Trust Me, I'm a Scientist
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Who are these scientists? What exactly do they say? How do we know that what we hear that "scientists say" is not actually what the media wants us to hear? Most people never talk to scientists directly. Everything they hear is through the media. Most people are not stupid and understand that what the media says is not always to be trusted (not necessarily because the media is corrupt or because it intentionally tries to mislead, but simply because the way the media works is that it focuses on the most popular and controversial topics to receive the most views).
TL;DR: The perceived distrust of scientists by the public could well be a distrust of media reporting of most issues in general, not necessarily a lack of belief in the scientific method.
You present an interesting idea, but I believe the reason this issue is missing from the debate is that there just aren't very many people who feel that way. Or if there are, they are remarkably unvocal about it.
Well I've seen examples of bad, exaggerated, sometimes completely misleading media reporting of scientific findings nearly everywhere. Now I have a scientific background and I can tell that those reports should be taken with a grain of salt, but how can people without such background filter out the signal from the noise?
I bet that many people assume that a reporter publishing something in "The Daily Galaxy" is actually the scientist. How would they ever trust him or her?
From your first comment, I thought you were saying that there was no mistrust of science, just of reporters, from this line "The perceived distrust of scientists by the public could well be a distrust of media reporting of most issues in general, not necessarily a lack of belief in the scientific method."
Apologies if I had misunderstood.
Is it your assertion that scientists are not motivated by something other than the pursuit of truth? Seems you are saying those who might think that are engaging in name-calling rather than simple observation of known facts. If this is your assertion (it is, but I'm giving you a chance to back down), please justify with evidence your claim that scientists are not motivated by something other than the pursuit of truth.
A similar fallacy would be to say that because prominent global warming skeptic Frederick Seitz's institute received $630,000 from Exxon Mobil, his ideas should be dismissed. That would be a fallacy. His research should be dismissed because it is either un-replicable or based on poor methodology.
But none of this addresses the issue of my previous response, it's a distraction. If you wish to proceed further, kindly address the previous points: "Is it your assertion that scientists are not motivated by something other than the pursuit of truth?"
From Wikipedia
An ad hominem (Latin: "to the man"), short for argumentum ad hominem, is an attempt to link the validity of a premise to a characteristic or belief of the person advocating the premise.
Ad Hominem is not always a fallacy. For instance, it would not be possible to assess a person for a position without considering that person's characterstics. Sometimes we neither have the resources to assess a claim based on anything other than the characteristics of the one who made it.
Because, for once, they aren't being mindless sheeple? Presented with something that can be proven or disproven, they actually want that to happen, unlike other subjects which don't have any hard lines that can be drawn, and they simply follow.
The essence of the scientific method is to trust nothing that hasn't been proven, with evidence, and peer reviewed. Then scientists go to the public and expect people to take their word for it. They really can't see why that doesn't work?
People are going to trust their experiences and pre-conceptions before the word of a stranger, no matter how many letters are after his name. If that stranger happens to line up with their existing knowledge, they believe him without question ONLY because their existing knowledge says the same thing. They don't believe the scientist, they believe in themselves.
That's how most people work, anyhow. There's a few who go beyond that and challenge even things they have always believed to be true.
To constantly question everything, or to go with one's preconceived notions irrespective of how much evidence there is against them, is both dangerous and stupid - professional scientists might be wrong about some things, but if the vast majority of them agree on something that you're not qualified to discuss, you can and should assume that they're probably right. A good litmus test for this is asking what evidence you would need to be convinced that you're wrong; if you don't know or if the answer is there is no evidence, you don't know what you're talking about.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/content/294/2/218.abstract http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/02/the-ideology-of-hea... (If someone could find a British metastudy containing a nice graph indicating ~50% of current standard medical treatments has no evidence of effectiveness, I would appreciate it - have had much trouble locating it.)
But of course, doctors are not scientists.
"What percentage of the around 3000 treatments included in Clinical Evidence fall into each category:
- 11% Beneficial
- 23% Likely to be beneficial
- 7% Trade off between benefits and harm
- 51% Unknown effectiveness
- 5% Unlikely to be beneficial
- 3% Likely to be ineffective or harmful
I haven't seen that study, but if you look up any given common medical condition, for many of them there are studies about what percentage of those diagnosed are being treated in accordance with best practices. And for most conditions it's usually not more than a third. Doctors usually just prescribe whatever is advertised the most regardless of whether or not it's even remotely effective or safe, e.g. http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/99/15/2055
The study also indicated a small percentage of treatments evidenced as actually harmful, so that in the end only a third of the treatments were efficacious.
My own experience in a clinical setting showed that most doctors (say, outside a university health system) have trouble keeping up with the research in their field.
There is a study somewhere about what percentages of doctors can name at least one finding from their medical field within the last year, and it was some abysmally low figure. Do you happen to know what I'm referencing? I am looking for the cite for something, but can't find it unfortunately.
Often this is not provided in enough detail to replicate the study. All such studies should be discarded.
Those that provide their data and exact protocol can be reviewed.
Journal articles are not an assertion of truth. They are an alleged reporting of results, which should be provided in enough detail to get the same results. This is necessary because historically only a minority of peer reviewed journal published results have reported things that ended up being true.
People fall into the same trap in many other situations. If you give someone a guessing game where a red card is shown 80% of the time, and a black card is shown 20% of the time, they'll usually start guessing red 80% and black 20%. They'll still do this even if they're given money for correct guesses. They'll even do this if they're told the game is totally random, and that red occurs more often!
You of course maximise your correct predictions by always guessing the majority class, unless you're more accurate than the prior distribution. So if you can't guess the next card >80% accurately, you should always pick red.
Likewise, if you can't know _when_ the scientists are wrong with >90% accuracy, you should just shut up and trust the scientists _always_. But, of course, this is not what people do.
Beating the baseline of always trusting the scientists is basically impossible for the lay-person to do. All they're going to do is look more closely at whatever claims perk up their ears based on their current biases, and then look just closely enough to spot some "flaw" which would get swatted aside in minutes by a serious researcher.
If you couldn't write a paper that had a good chance of being accepted by a journal (modulo bias) then you have no business doubting the conclusion. If you go about doing that, then your beliefs will on average be less accurate. And that's a bad thing, as the stakes are quite high.
Of course, some skepticism can be used to separate these three classes even for the layperson. The wiser layperson looks for articles on journal websites that they don't want to buy, looks for credentials from known universities, looks for something that sounds sciencey instead of new agey. These policies definitely can improve your capacity to learn from digested scientific material.
But if you interpret this power as roughly knowing how to interpret and trust scientists, which is probably a fair description of the actors in a lot of lay science argumentation (or politics in general), then you can quickly get out of your depth without others or even yourself noticing.
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I think the article does a good job conveying the idea of scientific doubt. I also love the idea of stressing science history in an effort to both demonstrate the uncertainty of scientific knowledge and the sheer volume of work that's gone behind a lot of it.
The real message, I believe, should be one of reverence toward the problem. When scientific knowledge is passed on to an increasingly lay audience, it should be known that this is the best guess a room full of really smart, dedicated people could get at. This guess may be good or bad, but unless you're willing to tackle the question they were asking at a similar level of rigor (like your "could you get a paper accepted" criterion) then you are pretty unlikely to understand and appreciate the less good options.
The problem is that it's trivially easy to find MAJOR errors in the methodology or interpretation of many or even most journal articles, and whatever passes for the scientific consensus is usually based directly off a very shallow reading of the abstracts and conclusions of these articles without taking any of their flaws into account, let alone questioning the epistemology behind them. There are probably fields where this isn't true, but they're definitely the minority. When the scientific consensus changes it's rarely because of brilliant new research, but rather because the flaws in old research gradually get publicized and so the old conclusions get replaced by the conclusions of new research that's also flawed, but where the flaws aren't yet widely known. But there's no reason why you can't actually figure out what these flaws are, it's not difficult at all, it's just that most people (including scientists) are too lazy to read the actual papers and think critically about them.
The point is that people who buy into scientific consensus wholesale aren't actually the rational skeptics they market themselves as being, but rather are just as dumb and ignorant as the worst of the religious fundamentalists.
If that were true, then the figure for scientific consensus being true would be much lower than 90%. But I don't believe that. I'd have to wonder what these scientists were doing, that I could just waltz in and blow them away with my wits and reason. I mean, what are the other scientists in this hypothetical field _doing_? Are they that incompetent or corrupt, that I can just blow a hole in their field based on casual observation? Why can't they see the same things I can?
This brings me back to that journal benchmark. Do you think you could write a summary paper discounting a substantial body of research for exhibiting various flaws? If so, do you think it would be accepted? I suggest there are few fields where it's really that easy.
I think if you actually look at research about the historical validity of science, you'll in fact find that the 90% figure is a wild overestimate. There are dozens of disciplines where virtually every single scientific consensus in the entire field has been overturned.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_...
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2010/11/lies-damne...
You seem to be arguing that since mankind once thought the world was flat and was wrong, and then mankind thought the world was round and was wrong (more oblate spheroidal), and then mankind thought the world was oblate spheroidal and was wrong, we definitely can't trust the scientific consensus that the world is approximately oblate spheroidal with a very slight bulge south of the equator. Indeed, maybe the earth will turn out to be cubical tomorrow, and a taurus the day after that.
"Wrong" is a relative statement. Saying the earth is flat is more wrong than saying the earth is a sphere, and saying the earth is a sphere is more wrong than saying the earth is oblate spheroidal. Yes they're all wrong, just as newtonian mechanics was, strictly speaking, "wrong", yet no one looks at a car and says "that was built using newtonian mechanics, and therefore can't possibly work".
No argument there, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't wrong to begin with.
"I don't think it's laziness to allow people who have devoted their entire lives to work out fantastically complicated problems to do their work without polluting the debate with my generally uninformed opinion."
Of course you shouldn't express your opinion if you're uninformed. But you also shouldn't put science on a pedestal. Writing your own literature review might not be feasible for most people, but deciding which of two factions (if not both) is full of shit doesn't take a whole lot of talent.
In real scientific debate, the two sides are actually likely to be sharing an enormous amount of common ground and quibbling over extraordinarily specific details. The trick is that sometimes these specific details have an enormous impact (bistability). It doesn't suddenly mean that one side is full of shit just because the world might change dramatically depending on how that tiny detail changes.
Since the greatest experts in each field publish their best results with a less than 50% accuracy rate, it seems clear that uninformed people randomly guessing things can do better by flipping coins.
Feynman found it useful to go with his gut feeling about something before he had reviewed any previous research in a field, and found this worked well for him. His IQ was 125 so he's just an ordinary guy with common sense.
If his IQ was measured to be 125, that tells us far more about the accuracy of the IQ measurement process than Feynman's intelligence. Feynman's extra-ordinariness is on clear display.
However, the reason there aren't more rock-stars like that is because when you actually have to inject yourself into the debate and have your own ideas exposed to the same level of skepticism, you often find that your own conclusions are as flawed as the ones you are critiquing.
Not saying science has all the answers. Not saying currently held beliefs won't be overturned. Not even saying that you might not be right about some of the things you are skeptical about. But I have seen a lot of people believe they know better about things of a scientific nature who have absolutely no idea about which they speak. As an outsider to think that something is easier than it is, and that you know more than you really know. It is not unreasonable to let the people whose life is devoted to the work, do their work. When you question smart people's life work, it is incredibly reasonable to apply some of the same skepticism you are applying to them to yourself.
I think people like to tell themselves this, but rarely is it actually true. If that's how humans actually worked then Michael Moore would have been canonized as a saint for showing that the Iraq war was a mistake.
At best the person who gets the credit is the person who used their clout to convince people that the old paradigm was wrong, not the person who actually did the analysis. And more commonly people begrudgingly accept the new model and no one gets credit, and even then they often don't accept the new model for dozens (or hundreds) of years after the evidence is in.
Really?
"it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs." Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/ari/nico/nico003.htm).
I don't think that's necessarily the case. The cited study only suggests that people trust scientists more than leaders of business or government. That might not be a very high level of trust.
I would rather suppose that people do not trust anybody very much unless they know them personally. To really convince a person of the contrary, he must grasp or experience it for himself.
The problem with scientific publications is that a lot of prior knowledge, preparation and work is required to really understand the reasoning behind the findings. Only that way, one can confidently reject or approve the scientific statement. Alas, most people are untrained and too disconnected from the subject.
Or is there.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn7915-most-scientific-p...
Science by itself; ok, I'm willing to listen and pay attention with an open mind. "Science" in league with _government_ (the only agency which can legally point a gun at my head and demand my compliance to ANYTHING)? I have EXTREME skepticism in this situation. Because such alliances can easily lead to totalitarianism in the name of science. Power-hungry bureaucrats and do-gooders see "scientists" as the key to getting the population at large to give up freedoms (to have a "safer" future). And few "scientists" will walk away from millions of dollars in grant money dangled in front of their noses. And if they want to get the next grant (what else are they going to do?), don't you suppose there's just a little bias injected into the activities sponsored by the current grant? It strains credulity to think that such biases don't exist. Most commenters on HN seem to think that such biases only arise in situations where "science" is funded by private business, but I see the potential for trouble as being much higher when "science" and governments join forces. You can almost always ignore or dodge something a corporation does, but dodging the government is basically impossible. The entirely miserable track record of "scientists" who've predicted "the world will end unless we all ..." over the past century reinforces my comfort in holding a skeptical position.
Basically, the (US) government today is in the business of controlling the behavior of citizens. The more ways they can control citizen behavior, the more bureaucracies there will be, and the bigger the existing bureaucracies will get. The ultimate expression of this will be "single payer" (a.k.a. 100% government controlled) health care. This will be the justification for total in-detail control of individual/personal behavior.
Think I'm paranoid? Let's just see what happens...
(Of course, vaccines are pretty obviously a great thing, and there is no reason to believe they cause autism.)
Thinking about problems don't provide new information. It's the same basic fallacy as assuming a really really powerful AI could deduce QM from a few minutes of webcam footage.
In either case, the emphasis is on conclusions being bought in the currency of experience.
Or in a more down to earth example, if we stop building ever higher energy particle accelerators there are things we simply don't get to know.
I understand but disagree. If a member of the public trusts scientists on some particular issue, what they're doing is not science (because science is based on reasoning and evidence and controlled experiments and mathematics and so on) but that doesn't mean it's anti-science. There's nothing wrong with someone who isn't a scientist making a decision by means other than Doing Science -- after all, if they could do that then they would be a scientist.
Trusting what scientists tell you is (for most people, most of the time) rational behaviour even if it isn't doing science. The only reason why scientists don't always do it is that they have an even better option, namely actually doing science. People who aren't scientists usually don't.
(Note 1. Actually, most of the time scientists also trust what other scientists say, and quite right too. Note 2. Of course Doing Science isn't really an activity strictly limited to Real Scientists; anyone can, in principle, do it. But in practice, for most areas of active research, doing it competently requires the right sort of brain, the right sort of training, and sometimes the right equipment, and the great majority of the people who have those are scientists.)
I think the public has good right to be skeptical of scientists' statements here.