Scientific communication in a post-truth society
pnas.org
pnas.org
> "Democrats are the party of the poor, city dwellers,women, nonwhites, and secularists. Republicans, in contrast, represent white males, rural areas, evangelicals, and the well off."
, they admit to invalid extrapolations of their own claims (ref 28) and their analysis lacks any attempts at comparative analysis. Their entire message is that "scientists have to put up with fake news". Yeah tough shit, this is 2018. So much more could be said about decades of promotic "scientific" politics (technocracy) and its failures as well.
And apparently, this is an opinion piece which somehow got peer reviewed and it dates from April.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3463968/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
https://everydayfeminism.com/2016/03/why-rationalism-is-irra...
http://www.indiana.edu/~koertge/rfemlog.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_wars
A number of different philosophical and historical schools, often grouped together as "postmodernism", began reinterpreting scientific achievements of the past through the lens of the practitioners, often positing the influence of politics and economics in the development of scientific theories in addition to scientific observations. Rather than being presented as working entirely from positivistic observations, many scientists of the past were scrutinized for their connection to issues of gender, sexual orientation, race, and class. Some more radical philosophers, such as Paul Feyerabend, argued that scientific theories were themselves incoherent and that other forms of knowledge production (such as those used in religion) served the material and spiritual needs of their practitioners with equal validity as did scientific explanations.
However I do think it’s a major trend that needs to be ridiculed. It’s all across the map. Many of my rightwing and libertarian leaning facebook friends have increasingly become skeptical of the scientific establishment when it comes to climate change, evolution etc. Many of my friends on the left are likewise making these claims about GMOs or anti vaxxers (regardless of political affiliation) often claim that the vaccines are population control and any arguments are paid for by governments. People on both sides of the Israel Palestine issue and so on are claiming that historical facts or context is “just talking points”. And yes, some major proponents of third wave feminism have espoused this as well.
To me these are all aspects of a weird “post modernist” approach to science, and particularly frustrating with climate change deniers (because it affects us all). It is a MINDSET where a rational argument is met with “oh well that’s just the ESTABLISHMENT, you are a XYZ” where XYZ is the opposite political or ideological identity.
Frankly now that I think about it, it is exactly an answer to the parent’s question. I will even quote Encyclopedia.com to show that my comment is “not just kicking at a position” but in fact simply stating it — and you are making a value judgment yourself:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/literature-and-arts/art-and-arc...
de-centered postmodern heterogeneity makes obsolete the Enlightenment ideal of consensus, which all too frequently required the suppression of minority dissent. Postmodernity, with its heterogeneous interests and worldviews, allows previously oppressed or marginalized groups to make claims upon justice, and upon a position of centrality, even in the absence of majority consensus concerning such claims.
Here are other sources too:
More truthful analysis would reveal science was never objective and just a collection of best guesses by all the scientists that contribute to the body of work. Truth was never an easy to define concept so the fact we only now realize that is almost scarier.
Sociologist and well studied scholar Nathan Jurgenson wrote a recent piece regarding our collective willingness to subscribe to this belief: https://reallifemag.com/faked-out/
> Kakutani misses how poststructural and postmodern thought has long been a response to science’s unwarranted claims of neutrality and objectivity. Yes, sometimes this work really is just a set of stylistic whims and nihilistic postures or arguments for full epistemic relativism. But the core of much of what was popular and is still taught — Foucault, Haraway, Harding, Latour, and so on — uses empirical evidence to show that objectivity is never as such. These theorists show how accepted notions of truth are deeply rooted in cultural contingencies, and that interrogating these notions helps better articulate reality than accepting false objectivism with blind faith. This work was not “post-truth,” but rather called for smaller, more local truths instead of absolute or universal claims made from a posture of neutrality.
Epistemology isn’t new, and lays below the foundation of “science”. This isn’t a new concept, but one that we are sadly being forced to face in contemporary culture.
Is some science more correct than other science? All sides are the same in this case, and communication in a climate of science where P values are eeked out of questionable datasets who is truly agendaless?
Science used to carry this undeserved "objectivism" which has always been informed opinion, subject to change by newer more compelling research. So I don't understand what really changed. It's always been a post truth society.
But what most people refer to when they talk about science is the results of the process. There too, we have a wide spectrum of quality. It's rather dishonest to throw all results into a single bucket and then cherry pick the poor quality results and claim everything is the same. It is not.
On p-values, yes, there is currently a large problem with some areas of science not understanding statistics correctly. This is not a problem with the theoretical process or goal, it is a problem with implementation that should be addressed. But again, to compare even this with non-scientific information which is literally made up to suite various non-scientific goals is very dishonest. These bodies of information are not remotely "the same."
The whole post-truth this article refers to is more about the wider dissemination of scientific knowledge to non-practitioners. While it's always been a challenge to communicate sometimes complex information to the wider public, what has changed in society today is arguably the amount of "corrupted" versions of the data. When you have people taking the scientific results and producing slightly distorted versions with the intention of misleading or making it hard to discern what is original, it's a bigger problem. This is what the article is referring to as "post-truth."
It's a wider societal problem that affects both scientific knowledge and other information alike. Let's not dismissing the problem by saying "all sides are the same." There is a very large range of quality of information, it is not all the same. The amount of bias and ulterior agenda in information varies hugely.
But also we are blessed with the internet and means to fact check what we hear. I don't believe this problem is getting worse in 2018 than say the 1900's. Snake oil salesmen still typically quote facts, no matter how dubious.
> There is a very large range of quality of information, it is not all the same. The amount of bias and ulterior agenda in information varies hugely.
Again, you’ve lost the thread when you are grounding yourself in an “this is information” and “this is not”. The question before your presumption is an epistemological one.
Unless you want to argue some unprovable metaphysics that makes the empirical world a misleading appearance.
As scientists we are supposed to be trying to answer questions. If we've decided in advance what the answer should be, and that we'll spin the data to get the preconceived result if possible and bury the result if it isn't what we wanted, we're not doing science, we're doing antiscience masquerading as science. There is a lot of that out there.
And ultimately to prove the record of scientific knowledge we need reproducible data that can be independently confirmed. Its entirely possible and common to do science wrong and that's kinda the point. To try and find truth and then corroborate claims with other researchers.
Science is always a best guess until a better guess comes along.
What's interesting about this is that I think it directly contradicts what people like Dan Kahan have been saying (http://www.culturalcognition.net/blog/), which is that motivated reasoning has always been the key problem for science communication, and that the only thing that really changes is not so much the degree of political partisanship but the choice of which scientific issues are the ones that end up being linked to politics. (For example, vaccinations have all the potential to be divisive but nevertheless have almost no political partisanship about them apart from the occasional tweet by Trump.)
It seems they put up the videos of the colloquium at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGJm1x3XQeK2xwsj2vkRg...
Also, I had to look this up, it's an Arthur M. Sackler Colloquium, which is the Sackler that marketed Valium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_M._Sackler), not one of the Sacklers responsible for Oxycontin.