The David Peters Problem | Hacker News Reader

The David Peters Problem

tetzoo.com

27 pointsapsec11215 comments

I don't know anything about paleontology or zoology, but this general class of problem resonates with me. What do you do about people who are good at saying things confidently and quickly while you, in accordance with the norms of reliable science, want to say things slowly and tentatively after lots of research?

This is the old "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth gets its pants on" problem, but exacerbated, I think, by modern communication. While it's genuinely good for science and for human knowledge that anyone can type up something on their blog and have it instantly readable to everyone around the world, and while it does open the possibility of a more meritocratic approach to science than journals controlled by established academics, we haven't really figured out how to apply our own skeptical eye to everything that we see in place of the traditional systems of review. And while others in the community technically can respond with "I'm not sure this is true yet, but my gut says it might not be, I'll spend a few days investigating it and let people know," it's unlikely to get anywhere near as much attention as the original flashy claim.

it certainly feels as if people have become markedly stupider due to this phenomenon and the internet. has anyone attempted to quantify this? some measure of falsely held beliefs over time? level of conspiratorial thinking over time?

It ‘seems’ that way for sure, but i have a feeling its because these people who were always this way now have a platform to speak on, or that validates their existing thinking and solidifies it. Its a good point though - how do we test a theory on this? It would be interesting to see if people are doing scientific tests in this space

I don't think people are stupider in the sense of less knowledge (or less g, for sure), but there is a phenomenon where people are expected to know more and know it quickly. Before the internet, if you were a working scientist and you wanted to know about something that wasn't in your field, it was a fairly involved process to figure it out, not 10 seconds reading Wikipedia. Analogously, if you weren't a scientist at all, you'd have to ask a scientist, you couldn't spend 10 seconds reading and potentially misreading Wikipedia, you'd just say "I don't know."

I think this has consequences in other fields besides science too. The general public now has the ability to have well-formed opinions about government policy and its effects, for instance. That may in practice be making people more confident in their ill-formed opinions, where they would have previously deferred to experts. (Of course, it also is a great potential benefit if we use it right, because those experts will generally have their own biases and agendas.)

It is on heck of a problem. We need two things to solve it. We desperately need networks of trusted institutions or experts to which we can offload some of the fact checking and individually we need to become much more skeptical about the information we consume. In fact we should be teaching our kids that most of the information they are likely to come across, outside a few trusted sources, is false, and often malicious.

HN comments are locked to further replies after 2 weeks. That doesn't exactly help.

Sometimes, figuring out what considered discourse looks like in a certain area is an unbounded process.

Sometimes it hinges on drive-by enlightenment by someone who happens to have exactly the right resource and a willingness to necropost it.

Yeah, I appreciate HN not having a notification system for replies unlike Reddit, but even so there's some pressure to reply quickly more than deeply. I'd be very interested in seeing a discussion forum that's intentionally much slower, e.g., having replies only show up at the next hour or half-hour.

One thing you'd want to be careful about is letting people say "This is obviously wrong" and having something to that effect show up quickly, so you don't waste a bunch of people's time replying with the same thing.

It's complicated by the fact that the world has a history of vilifying new ideas -- that are later validated and become part of accepted science -- and dismissing their authors as crack pots. My standard go-to example of this is Semmelweis, though he's hardly the only one.

Despite various publications of results where hand washing reduced mortality to below 1%, Semmelweis's observations conflicted with the established scientific and medical opinions of the time and his ideas were rejected by the medical community. He could offer no acceptable scientific explanation for his findings, and some doctors were offended at the suggestion that they should wash their hands and mocked him for it. In 1865, the increasingly outspoken Semmelweis supposedly suffered a nervous breakdown and was committed to an asylum by his colleagues. He died 14 days later after being beaten by the guards, from a gangrenous wound on his right hand which might have been caused by the beating. Semmelweis's practice earned widespread acceptance only years after his death, when Louis Pasteur confirmed the germ theory, and Joseph Lister, acting on the French microbiologist's research, practised and operated using hygienic methods, with great success.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis

Galileo would be a more famous example of this phenomenon.

This is a sad story but I really like the idea of “decrying the mainstream palaeontological world as if it’s part of a conspiratorial cabal of blinkered elites”.

I mean I can at least understand the internal logic of, say the climate conspiracists who think that climate scientists somehow stand to profit from their reports. But paleontologists...seem beyond the pale, so to speak.

The problem is that in the past (up through about 1980) paleontology/biology was kind of ... hokum/voodoo.

There is a reason why the Tree of Life had to undergo a lot of rearrangement once we could sequence DNA.

However, now that we have DNA sequencing, the foundations of biology/paleontology on on much more solid ground. If you want to attack them, you have a much higher bar to clear nowadays.

I assume you mean classification here, full biology is a lot more.

I wouldn't describe cladistics as hookum/voodoo. It's a quite well defined and successful method when used correctly, and has been in wide spread us since way before the 80ies.

The only problem is that it didn't really work for micro organisms, which is the majority of living things because they all look very similar. Sequencing has changed that, and that's why we see so many changes to the tree of life now (in fact it's not even a pure tree anymore)

For the specific problem of pterosaurs (which this article is about) sequencing doesn't help at all because there is no DNA. It's still all only bones and cladistics.

I think it would have helped if the article had discussed the work Peters got published in Nature, Science and any other top journals. Was it good work, or was that a failure of peer review? In principle at least, a lot of the problem being discussed should be addressable by the peer review process: rather than adjudicate on all of Peters' work en bloc, evaluate it on an article-by-article basis, via peer review. And don't engage with him at all in other contexts. But it sounds like part of the problem is that comment threads under journal articles and blog posts are being taken as a serious part of scientific discourse.

You're being too generous. Peters clearly hallucinates features; whenever he gets community acclaim, it's a failure of the community.

Well, the problem is that they are, in fact, a serious part of scientific discourse. Peer-reviewed publications are the output; the process of science also requires conversations in offices and labs and conferences, preprints, letters between researchers, etc. - and always has required it. You need to figure out what's interesting enough to research, what angles you may not have thought of yet, what ideas seem fruitful but lack someone pursuing them, etc. Blog comments (and mailing lists and newsgroups and Twitter) are a new way of accomplishing this at a larger scale, but they're not fundamentally anti-scientific - the conversations at Solvay weren't peer-reviewed either.

The major claim of the article is that Peters is pushing his ideas in that realm - not the realm of peer-reviewed articles - and taking mindshare away from legitimate and worthwhile ideas.

It's really astounding how he's clearly just pulling stuff out of thin air a lot of the time. Surely at some level he must realize he's just winging it?

It really bothers me when people act like they really know something for certain, when actual experts aren't even as certain as they are. Is there just some sweet spot of ignorance where you can easily convince yourself you've learned all there is to know about something, or do they know they're bullshitting?

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