I don't know who this is written for. The people who value the notion of truth already defend it and the ones that don't are destroying it on purpose. Neither side will be swayed by this.
I don’t really understand why they decided to only provide right-wing talking points in their examples. If somebody wants to engage in this sort of performative pseudo-objectivity thing, they could at least throw in a couple reference to, like, embryonic stem cell research for example to as a head-fake.
I mean, I’m pretty gullible, even a slight appearance of good faith engagement and I’ll check it out. But this is just too one sided. I guess the title was enough to get my click. I should look into the substack business model, not sure what metrics this kind of article targets.
The author seems like an enlightened high IQ centrist.
>Science and medicine have come under attack, mainly from the left, by problematizing their epistemic foundations and achievements. In the past, attacks on science came principally from the right and this may happen again. I have a clear non-partisan standpoint and I am critical of both the right and the left. I am very much in line with the critics of SJI coming from the left (see: Neiman, 2023, forthcoming).
I see both side, but the real problem right now is the bureaucratic intricacies of academia coming from "the left".
This is an apathetic and narrowly political opinion. It's written because the author was inspired to write it. You should evaluate it based on the content provided, not who you need to assume it's influential towards. Even then, how could you possibly know how many minds it could change? You're enforcing your cynicism and hoping others will follow your despair with no evidence to support it.
We have all woken up to the fact that many people stand (and even more have stood) on the world stage pretending to be “simply stating” when the intent has been to push a narrative or give credibility to specific groups.
I’m adding this rebuttal because it’s fresh in my mind: https://youtu.be/WBxAQYmPHDA (starting 42:28). If you don’t like Neil try to listen to the point he’s making and separate it from him. It’s a point worth at least discussing critically: the intent of a statement is integral to the statement itself.
I simply don't agree. We have not "woken up" in some magical modern age to the notion of bias and intentional influence, that's the downfall of all human communication and a tale as old as time. To suggest it's been tricking us all along and we never knew is ridiculous.
Factual information has the right to be stated, it's the audience's fault if they're not cogent enough to discern bias and malicious intent.
Your position is a plain defense of censorship and forced interpretation of media, not one that promotes media literacy or individual sovereignty to make up one's mind.
Not woken up in terms of all of human history, certainly not. Woken up since the 80s? almost definitely. The difference now is the scale at which bias and intentional influence operate.
For the record I’d much rather everyone be taught to think critically as a baseline but that’s simply not happening and to not call out bias or intentional influence is to be a bystander (something I choose not to do).
I'm always surprised by the anti-trans comments on Hacker News. "You should be able to own your devices and alter them however you want" seems to be in conflict with "but I don't want people altering their bodies."
I don't think it was the "do what you want with your body" part that generated the opposition. It was a push to make everyone else accept that, for example, a trans woman was exactly equivalent to a woman. Not just in rights, but in all respects. Or the strong push for everyone, trans or not, to make a decision and advertise their own preferred pronouns. It didn't help to then push the philosophy that children, even young ones, should be able to make these kinds of major decisions independent of parental guidance.
If it were just about bodily freedom, nobody would really care. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous. Trans advocacy has very aggressively gone well beyond anything we experienced during the push for LGB equal rights.
Mostly this concept is used to brutalize perceived threats to the professions more than guide their inquiry and work. Produce good results using the truth you work with and it will speak for itself. If instead you take it as a rallying cry to crush other intellectual traditions or nascent cultural experiments you are doing more damage to what you say you value than any opponent could dream.
This is why I vote Republican now. I grew up hating the religious right in the 90's for attacking science when it contradicted the Bible. But their efforts never actually affected the practice of scientific research.
on the other hand, if covid leak originated in a lab. Then scientists carelessly caused a global pandemic that killed millions. There must be some accountability for that too.
Biosecurity has nothing to do with politics or religion. Any research needs to adhere to security levels in accordance with its risks. It does not matter if it's Nuclear Power or DNA editing, it must be secure and failures of the security protocols will cause mayhem to people of all political opinions.
Except if the research was done for political reasons, like producing a bio weapon. So how are they unrelated from politics? One of the stated political reasons Putin justified the Ukrainian invasion was the destruction of bioweapon facilities. So again how is this unrelated to politics?
China literally allowed unrestricted flights out of China, knowing the pandemic would spread to the World. While at the same testing passengers on domestic flights to prevent local spread. Not Politics?
Also how exactly would you know if the current set of politicians wasn't acting out some pseudo religious motive, like saving the world from environmental Armageddon.
Or why would you dismis the possibility of secret societies,
when there are plenty of examples at political leaders through out history being parts of cults, or making up their own pseudo religious belief systems.
These kinds of posts always devolve into flamewars on HN. I posted an Ask HN a couple years ago about "Is there a place on HN for interesting yet flame-war inducing topics?", and came to the conclusion (which was actually a shift in my opinion before I asked the question on HN) that no, in actuality, there is not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29532676
Unfortunately, you are correct. I genuinely try to bring a rational, calm, fact oriented dialog about leftist ideas (decommodification of housing, trans regret rates, social and anthropological science/history around queer issues, systemic inequality, etc.) and largely the conversations I have get one great, engaged response and a whole lot of flames.
I had a fantastic discussion about the history of socialism on the African continent here, with one strongly anti-socialist person. And we both had to slap away people who just wanted to dunk on the "other team". It's unfortunate, really.
Science is uncertain endeavor. Especially when it comes to phenomena / events that occur within a certain region of spacetime scale close to what we experience. But people tend to not like uncertainty. They like the word to be predictable.
The main type of science denialism I see is people ignoring the error bars / qualifications on scientific claims. Part of this is done by press offices and the media trying to generate buzz and prestige. Another more cynical group of people do it for profit.
Typically the people I see who cry about censoring of science are the same type of people who cry about free speech when they get banned from a board. If you are a tenured professor you can research pretty much whatever. Just don’t expect a big time journal or conference to broadcast your work if it’s not addressing a “hot” topic. But at the end of the day that’s fine right? We scientists do this for the love of scientific inquiry, not money and status right? /s
IRB approval is not a super high bar if you are not doing something like giving people a research chemical, doing surgeries, or inflicting psychological distress. Just make sure the study is aligned with the principles of respect, beneficence, and justice.
In terms of grants / funding that is more of an economic issue. How do we allocate limited resources? There is a bit of grantsmanship that comes into play here, but that’s the game. The focus on ROI is in no small part a consequence of the numerous hit pieces crying about stuff like, “They spent X dollars on understanding the mating rituals of honey bees!?! Government waste!!!” But I agree that these decisions about what we as a society want to fund are inherently political.
Data access is a little more tricky. I generally take the stance that access is at the pleasure of the data owners / stewards, but they are also bound by the terms of the consent. So there is no small amount of risk that some of the subjects might get mad about how their data is being used and sink the whole ship. And this is probably not a bad thing in my opinion. I take the extreme view that subjects should have more control over their data than they currently have - probably as a reaction against the normalization of surveillance capitalism.
They are if you don’t want to be a modern Dr. Mengele. These principles are outlined in the Belmont Report — one of the foundations of ethical / responsible conduct of research.[0] Please give it a look to see how these concepts are defined.
Well science don't prove things anyhow, it's inductive. Theory of gravity is "just a theory" too, and Newtonian descriptions of it work well enough. That's just what all theories are and will be, descriptions and predictions based on evidence that will evolve as we make better predictions. There ain't no such thing as "just a theory" because theory is the best you get.
The article itself makes a very good point about Established Truth vs Provisional Truth that somewhat contradicts this notion.
Established Truths are generally as close as proof as any statement, scientific or not, may ever be. Episthemologically speaking they ARE proven truths.
That just seems to be playing with words to split hairs however's convenient to split. "Close as proof" is what a theory is, so now either it ain't a theory or it is a theory. Everything else is just window dressing.
The truth in medicine is that we don't really know a lot. The truth is that not every treatment works on everyone, for known and unknown reasons. The truth is that modern medicine has only been around since around the 1930s.
In science there are useful models and unhelpful models.
Does anyone know what the author means with the citation dates in:
"Bertrand Russell has argued that philosophical (“scientific”, note by the author) inquiry must stay value-free (Russell, 1956, 2007) "
I was somewhat enjoying the article, but hitting these dates attributed to Bertrand Russel (who died in 1970) made me think of these GPT generated essays that manage to look authentic but commit stupid errors. I was then terrified of being fooled by generative text and now I need to be sure before I can keep reading through.
As soon as science become politicized, it becomes rotten to the core. Science is weak because it must analyze all hypothesis, and masses of people can’t study all of them, while little groups of people with powerful decisions will always be perverted by interests.
Traditional societies are lead by traditions, but modern societies are driven by the ideal that science can measure everything. It sounds as stupid as architectural experiments of the 1960ies. As soon as science drives society, it becomes a tool of power, and the one who can pervert science can gain power.
Science has always been driven by power. We tell ourselves it isn't precisely to hold power today and trick ourselves that there is a distinction between science that isn't politicized (which happens to agree with what I think) and science that is politicized (which happens to disagree with what I think). Making this distinction is itself politicizing science.
> The problem arises when truth 2.0 becomes hypertrophic, self-righteous, rigid and unconnected with reality, which marks a transformation into ideology.
Ideology is the always a way of interpreting the Real into the Symbolic. If you don't think you have an ideology, congrats on having the dominate ideology. Ideology allows people to take the incomprehensible Real and distill it into the comprehensible Symbolic. The process itself is naively invisible in daily naive life. So much so, that the obviousness of it is reversed in order to justify the ideological process itself.
The author makes the uncritical assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality. And it's this confusion that is-and-ought are two sides of the same coin.
The whole 1.0 vs 2.0 conceptualization is a red herring based in a reactionary call to simpler times.
nonetheless, to witness the entire cognitive process of the author, as misguided as you find their conclusions, is a positive constructive experience isn't it?
IMO, the main point of the article is to assert that in some fields (medicine and science) this "assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality" is needed, and that to do away with this 'assumption' is 'irrational' and sends one down the path towards authoritarianism.
> this "assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality" is needed, and that to do away with this 'assumption' is 'irrational' and sends one down the path towards authoritarianism.
When you understand that the author is ok with authoritarianism so long as it validates his symbolic universe because it's draped in the fineries of rationalism, the sooner the piece clicks. The author is fine with authoritarianism so long as its his authoritarianism and he doesn't get to call it authoritarianism, he gets to call it reality. To him it is reality and anyone disagreeing with him is denying reality. When we talk about the most insidious delusions, it's his. It's intellectual narcissism. And that's why it's epistemologically vacuous.
Anyone who's studied epistomology knows he's arguing from within a system instead of outside it and it comes across as naive realism because it is.
on the other hand, this same pattern of "authoritarianism" is what we all learn to have when becoming adult members of our societies/cultures: it's an expression of one persons' individual consciousness with the ability to control their own behavior.
this gets weird when projecting our individual consciousness into the systems we construct to rule over ourselves (governments)... better known as our tendency (and capacity) to anthropomorphize anything.
Dude comes out as a bit alarmist but not enough for it to get flagged
In France issues of race have direct outcomes on healthcare, for example there is a very difficult line when recommending medical care based on racial predisposition to medical disorders. For example, communicating that there are elevated rates of sickle cell anemia in blacks, leaves medical professionals struggling for words at the detriment of those groups that would benefit from treatment.
The author had me until half way through, when he started to babble about "Cultural Marxism", revealing the length of his own bias and lack of knowledge outside his own field.
I am honestly concerned about how modern social-media related amplification moralism (aka Cancel Culture) may impact Science in general. Not for the reasons the author claim - at all - though. My perception, and fear, is that the current generation is overly concerned with "feeling good" to the point esoteric pseudocience is taking over important fields like medicine, with stuff like Homeopathy becoming accepted as medical practice in some countries.
The author, however, seems to be simply ranting about science taking a direction he personally does not like, and trying to sugarcoat his own prejudice in citations to credible sources.
There is NUMEROUS scientific evidence that demonstrated over and over again that the LACK of diversity in science has held us back tremendously in many fields, Medicine in particular. Years of experiments made by white men on white men, failing to take into account gender, ethnicity and other types of variations, leading to theories and therapies that only work as intended on white men.
Introducing diversity as a scientific requirement makes sure the very designing of experiments is less biased, as people with different backgrounds participate in the process.
I find it really ironic that people who supposedly understand the importance of variation in experimental samples can't see the importance of variation in experiment t designers.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 90.2 ms ] threadI mean, I’m pretty gullible, even a slight appearance of good faith engagement and I’ll check it out. But this is just too one sided. I guess the title was enough to get my click. I should look into the substack business model, not sure what metrics this kind of article targets.
>Science and medicine have come under attack, mainly from the left, by problematizing their epistemic foundations and achievements. In the past, attacks on science came principally from the right and this may happen again. I have a clear non-partisan standpoint and I am critical of both the right and the left. I am very much in line with the critics of SJI coming from the left (see: Neiman, 2023, forthcoming).
I see both side, but the real problem right now is the bureaucratic intricacies of academia coming from "the left".
Can't a cigar just be a cigar?
Not in 2023, not really.
We have all woken up to the fact that many people stand (and even more have stood) on the world stage pretending to be “simply stating” when the intent has been to push a narrative or give credibility to specific groups.
I’m adding this rebuttal because it’s fresh in my mind: https://youtu.be/WBxAQYmPHDA (starting 42:28). If you don’t like Neil try to listen to the point he’s making and separate it from him. It’s a point worth at least discussing critically: the intent of a statement is integral to the statement itself.
Factual information has the right to be stated, it's the audience's fault if they're not cogent enough to discern bias and malicious intent.
Your position is a plain defense of censorship and forced interpretation of media, not one that promotes media literacy or individual sovereignty to make up one's mind.
For the record I’d much rather everyone be taught to think critically as a baseline but that’s simply not happening and to not call out bias or intentional influence is to be a bystander (something I choose not to do).
If it were just about bodily freedom, nobody would really care. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous. Trans advocacy has very aggressively gone well beyond anything we experienced during the push for LGB equal rights.
We are decades behind because of religious fundamentalists.
Just because you are unaware of the damage doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Biosecurity has nothing to do with politics or religion. Any research needs to adhere to security levels in accordance with its risks. It does not matter if it's Nuclear Power or DNA editing, it must be secure and failures of the security protocols will cause mayhem to people of all political opinions.
China literally allowed unrestricted flights out of China, knowing the pandemic would spread to the World. While at the same testing passengers on domestic flights to prevent local spread. Not Politics?
Also how exactly would you know if the current set of politicians wasn't acting out some pseudo religious motive, like saving the world from environmental Armageddon. Or why would you dismis the possibility of secret societies, when there are plenty of examples at political leaders through out history being parts of cults, or making up their own pseudo religious belief systems.
I had a fantastic discussion about the history of socialism on the African continent here, with one strongly anti-socialist person. And we both had to slap away people who just wanted to dunk on the "other team". It's unfortunate, really.
The main type of science denialism I see is people ignoring the error bars / qualifications on scientific claims. Part of this is done by press offices and the media trying to generate buzz and prestige. Another more cynical group of people do it for profit.
Typically the people I see who cry about censoring of science are the same type of people who cry about free speech when they get banned from a board. If you are a tenured professor you can research pretty much whatever. Just don’t expect a big time journal or conference to broadcast your work if it’s not addressing a “hot” topic. But at the end of the day that’s fine right? We scientists do this for the love of scientific inquiry, not money and status right? /s
And most of those decisions are made in heavily politicized process.
In terms of grants / funding that is more of an economic issue. How do we allocate limited resources? There is a bit of grantsmanship that comes into play here, but that’s the game. The focus on ROI is in no small part a consequence of the numerous hit pieces crying about stuff like, “They spent X dollars on understanding the mating rituals of honey bees!?! Government waste!!!” But I agree that these decisions about what we as a society want to fund are inherently political.
Data access is a little more tricky. I generally take the stance that access is at the pleasure of the data owners / stewards, but they are also bound by the terms of the consent. So there is no small amount of risk that some of the subjects might get mad about how their data is being used and sink the whole ship. And this is probably not a bad thing in my opinion. I take the extreme view that subjects should have more control over their data than they currently have - probably as a reaction against the normalization of surveillance capitalism.
Isn’t that what the article is decrying? “Value Free or Value-laden Science” None of the items listed— especially justice— are intrinsic to science.
0. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belmont_Report
I prefer math where it isn't truth but fact.
Established Truths are generally as close as proof as any statement, scientific or not, may ever be. Episthemologically speaking they ARE proven truths.
In science there are useful models and unhelpful models.
"Bertrand Russell has argued that philosophical (“scientific”, note by the author) inquiry must stay value-free (Russell, 1956, 2007) "
I was somewhat enjoying the article, but hitting these dates attributed to Bertrand Russel (who died in 1970) made me think of these GPT generated essays that manage to look authentic but commit stupid errors. I was then terrified of being fooled by generative text and now I need to be sure before I can keep reading through.
As soon as science become politicized, it becomes rotten to the core. Science is weak because it must analyze all hypothesis, and masses of people can’t study all of them, while little groups of people with powerful decisions will always be perverted by interests.
Traditional societies are lead by traditions, but modern societies are driven by the ideal that science can measure everything. It sounds as stupid as architectural experiments of the 1960ies. As soon as science drives society, it becomes a tool of power, and the one who can pervert science can gain power.
Ideology is the always a way of interpreting the Real into the Symbolic. If you don't think you have an ideology, congrats on having the dominate ideology. Ideology allows people to take the incomprehensible Real and distill it into the comprehensible Symbolic. The process itself is naively invisible in daily naive life. So much so, that the obviousness of it is reversed in order to justify the ideological process itself.
The author makes the uncritical assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality. And it's this confusion that is-and-ought are two sides of the same coin.
The whole 1.0 vs 2.0 conceptualization is a red herring based in a reactionary call to simpler times.
IMO, the main point of the article is to assert that in some fields (medicine and science) this "assumption that his ontological conclusions exist as objective reality" is needed, and that to do away with this 'assumption' is 'irrational' and sends one down the path towards authoritarianism.
This involves more epistemology than usual
When you understand that the author is ok with authoritarianism so long as it validates his symbolic universe because it's draped in the fineries of rationalism, the sooner the piece clicks. The author is fine with authoritarianism so long as its his authoritarianism and he doesn't get to call it authoritarianism, he gets to call it reality. To him it is reality and anyone disagreeing with him is denying reality. When we talk about the most insidious delusions, it's his. It's intellectual narcissism. And that's why it's epistemologically vacuous.
Anyone who's studied epistomology knows he's arguing from within a system instead of outside it and it comes across as naive realism because it is.
this gets weird when projecting our individual consciousness into the systems we construct to rule over ourselves (governments)... better known as our tendency (and capacity) to anthropomorphize anything.
And no, authoritarianism is not synonymous with the social contract. Sorry. Maybe in some minds, but no.
In France issues of race have direct outcomes on healthcare, for example there is a very difficult line when recommending medical care based on racial predisposition to medical disorders. For example, communicating that there are elevated rates of sickle cell anemia in blacks, leaves medical professionals struggling for words at the detriment of those groups that would benefit from treatment.
I am honestly concerned about how modern social-media related amplification moralism (aka Cancel Culture) may impact Science in general. Not for the reasons the author claim - at all - though. My perception, and fear, is that the current generation is overly concerned with "feeling good" to the point esoteric pseudocience is taking over important fields like medicine, with stuff like Homeopathy becoming accepted as medical practice in some countries.
The author, however, seems to be simply ranting about science taking a direction he personally does not like, and trying to sugarcoat his own prejudice in citations to credible sources.
There is NUMEROUS scientific evidence that demonstrated over and over again that the LACK of diversity in science has held us back tremendously in many fields, Medicine in particular. Years of experiments made by white men on white men, failing to take into account gender, ethnicity and other types of variations, leading to theories and therapies that only work as intended on white men.
Introducing diversity as a scientific requirement makes sure the very designing of experiments is less biased, as people with different backgrounds participate in the process.
I find it really ironic that people who supposedly understand the importance of variation in experimental samples can't see the importance of variation in experiment t designers.