The problem is when we fully defer to scientists on things that are beyond their area of expertise. For instance, while an epidemiologist can provide valuable guidance on measures that could reduce the spread of a virus, they might not be equipped to assess the broader implications of these measures on aspects like the economy, child development, or mental health. Similarly, a climate scientist can project temperature changes for the coming century, but determining the comprehensive impact of these changes on human societies or conducting a cost-benefit analysis of various measures
to mitigate it might be outside their domain.
No one is looking to people who do weather modeling for policy advice. They do occasionally ask economists, but then generally ignore their advice due to being politically unpopular.
I suspect you greatly over-estimate how much politicians listened to epidemiologists during covid as well. A lot of decisions were more out of desire to be seen to be doing something, because the voters went to them and essentially demanded they do something.
"Policy makers", aka the government, should be weighing actions depending on their outcomes as projected by expert consensus.
That weighing should be to optimize according to a pre-defined value system, which of course is a matter of political deliberation.
To prefer personal interests (like not to have to wear a mask) over common interests (to protect against pandemic effects) incurs the negative consequences irrespective of whether one pretends to know better than the experts.
To let others play dumb and act against society is to be dumb yourself.
One could theoretically show comprehensively that individual freedoms reduce economic output and decrease average life span, and that would still not be an argument to restrict them.
I don’t think we need experts, we need polymaths, people who are sufficiently good enough not in one thing, but in multiple things and work at the intersection of the information needed to make proper decisions.
Fortunately, expertise is not limited to a single concrete topic. There are experts in climate change from a socio-economic perspective, which are able to do science in such complex environments :)
If such experts existed, centrally planned economies would work wonderfully. Unfortunately, they don't. For sufficiently complex problems, the knowledge is diffuse across a wide range of individuals and there is no one expert we can turn to. That's why debate, and tolerating dissent, is important.
Who are these “policy makers” and how did they come to power?
I believe the leadership in the major blocs(the U.S.A, EU, China) are not doing a great job running the planet.
In most of the western (so called) democracies, the “policy makers” primary skill is being put on a ballot for a political party, by the party leadership, frequently not the most qualified people to rule a country.
Crucially, popular referendums should be held, often and the more radical proposals the more important it is to have the popular support.
Rather than do their job of balancing competing priorities, many of the elected policy makers handed the keys over to a bunch of insane public health officials. In many places said unelected, unaccountable public health officials had the authority to enact all kinds of crazy crap. That’s why many blue state cities continued to have mask mandates, vaccine mandates and more well into the three year mark.
If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that technocracy is a horrible form of government. If “heath-care experts” were given the chance, I fully imagine us still playing covid theater to this day.
> For instance, while an epidemiologist can provide valuable guidance on measures that could reduce the spread of a virus, they might not be equipped to assess the broader implications of these measures on aspects like the economy, child development, or mental health
Amen to that. Some / most of them seemingly had little grasp of the the concept of cost / benefit analysis. And we let these jackasses (some, not all of them) drive the bus!
I don't agree anyone let scientists drive the bus. Scientists advised and the responsibility of balancing that advise against factors such as the economy was entirely the responsibility politicians and leaders.
> Some / most of them seemingly had little grasp of the the concept of cost / benefit analysis
Massive economic impact from social distancing vs massive economic impact from mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system. Those are your choices lol.
This is not the problem. The problem is that thinking in terms of these distinct subject matter is at the very heart of the problem. Reality doesn't have a clear divide between different subjects.
You can start from anywhere and build knowledge from there, there is no faculty that gaurantees some knowledge being objective. There is only conjecture and criticism.
i can't think of a better mechanism of dissent than to be more accepting of people outside of their domain trying to make claims on something they're not an expert on. even if its wrong, it can still get people thinking from a different perspective.
If we had made significant investments in CO2 reduction a decade or two earlier when scientists told us the full range of future effects, we would be in a much better position than we are today. Whoever is selling you this “comprehensive impact” nonsense lied to you so they could continue using the atmosphere as a dumping ground.
The GP comment is objectively true. Most climatologists study the climate, rather than the economics of climate intervention. “Climatologists agree that global warming is real” is them speaking within their area of expertise, “Climatologists agree that an investment in solar panels is worth the cost” is laundering their authority from one area into a superficially similar one. The fact that solar panels are worth the cost doesn’t impact this argument
However, since climatologists are much smarter than the average person, I would still rather that the average person defer to climatologists on almost any issue (regardless of what it has to do with the climate)
The problem is that "scientific dissident" is a meaningless term. You _must_ be a dissident to be a scientist. If you already believe you know everything, then there's no need to engage in the process of experimentation, recording, and ultimately discovery. As Feynman put it, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
"The science is settled" is a marketing term put forward by administrations that wish to manipulate the will of it's citizens. It's an inappropriate idea from an inappropriate place with inappropriate ends.
> As Feynman put it, "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."
The lived experience of a recent Nobel prize winner is illustrative here.
> In April 1982, Shechtman spotted an odd atomic arrangement through his electron microscope at Johns Hopkins University: A crystal of aluminum and manganese arranged with pentagonal symmetry. It was thought to be impossible — five sides do not a perfectly repeatable structure make. The laws of nature held that the atoms in a solid could be arranged in an amorphous, blob-like pattern, or organized with symmetrical periodicity into crystals. Shechtman saw something that fit neither category.
You would think a scientist holding physical proof from an electron microscope that atoms can arrange themselves in a way that had not been previously recognized would be able to share the discovery without being targeted by the "experts".
> He told his colleagues what he’d seen and they laughed him off, he said in an interview earlier this year. He was eventually asked to leave his research group for “bringing disgrace” to its members, he told the Ha’aretz in April.
Two years later, he finally published his findings, yet the skepticism remained — and it remained bitter, as the AFP explains it. The famous American chemist Linus Pauling once declared at a conference: “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists”.
Nope. He was attacked by world famous scientific "experts" including a double Nobel laureate and fired from his job, despite presenting proof that what he was reporting was real.
I believe appropriate skepticism is part of being a skilled scientist, being a dissident is part of being a noisy scientist. These two do not always correlate with each other.
That said, standing up when it is right is a good thing. But the above is similar to reasoning that I hear from a more anarchic political view, and I do not generally agree with that way of handling issues or doing science.
No. There are still so, so many things left that humanity doesn't even have an idea about what exists... submarine life is probably the largest of the uncharted territories. Or simple QA - repeating and reproducing the discoveries of others to uncover missing data, incomplete documentation or unthought-of implicit dependencies (e.g. barometric pressure, effects of gravity or magnetic field). For all of that, you don't need to be a "dissident" in whatever meaning of the word.
I think there's a pretty big difference between "this is what our knowledge of medicine and most experts in the field are telling us to do now and it's the best answer we have so we're going to do it until the consensus in the medical community changes" and "the science is settled". Nobody was trying to manipulate the "will of the citizens". Everyone in the medical and public health field was trying to prevent mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system to the best of their ability using the knowledge they had. Not being able to discredit random morons commenting on the situation with absolutely no expertise is an insane take.
> "The science is settled" is a marketing term put forward by administrations that wish to manipulate the will of it's citizens.
Especially those citizens who follow sheep-like behind a Media Personality who happens to believe that vaccines will make you a magnetic zombie from beyond the stars and give all your chakras autism of the turbo-cancer.
> That’s the whole point of science: it’s constantly evolving.
I think the point is actually to get a high degree of epistemic rigor, and when you see science "evolving", it's actually because the epistemic rigor in that field wasn't very good in the first place.
Physics hasn't really "evolved" very much in the way medical "science" has. It's developed, but it's never needed to totally contradict itself. QM and SR are refinements on classical mechanics, not rebuttals.
Indeed this is the case. The timing was unfortunate in that the pandemic hit during the absolute lowest point in trust of public institutions and bad faith actors stepped into the void to take advantage of that.
In terms of covid specifically, experts did what they typically do for high mortality diseases e.g. ebola, SARS where the mortality is high and the only course of action is to seal an area and let it burn through the population but at least contain it. That turned out to be the direct opposite course of action needed.
It’s a bit more than them starting with a random default playbook for serious disease outbreaks. They started with the playbook for this specific virus family! “Covid” is a synonym for SARS-CoV-2. It’s not that surprising that experts would start with the set of procedures that had successfully contained and eliminated SARS-CoV-1. It didn’t work in the case of v2, but I have trouble seeing why it’s a bad starting point to start with what actually worked in practice to stop v1.
It’s sort of interesting to me that the partisan politics on this have flipped from the early days though. Early on, Bill DeBlasio (at the time, NYC’s left-ish mayor) was against cancelling anything or imposing any travel restrictions, even telling people it was racist to avoid Chinese New Year or St Patrick’s Day celebrations, and xenophobic to ask for restrictions on travel. The NY conservative media were very critical of his decisions to let those events move forward and called for travel bans and event cancellations to stop the virus. Fast-forward a bit and they had each adopted the other side’s positions.
An issue I had, having been previously quite familiar with the literature on the 2003 variant of COVID, is that the government manifestly ignored many of the scientific findings of that earlier outbreak for political reasons.
It would have been great if they leaned on the science from the 2003 version of the disease, but they didn’t and some of the policies made no sense in light of that prior literature.
Early on it made sense and we were told the lock-down would be a couple of weeks. Those couple of weeks stretched for years and that's why there was a switch when it was obvious lock-downs didn't work but were still imposed.
Ultimately, the key learning was the CDC and other federal agencies will propagate misinformation knowingly and intentionally for their perceived public health reasons. I'm no stranger to massive state restrictions of individual rights when fighting infectious diseases. DOTS and friends are an effective means of fighting TB. But intentionally misinforming crosses a line since it makes the organization untrustworthy.
Irrespective of whether masks work or not, the state apparatus chose to go with the message that they don't for the reason that they wanted to preserve supply for healthcare workers.
I had a supply of N95 masks from earlier preparation for forest fires that I gave to healthcare workers here in SF. In future, I shall not donate like this. It is clear that every man is an island and the agencies set up to inform us believe they must control us through deceit instead.
That is weird, just one of many weird things around the whole COVID spectacle.
Also weird: that we don't do any serious post-incident analysis so we can harden procedures and institutions in case a really big problem knocks on our door someday.
There's something suspicious about this planet if you ask me.
> That turned out to be the direct opposite course of action needed.
I wonder, in hindsight, what would have been the better course of action.
Taiwan did that and their mortality and contagion rate is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. Same goes for Japan. Hell, even most European countries have a lower mortality rate than the US. All of these countries have also a higher population density than the US.
> Taiwan did that and their mortality and contagion rate is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. Same goes for Japan.
This is simply not true. I don’t care how much the data gets massaged to align with the narrative. It’s a lie. Misinformation, really. Which is par for course when it comes to covid.
The countries the tried to contain it until we had vaccines to protect vulnerable populations had far lower mortality rates than those that opened up, including the US.
Seems to me the containment strategy was exactly the action that was needed. Countries that followed the experts advice did far far better.
Disagree. COVID was high mortality at 1% before the vaccine with an especially high contagiousness. Hospitals were overwhelmed in areas that couldn't control the spread, which meant shortages of beds and oxygen for those who could be saved.
Sure, but is it too much to ask that the dissidents accept when they've lost on the merits instead of pivoting to an inane meta-argument about their theories being "silenced"?
To decide if they did or did not lose on the merits you need open discussion, as otherwise the more aggressive side can simply assert that they won and then silence the dissidents when they point out it's not true.
So, the "inane meta-argument" as you put it is in fact required to be resolved first before you can even get to the point of deciding who's right. Nothing inane about it. Without that, science can't be done at all.
In order to have scientific dissidents we need to -as a society- reject dogma. I'm looking at all of you who "followed the science" dogmatically these past three years.
I did not <follow the science> so to speak in that I believed the masking restrictions were not strict _enough_. But in this climate any criticism of these practices is co-opted by the anti-science people into shitting on all scientific practice and also for some reason invoking rants about wokeness, Bidens age and aliens. Simply put I feel afraid of saying anything about this for fear of getting clumped with people like Joe Rogan, RFK or any of these VCs who associate with this crowd now.
> I feel afraid of saying anything about this for fear of getting clumped with people like Joe Rogan, RFK or any of these VCs who associate with this crowd now.
Who cares about the stereotypes and generalizations of intolerant idiots? Say what you believe, and associate with people who appreciate honesty.
I mean, what exactly about the science are you disagreeing with? Do you think that Covid wasn't airborne? Or that putting a piece of cloth over your face doesn't slow down the spread of disease? Do you believe this pandemic wasn't ended by a set a vaccines? I'm really curious what your actual positions are here, and whether or not you're just an ass hole who thinks they're a "free thinker".
I think one cause of this inability to tolerate dissent is how scientists and capital-S Science have functionally (and inadequately) replaced religion/ethics/philosophy for a sizable portion of society. Many otherwise intelligent people think that religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game, or not something "serious" people study. Of course, they do this without understanding that this position is itself a philosophical position, the result of centuries of intellectual development.
The result: science, which is supposed to be a neutral process that encourages dissent, becomes a political game, where scientists are treated as the ultimate authority on non-scientific questions.
There is also an aspect where it goes from science to policy, and there is this step where certain parts of society simple state: "how dare you think you know better then x, who studied y for x amount of year, or this scientist".
It happens here too. During Covid, also here the lab leak theory was talked as a crazy non-scientific conspiracy.
For being shutdown and canceled, the lab leak theory is and has been talked about a shocking amount for the past 3+ years. Rarely a day goes by here that it hasn't been talked about, especially in 2020.
Could you fill in the logical leap from "spiritual institutions are no longer credible" to "science is now political"? That is not an intuitive leap. There are many independent and more plausible explanations.
Also, the pretense of scientists not being good at science (i.e. cannot handle dissent) is a rocky one. Any scientist worth their salt is a person of science.
I think you can make a narrative something like this: traditional spiritual institutions lose their authority at the same time as technological-scientific ones gain in authority. Human beings are not good at following abstract ideas; they need other human beings to follow.
Hence scientists fall into the role of “wisdom-givers” previously held by village elders, religious leaders, etc. Seeing as scientists are not trained to care about “wisdom” or ethics beyond the basics, it’s a mismatch that results in the problems I mentioned.
Adding to this: the typical narrative is that scientific advances eroded spiritual authority, but many philosophers like Charles Taylor (in A Secular Age) show that is a vastly oversimplified view of what happened.
>Many otherwise intelligent people think that religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game
Well, "subjective" is the wrong word, but I get what you mean. However, aren't they just word games? It's not like theology and philosophy study anything real. They just investigate what can be deduced from specific axiomatic systems that are entirely divorced from reality. Theologians aren't even consistent, since they have dogmas that they'll contort around in order to avoid contradicting, even if that involves contradicting other parts of scripture.
I'll never forget the time I asked a philosophy undergraduate why he decided to go to university for philosophy rather than just reading the bibliography by himself, and he told me that by doing so he could teach philosophy. An academic pyramid scheme.
> It's not like theology and philosophy study anything real.
That is a viewpoint. This is the exact fallacy pointed out upper in the thread. This is just a viewpoint of yours, however commonly held it may be in the society of today.
What do you mean with subjective? Both philosophy and religion are highly social topics. And past trivial instinctive moves, you need some languages and cultural framework to achieve anything that allows transcending individual limits.
Science names a lot of heterogeneous practices which all have in common to be constraint by human interests. So they are neutral only if you define neutral with this highly sociosubjective consideration.
By subjective I mean relative, I.e. there is no real difference between different options and it’s all no more significant than whether you prefer Pepsi or Coke. This is the attitude many people hold toward the topic.
Science as it is taught, is about the conclusions that scientists have come to over the centuries, it's about how they made their observations and how smart they were. It is taught as an orthodoxy, a settled thing that you can trust. This does not reflect science as a current work product.
A related phenomenon is the math problem on social media - what is 2 + 2 * 3 (or similar). A complete answer is "Using PEMDAS, the answer is 2 + 6 = 8". But instead of giving the complete answer, which includes your assumptions, people fight about the answer. It's GREAT for engagement.
---
It's interesting to me that religion has evolved many times in many places. It must fulfil a human need. It would be a nice story to tell oneself that one has no need of a childish crutch from a bygone era. It's a much nicer story than realizing everyone needs crutches. (Not the person reading this comment, of course, you are beyond such things; Now tell me again, who is the object of your righteous anger?)
> religion/philosophy is purely subjective, merely a word game, or not something "serious" people study
Innit, though? The people who whine about 'scientism' tend to be selling a religious or political ideology. They reject the need to measure things because they don't want their shit tested.
No, it isn’t, and the fact that someone could seriously suggest that the entire field of philosophy and religious studies is some kind of elaborate grift is a great example of what my original comment said.
The only "practical" thing I learned from pure math (I'm not good at it) is that everything is more or less, "word game", and everything can be questioned.
Once you realize even the most obvious things, like "A < B || A == B || A > B" can be not necessarily true for real numbers, you really can't stop wondering if what authority says is so true...
The Reals are ordered right? Any two elements can be compared.
I'm guessing you might be referring to infinite sets of reals being potentially unordered under zfc w/o the axiom of choice. In that case, you made up this word 'infinite' so you have to say what it means. I guess calling that a word game is one way to think about it.
I couldn't agree more. Widespread belief in 'the science' is no different to any other cargo cult.
One should either know whatever-it-is because one has verified it, or one should be able to express one's assumptions re one's hypothesis. Social beliefs ought to have no part of it. Objective truth is not uncovered by consensus.
The problem is that nobody can verify the truth of every statement for themselves. Reality is too complex and no individual person has the time or the resources. For the vast majority of our beliefs, we have to rely on the consensus of experts, and that actually works really well. That doesn't mean science is perfect. But look at the theories that allow us to build a CPU with 50 billion transistors or a rocket that can go to the moon and tell me there isn't objective truth there.
This is a non sequitur, which is ironic, given the rant.
For one, there are entire disciplines about ethics and philosophy of science.
Also, the number of scientists that have been legitimized outside their area of expertise, in the context of public discourse, is orders of magnitude lower than pretty much in any other career.
The discussion is about some specific area of science (epidemiology, sources of disease, ...) that inherently has social and political impact/interaction. There is no decoupling and decisions based on science there are political in nature, potentially trading off science vs social/political objectives. Typically, science cannot answer those trade offs easily (or at all sometimes).
Therefore it will always contain politics. Just like everything humans do. Just like software engineering. But that doesn't mean the technical aspects of software aren't also important. All the political insights in the world won't tell you how to make a webpage or how to build a telescope.
Tell me there's politics involved and I still have no idea what goes on in your research lab or your software team.
These sort of reductive, absolutist claims only sound wise when you're young. They basically never tell you anything useful about how to act in the world. Years ago a friend of mine would rant at length to anyone who would listen about how everything in human society is based on economic incentives. He's right! But I could easily make the same argument about all sorts of things. Everything in human society is also about status. Or politics. Or the myths we tell about ourselves (like religion and science). Everything can be explained by evolutionary biology. Or the tribe, or the individual. Or how children are raised. And so on.
There are so many important perspectives to have. But if you really want to know what goes on amongst scientists, there's no alternative but to spend time talking to them. You're so much more right, and more wrong than you think. The details are, also, everything.
In some sense sure, but that doesn’t imply that scientists ought to function as political actors - especially when doing so puts the actual practice of science at risk.
Sure there are. "Is the universe really billions of years old, or did it pop into existence three seconds ago in its current state including all of your memories?" It's impossible to answer this question scientifically because no empirical test could ever possibly be devised.
Science has come against its own limits many times.
Hume's problem of induction shows you that every scientific conclusion is a leap of faith. Scientists try to make it as small as possible of a leap, but it is still a leap.
Chaotic systems require more percision than physics allows, making many systems theoretically unpredictable. Having accurate models is useless. If you have a model that's theoretically accurate but requires more accuracy than the universe actually has then what does that even mean? Where does that information come from?
Qunatum mechanics was basically the end of causality as we know it. Forget correlation does not imply causation. There is no causation.
Godel's incompleteness, Turing's halting, prove that formal systems have limits and that even logic itself cannot go everywhere.
Metaphysics and ethics in philosophy are non-scientific. And these are extremely important things. Religion, which is folk metaphysics and folk ethics, is, to billions of people now living on this planet, more important and relevant to their daily lives than science is.
I feeling like this whole science has replaced religion is just right wing cope because science doesn't represent their feelings.
Also because people are becoming less religious, its an argument to prop up religions by saying: don't quit your current religion, all those "atheists" are just upholding different religious ideas, so they it is the same as switching to something like buddhism.
"Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."
Dude, scientists (in my experience) handle dissent just fine. The idea that scientists have problems with dissenting opinions is mostly propagated by assholes with some other agenda, whose scientific ideas have already had a fair hearing, who are just trying to prolong the public discussion for reasons typically unmotivated by genuine scientific interest.
I've spent most of my career around scientists of one stripe or another and I've literally never met a scientist committed to even their pet ideas at some kind of ideological level.
Are scientists perfect? Hardly. Have their been scientific paradigms or ideas that have persisted longer than they should have? Definitely. Scientists are human beings. There are limits to how rational they can be, especially in groups, but to suggest that science is somehow intolerant of dissent is a straw man cartoon ass argument.
I don't think the problem here is the actual scientists. The problem is the "I Follow The Science™" laypersons. A scientist can speak on a subject with some degree of authority, and be perfectly open to dissent if it's followed with sufficient rigor. However, their layperson followers may go on to parrot a claim made by said scientist, proclaim it to be an absolute truth, and shun anyone who might casually question it. A situation not unlike religious zealotry. In general, science is great; scientism isn't.
Uhm... It depends on the scientist. I've met a more then a handful of the "it has to be this way" types. The kind who thinks that being correct and being a brute are interchangeable words. Maybe the real problem is they feel the need to be correct about the unknown? Unclear.
Good scientists are what you describe. But they seem to be becoming more rare.
For sure, most of the ones I know are pretty honest with a high degree of integrity.
But it's also not hard to see there's an increasingly lot of politics involved in "science", the further up you go in the hierarchies, not to mention among public figures.
There is a bunch of examples of extremely influential theories that were dismisses because of authority figures, I don't know if you count math as science, but for example set theory was extremely controversial.
I agree with both of you, and I think a distinction is to be made around the "genre" of the dissent.
The reason I have to pick a somewhat awkward word is because awareness to the level of discussion and labeling of this concept does not yet widely exist, so I have to invent it here.
Is the dissent something which reinforces the money, power and people of my field (which, wherever in said field I am placed, I benefit from and aspire to ascend) or is it something that undermines (or is perceived to undermine) these vital field pillars?
TL;DR - Is the genre of dissent something the field can roll with, or does it threaten (or seem to threaten) to upend it?
To paraphrase Michael Douglas, scientists are like horses: easily spooked. If something smells like bad news for the field, then...woosh (sound of scientists galloping towards stability).
The reason it appears both as if: "dude, scientists handle dissent just fine" and "[scientists have] this inability to tolerate dissent" is because in case of each, the genre of the dissent differs (for that field).
Now would be a good point to chime in with some concrete examples, but you need to be an expert to really do that, and I'm not, so I'll probably get the example that supports my thesis wrong. My example:
In particle physics, it's fine to dissent over whether this or that fundamental force carrier may be the cause of the latest round of measurement discrepancies (analysis: because that reinforces dynamics in the field that channel funding and personnel to making new measurements and theories), but it's unfine to dissent over whether we should chuck the entirety of the theoretical edifice (depending on where you come down, you may read the preceding as "dogma") of dark energy down the drain (analysis: because, while not very explanatory, it safely does not challenge (nor threaten to challenge) everything else we are busy doing).
In conclusion, I think scientists handle one genre of dissent (including but not limited to specific technical dissent), just fine, and in so doing are performing the normative work of their field: interrogating theories through measurements; but, I think they have an inability to handle another genre of dissent (including but not limited to field-upending dissent), which makes step-change field-evolving progress glacial slow.
Depending upon which side you come down you will likely declare: "Well, that's as it should be!" or "That's exactly the problem I'm talking about!"
Perhaps that's why scientists, like horses, need some form of management, that is--well...--"unscientific". They do the work, but "management" (comprised of non-scientists) sets the priorities. I know, I know, awful...just unspeakably awful: But unless we can "train" scientists to embrace what threatens their daily bread, the ideal of science will be chomping at the bit of the restraints of its implementation structures for the foreseeable future...
Main criticism: "but the daily bread of science is constantly interrogating through measurement field upending dissent, that's literally science!"--I agree, but science as 'it should be', not, how 'it is'.
Second criticism: "well maybe in other fields, but not in my field". Fair enough! Maybe you can teach the rest of us how you manage it so well!
Covid debunks all your claims. I’ve taken all my covid jabs and boosters so I’m not coming at this as some alt right antivaxxer, but the systemic and systematic shut down of any dissent against mainstream science and scientific organisations was/is disgusting.
Modernity is when you pilot society using science. See: EPCOT and Disney’s vision in the 1950 of building entire cities with everything perfectly entirely planned.
So when you control science, you control the laws. And you can’t control science, but you can control the press around science, and how people talk about science.
Oh boy, a good old fashioned science versus religion brawl is about to go down. I haven't had a good one of these since the Atheist Crusade of the early 2000s.
I don’t really think my comment suggests that. I am saying that people should study philosophy and religion more, because it’s an extremely influential topic, especially when it comes to science. The framing of science and philosophy/religion as antagonistic is part of the problem.
Off wikipedia: "Arp never wavered from his stand against the Big Bang, and until shortly before his death in 2013, he continued to publish articles[14][15] stating his contrary view in both popular and scientific literature, frequently collaborating with Geoffrey Burbidge (until Burbidge's death in 2010) and Margaret Burbidge.[16] He explained his reasons for believing that the Big Bang theory is wrong, citing his research into quasars or quasi-stellar objects (QSOs). Instead, Arp supported the redshift quantization theory as an explanation of the redshifts of galaxies.[17]"
Readit News
I suspect you greatly over-estimate how much politicians listened to epidemiologists during covid as well. A lot of decisions were more out of desire to be seen to be doing something, because the voters went to them and essentially demanded they do something.
To prefer personal interests (like not to have to wear a mask) over common interests (to protect against pandemic effects) incurs the negative consequences irrespective of whether one pretends to know better than the experts.
To let others play dumb and act against society is to be dumb yourself.
Dead Comment
One could theoretically show comprehensively that individual freedoms reduce economic output and decrease average life span, and that would still not be an argument to restrict them.
This is a non issue.
Ackshually, plenty of policymakers have no clue about the topics they decide on, and that's a big issue.
In most of the western (so called) democracies, the “policy makers” primary skill is being put on a ballot for a political party, by the party leadership, frequently not the most qualified people to rule a country.
Crucially, popular referendums should be held, often and the more radical proposals the more important it is to have the popular support.
If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that technocracy is a horrible form of government. If “heath-care experts” were given the chance, I fully imagine us still playing covid theater to this day.
Amen to that. Some / most of them seemingly had little grasp of the the concept of cost / benefit analysis. And we let these jackasses (some, not all of them) drive the bus!
Massive economic impact from social distancing vs massive economic impact from mass casualties and complete collapse of the healthcare system. Those are your choices lol.
You can start from anywhere and build knowledge from there, there is no faculty that gaurantees some knowledge being objective. There is only conjecture and criticism.
However, since climatologists are much smarter than the average person, I would still rather that the average person defer to climatologists on almost any issue (regardless of what it has to do with the climate)
Dead Comment
See: ongoing statin controversy. Pretty much every drug related to diabetes. The discovery of the Benadryl-dementia link. Etc.
The science is never settled. That’s the whole point of science: it’s constantly evolving.
"The science is settled" is a marketing term put forward by administrations that wish to manipulate the will of it's citizens. It's an inappropriate idea from an inappropriate place with inappropriate ends.
The lived experience of a recent Nobel prize winner is illustrative here.
> In April 1982, Shechtman spotted an odd atomic arrangement through his electron microscope at Johns Hopkins University: A crystal of aluminum and manganese arranged with pentagonal symmetry. It was thought to be impossible — five sides do not a perfectly repeatable structure make. The laws of nature held that the atoms in a solid could be arranged in an amorphous, blob-like pattern, or organized with symmetrical periodicity into crystals. Shechtman saw something that fit neither category.
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accus...
You would think a scientist holding physical proof from an electron microscope that atoms can arrange themselves in a way that had not been previously recognized would be able to share the discovery without being targeted by the "experts".
> He told his colleagues what he’d seen and they laughed him off, he said in an interview earlier this year. He was eventually asked to leave his research group for “bringing disgrace” to its members, he told the Ha’aretz in April.
Two years later, he finally published his findings, yet the skepticism remained — and it remained bitter, as the AFP explains it. The famous American chemist Linus Pauling once declared at a conference: “Danny Shechtman is talking nonsense. There is no such thing as quasicrystals, only quasi-scientists”.
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-10/chemist-accus...
Nope. He was attacked by world famous scientific "experts" including a double Nobel laureate and fired from his job, despite presenting proof that what he was reporting was real.
I believe appropriate skepticism is part of being a skilled scientist, being a dissident is part of being a noisy scientist. These two do not always correlate with each other.
That said, standing up when it is right is a good thing. But the above is similar to reasoning that I hear from a more anarchic political view, and I do not generally agree with that way of handling issues or doing science.
No. There are still so, so many things left that humanity doesn't even have an idea about what exists... submarine life is probably the largest of the uncharted territories. Or simple QA - repeating and reproducing the discoveries of others to uncover missing data, incomplete documentation or unthought-of implicit dependencies (e.g. barometric pressure, effects of gravity or magnetic field). For all of that, you don't need to be a "dissident" in whatever meaning of the word.
Especially those citizens who follow sheep-like behind a Media Personality who happens to believe that vaccines will make you a magnetic zombie from beyond the stars and give all your chakras autism of the turbo-cancer.
I think the point is actually to get a high degree of epistemic rigor, and when you see science "evolving", it's actually because the epistemic rigor in that field wasn't very good in the first place.
Physics hasn't really "evolved" very much in the way medical "science" has. It's developed, but it's never needed to totally contradict itself. QM and SR are refinements on classical mechanics, not rebuttals.
You can test gravity using [almost] any method you want and nobody will care.
Start testing medical assumptions and pesky things like “ethics committees“ and “police” will show up rather quickly.
To come to an agreement among experts just like among anyone else one has to adhere to some obvious(?) rules.
Everybody having their own opinion without sound arguments validated by others leads to a useless cacophony.
Dead Comment
- There's two types of LDL cholesterol that are measured together in a standard fasting lipid profile: type A LDL and type B LDL
- Type A LDL makes up 80% of LDL and is increased by dietary fat consumption
- Type A LDL is not predictive of heart disease nor does it drive the accumulation of plaque in the arteries
- Type A LDL is lowered by statins
- Type B LDL makes up 20% of LDL and is predictive of heart attacks
- Type B LDL is not lowered by statins
- Taking statins comes with a bunch of side effects
- Selling statins has been a lucrative business
Citations at https://robertlustig.com/metabolical/metabolical-references-... for pages 34 through 39
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
In terms of covid specifically, experts did what they typically do for high mortality diseases e.g. ebola, SARS where the mortality is high and the only course of action is to seal an area and let it burn through the population but at least contain it. That turned out to be the direct opposite course of action needed.
It’s sort of interesting to me that the partisan politics on this have flipped from the early days though. Early on, Bill DeBlasio (at the time, NYC’s left-ish mayor) was against cancelling anything or imposing any travel restrictions, even telling people it was racist to avoid Chinese New Year or St Patrick’s Day celebrations, and xenophobic to ask for restrictions on travel. The NY conservative media were very critical of his decisions to let those events move forward and called for travel bans and event cancellations to stop the virus. Fast-forward a bit and they had each adopted the other side’s positions.
It would have been great if they leaned on the science from the 2003 version of the disease, but they didn’t and some of the policies made no sense in light of that prior literature.
Irrespective of whether masks work or not, the state apparatus chose to go with the message that they don't for the reason that they wanted to preserve supply for healthcare workers.
I had a supply of N95 masks from earlier preparation for forest fires that I gave to healthcare workers here in SF. In future, I shall not donate like this. It is clear that every man is an island and the agencies set up to inform us believe they must control us through deceit instead.
Also weird: that we don't do any serious post-incident analysis so we can harden procedures and institutions in case a really big problem knocks on our door someday.
There's something suspicious about this planet if you ask me.
It's crazy your criticizing people for changing if new information comes out. That's the basis of science and why it's not like religon
I wonder, in hindsight, what would have been the better course of action.
Taiwan did that and their mortality and contagion rate is orders of magnitude lower than in the US. Same goes for Japan. Hell, even most European countries have a lower mortality rate than the US. All of these countries have also a higher population density than the US.
This is simply not true. I don’t care how much the data gets massaged to align with the narrative. It’s a lie. Misinformation, really. Which is par for course when it comes to covid.
Seems to me the containment strategy was exactly the action that was needed. Countries that followed the experts advice did far far better.
So, the "inane meta-argument" as you put it is in fact required to be resolved first before you can even get to the point of deciding who's right. Nothing inane about it. Without that, science can't be done at all.
Who cares about the stereotypes and generalizations of intolerant idiots? Say what you believe, and associate with people who appreciate honesty.
The result: science, which is supposed to be a neutral process that encourages dissent, becomes a political game, where scientists are treated as the ultimate authority on non-scientific questions.
It happens here too. During Covid, also here the lab leak theory was talked as a crazy non-scientific conspiracy.
I do remember some people pushing the leak theory as if it was 100% proven and them getting called out.
I also don't have any hard evidence for the lab leak theory so I'm open to being wrong. I'm just suspicious because China hasn't been forthcoming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
Also, the pretense of scientists not being good at science (i.e. cannot handle dissent) is a rocky one. Any scientist worth their salt is a person of science.
Hence scientists fall into the role of “wisdom-givers” previously held by village elders, religious leaders, etc. Seeing as scientists are not trained to care about “wisdom” or ethics beyond the basics, it’s a mismatch that results in the problems I mentioned.
Adding to this: the typical narrative is that scientific advances eroded spiritual authority, but many philosophers like Charles Taylor (in A Secular Age) show that is a vastly oversimplified view of what happened.
Fun with set theory, tautologies, and rhetoric. Let's hope there are no negative repercussions!
Dead Comment
Well, "subjective" is the wrong word, but I get what you mean. However, aren't they just word games? It's not like theology and philosophy study anything real. They just investigate what can be deduced from specific axiomatic systems that are entirely divorced from reality. Theologians aren't even consistent, since they have dogmas that they'll contort around in order to avoid contradicting, even if that involves contradicting other parts of scripture.
I'll never forget the time I asked a philosophy undergraduate why he decided to go to university for philosophy rather than just reading the bibliography by himself, and he told me that by doing so he could teach philosophy. An academic pyramid scheme.
That is a viewpoint. This is the exact fallacy pointed out upper in the thread. This is just a viewpoint of yours, however commonly held it may be in the society of today.
Science names a lot of heterogeneous practices which all have in common to be constraint by human interests. So they are neutral only if you define neutral with this highly sociosubjective consideration.
When you turn the cultural relativism up to eleven.
Anyone that treats a scientist as an authority on non-scientific questions isn't practicing science nor are they being smart.
Science as it is taught, is about the conclusions that scientists have come to over the centuries, it's about how they made their observations and how smart they were. It is taught as an orthodoxy, a settled thing that you can trust. This does not reflect science as a current work product.
A related phenomenon is the math problem on social media - what is 2 + 2 * 3 (or similar). A complete answer is "Using PEMDAS, the answer is 2 + 6 = 8". But instead of giving the complete answer, which includes your assumptions, people fight about the answer. It's GREAT for engagement.
---
It's interesting to me that religion has evolved many times in many places. It must fulfil a human need. It would be a nice story to tell oneself that one has no need of a childish crutch from a bygone era. It's a much nicer story than realizing everyone needs crutches. (Not the person reading this comment, of course, you are beyond such things; Now tell me again, who is the object of your righteous anger?)
Innit, though? The people who whine about 'scientism' tend to be selling a religious or political ideology. They reject the need to measure things because they don't want their shit tested.
Once you realize even the most obvious things, like "A < B || A == B || A > B" can be not necessarily true for real numbers, you really can't stop wondering if what authority says is so true...
I'm guessing you might be referring to infinite sets of reals being potentially unordered under zfc w/o the axiom of choice. In that case, you made up this word 'infinite' so you have to say what it means. I guess calling that a word game is one way to think about it.
One should either know whatever-it-is because one has verified it, or one should be able to express one's assumptions re one's hypothesis. Social beliefs ought to have no part of it. Objective truth is not uncovered by consensus.
Religion is never wrong, faith is believing without evidence, and religion doesn't test it claims
For one, there are entire disciplines about ethics and philosophy of science.
Also, the number of scientists that have been legitimized outside their area of expertise, in the context of public discourse, is orders of magnitude lower than pretty much in any other career.
Therefore it will always contain politics. Just like everything humans do. Just like software engineering. But that doesn't mean the technical aspects of software aren't also important. All the political insights in the world won't tell you how to make a webpage or how to build a telescope.
Tell me there's politics involved and I still have no idea what goes on in your research lab or your software team.
These sort of reductive, absolutist claims only sound wise when you're young. They basically never tell you anything useful about how to act in the world. Years ago a friend of mine would rant at length to anyone who would listen about how everything in human society is based on economic incentives. He's right! But I could easily make the same argument about all sorts of things. Everything in human society is also about status. Or politics. Or the myths we tell about ourselves (like religion and science). Everything can be explained by evolutionary biology. Or the tribe, or the individual. Or how children are raised. And so on.
There are so many important perspectives to have. But if you really want to know what goes on amongst scientists, there's no alternative but to spend time talking to them. You're so much more right, and more wrong than you think. The details are, also, everything.
Dead Comment
Hume's problem of induction shows you that every scientific conclusion is a leap of faith. Scientists try to make it as small as possible of a leap, but it is still a leap.
Chaotic systems require more percision than physics allows, making many systems theoretically unpredictable. Having accurate models is useless. If you have a model that's theoretically accurate but requires more accuracy than the universe actually has then what does that even mean? Where does that information come from?
Qunatum mechanics was basically the end of causality as we know it. Forget correlation does not imply causation. There is no causation.
Godel's incompleteness, Turing's halting, prove that formal systems have limits and that even logic itself cannot go everywhere.
Proper science is value neutral.
Also because people are becoming less religious, its an argument to prop up religions by saying: don't quit your current religion, all those "atheists" are just upholding different religious ideas, so they it is the same as switching to something like buddhism.
I've spent most of my career around scientists of one stripe or another and I've literally never met a scientist committed to even their pet ideas at some kind of ideological level.
Are scientists perfect? Hardly. Have their been scientific paradigms or ideas that have persisted longer than they should have? Definitely. Scientists are human beings. There are limits to how rational they can be, especially in groups, but to suggest that science is somehow intolerant of dissent is a straw man cartoon ass argument.
Good scientists are what you describe. But they seem to be becoming more rare.
For sure, most of the ones I know are pretty honest with a high degree of integrity.
But it's also not hard to see there's an increasingly lot of politics involved in "science", the further up you go in the hierarchies, not to mention among public figures.
The reason I have to pick a somewhat awkward word is because awareness to the level of discussion and labeling of this concept does not yet widely exist, so I have to invent it here.
Is the dissent something which reinforces the money, power and people of my field (which, wherever in said field I am placed, I benefit from and aspire to ascend) or is it something that undermines (or is perceived to undermine) these vital field pillars?
TL;DR - Is the genre of dissent something the field can roll with, or does it threaten (or seem to threaten) to upend it?
To paraphrase Michael Douglas, scientists are like horses: easily spooked. If something smells like bad news for the field, then...woosh (sound of scientists galloping towards stability).
The reason it appears both as if: "dude, scientists handle dissent just fine" and "[scientists have] this inability to tolerate dissent" is because in case of each, the genre of the dissent differs (for that field).
Now would be a good point to chime in with some concrete examples, but you need to be an expert to really do that, and I'm not, so I'll probably get the example that supports my thesis wrong. My example:
In particle physics, it's fine to dissent over whether this or that fundamental force carrier may be the cause of the latest round of measurement discrepancies (analysis: because that reinforces dynamics in the field that channel funding and personnel to making new measurements and theories), but it's unfine to dissent over whether we should chuck the entirety of the theoretical edifice (depending on where you come down, you may read the preceding as "dogma") of dark energy down the drain (analysis: because, while not very explanatory, it safely does not challenge (nor threaten to challenge) everything else we are busy doing).
In conclusion, I think scientists handle one genre of dissent (including but not limited to specific technical dissent), just fine, and in so doing are performing the normative work of their field: interrogating theories through measurements; but, I think they have an inability to handle another genre of dissent (including but not limited to field-upending dissent), which makes step-change field-evolving progress glacial slow.
Depending upon which side you come down you will likely declare: "Well, that's as it should be!" or "That's exactly the problem I'm talking about!"
Perhaps that's why scientists, like horses, need some form of management, that is--well...--"unscientific". They do the work, but "management" (comprised of non-scientists) sets the priorities. I know, I know, awful...just unspeakably awful: But unless we can "train" scientists to embrace what threatens their daily bread, the ideal of science will be chomping at the bit of the restraints of its implementation structures for the foreseeable future...
Main criticism: "but the daily bread of science is constantly interrogating through measurement field upending dissent, that's literally science!"--I agree, but science as 'it should be', not, how 'it is'.
Second criticism: "well maybe in other fields, but not in my field". Fair enough! Maybe you can teach the rest of us how you manage it so well!
So when you control science, you control the laws. And you can’t control science, but you can control the press around science, and how people talk about science.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halton_Arp
https://archive.org/details/halton-arp-seeing-red-red-shift-...