Hacker News Reader

Comment by notacoward | Hacker News Reader

My worry with pieces like this is that they're meant to encourage intellectual diversity in scientific discourse, but some people will undoubtedly try to use them as "teach the controversy!" to justify any kind of crazy non-scientific idea. How do we teach people to draw that line? Or is that a lost cause?

View on HN

Well, one issue, is that this article (and many like it) only address controversy, and not whether a given controversy is warranted by evidence. I think it's important in discussing intellectual diversity to emphasize that going against established thought requires compelling evidence, usually rightfully so.

It also doesn't help that their only example of intellectual diversity is itself flawed, and not convincing, even to the authors.

Scientific discourse is based on the assumption that all parties have the basic reading comprehension to look at the primary data.

I'm not really worried about creationism or climate stabilism competing given those conditions. And if those aren't the conditions, it's not scientific discourse.

Others are not so discerning in what they think is scientific discourse.

If anyone who feels that way would like to suggest a neologism for the sort of discourse I describe, I'd be open to using it - I do feel the term 'scientific discourse' has been watered down a fair bit.

My point wasn't that I necessarily have a different view on what scientific discourse is; my point was that someone who is less discerning might see a discussion of one of the views you listed and see valid scientific discourse.

The issue is not that scientists, or discerning non-scientists, will take those views seriously, it's that others might (or will, or do). Hence the issue is not with defining scientific discourse, it's with educating a population to be able to apply that definition (or formulate their own functional individual ones).

> How do we teach people to draw that line

By teaching people to recognize where faulty data are and how they were collected. I always encourage people to look at several sources of news and figure out conclusions on their own, ignoring potential bias. [0]

It's never a lost cause to emphasize the importance of digging through an academic paper or a news article, effectively doing their own research instead of just listening to figureheads and looking through headlines.

[0]: https://www.allsides.com/media-bias/how-to-spot-types-of-med...

This makes us susceptible to what's essentially a Gish gallop, though. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop, for those unfamiliar.)

It takes inordinately more time and knowledge to debunk a false claim than it does to make it.

Also worth noting that false claims need not be malicious to serve as a DOS attack. An army of untrained ‘researchers’ drawing improbable conclusions from randomly combined snippets of scientific papers can generate a huge amount of pseudoscientific ‘sourced-looking’ ideas.

Unfortunately it takes a lot more effort to actually understand a paper then to ‘just throw it out there’.

What is the line between scientific and non-scientific idea?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com