Hacker News Reader

Comment by cuspy | Hacker News Reader

Given the track record of institutional science and the ever-growing list of regulatory failures, moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of scientific expertise, why do so many people seem to think that simply doubling down and bullying the general population into compliance with expert consensus will ever work? What if institutional science in the US has a legitimacy crisis because it has failed to police its own corruption and failed to address its own limitations and vulnerabilities? What if everyday people can see this more clearly than those striving on the margins of these institutions?

Personally, as a scientist, I am comforted that there are enough others out there who doubt the entire notion of a scientific establishment that the population should "trust" to make decisions without oversight. Our numbers are growing, and I know many people who fight every day to ensure we will never be ruled by unquestionable expert consensus. Anyone who has been inside these institutions knows exactly how petty and arbitrary the hierarchical structures can be. I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.

I think the constant stream of these articles just illustrates the massive social blind spot that comes from training STEM professionals solely for careers rather than for citizenship, communication and community membership. STEM training itself has sadly become a hierarchical, cult-like, anti-intellectual system that deprives students of critical thinking skills.

View on HN

As a fellow scientist (also very enthusiastic about science), the problem is that some factions are trying to bully through what are actually policy positions in the name of “science”, thereby hurting the credibility of the institution of scientific truth seeking. Articles like this one are definitely only hurting, from the longer term perspective.

Eg: However accurate/inaccurate/useful/useless epidemiology models might be, “science” can never answer questions about the recommended scale of our activities/lockdown/reopening. It’s ultimately a matter of values and judgement based on risk-tolerance given current situation and needs (which might also take into account model predictions and uncertainties). It is asinine to expect epidemiologists to make final policy recommendations (or for leaders to defer responsibility to them), since they understand only one piece of the puzzle. It is ultimately a judgment call to be made by political leaders elected exactly for that job.

I totally agree. I hope people like you will keep fighting for a vision like this. It's the only hope we have, and this problem is far more serious than most people are willing to admit. Unfortunately being outspoken about this viewpoint can be a big liability in a scientific career.

>legitimacy crisis

You've hit the nail on the head here. These past few years I've felt like every major institution has been in a credibility crisis. Government, news, universities, the whole thing is falling apart. One hypothesis I'm starting to believe was coined by Eric Weinstein as the Embedded Growth Obligation (EGO). The basic idea is we had a few historically unique decades post WWII of exponential growth, and all of our institutions are now reliant on that. But the real exponential growth is over and they're flailing about trying to fake it.

https://theportal.wiki/wiki/Embedded_Growth_Obligation

Yes, I'm familiar with this idea, and I think it really does get close to one of the roots of the problem. I hope more people start listening carefully to individuals like Mr. Weinstein before it's too late to change course.

I don't always agree with everything he says on other issues, but we are lucky to have him in a position where he's afforded the right to speak freely. It's a shameful embarrassment to the state of our public discourse that it takes a billionaire hedge fund backing to secure that right.

My problem with Weinstein and his ilk is that I don't see them offering solutions, they just yell "distrust, distrust, distrust" and not much creative and serious thinking about solutions. Meanwhile long time economists, labour and political activists (voluntarists and america-style libertarians, statist-socialists and classical neoliberals and a bunch of other flavors), artist/sacademics across the board and others have been saying "distrust these people for these reasons and do this to fix it" for decades and no-one seems to care because it goes against their politics, while claiming to not have politics because they are too smart and cynical for that.

The "Embedded Growth Hypothesis" for example has been a thing that socialists, eco activists and even austrian economics and classical keynesians (if that's a proper term, I mean Keynesians who believe that debt is a problem and you should pay it back and not rely on MMT to pay it back via inflation) have been trying to push for a long time. But they also offer solutions which are compatible with an open society (at least the ones moderate enough to become mainstream), they don't just claim the current system is corrupt.

It's fine to just criticize without offering solutions, but if you are gonna claim "everyones distrustworthy" you should back things up more.

---

Oh, and Weinstein in particular has been using his right to speak freely for decades and continues to use it about being silenced. Now he just has a billionaire backer whose politics align with what he's saying to amplify him.

> scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.

Bought off by who? I presume the "elite families" you mention. So either way we are ruled by the wealthy in this model. There are other options of course and I assume you would agree, I just wanted to point out my surprise at this false dichotomy (that's not even a dichotomy since they're mostly the same scenario).

I also agree 100% that STEM professionals should be trained to be citizens first.

I heard of tailoring findings to the preferences of the grant giver (advocate a wrong view and kiss your grant good-bye). This is very worrisome as a lot of experimental science labs are so grant dependent.

I actually think this is partly a self-inflicted wound -- a large fraction of major grant givers want truth and can stand findings that go against their beliefs, but given the heavy dependence of labs on grants there is a tendency to sugar coat findings to the taste of the money source.

Which is totally, completely and absolutely against the spirit of real science. My 2c.

> Which is totally, completely and absolutely against the spirit of real science. My 2c.

Absolutely true, but examine the power dynamic. The scientists are only able to provide results (whether for or against) if they have bread on the table. The funders (as private entities) provide an almost inescapable dilemma then for the researchers. So who's more at fault, the scientist or the ones holding the purse strings? Why would we expect scientists to live up to some lofty ideal while others seek only personal profit through them?

Really, this is just a greater indictment of what our system has morphed into, where science and R&D is increasingly seen as the province of private companies, and not to be funded publicly.

(Or worse, to be funded publicly and then gatekept for profit)

In the United States, the majority of research funding is from the Federal Government, and it has been increasing since before the Second World War. If there is a problem, it is likely in the government grant process.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/03/data-check-us-govern...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funding_of_science#United_Stat...

Hence the reason science has always been an aristocratic pursuit. Georg Feuerbach demonstrates this point with the thought-provoking claim that only a polytheistic tradition (such as Athens) can breed a love of natural beauty which obligates a love of knowing its ways.

But it is principally a love of Nature (and it’s universals) and not a love of wealth which moves the civilization higher. Galileo, Descartes, Newton had pretensions but immortal ones.

Don't follow the part about polytheism. I would say, if anything, polytheism is a hindrance to the development of science. For one, the capriciousness of the gods makes nature arbitrary and unpredictable.

FWIW, Stanley Jaki argues something quite different to what you've written in "Science and Creation" and "The Road of Science and the Ways of God".

P.S. A quick search doesn't bring up any noteworthy Georg Feuerbachs.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/feuerbach/works/e...

George, my mistake. (Polytheism brings up the relevant passage starting with Jews)

The philosophers did not follow the gods, they believed in the divinity of reason. If anything, and consistent with the Scientific Revolution, the confidence in the self-certainty of reason permitted the imagination to expand “beyond” the natural, to examine it, to know it, to necessarily effect it for our reasonable ends.

Where I think the pagans fall short is in their worship of visible objects, where they have no concept of an invisibly present permanence in nature, ie electromagnetic radiation.

Oh, Ludwig Feuerbach.

If I restrict myself to the topic at hand, then I have to say I don't see how he manages to construe the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo (CEN) as intrinsically opposed to contemplation or speculative knowledge—science that seeks knowledge for its own sake and not merely to master nature—or how he construes it as essentially utilitarian. I have a suspicion that this is a corollary of his position that God is merely a projection of Man, but my understanding is that this position is a consequence of Kantian skepticism and the resulting agnosticism. If you can't know things in themselves, then all you have left is science as mastery of nature.

One difficulty with the claim that somehow CEN is intrinsically opposed to theory is the failure to explain the entire Christian intellectual tradition. Since we're talking about science specifically, it becomes impossible to explain the enormous successes of the sciences in the West and historically the relative poverty of their success in every other civilization. While the stirrings of science occurred in a number of civilizations—and we should give them their due—and while the Greeks may be argued to be the most successful of the bunch, nowhere but the West, whatever its faults, do we see the flourishing of a sustained and vibrant scientific culture. If we take a broader and classical view of science, one embraced by the Greeks, to include any systematic body of knowledge, then this period of flourishing extends far into the centuries preceding the rise of modern science and includes the intellectually vibrant Middle Ages. Indeed, without the Middle Ages, it is difficult to imagine how modern science could have emerged in the first place. Without arguing that this could only have happened in the West (that is Jaki's position, as far as I understand it), it suffices to note that it did happen in the West and it did so in a culture that embraced CEN.

The fact that neither Jewish civilization, nor Islamic civilization for that matter, ever truly had a sustained and sophisticated philosophical or scientific culture does not support Feuerbach's thesis. Again, his claim is that CEN is intrinsically opposed to theoretical endeavors (which includes philosophy). But all I need to show is one example of where CEN did not stifle science.

Here I would add that one thing that stifled science in the Islamic world is not CEN, but the belief that Allah is essentially pure will, and a pure will that can contradict itself. Accepting that kind of creator can only discourage speculative science. Here, we can appeal to Feuerbach's own words when he says that the origin of a thing tells us about that thing. A world created by a self-contradicting creator doesn't inspire much confidence in the intelligibility of what he's created.

In stark contrast, Christianity (certainly Catholic Christianity) conceives of the world as utterly intelligible. To put it somewhat poetically, the world is divine thought or divine word and therefore intelligible and knowable through and through (we have to note both the immanence and transcendence of God to avoid both pantheism and deism). When John says "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.", the original Greek uses the word "λόγος" for word. Anyone familiar with Greek knows that the English translation of λόγος is utterly inadequate to express its meaning (the Latin "verbum" does a better job). In Exodus, when Moses asks God who he should say has sent him, God responds with "I Am" (or "Ehyeh", from which we get Yahweh). God is revealing himself as Being itself and in revealing himself is making himself known. So God himself is intelligible and therefore Being is intelligible. (Aristotelian metaphysics dovetails nicely because while Aristotle managed to provide us with a rich and robust theory of being, he stops short of discovering the act or principle of existence which Gilson argues was stifled by pagan eternalism. We have to wait for Avicenna for that to happen, later refined by Averroes and finally Aquinas.

I'm not sure I follow the connection here:

> only a polytheistic tradition (such as Athens) can breed a love of natural beauty which obligates a love of knowing its ways.

None of the people in your list below were polytheists:

> Galileo, Descartes, Newton

They were principally moved by Aristotle, however. First by Galileo falsifying him. Further, the development of analytical geometry and calculus necessitated the Greek polytheistic “infatuation” with geometry.

> Bought off by whom?

Of course there's the usual shenanigans re: funding, but anecdotally it seems like most people are "bought off" (or coerced) by their colleagues or their selves, and the payment is career success and social approval.

For example: No grad student will invalidate their adviser's career. Very few people challenge the veracity of ubiquitous model systems or paradigms ("measuring $this means $that"). Results are sometimes tailored to be visually appealing. Unexpected results are discarded. The meaning of results can be overstated. An experiment can be set up which is internally perfect but which relies on completely nonsensical assumptions to inform its relation to salient natural phenomena. Etc.

To behave that way is to be a "bad citizen", make trouble for people, lose friends, and never get ahead. And practically speaking, most people who challenge prevailing wisdom are noob grad students who don't even know how wrong they are.

Of course, this happens to varying degrees in different fields. For materials chemistry of steel, it's pretty obvious when the tensile strength is less than reported. For organic synthesis, many published syntheses are bullshit but it's still obvious if a chemical isn't what it should be. For psychology and some of the newer theoretical disciplines (thinking of one rockstar "network scientist" here!), social consensus carries more weight than "reality" because reality is so tricky to measure.

I was thinking primarily of other states or foreign entities who have an interest in undermining competitivity, stealing or suppressing emerging technologies. Mentioning elite families was as an illustrative contrast, since at least domestic entities (who may want to maintain a monopoly on certain technologies) would be less directly incentivised to undermine the institutions that serve them.

How 'bout the Chinese government?

And American companies. And the American government.

manux asks> "Bought off by who?"

Big pharmaceutical companies that stand to make trillions of dollars. Don't be stupid, follow the money.

Science in America tends to be practiced in universities, and universities in America are no longer open to the free exchange of ideas.

While it may look like the public is losing faith in science, it's actually the public losing faith in the platform on which science is practiced: academia. If we want the public to regain faith in scientific findings, we need to fix academia.

I agree to some extent, but the whole "culture war" dimension of this question is far less important than people think. It has much more to do with corruption and broken incentive structures than with the identitarian critiques being pumped out by poorly-funded humanities departments. Until getting so much attention recently, they were at worst a minor check on what really has been an undeserved intellectual hegemony of STEM. Sticks and stones really. There are certain critiques that have been accurate enough to stick, and STEM should learn from those. The rest are noise.

I think even now the Confused Critique Industry is largely just a distraction from the deeper, internal issues: No jobs for new graduates, abuse of grad student labor, no innovation, too many labs lazily churning out incremental work just to secure their own careers in a climate of precarity, and so on.

After all, the real target of these kinds of articles is obviously the supposedly right-wing extremist "science deniers" who reject the critical theory stuff even more strongly than scientists themselves do.

We need to clean our own house. I can't even keep track of how many brilliant people I personally know who have left academic research. It's really very tragic and our duty as citizens should be to ignore all the petty distractions and focus on doing what needs to be done. If the institutions are lost and beyond reform, we need to work on building new ones that work for us. The current crises could be great opportunities for this.

The real reason so many have left academia is that it requires loads of work and skill but pays like shit.

I don’t think it’s even vaguely to do with any of this “lack of free exchange of ideas” nonsense that a particular group of people love to bang on about.

Plus if they have something currently implementable as opposed to far theoretical why not go into the private practice to actually do it and learn more?

I am one of those (adjective intentionally discarded) people who left research to become a software developer.

I do agree with most of what you said, though. I left a PhD program without finishing after six years because:

1. I wanted financial security to start a family

2. I was not dealing well with the stress of navigating the Kafkaesque graduation process

3. Turns out market salary outside of research is pretty high even if you don't finish the degree

And I do feel vindicated in that as a software developer I'm getting positive performance reviews and feel like I'm making an impact on the organization.

One thing I want to add:

People's perception of scientific institutions will always be inextricably tied to their perceptions of schools (all levels of schools!) and K-12 schools are troubled institutions that mistreat a lot of young people, to say nothing of teaching misleading content or outright falsehood in (e.g.) history class. I, with my early-blooming aptitude for everything bookish, privileged college-professor parents, and serviceable athletic talents, had a pretty easy time in school. So trust in institutional science came naturally to me and eroded only painfully.

People from different backgrounds have harder times, and those with the least aptitude for (say) science have the hardest time.

> After all, the real target of these kinds of articles is obviously the supposedly right-wing extremist "science deniers" who reject the critical theory stuff even more strongly than scientists themselves do.

The National Basketball Association, with its overwhelmingly liberal player base, has all kinds of trouble with the conspiracy theories its players wind up believing and talking about in public (shape of the Earth, moon landing, and of course all kinds of stuff about Coronavirus).

I mention this, not just out of contrarianism, but because K-12 teachers famously mistreat young black men with athletic ambitions (if you follow the human interest side of the NBA you will hear a lot of stories to that effect), and because as they get older they discover what amounts to a conspiracy to cover up wrongs done to their ancestors (it was and maybe still is possible to get a K-12 education in Tulsa without ever learning about the Tulsa massacre for example).

Which is all a long-winded way to say that we're reaping what the education system has sown as well as the institutions of science.

The extent to which this is the case is massively overstated, particularly with regard to the “culture war” aspect I infer you mean from your comment.

Huh? How are universities not open to free exchange of ideas?

I do not understand this position.

It doesn't help that the critical theorists taking over American universities are openely hostile to critical thinking and the scientific method.

If critical theorists want to "take over American universities", they'll have to start generating waaay more dollars.

"STEM training itself has sadly become a hierarchical, cult-like, anti-intellectual system that deprives students of critical thinking skills"

Engineering definitely doesn't deprive students and practitioners of critical thinking. Other disciplines? Maybe. I can't speak to that.

As someone with an undergraduate degree in engineering and some professional experience as an engineer, I would counter that the training of engineers absolutely does deprioritize the kind of high level critical thinking I'm talking about. I'm not saying every engineer needs to be an ethics and politics scholar, but there is definitely room for improvement.

Nuance in communication and dealing intelligently with ambiguity is also a really big issue in all of STEM. Engineering is no exception. This is in fact something that COULD be improved. It's just not as profitable.

Ethics and political are technically peripheral to critical thinking.

One can be an unethical bastard and have the critical thinking to realize something is unsustainable or a scam or be a saint and taken in by utter bullshit (although the bullshit may persuade them to do horrible things believing themselves right).

Engineering deals with nuance certainly - although it is often a more pedantic technical form like say the difference between the stength of wood and steel vs temperature. Steel doesn't readily combust like wood but wood while it chars and burns doesn't weaken like hot steel. You don't need to melt steel beams to collapse a skyscrapper.

Without concrete examples, I'm going to continue to disagree.

Have you looked into the world of Tech Startups, by any chance?

>What if institutional science in the US has a legitimacy crisis because it has failed to police its own corruption and failed to address its own limitations and vulnerabilities? What if everyday people can see this more clearly than those striving on the margins of these institutions?

You are giving the anti-science crowd a huge benefit of the doubt. I don't think people who believe the Earth is flat or that wearing a cloth mask can cause you to give yourself COVID (EDIT: I was referring to the idea pushed by anti-science propaganda like Plandemic[1] that states masks "activate" COVID) is the result of a cogent analysis of the corruption of scientific institutions.

[1] - https://www.livescience.com/debunking-plandemic-coronavirus-...

Maybe I'm being too charitable, but wouldn't it be worse if it turned out that you were holding back progress in the conversation by insisting that ALL of your interlocutors are incapable of thinking critically?

We need to be more strategic than vindictive. Why not forget about the notion of a mass "anti-science crowd" and have some basic respect for your fellow citizens as individuals with widely varying levels of education due in no small part to these same institutional problems. We've failed them. I think your examples are straw men that contribute no real insight to the cause of the problems.

Also, just to be clear, a variation of that rumor about masks was indeed pushed by the surgeon general in early March:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/02/health/surgeon-general-corona...

I am not suggesting we be vindictive over strategic. I am suggesting that fixing corruption in the scientific community isn't going to solve this problem because the causes of the anti-science movement don't solely originate from within the scientific community.

If my specific examples are too much of a straw man, how about climate change? The US has largely been ignoring the science on that for decades. What is the more likely reason? The scientific consensus on climate change is the result of corruption, the scientific community ignores this corruption, and the general public turns to climate deniers as a result of this corruption. Or is it the most reasonable explanation that there are countless groups that have an invested financial and political interest in downplaying the scientific consensus regarding the issue? It seems obvious this is a situation in which the corruption leading to anti-science viewpoints is an outside force acting on the scientific community and not the other way around.

I also threw in a note about the mask issue in my original comment since I was unclear. To add another note on top, I'm not sure this administration is one I would point to as somehow anti-corruption especially when it comes to their interpretation of science.

Nutters will be nutters, you can't affect that. What you can affect is how the general public perceives the difference between the two camps. They may not know enough to judge on the merit of the arguments, but they understand reputation and character.

Every single bit of bullshit to come out of academia is one extra point for the detractors. I won't enumerate it here because there is an even chance you're in support of what I consider "bullshit" and vice versa, but it's not the point - the point is that people use their assessment of what they understand to extrapolate to things they don't, as a signal of trustworthiness of the source.

The entire intellectual class is marred by now, it's not just academia. If one does not denounce bullshit pronounced in their name the bullshit will stick.

Why doesn't this apply in both directions? If BS from academia invalidates the entire intellectual community shouldn't Flat Earthers invalidate the anti-institutional science community?

It does. Both sides take a hit on intellectual integrity, except that intellectuals put a lot of weight on it so they stand more to lose.

When that field is “leveled” rhetoric becomes decisive.

>Both sides take a hit on intellectual integrity, except that intellectuals put a lot of weight on it so they stand more to lose.

Wasn't your original argument about what the public thinks of the integrity of these groups? I'm not seeing how that meshes with this comment. Are you implying that the public sees intellectuals valuing their own integrity as a sign of a lack of integrity?

Ignoring the science or knowing the science and deciding the best course of action is to carry on as usual? The science doesn't tell us what the best action to take on climate change is.

Well, we won't know if the "anti-science movement" can actually be dealt with until we fix the corruption first, will we? Why assume that things can't be improved? You wouldn't try to secure a second funding round without a viable product or even a concrete business plan, would you? Bad example maybe...

Regardless, simply telling people they need to listen obediently to experts is going to do much more harm than good. If we take concrete steps to fix the massive problems in our institutions and there are still legions of anti-science activists holding us back through political means, we can at least point to our own reformed system with integrity and say that we're doing our best to get it right. Until then, we have no solid ground to stand on, and we'll continue to lose our own base of supporters, myself included. Scientists themselves will look elsewhere for a system that supports them.

The snide yet accurate approach is "I will respond to reasoned critical thinking instead of blatant motivated reasoning when I see it."

Actually good questions and proposals deserve legitimate feedback regardless of source. Bullshit deserves to be ignored or called out.

> wearing a cloth mask can cause you to give yourself COVID is the result of a cogent analysis of the corruption of scientific institutions.

You’re kind-of proving the point. That’s exactly what WHO and some other “scientific” institutions (but really political institutions using science as a pretense) were saying at the beginning (that wearing masks could increase the risk because people would be touching their face more or something).

There is no anti-science crowd on hacker news. Among other (presumable) intellectuals, we can discuss such ideas without worrying about "giving the [nonexistent] anti-science crowd" here anything.

I find it interesting that everyone responding to this finds it unthinkable that democracy and critical thinking are possible without the need for monarchs nor experts who function as technocrats rather than peers.

It's like pining for the Philosopher Kings of the Platonic tradition. Plato hated democracy fyi.

It is more a rejection of the "my ignorance is equal to your knowledge" anti-intellectualism as a foregone tragedy not only waiting to happen but also still ongoing.

> I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.

You did not read much history, did you?

I think the problem is in the stakes. Consider the USSR - it had pretty fucked up science scene around 1930s-1960s: a lot of areas had been politicized and guided by the Party Line instead of reality. For example Genetics had been considered anti-Marxist for whatever reason and Genetic research had been forbidden (other than research to expose Genetic as a pseudo-science). But the science needed to make weapons had been pretty good. Nobody wanted to make a theory of Marxist-Leninist Physics and spend the rest of life in prison for screwing up rocket or nuke development.

Then the late 60s came around and the Party found they don't grow nearly as much food as the Rotting West. The Marxist-Leninist Biology missed the Green Revolution for inexplicable reason. Even though not as important as weapons it was a big deal - the state could have been spending much less resources on growing food and buying food from abroad and use them to make ICBMs or something else speeding up the Global Revolution's approach! So Marxist-Leninist Biology got a book thrown at it. And, not being dumb, the Party restrained the politics in many other areas, just to be safe. So by 70s-80s science in the USSR had been much less politicized than now in the US in my opinion.

I hope the current crisis will be a wake up call to the US. Hopefully people realize that playing politics around medical research is not just giving you cushy jobs and government grants - it can also fuck up the whole economy and if people cannot stop doing it by themselves then somebody have to throw a book or a whole library at them. And, maybe, just like the CPSU, they might do it in other areas, just to be safe.

> Personally, as a scientist, I am comforted that there are enough others out there who doubt the entire notion of a scientific establishment that the population should "trust" to make decisions without oversight.

I'm not sure what you're actually proposing, but it sounds dangerously close to "pilots have been in control of airplanes for decades, and they've caused so many crashes, so maybe it's time to try people who aren't pilots."

> I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.

Do you really look at history and conclude that, because some scientists are corrupt or dishonest, you'd rather have monarchs control things like safety regulations for medicine, industrial activity, architecture, food, etc.? Again, that sounds very much like the "let's give non-pilots a shot at controlling aircraft."

I'm not 100% agreeing with the OP, but I am horrified by the massive number of scientists, medical leaders, and medical professionals who:

1. Downplayed the role of masks as a public measure to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 early on (often out of a duplicitous desire to preserve PPE for the medical community, without considering that homemade cotton masks would not reduce PPE supply for medical workers)

2. Didn't advocate for the use of masks, beginning with cotton masks (this is actually a different point than #1. Spreading confusion and not providing clarity are two different bad things.)

3. Downplayed COVID in general, and publicly wondered whether a ton more people had immunity than we thought. That was with specious evidence and, damningly, it increased confusion and probably reduced compliance with mitigation measures.

Also claiming that China's totalitarian lockdown measures would achieve nothing.

I agree with all those criticisms to some extent, but without some alternative I don't find the argument very useful, and I certainly don't find the original commenter's approach useful.

It's like listing the many many examples of plane crashes due to pilot error. That's not controversial. I don't think many people claim that individual pilots act without flaw, or that the entire system of pilot training and qualification is without flaw. But surely the proposal should not be to take comfort as more and more people "doubt the entire notion of an airplane piloting establishment that the population should 'trust' to make decisions without oversight."

Criticism moderates duplicity and complacency. The mere presence of widespread criticism would help. It would also serve as a foundation for a system to mitigate these problems going forward. You can't solve the problem until you:

1. First identify it as a problem (which I don't think we've done enough but you think the problem is apparent to everyone)

2. Direct the criticism to the right people (not just politicians, but medical leaders and the medical establishment as a whole - believe it or not, they have a halo effect and are not sufficiently criticized. The industry systematically weaponizes our high regard for the medical profession in order to prevent what it sees as adverse reforms)

3. and acknowledge that there is a way to mitigate the problem ex ante, instead of saying "sure it's a problem but it's unsolvable because of all the emergent complexity." Say what you want about Elon Musk, but the man thought "I'm going to shoot multiple giant rockets through the atmosphere and land them back on a moving boat simultaneously" then proceeded to actually do it. He didn't throw his hands up to emergent complexity. SpaceX took complexity by the horns. Synthesizing and amplifying non-duplicitous, high quality advice from medical leaders/orgs is not that complicated! Only they can lead you to believe that it's complicated, and then somehow deny that they did that. If they contradict themselves, it's because "we used the best available facts at the time." Laughable, and completely non-falsifiable.

As an aside, perhaps Americans would be less anti-scientific if a majority of them weren't scammed by the medical industry and charged $150-$200 for a tiny consultation with someone who is bribed by pharmaceutical representatives to shill for harmful drugs. Maybe Americans would be less anti-scientific if their government wasn't captured by medical lobbyists for over a century so that there isn't a faint hope for reforms like universal healthcare. The industry doesn't care, because they know that if America wakes up, and politicians aren't captured, total compensation for doctors and surgeons would eventually drop 40% with negligible or no impact on innovation and medical outcomes. To them, something is wrong if a huge chunk of your disposable income isn't siphoned to their wallets every year (part of which you never even see - that is, insurance premiums paid by your employer that you would otherwise receive as income).

The trouble with your example of healthcare is that Americans for whatever reason overwhelmingly approve of the American system of private health insurance plans, and even if they didn’t, I don’t think many would make an association between expensive health care and fundamental problems with the scientific community.

I'm highly skeptical of the "overwhelmingly approve" part.

Do Americans overwhelmingly approve of the deprivation of their disposable income and health due to the broken status quo? Of course not. It's just that many don't connect the dots because the debate isn't even happening. Democrats and Republicans are captured. The media doesn't seem interested. The system is too complex for people to even understand and know what to criticize. Most Americans don't even grok the fact that they would receive employer-paid premiums as salary under universal healthcare. They don't have a clue how well universal healthcare works in other countries and how widely approved it is (relative to a privatized system). Saying that Americans overwhelmingly approve of their private insurance plan is like saying Russians overwhelmingly approve of Putin...ya, ok, but I don't think the people who repeat that statement know how meaningless it is.

Do you know what American political scientists call foreign democracies with captured politicians, distorted media, and widespread corporate cronyism but...ostensible elections? Pseudo-democracies. There's a spectrum from democracy to pseudo-democracy, and we all know where we're headed.

As for the connection to trust in science, I already spoke about that from one angle (the exploitative interface between the average American and their medical care). Another angle is the following: the very same medical paternalism that broke our healthcare system also broke the institutional guidance regarding COVID-19.

I don’t really want to get into arguments of the form “they think they want X but they actually want Y,” because if you’re willing to use that mode of argument then it’s completely irrelevant to you what people think or say they want, and you might as well just argue for what they “actually” want without any regard for their input.

But the fact of the matter is that common proposals to overhaul the American health insurance system are extremely unpopular, and people overwhelmingly report being very happy with their private insurance plans.

How about this: 58% of Americans favored Medicare for All according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll. This was back in 2015, when people were in a less medically and economically precarious position, and despite all the aforementioned misunderstandings regarding universal healthcare. I'm sure the medical industry will play up the "but mah haylth insurance" trope as the prospect of universal healthcare becomes more real. https://www.kff.org/uninsured/poll-finding/kaiser-health-tra...

"Downplayed the role of masks as a public measure to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 early on (often out of a duplicitous desire to preserve PPE for the medical community, without considering that homemade cotton masks would not reduce PPE supply for medical workers)"

Or maybe you're being deceived now?

Honestly, the evidence for universal masking hasn't changed (recent papers on this have largely been terrible and/or meta-analyses of the same group of papers that were written before the pandemic). There are still a lot of informed, intelligent scientists who have been saying the idea isn't supported by data. The "consensus" on this issue appears to be driven by politicians and media, not by science:

https://www.cebm.net/covid-19/masking-lack-of-evidence-with-...

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars/specia...

Thank you for inadvertently proving my point. The evidence for the efficacy of universal, compliant mask-wearing is extremely strong, but there will always be specious studies with contra-claims. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more those studies are amplified, the more confused people are, the less they wear masks, the less their politicians mandate that they wear masks, the more it becomes a political issue, etc...and the less masks do their job, leading to more death and injury. I can't understate the marginal economic injury either. All for what? Seriously, for what? So that people don't put a $5 chunk of cloth on their face to save lives? Good lord. We're talking about a nearly certain enormous gain with very little "cost." There isn't even a real trade-off.

"Thank you for inadvertently proving my point. The evidence for the efficacy of universal, compliant mask-wearing is extremely strong,"

Indeed, thank you for providing a wonderful example of "scientism": a blind belief in the conclusions of "science", even when you're presented with ample scientific evidence that disproves your belief.

If your secret evidence is so strong, you should cite it, instead of merely asserting that it exists. I just gave you two incredibly well-sourced articles showing that the opposite is true, and your response is to insult me and claim I'm wrong (without proof).

Michael Osterholm (CIDRAP) and the Oxford Center for Evidence-Based medicine are not crackpot organizations, and the cited articles are reviews of all literature, not "specious studies". In all likelihood, these articles have already discussed the evidence that you believe is compelling.

Here is an excellent study with both theoretical and empirical results showing the efficacy and importance of universal mask wearing, even when cotton masks are used (PDF download is in the upper right corner): https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.13553

Institutions involved: University of Cambridge, University College London, Ecole de Guerre Economique, and Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

As for Michael Osterholm, I don't have much patience for people like him so I won't cite this but you can easily look it up: he clarified his comments and said that people should universally wear masks. Of course, he followed up with strawman arguments, implying that many people have the illusion that COVID would be suddenly be "driven to the ground" if everyone wore masks. He also said that other measures are important. Of course they are.

As for Oxford Center for Evidence-Based Medicine: simply put, they are like a hammer in search of a massive double blind nail. When it becomes more and more clear how tragically incorrect and misguided such organizations are during a pandemic, the "evidence" in their title will suddenly have a sardonic ring to it. Their example will demonstrate that sometimes expertise of a certain kind, if not properly adapted to a new situation, can become an impairment in the new context. Read the discussion at the following link: https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

That being said, the University of Oxford in general is a top rate institution. The Oxford Vaccine Group might be first to deliver a COVID-19 vaccine. They're also home to professor and NIH senior investigator Dr. Trisha Greenhalgh, who sharply discussed the limitations of evidence-based medicine during this pandemic at the above link :) Of course, that's evidence-based medicine as a specific category, not the general idea of medicine backed by proof.

"Here is an excellent study with both theoretical and empirical results showing the efficacy and importance of universal mask wearing, even when cotton masks are used (PDF download is in the upper right corner)"

This is not a study of masks. First, and most importantly, it assumes that masks work, and makes a model of a world in which they work. From the methods:

"A gradual increase in mask wearing was modelled using a linear increase in the proportion of individuals randomly allocated with a reduced rate of transmission. The factor by which β was reduced was conservatively set to 2."

And for their second model:

"Varying degrees of mask effectiveness are modelled by the mask transmission rate T and mask absorption rate A, which denote the proportion of viruses that are stopped by the mask during exhaling (transmission) versus inhaling (absorption), respectively. We set T = 0.7 and A = 0.7"

So when you make a model that assumes masks reduce infection by half or more, the model shows that infections are reduced. Shocking.

Then, when they say that their models have a "nearly perfect correlation" with reality...they don't actually compare their models to reality, nor do they calculate any correlations. They simply quote a bunch of numbers they cherry-picked from news sites (with no controls or normalizations) classifying countries into "mask-wearing cultures"...which is so obviously silly that any halfway rational person should see right through it. This is a "paper" only in the sense that it might someday be printed on paper by someone who was gullible enough to believe it.

Regarding your comments on the researchers I mentioned: perhaps you should spend more time reading the articles you cite, and less time judging well-established scientists who disagree with your opinions.

I'm not proposing anything like that. I said that I'm glad others are becoming more skeptical of the message of relying on trust without oversight. The fact that you read my comment as advocating a total disregard for training and expertise is exactly why we are in this mess. Where is nuance?

No, I look at the current situation and conclude that our institutions are failing us. Notice that I didn't say I'd prefer to be ruled over by elite families rather than a consistent, transparent and democratic government that is accountable for its mistakes. I want government that has a generational stake in the outcome of its policies.

All I can say in response to you is that without charitable reading of one another's thoughts, we are never going to get anywhere. It will be endless, pointless dispute. Just because something "sounds like" something else in some superficial way, doesn't mean it is.

I'm sorry you don't view my interpretation as charitable, but I do think a charitable interpretation of your first comment is that you don't propose ways of fixing problems in the scientific community but rather broadly dismiss the scientific community without proposing a better alternative other than "elite families."

Complaining about "the ever-growing list of regulatory failures, moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of scientific expertise" does not read to me as dismissing the core scientific community itself.

Plus, one could easily distinguish between the terms "establishment"/"hierarchical structures" as entrenched leadership focused on power dynamics rather than the science itself, versus "community" which is involved in the science.

> Where is nuance?

The problem with language is we have to make certain assumptions. It is easy to read your comment in that way. Just as it could be easy to read

> cuspy 15 minutes ago | parent | on: Science and Scientific Expertise Are More Importan...

> All I can say in response to you is that without charitable reading of one another's thoughts, we are never going to get anywhere. It will be endless, pointless dispute. Just because something "sounds like" something else in some superficial way, doesn't mean it is.

As promoting anti-vaxers. The reason is because these conspiracy groups mimic the same language (i.e. the anti-authority rhetoric). With so much dog whistling happening it is difficult to correctly interpret. Btw, I don't think that's what you're intending to imply and I didn't take it that way, but it is important to understand how it could be taken that way.

As a scientist, I care about many of the concerns that you are bringing up, but also be mindful that it is difficult to understand because these preconceived notions. It isn't so much that there is a uncharitable reading, but that it is hard to determine what you are meaning. There's "what you mean," "what you say," and "what is heard" and these can all the different things. This is specifically a problem because the division in our culture currently.

When you come into a conversation not knowing your interlocutor's intentions, I believe it is deeply unethical, inefficient and really a complete waste of everyone's time and energy to assume based on some weak superficial heuristic rhetorical cues that they are simply repeating a divisive talking point that you've heard elsewhere.

Again it's this a priori assumption that the other person is dumb that has gotten us into this situation. It's also just bad manners. All else equal, I do not see how you can possible read what I wrote as specifically promoting anti-vaxers. I didn't say a word about vaccination. You're applying your own baggage to a simple message. Anti-vaxers are for the most part just frightened people who deserve compassion, not derision. They've simply overgeneralized a very rational fear of institutions that have indeed made some very careless decisions for profit.

If you treat every conversation as adversarial by default, you will continue making all your conversations worse. I recommend following the Gricean Maxims in your conversations. Be productive and cooperative with others until you are certain that they're not being productive and cooperative. That's when you leave the conversation. It's not as complicated as you're making it out to be.

And here they are downvoting you simply because you offer an alternative to deriding people you disagree with.

There has been a steadily increasing mentality that outright hostility is the only way of disagreeing (or conversing at all) with someone else. Interpreting every statement of what other people have said via a binary classifier (for or against), etc. and making judgements rather than engaging intellectual conversation.

It is all very intellectually lazy and a classic identifying mark of the ignorant and stupid. People who know that they should not be engaging in actual intellectual discussion on a topic simply downvote and run away like cowards.

Sadly, even HN is devolving alongside the rest of society at this time.

I can't downvote them, but I don't think this is why it happened. I think it was because my comment was about the difficulty of language and that it comes with explanations (my sibling expands on this) and the parent attacked me with something that I didn't claim. Though my sibling comment addresses that I understand the miscommunication. But if you are going to accuse others of being ungenerous you should not respond in kind. I personally do not feel the response was a generous interpretation of my comment and missed the point. I'm not going to call them a hypocrite though because my thesis is that communication is difficult.

> I believe it is deeply unethical, inefficient and really a complete waste of everyone's time and energy to assume based on some weak superficial heuristic rhetorical cues that they are simply repeating a divisive talking point that you've heard elsewhere.

I'm sorry, I was trying to convey something else. That language itself has limitations and that we imply things naturally. I think Tom Scott did a good video[0] explaining the high level aspects of this, but it seems like you might be aware of this. But there's much more. Language is full of cues and a priori assumptions. You cannot avoid this. The idea that "what you mean, what you say, and what is heard" being different things is not a contentious statement in linguistics and communication. Lewis Carrol's Mad Hatter's tea party scene is all about this actually. For reference[1]. What I am trying to say is that communication is hard and emphasizing that it is even harder in our current cultural/political climate. An example is priming[2], which is the exact point of things like slogans. No one expects one to write a novel to discern all the nuance of their statements, so we naturally take shortcuts and a priori assumptions are a necessity. If you ignore that these shortcuts exist then communication is difficult. (As to dog whistling[3], that is exactly the point. To exploit this feature of language. Otherwise these phrases wouldn't be coded)

A perfect example is your interpretation of my comment. I can take it one of two ways. 1) Be upset that you didn't understand what I meant. After all I did say

>> Btw, I don't think that's what you're intending to imply and I didn't take it that way, but it is important to understand how it could be taken that way.

Why should I not be upset that you are accusing me of accusing you of promoting anti-vaxers when I said completely the opposite? At least that's what I meant. Or I can go with 2) try to refine my statement to clarify confusion. I am trying #2 because, well.. my thesis is that communication is difficult and I understand the misinterpretation. I intended to mean that anti-vaxers use similar language so it wouldn't be surprising if someone was primed to think you are implying something similar (this is where interpretation comes into play). I am trying to say that this is especially difficult because of the cultural and political climate that currently exacerbates this which unfortunately leads to us trying to be more clear and trying better to interpret. And I am not trying to treat this conversation as adversarial, I apologize if it comes off that way.

To clarify, the intent of my original comment was to say that communication is difficult and the breakdown in communication that is currently happening in the conversation. Not to accuse you of anything. Though I was trying to draw a parallel to illustrate why someone might confuse you (because you are toeing the line), but that I personally did not interpret it that way.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJEaMtNN_dM

[1] The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?” “Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles. — I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud. “Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare. “Exactly so,” said Alice. “Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on. “I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.” “Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!” “You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!” “You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep’ is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_(psychology)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics#United_St...

"Science" is the iterative loop of observing reality, modeling reality, and correcting the model based on observation. It's how children learn to walk.

Science doesn't require formal training in principle; in practice training in critical thinking is good, and training in specific techniques might be necessary to observe + interpret specific phenomena.

As an aside - Many practicing scientists don't fully understand all the techniques they use day-to-day, and almost certainly don't understand techniques several steps removed from what they do themselves. To understand everything is simply impossible.

Everything else a matter of faith: In the honesty of people reporting results, in the competence of people reporting results, in the similarity between model systems and the "real world", etc. Of course one might apply one's training in techniques to validate the consistency of stuff asserted by other things - people, instrument readings, etc.

I realize HN sperdos have a hard time with this concept sometimes, but MUH SCIENCE isn't how we make decisions as a society, anywhere, ever.

Leadership is decision under uncertainty. The best thing most scientists can do for leadership is tell them the best guess and estimates of how big the uncertainties are. Recent events have shown how unbelievably shitty these guesses were, and, frankly, continue to be; and as far as I can tell, none of the important players over the last 6 months mentioned any of the uncertainties in a useful actionable way.

Putting scientists and operations research types in charge of anything more complicated than airline routing tables is basically the definition of madness; literally every time it's been tried in human history has ended up a disaster. Adam Curtis and that gasbag Taleb have made a career of documenting this obvious truism.

> I realize HN sperdos have a hard time with this concept sometimes

Hey please don't do that here. Crotchety contrarianism needn't be a bad thing but the HN guidelines say "don't be snarky" for a reason, and there are other guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Many of your comments are clearly based on knowledge, which we cut a lot of slack for, but if you would make our lives a little easier I'd appreciate it. This comment would be just fine if it started with the "Leadership is" sentence. "Gasbag" is name-calling but as part of a backhanded compliment, no big deal; we're not sticklers.

> I'd rather be ruled over by elite families than squabbling, territorial, overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing and blackmailed easily.

Like the Trump family? I love me some "elite" autocratic rule!

The future never looked brighter. Idiocracy here we come.

> overconfident scientists who can be bought off for nothing

Well, I wouldn’t call sex with underage girls on a private island nothing.

Is there anything new here, though? Science is and always has been a human endeavor - it didn't arrive out of the sky delivered to us by gods or aliens. There have always been "regulatory failures (since we've had regulations, anyway), moral failures and outright abuses pushed in the guise of scientific expertise." this is nothing new.

Right, but what's your point? If it's an old problem we shouldn't try to address it? I think the evidence points to it getting worse and more importantly becoming more and more of a liability for our future ability to compete on the world stage.

I'm not completely convinced that it's getting worse (that was my point), but if it is getting worse then we should try to figure out what changed. Maybe it's the drive for Universities to profit off of their research due to less public funding? If we think of the example of Jonas Salk and the the polio vaccine he developed he didn't want to make any money off of it - he essentially gave it away. Maybe we've developed into more of a dog-eat-dog, every-man-for-himself society in general where you've got to get as much as you can else you might end up on the streets? I don't know, but if the problem is indeed worse then maybe those are a couple of reasons.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com