Scientists must fight for the facts
nature.com
nature.com
This is bread and circuses.
Let scientists do science - comics and comedians are the weapon to reach for.
America has lead the way for the past 4 decades in bringing the public into areas they don't have the prior knowledge to navigate.
Anyone old enough to remember the climate change debates will remember a time when scientists didn't debate climate deniers because it gave climate deniers too much credibility!
But what scientists didn't realize is that vested interests were setting them up.
Cranks and fakers were nurtured and given air time by a certain news channel till they eventually the "public interest" invaded the scientific.
At which point "science" lost. Science expected a debate, but walked into Spectacle.
Trump showed that with Twitter and crap you can cross the very low threshold required to beat the current crop of presidential candidates.
This is entertainment. If you don't treat it as such you lose space to the person who generates better TRPs.
We know that bullshit is asymmetric: it takes long to clear up than to cast. The way to take it down is to rip on the caster until they stop (or look ridiculous in voters' eyes) - this requires facts yes, but more importantly presentation.
I said it in another thread, if you keep demonizing people, they will eventually send demons.
Your right wing has been caricaturing and demonizing your left wing for a long time.
I've learnt a lot watching the Republican Party follow its discipline. The day Obama won, they rallied and fought for a one term president. At their nadir, they turned themselves around. That's something.
Today they have won most of the seats of power and have stymied the president for 8 years. They even have the chance to decide the next SC judge, something Obama should have had the right to (as I understand American politics)
A few of the things that come to mind - the complete shutdown of your government, the creation and agitation of the tea party, birthers, gun boats (or something), the refusal to increase the federal debt ceiling, their positions on medical insurance.
Not to mention Manufactured issues on evolution and climate change.
My rebuttal is that this fear of demons is redundant, the right is long past believing that demons have (literally) been sent. Their tools and tactics are specifically designed to stall and steal power from old liberal strongholds - science and learning.
You no longer have the luxury of deciding the terrain on which to fight. Tactics are all that's left.
For the record I used to be a bridge builder. A few months ago I would have given similar advice. But building bridges in the networked era is unlikely because of the echo chamber effect.
Until that problem is solved, other tools are needed to deal with current issues. And these tools also serve a bridge building purpose - negotiating with a party who has no leverage is redundant.
The Republicans and Democrats were playing a board game. Not liking how the game was progressing, the Republicans set the house on fire. The Democrats are still sitting at the board, surrounded by flames, weighing the tactical implications of moving various pieces in response.
There's also a difference between taking the piss effectively and just calling people names. E.g. calling Trump a misogynistic idiot isn't funny or persuasive. There was a lot of righteous name calling, but not much satire - from the right people.
Pft. I wish I lived in a world where Trump supporters lived in silence before the election. I don't buy this, at all. They were the loudest, most self-entitled, and they always represented themselves as victims.
Anyone looking at the numbers knew the election would be within 5% either way, so it's not like those 45M republicans were hidden, it was only a question of if the last 5M would get up on polling day. If they would, the conclusion was foregone because country-voters cast larger votes than city voters so they win all ties.
> if you keep demonizing people
You see - perpetual victims. Even though they won they're still going on about being hurt. If saying someone voted for a liar because they didn't bother to look up the facts is demonizing, then I don't know what you ever could say that they wouldn't complain about.
My father has been in the GOP base his whole life. The refrain when I challenged his views on science was: "those scientists are all liberals. Why should I believe anything they have to say?"
He encouraged me to study sciences anyway because it offered a better life than his. Now, of course, he explicitly regrets providing me that education, because he sees me as "brainwashed."
If a scientist pursues a line of work that might end up contradicting the GOP party line, they're immediately disqualified as a scientist. To him, that proves the scientist is motivated purely by political or financial gain.
At least you don't lose more ground or have to rebuild more institutions.
Bringing dry facts to a Comedy Central roast isn't good strategy.
It is undeniable that humans and human-run institutions are subject to all the same corrupting factors that every other person or institution is.
It's alarming that most of the comments here start off with the default of "the science must be true".
Science as a process is virtually infallible, but science as practiced by humans in human-run institutions is very very far from infallible.
Hyper group-think is one of the more unfortunate aspects of our modern technological dilemma. Places like HN breed it. I find it utterly despicable...it's as if most of the people here are willfully incapable of considering any point of view except their own.
If you disagree with the local group-think in the slightest, you just get censored and your words start fading away into nothingness. It's such crap.
I have designs for a new, better commenting and comment voting system could solve this problem. The up/down vote is so childish and overly simplistic. I look forward to a time when people get sick of it and finally change to something better.
As a scientist, I instinctively trusted other data scientists to be as rigorous as I was when I did research. It turned out they were using extremely wonky simplistic models for complex human behavior, and it left me cold and clueless.
If poll-based divination is a better descriptor than political data science, then scientists should decry their stealing of the term.
Of course, some people built bad models and predicted 90+% chance of winning for Hillary, and those people need to rethink their approach. But this election was not a refutation of polling and modeling as a whole.
Before I moved here, I remember thinking that Americans must be too stupid to understand "The Simpsons" because it takes apart and laughs at all the obvious flaws in American society, but discovered instead that Americans can cheerfully laugh at Homer, understand why they're laughing at Homer, and be Homer all at once.
Bear in mind that a Christian Conservative is already managing epic levels of cognitive dissonance "the love of money is the root of all evil.... mmmmm tax cuts" so a bunch more is barely going to have an impact.
This is not unique to Americans.
You can generalize your assertions to humanity as a whole. America is not unique in believing wildly irrational, logically inconsistent ideas and compartmentalizing cognitive dissonance. This is the story of human politics since the beginning of history...
Unless you're taking the time to do the science yourself and verify the results - you could be getting lied to or otherwise misinformed. Do you ever actually do that or do you generally just trust people who call themselves a scientist and who are trusted by other so-called scientists?
This article is also a bullshit piece of propaganda that is going on attack because somebody in the White House wrote a 7 paragraph energy plan summary that didn't include their favorite word. The plan clearly states that "Lastly, our need for energy must go hand-in-hand with responsible stewardship of the environment." and last time I checked the "climate" is part of our environment.
Do you really think that Science as an institution is incorruptible?
I got some news for you: this world ain't perfect.
Your entire arguments rests on a "No true Scotsman"-like logical fallacy.
You seem to imply that there is this perfect thing called science, which is wholly separate from people... This is a huge blunder because, in fact, there is no science at all without people. Therefore, science can't possible be responsible for anything by itself.
So, as you can see (hopefully...and finally), it follows that I couldn't possibly be blaming this inanimate thing called Science for anything. Nope. Not possible. I blame people.
People make errors. There is no science without people. You're trying to separate the two. Stop doing that.
Repeatedly responding to me with the same point and misrepresenting my position is equally rude. This person keeps saying that I'm "making a mistake" and that's all I'm saying back to them. Nobody is calling names or anything like that, so why don't you just butt out?
Furthermore, this person seems to just have a deep burning desire to have the last word, no matter how meaningless and trite that is. So, why don't you try reprimanding them instead?
As for a "burning desire to have the last word", I see no less desire on your part than on theirs.
Oh I see your problem. Your perception is way off. Please allow me to correct your misunderstanding once again and hopefully for the last time.
This goes well past the line of civil discourse. Communication is a two-way street, and requires active participation of both parties. Once you decide that it's all their fault, rejecting the possibility that you're not communicating your ideas effectively, you're no longer participating in good faith. At this point it's better just to back off. (As I'm about to do.)
Well, the fake news factories are also good at pushing people to take a hard stance on things they have no clue about.
At a visceral level Americans are beginning to revolt against a system that continues to grow in its power to pick winners and losers through a systematic war on education, media, and democracy.
Obama promised change; Trump didn't have to.
The American oligarchs became complacent. A shrewd sexist, racist shark capitalized on the structures they have built to perpetuate their power.
> Within two days of Trump assuming power, White House
> officials have found themselves embroiled in a
> scandal over “alternative facts”.
Actual alternative facts do exist because we often select the facts we represent based on our tribal affiliations.
I won't be able to reclaim the term now that is smeared. But I wish people could point out when somebody is lying (or misleading) without trying to smear the existence of counterzeitgeist truth.
Aside: why didn't anybody in the Trump administration respond by pointing out that Washington, D.C. is majority democrat, and that Bush's inauguration might have been a better comparison? Quite embarrassing that they would lie when deflating the authority of the comparison would have probably been more effective...
The indiscriminate usage of the term by the mainstream media is a strategic mistake since they are giving ground to the frame of all facts being subjective and equally applicable. Remember that 'fake news' was quickly and effectively used by the alt-right to tarnish mainstream media. I expect 'alternative facts' will eventually be used against them, too.
Also 'alternative facts' might be a position that the mainstream media needs to defend, if the current administration upped their game and began to mislead through selective usage of facts rather than more overt lying.
I guess you meant to write "objective" there instead of "subjective", at least otherwise I can't make sense from what you write...
The thing is: Facts are, by definition, obective: "a thing that is known or proved to be true". However, their interpretation is not, and it may well be influenced by additional facts being revealed -- thus, whenver somebody says "given the facts, it is clear that XYZ holds", what they really mean (whether they are aware of it or not is another question) is "given the facts I am aware of, XYZ holds".
But again: these are additional facts, not alternative facts.
So all in all, I don't think your suggestion about an eventual legitimate need for the term "alternative facts" holds gound.
Subjective facts as-in those with different sources or ways of measuring information. For example, people can choose the scientific studies that they draw attention to, and find an expert that agrees with them. (Also, the way in which people use the term 'fact' often relates to empirical observation and this can be miscalibrated: what was considered objective fact sometimes gets disproved or constrained.)
Alternative facts as-in alternative selections of facts. Not merely a case of adding facts, but also in not acknowledging the facts that you don't like.
Aside: @smackay's comment is very close in meaning to what I wrote (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13480772). You might find it easier to understand.
> The indiscriminate usage of the term by the mainstream media is a strategic mistake since they are giving ground to the frame of all facts being subjective and equally applicable
They're saying that the media using the term "alternative facts" is giving ground to the very people who initially began spreading the lies, and in doing so is giving them an opening to exploit. Those people want to portray facts as subjective and all equally applicable. They aren't, and we should expect the the same people who started spouting "alternative facts" (read: lies) to begin branding actual facts as "alternative facts".
But when a reporter on CNN says "Why did the Donald Trump tell the Press Secretary to come out and tell falsehoods?" that diminishes what actually happened. The PS lied on national television. Call him out on it. Use the word "lied" or "liar" and stop dressing it up by using terms like "telling falsehoods."
When a liar is said to be "telling falsehoods" it's only one small step for them to reply with "alternative facts."
I don't understand the pervasive notion that anyone who voted Trump can't be reasoned with and isn't upset with how his administration has operated in the last week.
Neither I nor the person I replied to said or implied that all Trump supporters are, well, anything. The other fellow talked about "lots of Trump supporters" (which could easily refer to just a few percent of the total) and that's the group I referred to in my reply.
I don't understand the pervasive notion that if you talk bad about any set of Trump supporters, you're somehow painting 63 million people with the same brush.
This has been a tried and true strategy of con men and salesmen and marketers throughout history. (It was also a tried and true strategy of various NBA teams -- foul so much that that level of fouling seems normal and the refs stop calling it. Highly, highly successful strategy; you basically force the game to unfold the way you want.)
I wrote about this recently:
"When we are interested in a topic and have time, we read about it and contrast different points of views. But when we don’t have time or are not interested in something, we believe what our culture, friends and influencers say. And we are so bombarded with information nowadays that we can’t get informed about everything all the time" [1]
Do you think that a site tracking expert's opinions on important topics might help?
That's what we are doing on AgreeList.com / Wikiopinion.org We haven't decided yet if it should be a for-profit startup or a nonprofit organisation.
Do you think this would help to tackle fake news?
[1] https://medium.com/@HectorPerez/wikipedias-social-network-57...
I would really hope that there's a threaded discussion component, and I would hope that differing opinions/theories are allowed (and critiqued, obviously).
Do you mean a threaded discussion per topic or per opinion?
Of course, there's going to be the typical reddit-like absolute nonsense bickering, deceit, lying, disingenuousness, half-truths, etc. But within this mess there is frequently some extremely good information.
And then there's the academic/professional opinion, which would tend to be less verbose and higher quality, but then we know from experience that now and then these people are a little casual with the truth.
I would like to see a site where people can go to (as much as is practically possible) solve disagreements on popular topics. Take climate change: I would like to see the problem clearly described in (as much as is practically possible) layman's terms, so the average voter can understand it. For those interested in more detail or technical depth, drill down hierarchically into deeper levels of documentation.
Also, I would like to see any issues or loose ends raised by those who are not completely on board (aka "deniers", because only certain thoughts are allowed these days) debunked thoroughly, or left with a status of "we don't know how this fits into our theory".
To me it would be tremendously more efficient if rather than bickering on the internet, we could simply link to the objective (reviewed by both "sides") facts. Wouldn't having a resource like this been a good idea for the Clinto campaign, rather than hiring people to infiltrate internet forums? It makes me wonder why this approach wasn't taken.
http://www.hopesandconcerns.org/
I'm not super excited about "expert" opinion. An expert, to quote Niels Bohr, "Is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field." A jet engine mechanic is an expert if none of the planes she works on experiences engine failure. A scientist is, almost by definition, not an expert. This is especially the case when experiments cannot be carried out. For instance, we cannot instantiate 1000 earths, vary their CO2 content, and then observe what happens. We can only model, and modeling is based on assumptions, or "alternative facts." Almost everything controversial today (e.g., drug policy, economic interventions, climate change, etc.) falls into this quasi-scientific realm. I'm not sure that there is a quick way to reach a consensus on such issues other than by having all of the interested parties slug it out in public over an extended period. I also believe we must be careful about overzealously applying the precautionary principle to the point that policies that are objectively not working become sacred cows (e.g., the War on Drugs).
- Experts have 20-40 years of experience in a particular field within their discipline. Young scholars or those belonging to the academic middle field need not be counted as experts. (They may still be experts, but that doesn't mean you should resort to them for providing expertise.)
- Experts have 20-40 years of continuous publications in peer-reviewed international academic journals about the subject matter, or have been working in the field for that time in a senior role in non-academic fields (e.g. race driving, casino security, etc.).
- Experts are recognized as eminent scholars by the majority of fellow scientists who also work in the field, whether they agree with them or not. Not just scholars or average scholars, eminent scholars.
- The expert's discipline is an actual science and their field of expertise is in fact a subfield of that discipline. Fields are much narrower areas of specialization than disciplines. (Hence, priests are not experts about 'what's good', astrologers are not experts in astronomy and mechanical engineers who muse about special relativity are not experts about special relativity.)
- The expert is given the intellectual independence and has sufficient access to the evidence needed to provide his expertise.
These criteria really suffice to weed out all the pseudo-experts of the world. That's because most if not all pseudo-experts are either laymen or crackpots from related disciplines, and in any case are not recognized as eminent scholars from people of their field. Someone can be an expert without satisfying these criteria, Richard Feynman on the Challenger catastrophe, for instance, but if you want to make sure, the above criteria suffice.
Last but not least, nobody is forced to believe genuine experts, but he should also be prepared to defend his points of view as well as a genuine expert or be regarded a stupid assclown if he doesn't.
For instance, consider James Hansen. There is no doubt that most climatologists consider him an expert in climatology. He ticks off many of the boxes on your list. That's fine, but the climate models he presented to Congress in 1988 don't match observations since that time [1]. That's not to say climate change (née global warming) isn't happening, but that it is happening differently than originally predicted. This nuance is lost when "expertise" is accorded to the modeler. It is lost even more when we start talking about a 97% "expert" consensus that humans are causing climate change.
Perhaps treating "experts" like predictors and somehow attaching a coefficient of determination to each one would ease my concerns.
[1] https://www.skepticalscience.com/Hansen-1988-prediction.htm
When tens of "expert" climatologists with an error rate of say 5% in their field testify in support of a policy that eliminates thousands of expert miners, geologist, etc. with error rates of say 0.01% in their fields, you're going to have resistance. That's a huge perceived inequality in terms of ramifications and consequences.
We all experience alternative realities and use our 'alternative facts' to justify our beliefs. We all literally do this every single day.
As a libertarian or a marxist one has 'alternative facts' about the nature of humans, society and the environment, from there they build up their world.
In epistimology one discusses 'justified belief'; an apparently valid belief obtained in a repeatable and seemingly rigorous manner. But still subject to interpretation through our lens of 'knowledge'.
Think about the current cosmological debates about Dark Energy. Something like 5,000 papers have been published; it seems to be a 'fact' that Dark Energy exists and exerts an influence, but in 200 years from now we might have a justified belief that it does not as some aspects of relativity were incorrect.
> 'Facts' don't have an independent objective existence,
> unfortunately. 'Things that occurred' ( the literal
> etymology of 'facts' ) always require some form
> of interpretation in order to bring them into our
> domain of comprehension, and that's where the
> fuzziness enters.
For example, "It's 3:56 pm in the UK" is a fact in my mind.
(It won't be the case in a minute of course.)
The way I see it: facts are like memoized predicates. They are statements of truth within a particular context. Often they need to be re-executed to be kept fresh.
1) The President and his staff are mistaken, but honestly believe what they say
2) The President and his staff are lying, and know they are spreading falsehoods
3) The President and his staff are delusional
What other options are there?
If (1) is the case, and the actual facts are presented and they refuse to believe them, that would also seem to imply (3).
That they are willing to outright lie to the world about simple facts that are plainly obvious even to a child (e.g. crowd size in photographs) does not bode well for their representation of complex, nuanced, and consequential information.
I suppose there is a fourth possibility: this is a dominance game for the President, forcing staffers to lie about his hobbyhorses, knowing millions will accept the pronouncements as truth, and winking at his infuriated opponents. If he'll say his crowd was the largest in history when it's plain to all that it was not, what will he say about some new "Presidential voter fraud investigation" whose conclusions will be used to further suppress the vote and "make him correct"?
Edit: clarity
The man is remarkably insecure. Everything he does has to be the "best ever" or it's just not good enough. Having someone like that in charge scares me.
There are no alternative facts, only additional ones.
Do I say this to downplay empirical science? On the contrary. However, the focus on facts is I think more harmful than it might appear in trying to protect our scientific legacy. Dump every table ever recorded on the internet as a torrent, and very little useful things will come from it. It's protecting the institutions and freedom to reason about, and talk about, those findings that is important; to be able to openly challenge them, and rigorously come up with "best explanations" (a human intellectual construct, not fact, not truth).
Gag orders to silence academic findings, that is problematic. More so than trying to "protect" facts-of-the-matter as if they are somehow the pinnacle of human intellect.
Corollary this is also why I always find "humanities are not science" or "this is not Nature worthy"-statements rather annoying. It's a no-true Scotchman fallacy. Science is more than stamp collection, it's more than peer-review, it's more than running elaborate statistical tests on randomized experiments: it's the collective human endeavor to understand the universe and ourselves, it's a mindset. A mindset that can, and should be, in constant flux as our understanding progresses (and sometimes regresses).
No, it's more than that. Without the rigor to come up with testable hypothesis and reproducible results, you might as well be practicing religion. You can have a very inquisitive mindset but without applying scientific rigor, you're right in line with numerologists and whatever else.
That's why people are so hard on shaky humanities studies that have poor experimental design, poor analysis, or terrible biases in the data. You can't derive meaningful conclusions from bad science. Garbage in => garbage out.
“Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible… We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.”
I saw The Ascent of Man at a young age (probably 7 or 8) and I've always remembered this scene:
And in the end... it's a tension that can't be resolved. All there is is the tension. That's what science is, despite our hopes in it as a rational, dry methodology; at some point, the methodology has to come to a conclusion, the controlled experiments and p-values end up affecting the way we think and act, and we all just keep trying our best to make sense of the world.
http://repository.cmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3032&c...
I think the focus on data-driven pipelines for discovery, rather than focus on fundamental understanding of the biology and chemistry of organisms might also play a role. But I have no "proof" to back that up, other than my anecdotal experience as a researcher in a genetics institute :p
So, it comes down to trust. Unless you're going to do the science yourself, you have to trust somebody.
Also, despite mainstream scientific consensus being based on "testable hypothesis and reproducible results", it's still managed to get things terribly wrong. That's what they call a paradigm shift but most people would just call it being proven wrong.
Let's face it: Joe H. Average does not "reason". He just takes it on faith that there are various authorities on different matters, and just subscribes to the points of view of those authorities.
So then, the really sinister thing is this massive push to denigrate some authorities, while setting up "alternatives" in their place.
The vast, vast majority of people are puppets with very limited mental autonomy. If you think otherwise then you have no chance of understanding what's really going on now - because that's how the manipulators are thinking about the world, and they are succeeding.
I don't want to get too political, but one can't help but wonder if the way science has been talked about in the media has led to a skepticism of academia to an unhealthy degree.
However, in other contexts it seems like the prevailing consensus is reported without any controversy. For example; many popular psychology books have been written and findings reported as truth, which is now being thrown into question by the recent reproducibility crisis in that field. I've not seen any coverage of "big bang denialists" or "inflation denialists", despite how esoteric some of these theories are.
I'm tempted to see a link between those issues which negatively affect people's lives and the rise in belief in alternatives which are less negative (but potentially falsifiable). However, this is by no means a thorough review of the issues, and perhaps reflects my bias in recalling examples.
I recall reading about an effect who's name I forget, but it goes something like this:
The larger and more distant a phenomenon is from the day-to-day of an individual, the less likely that individual is to accept it.
Scientists understand this, headline writing journalists less so, and agenda-pushing activists and politicians definitely don't.
"Hooked on grant money" is a smear trope that is used by political opponents. If there was a credible scientific opposition to GW, they'd get all the grant money they could handle. It just ain't so.
> If there was a credible scientific opposition to GW, they'd get all the grant money they could handle.
Really? Without claiming that GW is not real (I think it likely is). What journals would they be published in? Who would review their papers? Who would review their grants? Where would this hypothetical credible GW scientist be getting their PhD from? Which advisor and committee members signed off on their degree? The overall process for getting money for science (and getting to the point where you're even in contention for getting money) is not different between chemistry and biology and climate science, and there is so much pettiness in the process in chem and bio, it's disgusting (and a large part of why I left). In the end whether or not you get money pretty much boils down to who you know and what your pedigree is.
I guess my overall point is that at this juncture in history, our scientific edifice is on very shaky foundations across the board. As much as I disagree with Trump, the fealty to which "anti-Trump" writ large gives over to "science", or really "scientific authority" is unfortunate. Moreover it's not 'being hooked on grant money' per se, but in order for scientists to keep being paid like they are, they must accept the validity of the system as a whole.
Being willing to believe things based on what reality says is the thing we should value. And it should be very highly-valued indeed.
1. Facts may exist in the abstract, but in the real world, most facts aren't knowable as such. Every experiment makes decisions about how to set up its apparatus, what to do about measurement error. As such, everything that we choose to use the convenience of calling "observed facts" is really filtered through those factors of human judgment. And thus, all of our knowledge is tentative, depending on the quality of our experimental judgments. We really don't know with certainty as much as we tell ourselves that we do. In general, it's not an unpardonable sin for someone to claim your observations are not valid. (although in doing so, one, would expect more of an argument about why the method of observation was faulty, rather than just a "he said, she said" argument.)
2. As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, science even at its best can only tell us raw information. This does not lead inexorably to decisions about policy. This process necessarily passes through our values, at an individual and at a societal level. In a universe of finite resources and finite opportunities, we must always make the value judgments of which course of action is best, by analyzing expected benefits versus opportunity costs (not just monetary, but also in our moral and aesthetic senses), to see which course gives the greatest net benefit.
(sorry for not giving concrete examples to explain. I'm afraid that if I were to do so, it would distract by causing debate about the examples themselves rather than my actual point)
A fact is generally considered to be a proposition that is true. The problem is, science doesn't deal in what's true. Science deals in what's falsifiable.
Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable, and therefore fall into the epistemologically nebulous category of "things which are not yet false". I'd suggest that trying to build a positivist bastion of truth on such shifting epistemological sands is doomed to fail.
That's the epistemology of Popper. Not necessarily how science works. See e.g. Fayerabends arguments in "Against Method".
Where do you get that idea? A fact has to be "established." As in the trial, in front of a jury.
Now in science, the jury are qualified scientists. Others simply aren't qualified. Even unqualified people can invalidate something that is believed to be a fact. But they can't do by just being loud. The jury has to acknowledge that that unqualified guy is not speaking nonsense.
Read about the testing of EmDrive as an example. The guy who made it and can't explain it will still be accepted to be the discoverer, if his claimed effect gets to be really proved. The jury was skeptical, but they will still accept the results, if the measurements demonstrate it "beyond any doubt." At the moment, what was measured is far from that.
Another example: global warming is a scientific fact. There are some loud persons claiming that it isn't so, but what they bring to support their claims is truly and utterly worthless. Who says that: the climate scientists, all in the world. How do we know it's true? Because that's how science works, the specialists are trained the whole life to recognize the valid claims. The valid claims would become a new facts. The deniers don't have them.
Fact: "I measured the CO2 content in a sample of air, and it was 400ppm." (I didn't actually measure. Bear with me.)
Fact: "50 year old textbooks list the content of CO2 in air as 280ppm."
Theory: "The increase of CO2 content in air is caused by the burning of fossil hydrocarbons."
You can argue with the theory. You can not argue with the facts. All three of them are science, and yes, that explicitly includes the argument.
> Most things that are believed to be true aren't falsifiable
What?! Citation needed.
1) The effective radiating temperature of the earth, T_e, is determined by the need for infrared emission from the planet to balance absorbed solar radiation:
pi*R^2(1-A)*S_0 = 4*pi*R^2*sigma*T_e^4
2) Rearranged, this equation gives:
T_e = [S_0*(1-A)/(4*sigma)]^0.25
4) The mean surface temperature is T_s ~ 288 K.
5) The excess, T_s - T_e, is the greenhouse effect of gases and clouds
2, 3) Simple conclusions from (1).
4) Fact... sort of. It needs a precise defintion of "mean surface temperature" that makes sense in the face of the equation in (1). Shouldn't you take the fourth root of the mean of the fourth power of temperature? For practical purposes, this is called a "ball park number".
5) Plain wrong. The correct coclusion is that either (a) the theory presented in (1) is wrong or (b) one of your inputs (R, A, sigma, S_0) is wrong. Turns out the value of A is wrong, and the simplistic idea of albedo is not good enough for the theory in (1).
https://www.washingtonpost.com/amphtml/news/speaking-of-scie...
* Reproducibility crisis - http://www.nature.com/news/1-500-scientists-lift-the-lid-on-...
* P-hacking http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-statistical-err...
* Prominent scientists criticizing those who find math errors in their works http://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2016/9/30/13077658/sta... (There are few facts more basic than math, and one of the scientists actually used the words "methodologic terrorism" to describe this effort)
* Not publishing raw data so others can analyze it http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2016/08/16/sc...
These issues, especially the last two make it seem that a lot of scientists are not fighting for the facts, but for their own academic position.
It's people holding these beliefs receiving human connection in the context of these beliefs primarily from people who share the same beliefs! We use differing beliefs as a reason to disconnect & disassociate, which is EXACTLY what got us Trump in the first place.
Science knows this! We have to temporarily affirm their worldview before challenging specific pieces of it. The more foundational the belief, the deeper the connection needs to be.
My hypothesis: we need to collectively learn nonviolent communication in order to hear the right on an emotional level. By connecting with them over all their deep-seated fears & beliefs, we can then more easily stay changing them.
A scientist job is to present the facts. It's the media, and ultimately the citizen job to fight for them.
> The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Example: In education it's important for students to learn a wide range of things about a subject, even things they didn't know that they needed. This is why self-taught students often have large but important holes in their knowledge; they simply didn't know what they had to study, so they didn't look for it.
If you know that you don't know something, that's a "known unknown", and you can plan to research it. If you don't know that you don't know something, then that's an unknown unknown, and that's a much harder problem to fix without external help or accidental discovery.
We need to act, and we need to act now. Science is what got this man elected (twitter, television), now it needs to fight for the very basic principles.
The word "science" seems to mean almost everything nowadays.
Twitter and television are not science. They are social constructs built around the works of engineering, which itself was based on some established scientific knowledge.
I admit it's a long causality chain, but without the scientific methods, those things would not exist. Thus, those methods are what we need to preserve in order to advance, and this is very openly threatened by the current administration.
As for Trump's administration creating creating a danger for the climate-change mitigation efforts, that's another topic.
But you're right that using Twitter by itself is not science.
Still looking for the facts in this article...
You say there are "too many to list" but if you want this argument to sound even vaguely informed you're going to have to be a lot more specific about which science is bad and why.
From your comments it's not clear whether you know anything about science or public policy or have just read an article that says "science is bad, mmkay"
That's not science, that's politics. You might very reasonably disagree with it, but there's no branch of scientific inquiry that says that the EPA should be funded to a specific amount or be communicating in a certain way.
Obama expanded the EPA to care about climate change, Trump is reining it back in. C'est la political vie, and it should be dealt with like any other politics one might disagree with, but it's nothing to do with science.
So it's a bad article, aka a political fluff piece. I got that message from reading it.
But what are these facts?