen increasing amount of people very "knowledgeable" about the "scientific method" but who never made derived one proof in their life or never made up a concept from zero. It's very painful to see sheeps throwing wikipedia paragraphs pavlov style.
Talking about the bible, there was a talk about the printing press and the fact that it made debates a bit saner since people could avoid hearsay. The Bible might not be the most refutable piece but it seems it gave some kind of stable ground for discourse.. (according to the people at that conference)
Unfortunately, we appear to be quite fundamentally, in the vaguest sense of the word, religious beings...
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.
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.
Think about small skinny guys. Short guys are often perceived as less attractive and less manly, so they often compensate for that by being gym rats or acting hyper masculine, or just trying to project lots of confidence. I've seen enough of them to think there is a trend. If people of one sex are consistently physically weaker, I can imagine it can cause changes in behavior and brain.
I want research to be done even in areas that are considered taboo. No one argues that men are more prone to physical violence, risky behavior and substance abuse. You can get away with saying lots of bad things about men in general, and it's almost fashionable now. I want it to cut both ways. No sex or "race"(skin color) or faith or whatever should be immune to criticism and study.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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/
To take it a religious way, science is the lantern in this story from babylon 5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts .
A quick check shows me we have several universities with this name, one example is here: https://stiinteexacte.uav.ro/prezentare/prezentare
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.