I feel like this is the philosophical equivalent of "all sides are the same." That is to say, it's a way to just dismiss the issues rather then try to fix them and be more objective.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Unless you want to argue some unprovable metaphysics that makes the empirical world a misleading appearance.