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Comment by nonbel | Hacker News Reader

Be careful, there are lots of people passing themselves off as scientists who aren't these days.

It is all over the place. From medical research where they call people who try to check the data analysis "parasites"[1], to psychology where they call people who do replications "bullies"[2], to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3].

[1] http://researchparasite.com/

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...

[3] https://www.quantamagazine.org/physicists-and-philosophers-d...

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That parasite website is so weird. It sounds so negative, like a piece of satire, but then you read the actual text and it sounds like a serious award whose goal is to encourage rigor in scientific research.

Whose stupid idea was it to call it the Parasite Award

Maybe natural scientists are more accustomed to using the strict, cold, definitions of biological concepts without being emotionally influenced by any cultural value judgement attached to them.

Good thing we live in a strict cold culture-less world then.

I think it's too much to ask to expect every little scientific niche, every subculture, to have to adapt their local personalized context-aware terminology to the global culture, just because a random person coming from outside the niche might be confused by their language. It's like demanding that no part of a public speech should be able to shine a poor light on the speaker when a substring of it is taken out of context. It's an unnecessarily harsh constraint.

The name is tongue in cheek. It's taken from a NEJM editorial that attempted to negatively characterize people who just analyze data without doing the grunt work of collecting it as "research parasites".

(Obviously the editorial is gesturing at a real problem: that by unbundling data collection and analysis and, as is unfortunately typical, only giving credit to the result of analysis, there could be a dearth of data collection from lack of incentive. But characterizing pure analysis negatively is obviously the wrong response.)

> to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3]

I don't see how you got that from the article you cited.

Take string theory. It was created to unify gravity and quantum mechanics. Afterwards it was found that it also could correctly solve problems from several other areas of physics outside of the unification of gravity and QM. It had not been designed to solve those. That came out of it unexpectedly.

If the existence of those problems had happened to have been discovered after string theory instead of before, they would have been testable predictions of string theory that it would pass, and would count as evidence for string theory.

It seems ridiculous to disqualify them from being evidence for string theory just because of the historical accident that they happened to have been discovered earlier.

This is what it says:

>"Many of today’s theorists — chief among them the proponents of string theory and the multiverse hypothesis — appear convinced of their ideas on the grounds that they are beautiful or logically compelling, despite the impossibility of testing them."

Your position seems to be different from that described in the article. Anyway, post-dicting is not as impressive as pre-dicting. How much less impressive is determined by the flexibility of the model. My understanding is that the string-theory/multiverse model is extremely flexible.

Your quote is coming from some people quoted early in the article (around paragraph 5). My position is based on quotes quite a ways farther into the article, from people who are disagreeing with the earlier quoted people.

" to physics where they want to get rid of the need for evidence altogether[3]." Don't pick on string theorists...

I would then ask: "what is science?", "who defines it?", "who is science?"

Readiing the last article you linked, it seems like a legitimate debate about the scientific method and what constitutes scientific theories. Every scientists (but especially "science fans") need to acknowledge the fact that all science rests on certain axioms (partially laid out in the scientific method) that can't be proven by science. So going with the newest developments in the philosophy of science, the people developing science itself, seems only reasonable. What you call "getting rid of evidence" is only the exploration of other types of evidence aside from classical empirical evidence

Up until this weird new thing where people want to dream up models and not worry about empiricism, "science" has always been characterized by the fact that you can strip out all the dependence on philosophy and reduce it to statements about procedures and algorithms. Every metaphysics has to reckon with our ability to act in the world, but they don't all have to include particular statements about the ontology of (say) numbers. As a result, statements about similarities between processes (for example the way counting in your head, a neurochemical process, is similar to putting stones in a bucket, a mechanical process) can be "independent" of the underlying ontological model. After all, whatever "similarity," means on the inside, those processes are "similar."

In a sense, it's similar to how mathematicians write proofs in natural-ish language and call them true under the idea that they could convert them to purely formal symbolic manipulations if they wanted to put in the effort. Scientists talk about things as if they had all kinds of ontological statuses that they can't be shown to have - (ever heard a chemist describe electrons as "wanting" to occupy the lowest energy state?) - but that's nothing but language. The only reason any of it works is because you could cut out all of the weird stuff if you really wanted to.

I can't quite tell if I agree with you; so I shall attach this opinion. Science is characterised by being able to strip everything out of it down to a procedure to gather data and some guesses at how future data will look.

Taking gravity as the classic example, in theory any person with any set of biases can put together a table with column A being mass and column B being distance to the ground and column C being time to fall the distance. From that, they could reconstruct Newton's Laws of Gravity if they measure everything carefully enough and are honest.

Maybe the theory they come up with is F = g m / r^2 and the mechanism is tiny goblins. Cool. They can call that science as long as the goblins will always follow the rules. But the rules of evidence are very important, we can't claim the goblins are going to do something differently sometimes if we haven't observed it in the data.

The data is the science. The formula and mechanisms are useful, but they are inevitably wrong in detail. Gravity isn't ever going to be the only effect measured in a data set, so no data set can ever perfectly confirm a theory correct, and certainly cannot confirm a mechanism.

We don't need to rely on the scientists getting the mechanisms right. But we do need science to have a very high standard of measurement. It would help if they hold themselves back from coming up with crazy theories, but I don't know what a crazy theory looks like so I'm not going to try and police that today.

The models are also the science, because they come packaged along with statements about how well they fit the data. It's the "mechanism for the sake of having a mechanism" stuff that usually ends up as egg-on-face.

Strings sit in the same group as "flux-as-actual-fluid," Boltzmann's atoms, and caloric fluid: intellectually interesting guesses that remain guesses until the empirical side gets advanced enough. The fluids lost, atoms won, and we're waiting on strings.

Is your main argument there Bill Nye. If it isn't, it should be.

Bill Nye and Degrasse Tyson come to mind.

Bill Nye is a science "presenter". I think he was a mech eng at Boeing.

Degasse Tyson is a trained scientist but has a tendency to espouse opinions on subjects he's not an expert in, but with the authority of his professional background.

They both use the term Carl Sagan used. "Science communicator"

I'll be frank, if supposed "actual scientists" were better at science communication, may be there wouldn't be a need for "science communicators."

I say this as an actual scientist who mostly dislikes communication. I'm happy there are communicators out there that raise our profile a little, I don't feel jealous or spiteful for some reason towards them.

I think you're mistaking "communication" for "vulgarization". Most decent scientists are good at communicating their findings via publications. Making those findings understandable by laypeople, maybe not so much.

Your statement about Tyson implies that he isn't allowed to talk about anything other than the topic of his PhD defense.

No, that's not what I mean. Of course he like everyone else can have an opinion on anything they want to opine on.

What I'm saying is because of his background, that offers him imprimatur on things which he's not an expert but people will presume that because he's an expert elsewhere he's opinion in other areas are equally valid.

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