Comment by internaut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by internaut | Hacker News Reader

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There is a general problem where for laypeople it is difficult to tell the difference between bullshit and non-bullshit. Witness the success of Deepak Chopra.

The confounding factor is that the layperson's suspicion that some academics are lying or involved in some conspiracy is not always wrong. Then there are the culture wars between various factions. Witness how computer scientists think of the social scientists in general. Not much love being exchanged there, they might as well be different species.

I think the only thing you can really do educationally is teach logic and thinking from first principals as well as heuristics for bullshit detection.

My technique is to pin down the person with a clear definition for a piece of their explanation. I then write this down. Eventually I find their ideas to be either consistent or inconsistent. Being consistent doesn't make them right but it sure does filter out most bullshit. It's like being a detective!

Unfortunately bullshit detection, first principals + basic logic only take you so far because for many real world things you require large amounts of domain knowledge. Teaching all that is impossible. You can however teach about what Neal Stephenson called icongraphies in his book Anathem. There are historical patterns, mental models that are domain specific but which can enable you to rapidly detect whether something fits into a framework or whether it's off the rails.

Here is a fair warning though. There is some interesting ideas about the split between 'American science' and 'Russian science'. That is something that shouldn't have happened but the communication breakdown led to several fields taking different paths. For example Geology supposed in America that Oil was generated from a biological source in the distant past. You might take that idea for granted. But in Russia it was thought seriously for a long time that Oil was generated from a non-biological source. I don't know the real answer myself but it is worth knowing that this does happen. I mean... one of them is almost certainly wrong.

I think a few things contribute to this in a big way:

1) Explanations of science (or the findings of science, anyway) in school are often awful and/or wrong, and not always for any good reason. See: how airplane wings work, for an exceptionally bad one. Finding this out for one thing after another as one grows up paints all of science as kinda bullshitty.

2) People who (apparently) know what's going on often have trouble explaining why something that seems like it ought to have a decent intuitive explanation works other than "the math says it does, so it does". See, for an example: basically any place online where several seemingly-knowledgable people try to explain how/why the Oberth effect works. Also the talk section for the wikipedia page about how airplane wings work :-(

3) Most people (I'd guess) are looking for satisfying answers to "why" in science, and often science actually does run out of answers to that question beyond "because the math says so" or "because we've observed that this happens, for whatever reason", and sometimes surprisingly far from the edge of our knowledge on a topic. These spaces are often filled with fairy tales, which may be tossed about as if they're "real", confusing laypersons. This obscures where the satisfying-to-a-layperson part of a given topic ends and where here-be-dragons-and-magic-and-mostly-just-math begins.

4) Common words overloaded to serve as highly specific scientific terminology are incredibly difficult to parse as a layperson, and they're all over in science. It's easy to get fairly deep into a topic before realizing that a term like this is barely mapped to any common meaning, if it is at all. Doubly so if the reason the term was originally used turns out to be wrong, but the term remains in use for whatever phenomenon/term it was describing just because all the experts are used to it. Physics is extremely bad about this, to the point that it comes off as intentional.

Given those things (among others), no wonder non-experts have trouble sorting BS from legit science.

[edit] "there" to "where"

> Explanations of science (or the findings of science, anyway) in school are often awful and/or wrong

One of the biggest problems in science education is the failure, I think, to distinguish enough between the teaching of the results of science (and simplifications of those results) and science itself. Related to that is insufficient teaching of the evaluation of scientific claims. (Which really overlaps with general critical thinking.)

>Witness how computer scientists think of the social scientists in general. Not much love being exchanged there

A lot of that is because social sciences are often genuinely non-rigorous, hand-wavey, and opinionated.

I was required to take a sociology class once. Some of what was presented was solid, like the observed stages of childhood development with respect to self-awareness and the issues with the poverty cycle, but in other areas a lot of theories were presented as the "right" thing to believe that had some combination of being unverifiable, having insufficient sample sizes in their foundational studies, having glaring methodological problems, contradicting other things also presented as factual, or having reaching conclusions.

There was an assignment to make a food plan based on an average food stamp allocation, that let you eat 2000 calories per day along with some other requirements that I don't remember. The professor claimed only one person had ever been able to do it. You weren't expected to be able to do it, but if you couldn't, you had to write an explanation of it and how the experience made you feel - assumedly an "eye opening experience" was expected. It was conveniently not mentioned that food stamps are intended to be supplemental, not for all of your food. The program even has the word supplemental in the title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supplemental_Nutrition_Assista...

Regardless, even with unrealistic restrictions, I was able to do it without any trouble. Taking the high values of what the food prices ranged at the local budget food store, I had a result that was well-balanced and below-budget. Of course, the professor had to make some snide comment about "sodium poisoning" to the class about it, which this diet certainly cannot cause.

Here's a paste of it: http://pastebin.com/QnmnHXbA

Not everybody has access to as good of a budget store as ALDI, so results can vary, but this particular ALDI is located in a low-income area, and there's clearly no epidemic of malnourished low-income individuals nationwide given that poverty is correlated with obesity. This was just one example of the many problems in that curriculum. For another example, the wage gap was simply stated to be indisputably the common 77 cents per dollar figure, which carries certain implications of it being entirely discrimination when stated without any qualifiers; however, when just looking at the Wikipedia article, it can be seen that the problem has more subtleties to it, including which portions are "explained" vs "unexplained," and that widely varying figures have been reported. Motivating more women to participate in male-majority fields is a good thing, along with other proposed solutions to help the problem, but none of that was mentioned in the class.

Aside from this one biased professor, I've read from others that these problems are very common in social science classes. It would be nice if there were some data available on how students rate their professors' bias in this field.

Completely off-topic note, but I actually lived on food stamps for a while in 2009, and, yes, it's extremely easy to stay under-budget if you have access to a well-stocked kitchen, and you know how to cook and plan meals for yourself and your family (not a difficult skill, but not a trivial one either). Fortunately, I'm a decent cook, but for a couple months I lived in illegally-run housing where you had five units sharing a tiny unventilated kitchen and an old fridge.

The landlord would go through and unplug the communal appliances (including the fridge) regularly to reduce energy consumption. I thought it was odd that the fridge was empty, except for sodas, when I got there, but I found out why pretty fast. Food would get stolen, I was regularly harassed (not "oh, that guy hit on me and I didn't like it" harassment, but huge dudes with mental illnesses, prison records, and nothing better to do threatened to beat me up, and yelled at me over imaginary things they suspected me of, one guy threw a block of my cheese out the nearby bathroom window -- as a single female, I was an easy target), there was just a single bathroom for everyone, connected to the kitchen, and I watched people empty soda bottles of urine into the kitchen sink (yeah, super gross). The oven was so dirty the unventilated kitchen filled with smoke when you turned it on, and you had to stay there to make sure no one fucked with your food. Towards the end, everything I ate basically had to be shelf stable and require no preparation. Also, there were mice, so if you don't like mice in your tiny bedroom, keeping large amounts of food around is a problem.

Anyway, I was fortunate to have the resources to get out of that situation extremely quickly, but a huge problem for many people on food stamps is that they just don't have the ability to reasonably store and prepare food. Having your own kitchen (or a kitchen with responsible people you trust), buying appliances, providing electricity, and maintaining everything is expensive. My own kitchen, big-ticket appliances aside, probably has thousands of dollars worth of gadgets, dishes, and cutlery in it right now -- I certainly don't take that for granted anymore! We often assume that people have access to a kitchen where they feel safe, AND the knowledge to cook and plan meals. The next place I was at, I could get six meals out of a roast chicken and a few potatoes and was under-budget every month. But the first apartment was awful. I ate terribly, felt exhausted, and was struggling at the end of the month, with the exact same budget and skill set.

Preparing "food stamp menus" in a text file demonstrates very little about the program one way or another. There are much larger issues around food supplement programs that people don't often understand.

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