It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself. We started out with the well and good ability of science and engineering to understand some things and produce revolutionary useful goods. Now it seems like other fields where such principles aren't really applicable have attempted to borrow the trappings of science in order to co-opt the trust that people have given it. The only time a phrase like "trust the science" starts to seem necessary is when this scheme has been found out, and somebody is trying to preserve it.
Many of the big society-level issues that we grapple with are more properly questions of economics than science. It's more about how we choose to value various courses of action and potential consequences against each other, and there's rarely a clear, obvious, or simple answer. "Science" can only give us an estimate of what the results of a particular course of action might be, it cannot compare once against another and tell us with certainty which one is better.
"Trust the science" is usually a rhetorical weapon used by a side that is attempting to show one particular potential outcome as the worst thing imaginable that must be avoided at all costs, but in reality there are rarely things that bad. I'd like to have a world where we can look at the actual science and economic costs of all choices and rationally debate exactly which road to take, but it sure feels like we're only moving further away from that world.
Yes, I completely agree. The reason this is very disheartening to me is because I believe the thing that is really special and awesome about science as a discipline is that it teaches people how to critically evaluate and weigh evidence in support of a hypothesis. So instead of teaching people how to be good critical thinkers (and, especially in this day and age, ascertain whether a particular source of evidence should be trusted and what the potential biases that source may have), "trust the science" has been turned into a pretty empty appeal to authority.
This has been pretty evident in the past year when the experts have often been wrong, or at least pushed their opinions in a way that wasn't really supported by the underlying evidence ("the public doesn't need to wear masks" back in March is a good example). It actually wasn't really that hard to dig in to the underlying evidence, assess the validity of that evidence, and make up your mind for yourself.
While it wasn't that hard, general public does not know where to even look for primary or even preliminary evidence. Much less how to evaluate the densely written papers.
So in the end it is reliant on science communicators, and there is enough people who are either bad at it, fake it or altogether evil and misrepresenting scientific evidence for it to fail.
You always will have some authority needed as you have to be able to read really well and a lot of practice with the specific field to handle the outputs of science.
yah, who knew how limited the utility of masks were until we tried it en masse? or the unreasonable effectiveness of distancing indoors around familiars, even without a mask? crazy, isn't it?
There is some danger in publicly adopting a "science has become religion" position. Just as "trust the science" can be used as a rhetorical weapon, "science has become another religion" can be too .. and usually to more dangerous effect because a lot of what is essentially known bullshit (see https://www.callingbullshit.org) gets accommodated by the latter compared to the former.
There are reasonable accepted empirical approaches in accepted use today. Any team that follows these methods and reports honestly can be trusted more than a team that doesn't.
Also "trust" is a loaded word .. but mostly we just mean "predictability" - ex: to "trust someone" means to be sure that if you know what they've said, you can predict what they'll do. Much of empirical science is about offering up data and models that aid such predictability, so declaring "trust the science is extinct" is an outright rejection of these empirical methods (ex: randomised control trials) that have taken a long time to mature and take root as standard practice.
What is needed though is to be able to separate the science from policy making. As Dietrich Dörner has shown in "The Logic of Failure" [1], folks in the hard sciences don't fare very well when policy making in systems with complex causally interconnected parts is tasked upon them due to learnt heuristics that don't fare well in that world.
Let science do its thing - which is inform and educate. Let policies be made by those with more full understanding of the system into which changes need to be effected.
> There are reasonable accepted empirical approaches in accepted use today. Any team that follows these methods and reports honestly can be trusted more than a team that doesn't.
The underlying problem isn't actually a problem with science, it's a problem with politics.
You need to hire some scientists to do your experiments. If they follow the scientific method, you get results using the best system we know how.
But if they follow the scientific method then the Republicans work to defund climate science research and the Democrats work to cancel any scientist whose results challenge the orthodoxy on race or gender.
And if politics interferes then it's not science anymore. If research leading to politically inconvenient results has its funding withdrawn or scientists are intimidated into self-censorship then it's all just selection bias and fudging the numbers.
Maybe what we need is to do something like the court system, where you have multiple research funding "judges" which have lifetime appointments and each get a given amount of research money to dole out every year, and their job is to decide how to spend it. Then they can spend it however they like and can only be removed for e.g. corruption, not for funding research somebody doesn't like.
At the beginning (early March 2020) we were told that the lockdowns would last for at most a month or two, in order to "flatten the curve", at least that's what "science" was telling us. I know I believed in that, even though I'm no scientist.
One year on and that "prophecy" (because that's what that was, just a prophecy) turned out to be pretty damn false. Nevertheless, we still let the people/scientists who deceived us back in March 2020 to take "science"-based decisions that will affect the lives of hundreds of millions going forward. Nobody will be held responsible, apart from a few politicians.
>Let science do its thing - which is inform and educate. Let policies be made by those with more full understanding of the system into which changes need to be effected.
But what about when scientists collaborate with the policy-makers to shape public perception about how to inform and educate people?
One prime example is last years long and detailed study on how there was no "gay gene". In effect, homosexual activity and inclinations could not be shown to be the result of any specific gene expression after many trials and searches for such.
The scientists, worried about how this result would look to the public, worked with LGBTQ advocacy groups to shape how the paper would be released to the media and explained to the public[1].
Now, a sizable portion in HN's demographic will feel this is all well and good, but how far should this go? The uncomfortable truth here is that people are not "born gay" as we have been told so often. And that has been a very important talking point in the past two decades when debating about gay rights. Many people were convinced to support gay rights for this reason alone (however we might feel about that, it's true). They very well may feel duped by scientists and no longer "trust the science". How far should scientists go to shield the public from uncomfortable truths? And how much will the public continue to trust them when such veiling of the truth is made known to them?
> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself
I think this is true but I doubt it's anything new. I think the fundamental similarity between religious belief and "trusting the science" is the psychological simplicity of delegation to authority, and probably a deep seated property of the human mind.
Not knowing the right answer to questions we deem important, or worse the mental state of doubting what we've been raised to consider foundational and "obvious", is just too uncomfortable for the majority of people (I would've said all people, but I can't be sure).
True, but the problem is that religion can not be questioned, changed or reasoned with in any meaningful way. Science can. If we lose this distinction between the 2, then we just end up with a new religion with more modern priests.
I think that in science there is an inherent tension between what scientists know and what what the public knows.
Scientific knowledge is covered in asterisks. To read and understand science typically requires an extensive amount of background knowledge; without that it is very easy to misinterpret the strength, significance, or applicability of a scientific finding. Many of the asterisks are themselves scientific conclusions with their own set of asterisks.
The public, at least in areas which are not immediately relevant to daily life, cannot be assumed to have that background knowledge. Therefore, the tension is essentially this: How can scientists make people aware of (or interested in) scientific knowledge if they have to strip out all the asterisks when talking to them?
Making science into a catechism is simply one solution to the above problem. Ignore the asterisks and turn the fundamental findings of physics and chemistry into dogma and dispense it as gospel truth. I actually am somewhat o.k. with this. Sure, Joe Public might come away with an over-simplified and over-confident knowledge about what science says, but I think that a clumsy knowledge of scientific facts is better than the impression that scientific knowledge is arcane and out of reach. After all, it is highly unlikely that Joey P. will find himself in a situation where it is very important for him to really understand all the subtleties behind his k-8 scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is likely to come in handy.
The only problems with the science-as-religion solution are a potential "loss of faith" and the perception of arbitrarity with regards to scientific findings. The first can easily happen when someone learns about a new finding which contradicts the dogmatic version of science but is entirely consistent with the heavily asterisked actual scientific consensus. The second problem is basically "rejectability;" if people think that science is a set of arbitrary rules, then they are free to reject them the same way they would reject other religions.
>Joe Public might come away with an over-simplified and over-confident knowledge about what science says, but I think that a clumsy knowledge of scientific facts is better than the impression that scientific knowledge is arcane and out of reach.
This seems like a false dilemma. Joe Public is as capable of reading a paper on sci-hub as anyone else. It would probably do everyone a bit of good if JP were more likely to do that when he's wondering what to do about the aphids in his garden, or read a patent relevant to his mechanics business, or assess the evidence around masks during a pandemic. And I think it's the idea that science needs to be dumbed down for a certain kind of person that keeps ordinary people from digging into the asterisks when things are relevant to what they're doing. Executive summaries are useful when something isn't very relevant, which is most of science for most people. But some science is relevant to everyone, and it would be good if we challenged the myth that one needs to belong to some kind of separate class in order to practice science. Science is for everyone. No one can know all of it, but everyone will come to a point where they'd benefit from knowing some of it.
I think falling for the Science as religion trap is a bad choice in the long run.
Why not Math as a religion, dumb down complex problems, if it's wrong for the common Joe, it's okay cause he wouldn't understand it anyway.. not a good strategy.. I think if Science has a knowledge management problem, that should be addressed rather than dumbing down of things for public consumption.
I find it rather unfortunate that this comment is the top comment, because I think the "science is like a religion" is both misleading and a strategy to dismiss evidence which don't align with ones ideological views (which is a very human reaction to be fair and it takes conscious effort to avoid, speaking from my own experience). As you acknowledge the scientific method has given completely new technology (I find your choice of words "revolutionary useful goods" a bit weird, as if the only purpose of science was to produce new goods).
You're setting up a bit of a straw man that science can not tell us with certainty what is the better course of action. Stating that science can give answers with absolute certainty is a stark misunderstanding of the scientific process (something alluded to in the article). However, trusting the (scientific) evidence (what is typically meant when people use "trust the science") can very definitely guide our decision making process. People typically bring up "trust the science" when proposals are being rejected based on some "ideological" reasoning.
To give a more concrete example, in the discussion about universal basic income, one of the main counterarguments is that people will just stop working. The answer to that counterargument is "trust the science", because every study made, has found that in fact people don't just stop working. Now one might still reject the concept of UBI for various other reasons, but this should be underpinned by evidence based arguments, not saying that the side which says trust the science (evidence) is treating it like a religion.
When people use the term "trust the science" what they typically mean is "trust the (scientific) evidence" and yes that is what we should be doing, even outside the "technological fields". The "trust the science" argument is often made when people reject an
Socio-economic science is rife of p-hacking. The vast majority of those studies are not reproducible. Your argument would be stronger if you'd choose a different example. I would assume that most studies on UBI are done by strong supporters of it which introduces enough subconscious bias to make them problematic.
In the medical area (testing medications) history is full of wrong studies either by negligence or just by greed.
"Trust the science" is never a good argument as being to general. I'd trust most of the science in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Apart from those there are too many shenanigans.
Did the participants receive enough money to maintain their current standard of living? Was the UBI granted for life or just for a few years? If it was granted for life, did the participants fear that the program might be ended prematurely? Did they keep working to be a role model for their children, who might never receive UBI? Did the participants even have a job to begin with? A study can give only unemployed people UBI and if the participants don't seek employment, the unemployment rate doesn't change, and your conclusion drawn from this fact is all wrong.
> one of the main counterarguments is that people will just stop working
One of the main counterarguments to the universal basic income is that napkin math does not work out. You don't even need to get the "science" involved, just relatively simple algebra. Humanity does not have the resources for the majority of the population to receive benefits out of thin air. And no, $3200 AMZN is not really a resource most people would feel comfortable surviving on, unless they can exchange it for something of an actual value.
p.s. the Amazon bit is related to the "let's divide the wealth of the billionaires and we all will live happily ever after" mantra.
Using the "trust the science" line on UBI studies is a perfect example of the abuse of the phrase.
> To give a more concrete example, in the discussion about universal basic income, one of the main counterarguments is that people will just stop working. The answer to that counterargument is "trust the science", because every study made, has found that in fact people don't just stop working.
In literally every study ever done, the UBI substitute was not permanent. Studies of the impacts of a temporary stipend do not logically transfer to a permanent stipend. If you get a source of income that will stop in three years, it makes perfect sense to use that income to prepare yourself for life after the income. If you get a source of income that has been guaranteed for life, you've got a completely different set of incentives and there is no reason to assume that studies of temporary stipends apply.
I think people would stop working, but it might not be so terrible. Maybe all the "bullshit" jobs would disappear and people would have more time for community activities, volunteering, youth work actions, political engagement, art, culture...and maybe even science?
In all these discussions we forget that science is “created” by humans and thus just as fallible as humans are.
“Trust in science or “because science” are just ways to shut down discussion or lines on inquiry that dare question the existing narrative.
Don’t believe me? Here’s an example.
Have you ever wondered, just hypothetically, if the Covid outbreak may have had any relation to the bio research lab located in Wuhan?
Well, you can’t wonder about that. If you do, being called a conspiracy theorist is the nicest thing anyone will say about you. If you think this is a good thing then you’ll be in for a rude awakening hen you happen to find yourself on the wrong side of the “scientific” debate.
Real science is not without it's problems but, in general, nothing comes close to it for producing trustworthy and useful results.
There is plenty of pseudoscience masquerading as science unfortunately. A good book to read on this is Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". A significant portion of the book is devoted to what Sagan calls a "Baloney detection kit" that he thinks everyone should have. If more people could accurately distinguish science from pseudoscience, the world might be a better place.
My personal pick for pseudoscience that is routinely given credence by the general public is nutritional studies. Any study that says an oddly specific food (e.g. blueberries) is a "superfood" is probably baloney. Producers of that food probably got together and funded a study that, surprise, says what they produce is good to eat! Why aren't other berries just as good? What about berries vs other fruit? What is in blueberries that is not present in other berries?
The thing about nutritional studies is that they're so hard to do properly that virtually nobody does. If you wanted to find out which foods are genuinely healthy you'd need a large sample size of people willing to have their diets and activities micro-managed in a way that would make most people rebel. You could probably do a decent study if you had enough money, but nobody is willing to foot the bill. The only people with skin in the game (e.g. blueberry producers) have no interest in a study that puts blueberries fairly in their place amongst a plethora of other foods.
My crazy prediction is that, sometime in the next century or two, we're actually going to become interested enough in optimizing healthy bodies that governments will start funding real scientific studies on nutrition, exercise, etc.. The crap that's out there today is going to be seen as utter quackery, albeit with some nuggets of truth mixed in almost by random chance.
Knowing what is science and what is pseudoscience is a science itself. To take a trivial example, consider the climate change topic. Read a couple randomly chosen papers and if you’re unlucky, you might come out of it thinking global warming isn’t real. (Remember, papers like that do exist and although they are a minority, random number generation doesn’t know about that.) How do you know if the papers you read are a representative sample? How do you know the papers that are published are a representative sample? It boils down to some disturbing epistemological conclusions. You can use metastudies, but then the metastudies could have the same problem, or worse, might not exist. (In my experience they usually don’t.)
> other fields where such principles aren't really applicable
Statistics and reasoning are almost always applicable, and that's the extent science is applied to most fields.
If you want people to act in an evidence-based way without invoking trust/faith, they need to understand statistics and be able to evaluate studies on their statistical merit. Unfortunately that's quite difficult and the educational systems we have do a poor job of teaching it.
To build on that, most scientists* are also terrible at statistics.
Perhaps more controversially, I also don't think statistics in general is a particularly rigorous or well-founded field. Where there is any analysis at all in the field - that is, very rarely - it provides guarantees only with hefty assumptions and in the limit. I'm fine with that from a theoretical perspective, but practitioners of all stripes seem to assume that with real world phenomena, the data either satisfy the assumptions or, more defensibly, don't violate the assumptions by enough to invalidate the results.
I don't know about others, but I see real-world datasets all the time that wildly invalidate the assumptions of common regression analysis, to take just one example.
To reign this little rant back into a well-formed comment, perhaps my summary is "everything and everyone is wrong, almost all the time, and I'm not quite sure how to fix that."
It looks like the author of that article isn't too clear on the matter either, since there's a fundamental arithmetic error leading to a self-contradictory claim halfway through the article.
> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself.
This might be because there is very, very little scientific thinking in the general population. People like doctors who, due to their education, should have scientific thinking, no longer can be trusted to have this scientific thinking. Instead of approaching issues with a scientific attitude, the resort to "trust me, I'm a doctor".
Scientific thinking, at its core, is just "things might not be how you think they are". It is a type of skepticism about your own thinking and a reliance, or trust, on a set of processes that have been proven to produce useful epistemic truths. A good example of this is the Monty Hall problem where loss aversion would make most people pick the suboptimal solution. The Cognitive Bias Codex [1] documents a lot of these cognitive biases.
So, the way to move forward is to fix the education process so that this kind of thinking is inculcated into most children by age 12.
>> Many of the big society-level issues that we grapple with are more properly questions of economics than science.
I would add that resolving those issues should involve engineers because they try to design solutions that take reality into account. To often solutions from politics and government are based on hope and intent. Sometimes they dont even care about money, principles or goals.
That ignores the understanding problem of power struggle for resources between those that have a lot and those that don't. It assumes all actors have intentions for the "common good". The system is the way it is because it works for someone, it just seems broken to you because you are not the beneficiary..
The problem with blindindly "believing the science" is that with enough money you can get scientific results that push a certain narrative. We are learning now that most of the anti-fat dietician push was sponsored by sugary drink companies. Likewise we are learning that a lot of "clean air" research is sponsored by fossil fuel companies. What current research will we learn about 10-20 years from now that it was mostly sponsored by a party with a commercial interest?
Thankfully there are a few places on the internet where a statement about not having faith in Science is not automatically blasphemous. Everytime I see "TRUST SCIENCE" - I picture a customer for quantum healing crystals.
I have faith in religion. Science my friend stands on that other line there where everything has to be proven. That is the strength of science. If it tries to get in the religion line where I need to put faith and belief it's no longer Science.
Science is where almost nothing is proven. Most findings are mutable, preliminary and incomplete.
Engineering is where things are proven, by building things using or that are proving scientific findings. For example, Randomized Controlled Trials are one of the final engineering steps for drugs, with partial engineering step being chemistry and process chemistry. Similar steps should be done but are often omitted for social sciences.
The exception to this is pure mathematics.
Example from biology: you found some fun cellular process model description. Fine, now you have to mess with it using engineering to prove it actually works in the way you described, is not missing crucial steps and so on.
This for example happened a lot in gerontology - studies of aging. People latching on to small pieces of mechanism which actually are not very relevant or actionable.
Examples from physics are machines that use physics theories, such as quantum communication devices, particle colliders, clocks or nanostructured devices.
Examples from chemistry are evaluations of synthesis processes step by step by introducing various process changes.
Analysis is rather on the side, as without engineering first you cannot really proceed with it.
The part about religion reminds me of an excerpt from the "circular reasoning" wikipedia article.
"-"using the scientific method to judge the scientific method is circular reasoning". Scientists attempt to discover the laws of nature and to predict what will happen in the future, based on those laws. However, per David Hume's problem of induction, science cannot be proven inductively by empirical evidence, and thus science cannot be proven scientifically." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning
Humans are hard-wired to be religious, and in the absence of a well-structured religion, most people will default to poorly-constructed religions like secular state scientism. This doesn't apply to everyone, but I think it applies to at least 80% of the population.
i think it's more like all human brains need heuristics to process the vast amount of data in the universe. the best heuristics come in the form of grand narratives, such as traditional religions, historical materialism, transhumanism, or whatever works for each brain.
> It feels to me like "science" has become something of a religion unto itself.
People like Jacques Ellul had been warning us about that for at least five or six decades now, I guess that's how long it takes from an idea first being "caught" as actually "existing" (for lack of a better word) to becoming so prevalent as to be very easily observable.
I'd also very highly recommend the works of Ulrich Beck [1], well, his "Risk Society" to be more precise, to quote wikipedia: "Risk society is the manner in which modern society organizes in response to risk" [2]. It is a book written in the mid '80s, right before Chernobyl, and recently other people have (re-)discovered him too, like in this "Foreign Policy" article [3] from last August.
Agreed. The most visible manifestation of this is that I've recently noticed is the phrase, "wear the mask." Not the message, but the phrase. You see, it's not an ordinary English construction like "wear a mask" is. So when I see people saying it, I can be pretty sure that it was copy-pasted word-for-word as a slogan, not the expression of an original thought. I don't have an issue with the message, but it bugs me because it's such a visible example of people just repeating something. Most of the people saying to "trust the science" haven't read any more of it than the people saying not to or peddling conspiracy theories.
And of course, there is no "the science". "The science" for decades said that fat was bad and carbs were fine. There was other science that said otherwise, but that's what "the science" said. Same with tobacco and many other things. And people believed them, because they just "trusted the science" instead of doing their own reading. The most scientific thing one can do is to always view something with skepticism and subject evidence to harsh scrutiny. There is a reason that things as well-established as evolution and relativity are still theories.
Sometimes, the "science" is wrong. Everything from low-fat diets, to high sodium diets, to DDT, to MSG. Many of the things that we have literally been indoctrinated with have been fully wrong.
Most recently, when the government, most especially the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work. That infuriated me and they instantly lost credibility with me. And it caused a split in Americans where too many believed that masks didn't work, even after they changed their tune. It was absolutely unnecessary to lie and it killed people.
So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
> But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
I don't see that being very practical. The average person simply isn't qualified to read scientific literature and draw their own conclusions. I doubt I'd be able to make much sense of a research paper on virology or epidemiology, despite that I consider myself scientifically literate in the general sense.
The answer is to have credible communicators of science. The best way to do that is with credible institutions. If the assumption is that this is impossible, the game is already lost.
> the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work. That infuriated me and they instantly lost credibility with me. And it caused a split in Americans where too many believed that masks didn't work, even after they changed their tune. It was absolutely unnecessary to lie and it killed people.
Broadly agree, although I think anti-mask sentiments are due to mindless partisanship rather than listening to Fauci's early lie.
> The average person simply isn't qualified to read scientific literature and draw their own conclusions.
Reading the scientific literature is still "trusting the science".
Are we replicating experiments to see for ourselves if the data is correct? Are we re-working the error calculations to make sure the statistical evaluation is correct? Are we studying the topic so we're informed enough to identify poor work as well as the peer reviewers?
> ... even Fauci, told people that masks don't work.
So, this troubles me.
One thing about science, of course, is that you need to be certain of your measuring equipment, and of your observations.
I cannot find any evidence that Fauci ever said that "masks don't work".
I have found:
* Late Feb: "at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis"
* March 8th: "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask"
* March 8th: "When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face"
* March: "Right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks … You should think of healthcare providers who are needing them and the people who are ill."
I see:
* ~"No need to panic at this time" (Feb)
* ~"Masks do not confer perfect protection, make sure to use them correctly, social distancing is still required" (Mar)
* ~"Reserve PPE (e.g. N95 masks) for the people who need it most" (Mar)
And shortly after this time, his recommendation changed to strongly recommending masks, when three critical things changed: asymptomatic spread was established, PPE supplies were beginning to stabilize, and testing determined that cloth masks are roughly as effective as surgical masks (not N95 masks).
All of those statements and decisions strike me as reasonable, from a spokesperson for public health in that time frame.
My memory of last spring is that masks were not recommended for the general public, but the clear message was that they do work, otherwise they would not be recommended for health workers.
I do not ever remember any non-political health professionals saying that masks do not work. So it troubles me to see it repeated ad nauseam that Fauci said such a thing.
"When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face"
What do you think is being communicated here? It makes you feel better, but there are unintended consequences is worse than they don't work, it is saying they are worse than nothing. Around the same time the Surgeon General more explicitly said they don't work.
“They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Which was an absurd statement at the time - if they are not effective for the public, why would health care providers need them.
As I've not been commuting for a couple of years, I am way behind in my podcasts. Just this weekend, I listened to the March 10, 2020 episode of "Naked Scientists" (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/), a British radio science show from Cambridge. Chris Smith, a virologist, (https://www.thenakedscientists.com/users/chris-smith), at that time, said to buy beer rather than masks; you'll enjoy the beer and it'll protect you as well as a mask.
His concerns were that (1) cloth masks wouldn't help, and (2) that wearing masks incorrectly wouldn't help either. He was wrong about (1), but (2) is still a problem.
I'm sure I'll have opportunity to provide updates as I get further along. :-)
The Nature podcast didn't get on the mask bandwagon until early June, when they had an interview on the effectiveness of masks in this specific case.
No one I've seen has said that medical masks don't work.
Maybe the population wouldn't have to reserve N95 masks for medical personnel if:
* the production hadn't been outsourced to China which then decided to ban exports while also accepting the PPE donations of other countries
* the government would have noticed that there's a pandemic brewing, and instead of saying "nothing to see here" would have ramped up PPE production or at least procured PPE from the market.
* failing all of the above, at least instituted an export stop so that the remaining PPE wouldn't have been bought from under their noses.
But yes, when one fails so utterly, one has to end up begging the people to work against their own interests with predictable results.
And yes, Fauci and the surgeon general lied. Nothing ambiguous about it, even if they were trying to save PPE for medical personnel.
saying that masks work, is a tad simplistic. there are many types of masks, and while they have their benefits there is plenty of evidence that mask wearing has not inhibited the virus from spreading in the population. there is little evidence that the casual masks that are being worn have significantly reduce the risk of exposure.
fauci was well justified when he said before that mask wearing isn't the solution to this pandemic, but now any nuanced discussion is not tolerated, which, perhaps, is the reason people aren't trusting the science. another reason is that politicians are making arbitrary decisions claiming it is what science (facts and data) told them to do.
Science is always wrong to begin with and it gets close to a correct answer with iteration. It’s actually not at all a solved problem how to communicate “science” to the public. Your comment is a perfect example of one of these annoying fallacies I see around covid messaging. Don’t you think they “changed their tune” because they got better data that showed that masks are helpful? You seem mad that they couldn’t conjure clinical data in early 2020 that showed that masks cut the transmission by X%
To go one level deeper, I feel your comment exhibits a fallacy as well.
Sure, science progresses over time. It's fallacious to say that science is wrong because we used to think the sun revolved around the earth. Evidence evolved, ideas changed.
But dismissing all instances of scientists changing their mind, when they really just lied, as "oh, evidence evolved" is the kind of thing that (I feel) erodes trust in science.
I think the evidence is strong that advice against masks was a lie meant to prevent panic, not honestly communicated "best we could do at the time" science. A lie with good intent for overall public health, but dishonest nonetheless.
Evidence is nice, but sometimes it makes sense to reason from known principles. SARS-CoV-2 was known to spread through respiratory droplets almost from the beginning. Particulate respirators are known to protect people against respiratory droplets. Surgical masks are routinely used for source control of respiratory droplets in surgical settings. A mask recommendation made a lot of sense, even before there was data suggesting they were specifically helpful against SARS-CoV-2.
In general, I think you are right. In this case, the person involved admitted in an interview with "The Street" 6/12/2020 that it was to keep the supply for healthcare workers.
> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
> Most recently, when the government, most especially the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work.
They said that mask don't work in preventing you from contracting covid. This holds up to this day. As early as February, Fauci was saying that he was discouraging masks because he wanted make sure there were enough for healthcare workers and sick people, but people are acting like it was a secret agenda. I think that people are deliberately misinterpreting Fauci's words, so that they can blame someone besides themselves or their own social circle for the pandemic. People completely ignored stay at home orders and social distancing. Masks are only meant as a last resort if you have no other choice.
Having closely followed the mask discussion, they lied, plain and simple. Maybe they didn't specifically use a certain wording, but the aim was clear - discourage people from wearing any masks.
And N95+/FFP2+ masks work at protecting one from the virus, why else would medical personnel wear them? They work even when not worn perfectly.
Of course many are being purposefully obtuse and call those "respirators" in order to muddy the waters and don't even consider them to be masks, even if one wears them on their face and breathes through them. Those so-called respirators are high-quality masks, that's all there is to it.
> So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
This is not feasible advice. I can't read studies and correctly interpret and summarize them in every area of science which could affect my day-to-day decisions. That's insane.
We need to work on improving the trust of our scientific institutions, so that we can continue living our lives and focusing our efforts on our specializations. This may involve changing the institutions themselves to fix legitimate issues (like the funding fiasco), addressing misunderstandings by the public that also contribute to mistrust, etc.
There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As with many issues of our day, the challenge will be in disciplined focus on the issues themselves and what changes we should make to address them, instead of surrendering to tribal bickering.
This is not feasible advice. I can't read studies and correctly interpret and summarize them in every area of science which could affect my day-to-day decisions. That's insane.
But if you wanted to study something out and make your own decision, you should be free to do so.
I think nutrition is a great example. Despite decades of research, there appears to be no one single answer as to what constitutes a healthy diet, or what the most important aspects of a healthy diet are.
As an individual, you have lots of choices, including eating whatever you want with no particular dietary plan at all. But if you want to read a book or read research papers and change your diet, you can.
> We need to work on improving the trust of our scientific institutions, so that we can continue living our lives and focusing our efforts on our specializations.
Putting it that way is putting the cart before the horse. Our institutions need to become more trustworthy, then we'll be able to trust them more. Even then, I suspect a certain level of scepticism is needed to keep them honest.
> So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
For most people, even educated people, they are more likely to hold correct beliefs by listening to experts blindly than investigating papers themselves. Sometimes experts are wrong. But experts are wrong way less often than laypeople. A culture of a bunch of inexpert youtubers reading papers and convincing people of medical advice is perilous.
Scientific knowledge is _always_ wrong in a strict sense. Every law, every theory has a confidence interval attached. Every measurement, an error bar. Sometimes that confidence interval is really, really big, like our model of how gravity works when things aren't too big or moving too fast. Sometimes those error bars are really, really big, like how we though non-HEPA masks wouldn't really help prevent the spread of a novel airborne virus, so more conservative pandemic mitigations were necessary to prevent unnecessary deaths. The good news is that the scientific process emphasizes and incentivizes increasing those confidence intervals and reducing errors (but never eliminating them—that's impossible). We know a lot more now than we did this time last year. It's why we have not just one but several safe and effective vaccines, for example.
> It's why we have not just one but several safe and effective vaccines, for example.
Well, if I were to follow your skeptical line of thinking, I'd say that vaccines are never safe/effective, they simply have a confidence interval attached to them. Furthermore, vaccines made using novel processes have no long term data. Its never this simple :)
You see, we can't really apply such logic to every day decisions. The 'error bar' you referred to is of little benefit here, and also subject to the same skepticism. Its useful when you know a high percentage of the the variables, and all the mechanisms where data can be wrong/insufficient, etc. But you can't know that when you know so little of the pathogen. Its turtles all the way down :)
Also, HEPA masks cannot filter out COVID-19 (~ 100nm). HEPA filters, or sterile filters in general are roughly around 0.2um (200nm).
I think it only really became a debate once a popular idea spread around saying that wearing a mask is to protect others from yourself. Before that, mask wearing seemed a little bit selfish or paranoid, but that idea turned it into a moral action. And morals give people a feeling of rightousness in judging others and fighting against them. Then when people start fighting, others find themselves in the position of enemy so they fight back out of indignation.
Well, this is how you get anti-vaxxers as well...don't listen to the experts blindly and do your own "research". Most of the population lacks the skills (as evidenced by general math scores) to make even a partially informed judgment if they were to do their own "research"...
Science is a process. I repeat: science is a process. It is not a collection of special knowledge. It is not "truth". It is not the opinion of some expert or group of experts. Science is a process.
I get so sick of people talking about "trusting science". What they always seem to mean is "trusting some specific scientist or group of scientists". At this point I'm inherently cynical regarding anyone who claims to have "science" on their side.
Science is a process for establishing trust in an idea. It is a process for evaluating theories. It is a process for creating evidence. Science is a process.
The notion of what science exactly is, and how to use it isn't even taught in schools. (Stuff like Popper's falsification techniques)
As a result people find that the only way they can verify information is through appealing to authority, which of cause manipulates them to their own will.
Yes, but ... there are degrees of trustworthiness. Results in physics tend to be very trustworthy and can withstand time well. On the other end of the spectrum, there are academic disciplines that have little more to offer than opinions. And there's a lot in between. You can only trust a discipline to the degree it has shown to be trustworthy.
That, of course, says nothing about trusting individuals or daring new hypotheses, which is what the article seems to address rather pointlessly, with some hand-waiving, and avoiding the difficult issues: you might want to apply the proposals to physics, precisely because it is so trustworthy, but probably not to the other disciplines.
What worries me the most is when people use the phrase "a majority of experts agree that..." and imply that is the absolute truth. It's not.
A majority of experts, in their day, agreed that the sun is rotating around the earth. A majority of experts agreed that time and space are absolute. And since it's trendy these days to declare absolute medical truths, a majority of experts agreed that disease is caused by imbalances of bodily fluids and that bloodletting is the cure to any disease.
Prediction of phenomena in a repeatable fashion is the hallmark of all good science.
Very few of what pass for sciences today in our world, save for the sciences of chemistry and large parts of physics, have achieved such precision of prediction in the laws they have been able to come up with to describe the universe.
Parts of Medicine largely fit the bill but other parts aren't yet that far along.
Psychology and psychiatry are at best a crap shoot and do not have solutions that work for all, in a repeatable fashion.
Economics and social "sciences" are at best a set of theories with varying degrees of merit or applicability but are mostly a set of opinions and authorities who like to argue with each other about their own pet theory.
It's amazing how far humanity has come thanks to the advance of true science but it's important to not forget we have a long ways to go still.
You say that but the fact that dark patterns in games, apps, websites, and advertising are so effective would seem to contradict this. Also, a psychiatrist is an MD and completely different that a psychologist who usually has a PhD and is actually running experiments. That said, psychology does have a repeatability problem for sure. The sheer volume of papers submitted is so much noise that picking out the signal is a hard problem with no good solution at the moment.
Science is about the idea that ideas are tested by experiment (or more generally, some objective empirical validation ). Economics, while traditionally a scene of some combination of occasional mathematical rigor combined with ideological opinion, has as of late been going through an empirical renaissance of late. Economics is changing.
Sure, it's not quite correct -- what he actually proposed was injecting bleach, which is even worse.
You can watch the entire press conference here [1]. The relevant portion, starting at 27:04, is:
-----
Bill Bryan:
We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids and I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes. Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing. Just spraying it on and leaving it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster ...
Donald Trump:
A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.
-----
This matches my recollection of what was being reported at the time. The fact check you linked to is about a claim by Joe Biden, not a media report.
"A Cedars-Sinai research team is in the pre-clinical stages of developing a technology that harnesses intermittent ultraviolet (UV) A light for treating viruses and bacteria."
I wonder why you posted that, since it shows him clearly not proposing injecting bleach. That quote shows him wondering if there is some way some disinfectant can be injected into the bloodstream to destroy the virus, and that it would be interesting for doctors to look into that. He was obviously told that UV light is a disinfectant that has been used to directly treat blood (which is true).
I really dislike Trump, but I feel like I end up defending him quite often against people who are just completely uncharitable in their interpretations of everything he's ever said or done.
There is no such thing as "the science". Science doesn't say anything, people say thing. You don't follow science, you follow what some people said in their research. The world needs to understand that science is nothing but a set of guidelines/principles to discover knowledge and it is up-to the people to follow them properly or cut corners and let their biases take over.
Science tells us what is true, it does not tell us what to do about it. What to do is up to people - we need to get together and look at the situation and the trade-offs and agree on a way forward. 'Trust the science' is a lame excuse for not engaging with the discussion.
Science is a process for inspecting and then describing phenomenon. It does not say what is true, it only does its best to accurately and meticulously describe reality. It does not, and can not, know if it has missed something, or if the things it has described will be changed by nature tomorrow and invalidate everything that went before. The results of the scientific process are always provisional and subject to revision.
We need to be humble about what science can actually achieve. Yes, it's the absolute best humans can do given the limitations of our senses and no signed contract from the universe to always behave as it did yesterday. But we need to stop treating the "facts" it produces as divine revelation that we can beat the congregation into submission with.
‘Trusting the Science’ is mostly used by people who can’t write a line of code in python or figure out basics of linear algebra. It is scientism not science, just cherry picking theories to support politicised narratives
Also, consensus science is BS. If it's science, there does not need to be any consensus for something to be true. It's not like science is evaluated democratically. Unless, of course, the science says something nobody likes to admit is true.
Well what if the science is still developing and is extremely complex and the predictive models require petabytes of data and supercomputers and expert interpretation? Like, say, with climate change. Doesn't seem like there's an easy way for an individual scientist to take in all that info and make accurate predictions. Hence groups of scientists reach a "consensus" of what the current best interpretation of the complexity is. The consensus might still be wrong, but at least it signals "all the experts are currently thinking the data means X, Y, Z"
> Well what if the science is still developing and is extremely complex and the predictive models require petabytes of data and supercomputers and expert interpretation?
Then the public and policymakers should be aware that there isn't a consensus. If there are question marks about a lot of points of detail, then we can't just average everyone and then be confident in the result of that.
The scientific consensus is so that the guy who doesn't want to know the details can see what most experts believe. That's a perfectly reasonable way to develop knowledge if you weight it correctly. It's like when I want a TV, I want it to be big enough and show a nice enough picture. I just go to Wirecutter. I don't go buy and return a bunch of TVs till I'm content. That's because I've only got 80 years on this Earth.
No one who uses first principles experiments for anything is capable of forming higher-level hypotheses. Heck, I've never even really formally tested if rain causes the roads to be wet.
Readit News
Many of the big society-level issues that we grapple with are more properly questions of economics than science. It's more about how we choose to value various courses of action and potential consequences against each other, and there's rarely a clear, obvious, or simple answer. "Science" can only give us an estimate of what the results of a particular course of action might be, it cannot compare once against another and tell us with certainty which one is better.
"Trust the science" is usually a rhetorical weapon used by a side that is attempting to show one particular potential outcome as the worst thing imaginable that must be avoided at all costs, but in reality there are rarely things that bad. I'd like to have a world where we can look at the actual science and economic costs of all choices and rationally debate exactly which road to take, but it sure feels like we're only moving further away from that world.
This has been pretty evident in the past year when the experts have often been wrong, or at least pushed their opinions in a way that wasn't really supported by the underlying evidence ("the public doesn't need to wear masks" back in March is a good example). It actually wasn't really that hard to dig in to the underlying evidence, assess the validity of that evidence, and make up your mind for yourself.
So in the end it is reliant on science communicators, and there is enough people who are either bad at it, fake it or altogether evil and misrepresenting scientific evidence for it to fail.
You always will have some authority needed as you have to be able to read really well and a lot of practice with the specific field to handle the outputs of science.
science is hard; human behavior is even harder.
There are reasonable accepted empirical approaches in accepted use today. Any team that follows these methods and reports honestly can be trusted more than a team that doesn't.
Also "trust" is a loaded word .. but mostly we just mean "predictability" - ex: to "trust someone" means to be sure that if you know what they've said, you can predict what they'll do. Much of empirical science is about offering up data and models that aid such predictability, so declaring "trust the science is extinct" is an outright rejection of these empirical methods (ex: randomised control trials) that have taken a long time to mature and take root as standard practice.
What is needed though is to be able to separate the science from policy making. As Dietrich Dörner has shown in "The Logic of Failure" [1], folks in the hard sciences don't fare very well when policy making in systems with complex causally interconnected parts is tasked upon them due to learnt heuristics that don't fare well in that world.
Let science do its thing - which is inform and educate. Let policies be made by those with more full understanding of the system into which changes need to be effected.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Logic-Failure-Recognizing-Avoiding-Si...
The underlying problem isn't actually a problem with science, it's a problem with politics.
You need to hire some scientists to do your experiments. If they follow the scientific method, you get results using the best system we know how.
But if they follow the scientific method then the Republicans work to defund climate science research and the Democrats work to cancel any scientist whose results challenge the orthodoxy on race or gender.
And if politics interferes then it's not science anymore. If research leading to politically inconvenient results has its funding withdrawn or scientists are intimidated into self-censorship then it's all just selection bias and fudging the numbers.
Maybe what we need is to do something like the court system, where you have multiple research funding "judges" which have lifetime appointments and each get a given amount of research money to dole out every year, and their job is to decide how to spend it. Then they can spend it however they like and can only be removed for e.g. corruption, not for funding research somebody doesn't like.
One year on and that "prophecy" (because that's what that was, just a prophecy) turned out to be pretty damn false. Nevertheless, we still let the people/scientists who deceived us back in March 2020 to take "science"-based decisions that will affect the lives of hundreds of millions going forward. Nobody will be held responsible, apart from a few politicians.
But what about when scientists collaborate with the policy-makers to shape public perception about how to inform and educate people?
One prime example is last years long and detailed study on how there was no "gay gene". In effect, homosexual activity and inclinations could not be shown to be the result of any specific gene expression after many trials and searches for such.
The scientists, worried about how this result would look to the public, worked with LGBTQ advocacy groups to shape how the paper would be released to the media and explained to the public[1].
Now, a sizable portion in HN's demographic will feel this is all well and good, but how far should this go? The uncomfortable truth here is that people are not "born gay" as we have been told so often. And that has been a very important talking point in the past two decades when debating about gay rights. Many people were convinced to support gay rights for this reason alone (however we might feel about that, it's true). They very well may feel duped by scientists and no longer "trust the science". How far should scientists go to shield the public from uncomfortable truths? And how much will the public continue to trust them when such veiling of the truth is made known to them?
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02585-6
I think this is true but I doubt it's anything new. I think the fundamental similarity between religious belief and "trusting the science" is the psychological simplicity of delegation to authority, and probably a deep seated property of the human mind.
Not knowing the right answer to questions we deem important, or worse the mental state of doubting what we've been raised to consider foundational and "obvious", is just too uncomfortable for the majority of people (I would've said all people, but I can't be sure).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9209761
I think that in science there is an inherent tension between what scientists know and what what the public knows.
Scientific knowledge is covered in asterisks. To read and understand science typically requires an extensive amount of background knowledge; without that it is very easy to misinterpret the strength, significance, or applicability of a scientific finding. Many of the asterisks are themselves scientific conclusions with their own set of asterisks.
The public, at least in areas which are not immediately relevant to daily life, cannot be assumed to have that background knowledge. Therefore, the tension is essentially this: How can scientists make people aware of (or interested in) scientific knowledge if they have to strip out all the asterisks when talking to them?
Making science into a catechism is simply one solution to the above problem. Ignore the asterisks and turn the fundamental findings of physics and chemistry into dogma and dispense it as gospel truth. I actually am somewhat o.k. with this. Sure, Joe Public might come away with an over-simplified and over-confident knowledge about what science says, but I think that a clumsy knowledge of scientific facts is better than the impression that scientific knowledge is arcane and out of reach. After all, it is highly unlikely that Joey P. will find himself in a situation where it is very important for him to really understand all the subtleties behind his k-8 scientific knowledge, but that knowledge is likely to come in handy.
The only problems with the science-as-religion solution are a potential "loss of faith" and the perception of arbitrarity with regards to scientific findings. The first can easily happen when someone learns about a new finding which contradicts the dogmatic version of science but is entirely consistent with the heavily asterisked actual scientific consensus. The second problem is basically "rejectability;" if people think that science is a set of arbitrary rules, then they are free to reject them the same way they would reject other religions.
This seems like a false dilemma. Joe Public is as capable of reading a paper on sci-hub as anyone else. It would probably do everyone a bit of good if JP were more likely to do that when he's wondering what to do about the aphids in his garden, or read a patent relevant to his mechanics business, or assess the evidence around masks during a pandemic. And I think it's the idea that science needs to be dumbed down for a certain kind of person that keeps ordinary people from digging into the asterisks when things are relevant to what they're doing. Executive summaries are useful when something isn't very relevant, which is most of science for most people. But some science is relevant to everyone, and it would be good if we challenged the myth that one needs to belong to some kind of separate class in order to practice science. Science is for everyone. No one can know all of it, but everyone will come to a point where they'd benefit from knowing some of it.
Why not Math as a religion, dumb down complex problems, if it's wrong for the common Joe, it's okay cause he wouldn't understand it anyway.. not a good strategy.. I think if Science has a knowledge management problem, that should be addressed rather than dumbing down of things for public consumption.
You're setting up a bit of a straw man that science can not tell us with certainty what is the better course of action. Stating that science can give answers with absolute certainty is a stark misunderstanding of the scientific process (something alluded to in the article). However, trusting the (scientific) evidence (what is typically meant when people use "trust the science") can very definitely guide our decision making process. People typically bring up "trust the science" when proposals are being rejected based on some "ideological" reasoning.
To give a more concrete example, in the discussion about universal basic income, one of the main counterarguments is that people will just stop working. The answer to that counterargument is "trust the science", because every study made, has found that in fact people don't just stop working. Now one might still reject the concept of UBI for various other reasons, but this should be underpinned by evidence based arguments, not saying that the side which says trust the science (evidence) is treating it like a religion.
When people use the term "trust the science" what they typically mean is "trust the (scientific) evidence" and yes that is what we should be doing, even outside the "technological fields". The "trust the science" argument is often made when people reject an
In the medical area (testing medications) history is full of wrong studies either by negligence or just by greed.
"Trust the science" is never a good argument as being to general. I'd trust most of the science in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Apart from those there are too many shenanigans.
Did the participants receive enough money to maintain their current standard of living? Was the UBI granted for life or just for a few years? If it was granted for life, did the participants fear that the program might be ended prematurely? Did they keep working to be a role model for their children, who might never receive UBI? Did the participants even have a job to begin with? A study can give only unemployed people UBI and if the participants don't seek employment, the unemployment rate doesn't change, and your conclusion drawn from this fact is all wrong.
One of the main counterarguments to the universal basic income is that napkin math does not work out. You don't even need to get the "science" involved, just relatively simple algebra. Humanity does not have the resources for the majority of the population to receive benefits out of thin air. And no, $3200 AMZN is not really a resource most people would feel comfortable surviving on, unless they can exchange it for something of an actual value.
p.s. the Amazon bit is related to the "let's divide the wealth of the billionaires and we all will live happily ever after" mantra.
> To give a more concrete example, in the discussion about universal basic income, one of the main counterarguments is that people will just stop working. The answer to that counterargument is "trust the science", because every study made, has found that in fact people don't just stop working.
In literally every study ever done, the UBI substitute was not permanent. Studies of the impacts of a temporary stipend do not logically transfer to a permanent stipend. If you get a source of income that will stop in three years, it makes perfect sense to use that income to prepare yourself for life after the income. If you get a source of income that has been guaranteed for life, you've got a completely different set of incentives and there is no reason to assume that studies of temporary stipends apply.
“Trust in science or “because science” are just ways to shut down discussion or lines on inquiry that dare question the existing narrative.
Don’t believe me? Here’s an example.
Have you ever wondered, just hypothetically, if the Covid outbreak may have had any relation to the bio research lab located in Wuhan?
Well, you can’t wonder about that. If you do, being called a conspiracy theorist is the nicest thing anyone will say about you. If you think this is a good thing then you’ll be in for a rude awakening hen you happen to find yourself on the wrong side of the “scientific” debate.
There is plenty of pseudoscience masquerading as science unfortunately. A good book to read on this is Carl Sagan's "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". A significant portion of the book is devoted to what Sagan calls a "Baloney detection kit" that he thinks everyone should have. If more people could accurately distinguish science from pseudoscience, the world might be a better place.
My personal pick for pseudoscience that is routinely given credence by the general public is nutritional studies. Any study that says an oddly specific food (e.g. blueberries) is a "superfood" is probably baloney. Producers of that food probably got together and funded a study that, surprise, says what they produce is good to eat! Why aren't other berries just as good? What about berries vs other fruit? What is in blueberries that is not present in other berries?
The thing about nutritional studies is that they're so hard to do properly that virtually nobody does. If you wanted to find out which foods are genuinely healthy you'd need a large sample size of people willing to have their diets and activities micro-managed in a way that would make most people rebel. You could probably do a decent study if you had enough money, but nobody is willing to foot the bill. The only people with skin in the game (e.g. blueberry producers) have no interest in a study that puts blueberries fairly in their place amongst a plethora of other foods.
My crazy prediction is that, sometime in the next century or two, we're actually going to become interested enough in optimizing healthy bodies that governments will start funding real scientific studies on nutrition, exercise, etc.. The crap that's out there today is going to be seen as utter quackery, albeit with some nuggets of truth mixed in almost by random chance.
Dead Comment
Statistics and reasoning are almost always applicable, and that's the extent science is applied to most fields.
If you want people to act in an evidence-based way without invoking trust/faith, they need to understand statistics and be able to evaluate studies on their statistical merit. Unfortunately that's quite difficult and the educational systems we have do a poor job of teaching it.
Statistics is subtle. For example, "It turns out, most doctors don’t know actually know probability." https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2014/11/12/doctors-dont-k...
Perhaps more controversially, I also don't think statistics in general is a particularly rigorous or well-founded field. Where there is any analysis at all in the field - that is, very rarely - it provides guarantees only with hefty assumptions and in the limit. I'm fine with that from a theoretical perspective, but practitioners of all stripes seem to assume that with real world phenomena, the data either satisfy the assumptions or, more defensibly, don't violate the assumptions by enough to invalidate the results.
I don't know about others, but I see real-world datasets all the time that wildly invalidate the assumptions of common regression analysis, to take just one example.
To reign this little rant back into a well-formed comment, perhaps my summary is "everything and everyone is wrong, almost all the time, and I'm not quite sure how to fix that."
* In my personal experience.
This might be because there is very, very little scientific thinking in the general population. People like doctors who, due to their education, should have scientific thinking, no longer can be trusted to have this scientific thinking. Instead of approaching issues with a scientific attitude, the resort to "trust me, I'm a doctor".
Scientific thinking, at its core, is just "things might not be how you think they are". It is a type of skepticism about your own thinking and a reliance, or trust, on a set of processes that have been proven to produce useful epistemic truths. A good example of this is the Monty Hall problem where loss aversion would make most people pick the suboptimal solution. The Cognitive Bias Codex [1] documents a lot of these cognitive biases.
So, the way to move forward is to fix the education process so that this kind of thinking is inculcated into most children by age 12.
[1] - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Cognitiv...
I would add that resolving those issues should involve engineers because they try to design solutions that take reality into account. To often solutions from politics and government are based on hope and intent. Sometimes they dont even care about money, principles or goals.
And in that light:
Both science and economics are used broadly and brutally to justify a biases.
Both are ignored for their ability to measure, and used to shout over disagreements instead.
May we use both for more nuanced conversations, instead of less.
Popper, K. (1978). Natural selection and the emergence of mind. Dialectica, 339-355.
I have faith in religion. Science my friend stands on that other line there where everything has to be proven. That is the strength of science. If it tries to get in the religion line where I need to put faith and belief it's no longer Science.
Engineering is where things are proven, by building things using or that are proving scientific findings. For example, Randomized Controlled Trials are one of the final engineering steps for drugs, with partial engineering step being chemistry and process chemistry. Similar steps should be done but are often omitted for social sciences.
The exception to this is pure mathematics.
Example from biology: you found some fun cellular process model description. Fine, now you have to mess with it using engineering to prove it actually works in the way you described, is not missing crucial steps and so on. This for example happened a lot in gerontology - studies of aging. People latching on to small pieces of mechanism which actually are not very relevant or actionable.
Examples from physics are machines that use physics theories, such as quantum communication devices, particle colliders, clocks or nanostructured devices.
Examples from chemistry are evaluations of synthesis processes step by step by introducing various process changes.
Analysis is rather on the side, as without engineering first you cannot really proceed with it.
"-"using the scientific method to judge the scientific method is circular reasoning". Scientists attempt to discover the laws of nature and to predict what will happen in the future, based on those laws. However, per David Hume's problem of induction, science cannot be proven inductively by empirical evidence, and thus science cannot be proven scientifically." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reasoning
See:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism
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People like Jacques Ellul had been warning us about that for at least five or six decades now, I guess that's how long it takes from an idea first being "caught" as actually "existing" (for lack of a better word) to becoming so prevalent as to be very easily observable.
I'd also very highly recommend the works of Ulrich Beck [1], well, his "Risk Society" to be more precise, to quote wikipedia: "Risk society is the manner in which modern society organizes in response to risk" [2]. It is a book written in the mid '80s, right before Chernobyl, and recently other people have (re-)discovered him too, like in this "Foreign Policy" article [3] from last August.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulrich_Beck
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_society
[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/08/01/the-sociologist-who-cou...
And of course, there is no "the science". "The science" for decades said that fat was bad and carbs were fine. There was other science that said otherwise, but that's what "the science" said. Same with tobacco and many other things. And people believed them, because they just "trusted the science" instead of doing their own reading. The most scientific thing one can do is to always view something with skepticism and subject evidence to harsh scrutiny. There is a reason that things as well-established as evolution and relativity are still theories.
I like Murray Rothbard's take on this "scientism", and would recommend his writings. https://mises.org/library/mantle-science
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Most recently, when the government, most especially the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work. That infuriated me and they instantly lost credibility with me. And it caused a split in Americans where too many believed that masks didn't work, even after they changed their tune. It was absolutely unnecessary to lie and it killed people.
So read the science. Listen to the science. But read up further, and make educated decisions. Don't just listen to "experts" blindly.
I don't see that being very practical. The average person simply isn't qualified to read scientific literature and draw their own conclusions. I doubt I'd be able to make much sense of a research paper on virology or epidemiology, despite that I consider myself scientifically literate in the general sense.
The answer is to have credible communicators of science. The best way to do that is with credible institutions. If the assumption is that this is impossible, the game is already lost.
> the Surgeon General and even Fauci, told people that masks don't work. That infuriated me and they instantly lost credibility with me. And it caused a split in Americans where too many believed that masks didn't work, even after they changed their tune. It was absolutely unnecessary to lie and it killed people.
Broadly agree, although I think anti-mask sentiments are due to mindless partisanship rather than listening to Fauci's early lie.
Reading the scientific literature is still "trusting the science".
Are we replicating experiments to see for ourselves if the data is correct? Are we re-working the error calculations to make sure the statistical evaluation is correct? Are we studying the topic so we're informed enough to identify poor work as well as the peer reviewers?
I believe the answer to these questions is "no".
On the other hand, the separate disciplines are more and more specialized and complex, so then I agree 100% that communication (translation) is key.
Lastly, "mindless partisanship" may be the cause, but is also an effect of other longer/subtler trends in media-tech, culture, education, etc.
So, this troubles me.
One thing about science, of course, is that you need to be certain of your measuring equipment, and of your observations.
I cannot find any evidence that Fauci ever said that "masks don't work".
I have found:
* Late Feb: "at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis"
* March 8th: "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask"
* March 8th: "When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences — people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face"
* March: "Right now in the United States people should not be walking around with masks … You should think of healthcare providers who are needing them and the people who are ill."
I see:
* ~"No need to panic at this time" (Feb)
* ~"Masks do not confer perfect protection, make sure to use them correctly, social distancing is still required" (Mar)
* ~"Reserve PPE (e.g. N95 masks) for the people who need it most" (Mar)
And shortly after this time, his recommendation changed to strongly recommending masks, when three critical things changed: asymptomatic spread was established, PPE supplies were beginning to stabilize, and testing determined that cloth masks are roughly as effective as surgical masks (not N95 masks).
All of those statements and decisions strike me as reasonable, from a spokesperson for public health in that time frame.
My memory of last spring is that masks were not recommended for the general public, but the clear message was that they do work, otherwise they would not be recommended for health workers.
I do not ever remember any non-political health professionals saying that masks do not work. So it troubles me to see it repeated ad nauseam that Fauci said such a thing.
If I have missed something, please help me out.
What do you think is being communicated here? It makes you feel better, but there are unintended consequences is worse than they don't work, it is saying they are worse than nothing. Around the same time the Surgeon General more explicitly said they don't work.
“They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if health care providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Which was an absurd statement at the time - if they are not effective for the public, why would health care providers need them.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-n95-fa...
His concerns were that (1) cloth masks wouldn't help, and (2) that wearing masks incorrectly wouldn't help either. He was wrong about (1), but (2) is still a problem.
I'm sure I'll have opportunity to provide updates as I get further along. :-)
The Nature podcast didn't get on the mask bandwagon until early June, when they had an interview on the effectiveness of masks in this specific case.
No one I've seen has said that medical masks don't work.
* the production hadn't been outsourced to China which then decided to ban exports while also accepting the PPE donations of other countries
* the government would have noticed that there's a pandemic brewing, and instead of saying "nothing to see here" would have ramped up PPE production or at least procured PPE from the market.
* failing all of the above, at least instituted an export stop so that the remaining PPE wouldn't have been bought from under their noses.
But yes, when one fails so utterly, one has to end up begging the people to work against their own interests with predictable results.
And yes, Fauci and the surgeon general lied. Nothing ambiguous about it, even if they were trying to save PPE for medical personnel.
fauci was well justified when he said before that mask wearing isn't the solution to this pandemic, but now any nuanced discussion is not tolerated, which, perhaps, is the reason people aren't trusting the science. another reason is that politicians are making arbitrary decisions claiming it is what science (facts and data) told them to do.
Sure, science progresses over time. It's fallacious to say that science is wrong because we used to think the sun revolved around the earth. Evidence evolved, ideas changed.
But dismissing all instances of scientists changing their mind, when they really just lied, as "oh, evidence evolved" is the kind of thing that (I feel) erodes trust in science.
I think the evidence is strong that advice against masks was a lie meant to prevent panic, not honestly communicated "best we could do at the time" science. A lie with good intent for overall public health, but dishonest nonetheless.
> "Well, the reason for that is that we were concerned the public health community, and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply. And we wanted to make sure that the people namely, the health care workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who you know were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
They said that mask don't work in preventing you from contracting covid. This holds up to this day. As early as February, Fauci was saying that he was discouraging masks because he wanted make sure there were enough for healthcare workers and sick people, but people are acting like it was a secret agenda. I think that people are deliberately misinterpreting Fauci's words, so that they can blame someone besides themselves or their own social circle for the pandemic. People completely ignored stay at home orders and social distancing. Masks are only meant as a last resort if you have no other choice.
And N95+/FFP2+ masks work at protecting one from the virus, why else would medical personnel wear them? They work even when not worn perfectly.
Of course many are being purposefully obtuse and call those "respirators" in order to muddy the waters and don't even consider them to be masks, even if one wears them on their face and breathes through them. Those so-called respirators are high-quality masks, that's all there is to it.
This is not feasible advice. I can't read studies and correctly interpret and summarize them in every area of science which could affect my day-to-day decisions. That's insane.
We need to work on improving the trust of our scientific institutions, so that we can continue living our lives and focusing our efforts on our specializations. This may involve changing the institutions themselves to fix legitimate issues (like the funding fiasco), addressing misunderstandings by the public that also contribute to mistrust, etc.
There's no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As with many issues of our day, the challenge will be in disciplined focus on the issues themselves and what changes we should make to address them, instead of surrendering to tribal bickering.
But if you wanted to study something out and make your own decision, you should be free to do so.
I think nutrition is a great example. Despite decades of research, there appears to be no one single answer as to what constitutes a healthy diet, or what the most important aspects of a healthy diet are.
Low-calorie? Low-carb? Dairy-free? Meat-free? Low-sodium? Low-fat? High-fat?
As an individual, you have lots of choices, including eating whatever you want with no particular dietary plan at all. But if you want to read a book or read research papers and change your diet, you can.
Putting it that way is putting the cart before the horse. Our institutions need to become more trustworthy, then we'll be able to trust them more. Even then, I suspect a certain level of scepticism is needed to keep them honest.
For most people, even educated people, they are more likely to hold correct beliefs by listening to experts blindly than investigating papers themselves. Sometimes experts are wrong. But experts are wrong way less often than laypeople. A culture of a bunch of inexpert youtubers reading papers and convincing people of medical advice is perilous.
Well, if I were to follow your skeptical line of thinking, I'd say that vaccines are never safe/effective, they simply have a confidence interval attached to them. Furthermore, vaccines made using novel processes have no long term data. Its never this simple :)
You see, we can't really apply such logic to every day decisions. The 'error bar' you referred to is of little benefit here, and also subject to the same skepticism. Its useful when you know a high percentage of the the variables, and all the mechanisms where data can be wrong/insufficient, etc. But you can't know that when you know so little of the pathogen. Its turtles all the way down :)
Also, HEPA masks cannot filter out COVID-19 (~ 100nm). HEPA filters, or sterile filters in general are roughly around 0.2um (200nm).
(source: works in biotech on vaccines)
There is a reason surgeons wear masks in operating theaters.
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I get so sick of people talking about "trusting science". What they always seem to mean is "trusting some specific scientist or group of scientists". At this point I'm inherently cynical regarding anyone who claims to have "science" on their side.
Science is a process for establishing trust in an idea. It is a process for evaluating theories. It is a process for creating evidence. Science is a process.
The notion of what science exactly is, and how to use it isn't even taught in schools. (Stuff like Popper's falsification techniques)
As a result people find that the only way they can verify information is through appealing to authority, which of cause manipulates them to their own will.
That, of course, says nothing about trusting individuals or daring new hypotheses, which is what the article seems to address rather pointlessly, with some hand-waiving, and avoiding the difficult issues: you might want to apply the proposals to physics, precisely because it is so trustworthy, but probably not to the other disciplines.
A majority of experts, in their day, agreed that the sun is rotating around the earth. A majority of experts agreed that time and space are absolute. And since it's trendy these days to declare absolute medical truths, a majority of experts agreed that disease is caused by imbalances of bodily fluids and that bloodletting is the cure to any disease.
Very few of what pass for sciences today in our world, save for the sciences of chemistry and large parts of physics, have achieved such precision of prediction in the laws they have been able to come up with to describe the universe.
Parts of Medicine largely fit the bill but other parts aren't yet that far along.
Psychology and psychiatry are at best a crap shoot and do not have solutions that work for all, in a repeatable fashion.
Economics and social "sciences" are at best a set of theories with varying degrees of merit or applicability but are mostly a set of opinions and authorities who like to argue with each other about their own pet theory.
It's amazing how far humanity has come thanks to the advance of true science but it's important to not forget we have a long ways to go still.
speaking of trust. here's a PSA for those, who like myself, had trusted the media and thought that happened:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/jul/11/joe-biden/...
If you believe that he's telling you to drink bleach is up to you, but some people certainly did, and tried it.
You can watch the entire press conference here [1]. The relevant portion, starting at 27:04, is:
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Bill Bryan: We’re also testing disinfectants readily available. We’ve tested bleach, we’ve tested isopropyl alcohol on the virus specifically in saliva or in respiratory fluids and I can tell you that bleach will kill the virus in five minutes. Isopropyl alcohol will kill the virus in 30 seconds and that’s with no manipulation, no rubbing. Just spraying it on and leaving it go. You rub it and it goes away even faster ...
Donald Trump: A question that probably some of you are thinking of if you’re totally into that world, which I find to be very interesting. So, supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light, and I think you said that hasn’t been checked, but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that too. Sounds interesting, right? And then I see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in one minute. And is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside or almost a cleaning because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that so that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.
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This matches my recollection of what was being reported at the time. The fact check you linked to is about a claim by Joe Biden, not a media report.
[1] https://youtu.be/YqsGjWNXB2M
https://www.cedars-sinai.org/newsroom/cedars-sinai-statement...
I really dislike Trump, but I feel like I end up defending him quite often against people who are just completely uncharitable in their interpretations of everything he's ever said or done.
We need to be humble about what science can actually achieve. Yes, it's the absolute best humans can do given the limitations of our senses and no signed contract from the universe to always behave as it did yesterday. But we need to stop treating the "facts" it produces as divine revelation that we can beat the congregation into submission with.
Then the public and policymakers should be aware that there isn't a consensus. If there are question marks about a lot of points of detail, then we can't just average everyone and then be confident in the result of that.
No one who uses first principles experiments for anything is capable of forming higher-level hypotheses. Heck, I've never even really formally tested if rain causes the roads to be wet.