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Comment by cderwin | Hacker News Reader

I think of late one of the problems is that there is a certain dogma within political circles and the media that the body of facts produced by scientists is absolute and irrefutable, when the truth is somewhat the opposite: the body of knowledge produced by science is constantly changing, individual results are continually reevaluated, and theories are compared against each other until there is a preponderance of evidence in favor of one over the others.

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.

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I think a tangential issue is the assumption that science can decide one particular course of action to be the correct one, often expressed in a form such as that the science of climate change tells us that we must build solar farms and wind turbines. Science doesn't, in fact, tell us that, directly at least -- but it can tell us that if we want to combat the root cause of climate change, we need to decrease CO2 emissions, and major component of CO2 emissions is electricity generation, and solar and wind are reasonably practical, comparably low CO2 options, compared to most other option. But they are also expensive, and science can't tell us if it's 'worth it' (specifically if its more 'worth it' than other competing expenses), for an example.

Scientists understand this, headline writing journalists less so, and agenda-pushing activists and politicians definitely don't.

Do scientists understand this? I've tried to have this sort of conversation with scientists and most don't see things that way. I don't know if contemporary scientists see themselves as activists or if they are too hooked on grant money to give up the notion of scientific hyperauthority (reminded of Upton Sinclair's lament about getting people to understand things)

Generally it's my experience that if you catch a scientist whose work has been through the media, they're quite humble "well, actually" about it. But yeah, certain areas does appear to have become very politicised. I'll try to keep my faith, and suspect that it's worst in fairly small (very loud) circle, and that the rank and file is more modest.

Yes, in great numbers they do. The spur to activism is in response to political foot-dragging, and the party bias is simply because the Republicans resist the whole issue en masse.

"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.

no the spur to activism existed long before trump was elected president. I haven't been an active mainstream scientist for about 4 years or 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.

It would all be so much more convincing if scientists fought for the facts from the start. Having been there, I have seen lots of scientists fight for publications, status, grant money, etc (and the 'winners' coming from that ilk - and not the honest type). It felt like facts at best were a second class citizen in the career of a scientist. I suppose that's just human, but then we shouldn't be making scientific results to such an apotheosis.

I think the apotheosis is not the result of science, but the method by which those results are arrived at or observed. Do you have a hypothesis, and do you reject/alter that hypothesis based on what you observe in reality? (Or, more literally, based on the manipulations of reality that you perform in the course of experiments?)

Being willing to believe things based on what reality says is the thing we should value. And it should be very highly-valued indeed.

That theory doesn't really align with the number of climate change denialists that appear on media channels and say that scientists are a) wrong, b) biased, c) not in consensus, d) unsure in their predictions, e) paid shills.

I think it depends on context. As you point out, a lot of coverage is given to climate change denialists - out of proportion to the number of scientists who are sceptical of the consensus. Other examples of that include vaccine safety, evolution, GMO safety and cancer therapy.

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'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).

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.

The mistake is to believe that people should care about an issue just because of proven risk. That is actually the domain of politics, ethics, and philosophy. Turning it into a scientific debate does not actually pursuade people of a particular world view.

I think you're on the right track - and the discourse from both sides is clearly wrong - but it goes deeper than that.

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)

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