Comment by losteric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by losteric | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Your statement reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientific process.

If you watch things carefully in the scientific world, you'll notice every domain has hundreds or thousands of people actively researching in the field. Some individuals are on the cutting edge, they define what is worth researching next (usually by themselves), but the accepted knowledge is based on mountains of research from all over the world.

There are no authority figures. Science is iterative refinement of our understanding of the world through consensus acceptance of research results. I mean, this sentence:

> Yet how do we know these few are willing to take on the new information, and actually take it seriously, especially when so much money might be on the line for them.

is outright hilarious, and depressing, for someone who's done research. Scientists are smart people that care about advancing the frontier of knowledge - revolutionizing a field of research is the most desirable outcome. There is no money behind defending the status quo, because that isn't even science.

Science is the metaphorical tree of knowledge. A solid trunk made of facts like "2+2=4" and "Apples fall off trees", while the cutting edge is unproven branches near the top that may not survive the year... but everyone in the field knows and expects that.

The scientific process underpins every aspect of our modern era. It's how we went from room-sized computers calculating projectile trajectories to smart phones that support multi-player online virtual reality... in a single generation.

> I think too that the reason pop-science and alternative medicine is so successful is because regular science is too quick to hold the wrong things up - they are holding up people not results

Theory 1: Millions of academics across the world are united in a global conspiracy to do bad science

Theory 2: Public education has failed this generation of Americans, and now the free market is just exploiting ignorance with snake oil

There is actually nothing wrong with the scientific process, it's great and works. Also everything you're saying about the mountain of information built up by thousands of people is correct to. What I'm talking about is that the mountain is usually under extreme control from a few dictators that provide funding, and basically are the "trolls" of the community that either make vast swathes of research "laughable" or not.

None of that aspect to "science the religion" has anything to do with the scientific process.

By the way, Science, which I hope people recall, has no ability to fully describe the truth - only our best possible guess. That's also written in the scientific process.

Also many people say "because science" and note things like computers and gravity to justify anything related to science that can't possibly be wrong.

Here's a simple thought experiment to help you understand how little we actually are with science and the human body:

Dig up every article and research paper you can on coffee.

Tell me now, for sure, is Coffee Good for you or Bad for you?

That's probably a lot harder to answer than:

Is plastic in Salt Good for you or Bad for you?

And then ask yourself if you drink coffee or drink melted plastic and try to reveal your biases and realize every scientist is doing the same.

With only a little bit of hyperbole, that's because the question "is Coffee Good for you or Bad for you?" isn't scientific.

At best, science can try to answer the question "Do people, that are very similar to you, perform better on some metric when they drink coffee or don't drink coffee?"

Especially when it comes to food, there are so many variations on what "good or bad" looks like, and what "you" looks like, that we should expect different studies to come to different conclusions they look at different populations, and measure different things.

Even when we try to measure the same thing, on similar populations, it can be really hard to isolate all the important factors. Even then we expect different results.

The problem you are talking about is not a science issue, at least not directly.

It's a Popular Science issue, or at a stretch a Science Communication issue.

Everybody loves a powerful model - a simple description that explains a lot - but those are rare and far between in science. In attempting to reach for new models, such as modelling the effect of coffee on human lives, there is a tendency to take scientific results and reduce them so that they look like a powerful model. Coffee is Good! Coffee is Bad! This process is not science! At best this may spur researchers to test if the model is correct, but more often it's just fuel for press releases, popular science journalists, and social media battles.

> Theory 1: Millions of academics across the world are united in a global conspiracy to do bad science

You don't need a conspiracy to do bad science. Just as you don't need a conspiracy to do bad code - and we all on HN know how much of bad code is around. All you need is to write code - with the best of intentions - and to neglect to follow best practices or cut corners from time to time, or just lack experience or foresight to predict potential problems. Sometimes you don't even know it's bad code until you come back to it a couple of years later and stare at it in horror - how could anybody do this?

With code, though, there's an evolutionary pressure acting on it - it is actually meant to be run. If the code does not perform, if it is buggy, if it's insecure or unmaintainable - it creates incentive to be replaced, so some of it dies off and hopefully is replaced with better one (or one bad in different way :). With scientific papers, bad paper can linger around for years until either it obviously contradicts reality in a way making its claims unsustainable, or is refuted by other paper. But for many papers just finding out it is wrong requires doing the same work as the original author did, sometimes more - and the incentives to do that are usually much less prominent.

> The scientific process underpins every aspect of our modern era.

True. But the fact that this process allowed us to achieve much does not mean every part of it is perfect - just as the fact that Facebook has billions does not mean every piece of code running Facebook is great. Some of them is surely terrible.

I don't know enough to ask the right question...but do you think there is any type of research being paid for with a specific outcome targeted? Not to break out my tinfoil hat, but the conspiracy theory part of me assumes that pharma/manufacturing companies with the most to lose, would be willing to part with large sums to skew research majorities in their favor.

Like I said I'm mostly ignorant of that domain, and curious what more informed people would say on that topic.

Absolutely science for hire is a real thing and even unconscious bias is dangerous, but the scientific method is based on reproducibility and predictive power. Important results will get tested and picked apart and studied over and over. It might take time to arrive at a really solid conclusion, but the only way we have to fight bias and error is to repeatedly compare our ideas to reality. That’s all science is.

In this case, it seems like a claim that most table salt contains micro plastics should not be a very hard result to refute or reproduce. Usually scientists will avoid making claims that they aren’t really sure of and are easy to disprove.

The scientific method has been compromised and the proof is in the pudding , so to speak. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis

There has always been bogus science, since before there was science. The fact is we know there is a replication crisis. How to we know that? By applying the scientific method to try to replicate results.

The replication crisis is an example of science working the way it is supposed to. It’s scientists using the scientific method to call their colleagues to account. It’s just that it takes time.

There’s nothing wrong with the method itself. Make testable claims. Have other people test them. What the replication crisis tells us is we need to do this more, not that we need to do it less or not at all.

In specific fields that have always been regarded as less scientific (social sciences and pharmaceuticals).

Medical research is paid for by people that want a specific outcome. But, they also care about the truth as they don’t want drugs that kill people for example.

Net result a small bias, but not the kind of conspiracy worth talking about.

tobacco/fossil fuel companies come to mind - it's never explicit, but there is nudging to disprove certain claims.

You can see how well it's working - money delayed but did not change the truth.

Science is very difficult to pay off. Individuals can spend another 10 years studying after high school just to get enough responsibility worth bribing... and even if they accepted the bribe, peer review would still reveal the sham research forever tainting their name.

So, yeah, people don't really accept bribes.

The worst you'll see is in pharma, where they're testing drugs - a researcher might select test subjects that will react well to a drug in order to make it look better (hiding side effects).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com