Trust: The Need for Public Understanding of How Science Works

This is what gives me the biggest headache. When discussing any politically motivated topic you can't ask questions that even remotely disagree with the popular Science opinion of the day. I had a professor scold me for asking if there were any natural phenomenon that may also be contributing to rising CO2 levels

Unfortunately, the popular idea of Kuhnian paradigm shifts is even more wrong than the popular idea that it's one big model of nature that keeps getting better. Paradigm shifts often don't invalidate earlier results; they refine them. Take the prototypical example: classical vs quantum mechanics. The statement "quantum mechanics is a more refined model of the world than classical mechanics" is far more accurate than "quantum mechanics proved that classical mechanics is wrong". Classical mechanics is still taught in universities (in the physics departement not in the history departement), and those courses spend a lot of time showing how classical mechanics arises as a particular limit of quantum mechanics, and how the two relate, and in which range of conditions the two theories give the same answers.

Science is simply the process of using of data to come to conclusions. Is there a better method for building a model of the world?

Therefore, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about “science” as an authority. There are people and organizations that claim they used the scientific process to come to this or that conclusion. Maybe they used proper data and the right math. Maybe they didn’t. But their errors in the scientific process doesn’t say anything about the validity of the scientific process, for which there does not seem to be an alternative.

- Traditionalism: Driving society according to the word of the elders,

- Modernity: Driving society using science.

Leaders understood that. So there are extremely high stakes in fabricating or twisting science, because once you have science on your side, all modern societies will help you.

Example with feminism: It is literally illegal in some countries (ex: France, law for true equality 2014, followed by multiple decrees since Macron) to communicate information that unflatters women (it’s considered demeaning), so even though some figures are extremely false (girls aren’t better at math, it’s only when we put a female name on exams that the sheet has 6% higher mark, this science is considered demeaning towards women therefore illegal to publish – same goes for the wage gap, women work less and less intensively per hour worked, but it is illegal to point it out), everyone still believes wrong things.

And just like this, laws pass. Same goes for immigration or all other science-backed laws where one side is forbidden to speak.

Science works... assuming equal analysis of both sides of each hypothesis. That’s why it only works in democratic cultures, but that assumes the media is balanced.

You see this everyday right now during the pandemic. Policy making is very different from say, civil engineering, where failure scenarios can be quantified within tightly defined bounds. At the nation state level every decision may affect everybody. Nobody wants to be told their specific circumstances are the "statistical outliers". But science rarely gives good answers. The only time science has been reliable is when a large amount of resources is dedicated to figuring out answers in a single, specific problem. Unfortunately the life sciences don't have the luxury of physics and the formal sciences. There is no concerted level of effort to cure cancer that is comparable to the Apollo program. The military prefers to buy ten more hellfires than to redo life science ethics. If you quantify the ultimate utilitarian value, the damage ten missiles can do to humanity may be the same as a FDA that focus more on progress than covering their own ass. Yet the former is more acceptable than the latter. Science has failed because it no longer gives useful answers. When somebody's grandmother is lying sick in the hospital, they want a cure that is immediately accessible, not yet another feel-good post on Reddit or Facebook about "Scientists claim experimental cure for cancer found! Appearing in your friendly neighborhood pharmacy in ten years".

Who or where precisely have you ever seen that actually done? Are you perhaps confusing people who are asserting/suggesting that science is our best tool to understand truth, and assuming they believe it is always true, or that it can/has uncovered all truths?

From my point of view science isn't fetishized nearly enough. People reject vaccines for crazy reasons, think the Earth is flat, think the moon landing never happened, basically have no idea how anything works at all.

   In general we look for a new law by the following process: first we guess it, then we compute the consequences of the guess... and then we compare those computation results to experiment.  

   If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.  It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is.  It doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is.  If it disagrees with experiment its wrong, that's all there is to it.

   Notice however that we never prove it right... In the future there could be a wider range of experiments, or you could compute a wider range of consequences, and you may discover then that the thing is wrong. That's why laws like Newton's laws for the motions of planets last such a long time... It took several hundred years before the slight error in the motion of Mercury was developed.

I live in a neighborhood in the shadow of a big university, where you can't spit without hitting a scientist. I work for a science oriented business. My parents, my siblings, and our spouses, are all scientists.

I don't know a single scientist who treats science as a god-like authority. In fact I believe this is a popular straw man, or a tu quoque fallacy trying to pin the characteristics of religion on science.

You can use truth and facts to form an opinion and propose a policy, but it cannot be made to sound like the only option, or else we end up embittering those who would be put out by the policy, to the point that they have no recourse _but_ to attack the science and facts. You _have_ to be willing to tradeoff and find an imperfect compromise.

Add to that the fact that scientific discoveries and understandings are especially easy to attack _because_ they are evolving.

A lot of pro-conformists make the argue that tolerating ideological diversity means regarding creationism and evolution as equally valid; of course this is untrue--science can (and indeed did) find that evolution is the more valid idea without explicitly persecuting creationists. In other words, normal heterodox science would already prefer evolution to creationism--not only is there no need to (for example) write open letters demanding various creationists' resignation/termination/excommunication/etc, but that sort of persecution actually harms the health (heterodoxy) of science (not because science needs creationists, but because science needs heterodoxy to be able to decide that creationism is the invalid idea in the first place).

There's a difference in trusting "the scientific process" versus scientists; We can trust scientists so far as they are following that process, which isn't guaranteed.

Also, the two things are not mutually exclusive; While peer review is important in science, it is not strictly the same as consensus; The paradigm shift of the outsider is enabled by this fact. What we really have to fear is that peer review degrades into the consensus-base of typical power structures.

I agree. But as you point out this is basically a reaction to the inverse: some loud non-scientists, which are overwhelmingly skeptical of science/medicine for the sake of sowing distrust, rather than being followed up by critical discussion.

I'm not in favor of blind trust of anything. But for "scientism" it's an unfortunate reactionary message against the blind and blanket mistrust of science/medicine that has become popular e.g. on some circles of the internet.

The problem is that many of the "skeptics" in media are more concerned with contrarianism and sowing doubt than healthy debate.

How do you have a rational discussion with someone who comes to the table set on not trusting the scientific process?

I don't think the basics of Karl Popper and Kuhn are beyond the grasp of a secondary school student, considering their importance not just in science but in the world we now live in.

I'm thankful for that program even though I don't work in Science currently. Many of my peers are terrified of reading journal articles, but I'll dive right in.

In terms of philosophy, a big portion of the Kantian/Enlightenment project was about grounding or justifying Science as epistemological practice. But that's not really what the Public needs, because "Science" now is not "Natural Philosophy" reaching for the things-in-themselves, but an institution with norms, financial and political incentives, etc. Better to read Lyotard ("Postmodern Condition") than early Wittgenstein for this kind of thing.

Most good schools actually already do this as part of their standards-based curriculum. The Next Generation Science Standards [1] has "Practices" as one of its three key strands, which focuses on how to ask questions like a scientist, what evidence is, how you design an experiment, etc. The nature of "inquiry" is applicable to all future understanding of what scientists do, more so than memorizing whether mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell.

1. https://www.nextgenscience.org/

> At least since Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions", historians and philosophers of science have been aware that the traditional methods of science—as described in “science as inquiry”—do not give a complete picture of how scientists develop, test, refine, and replace scientific theories. That ideologies, peer pressure, confirmation bias, and a host of other "biasing factors" play an ineliminable role in the process of doing science is now widely acknowledged. Yet "science as inquiry" has not adjusted to these findings. It continues to regard any bias as bad for science and to insist on the overall neutrality, “logicality,” and objectivity of science. As a result, there is much about the history of science, as well as about contemporary science, that “science as inquiry” misrepresents.

The problem is that from the fact that various biases cannot be avoided in science it is concluded that it is somehow desirable to "adjust to these findings" and stop regarding bias as bad. Instead of continuing to strive for elimination of bias and lessen the impact of biasing factors, the author instead insinuates at various places that biases should somehow be embraced, even emphasized in historical examples. But it doesn't follow from the fact that there will always be bias in one form or another that it's not methodologically advisable to attempt to eliminate it as much as possible.

"When scientific disagreement arises, it is interpreted as likely showing that one or more scientists have bias."

That is rarely claimed. Isn't it way more more likely that the experiments are not decisive enough or the theories not yet developed well enough, that more data has to be collected or more theoretical advances have to be made?

Other points in the article are fine. Of course, consensus is not the point of science. But I have to say I've become rather dismissive about articles who build up "logical empiricism" as a straw man and then come with Kuhn. There have never been such trivial logical positivists. The Vienna Circle had quite elaborate and diverse views, and, as one may add, logical positivism was a large reductionist philosophical programme that failed for a vast variety of reasons that have nothing to do with Kuhn's theses and how work in science is actually conducted. Those reasons were, for example, that there was no logical way to generalize from 1st person to 3rd statements, the inadequacy of crude verificationism, the lack of a logic of theory discovery, Quine's work on analyticity and ontological relativity, problems with counterfactual reasoning and theoretical notions, problems with making reductionism credible in light of apparently emergent properties, and the failure of operationalism.

Brace Yourself: The UK Physics A-level does not require any calculus at all. None - no scientific method, no discussion of any quantum mechanics etc. etc.

My SO was a HS science teacher, so I have some second-hand experience, whatever that is worth.

This very much tracks with my SO's experience in both very poor schools and in 'good' schools. It would be amazing to have the time, money, and resources to teach kiddos about the philosophy of science. But just getting through the facts is hard enough. I'll save you the belly-aching about home environments, intra-classroom management, funding, pay, snow-days, etc. Even if/when we get back to all in-person teaching and then get the kids back up to grade level, adding in the philosophy of science to uninterested teenagers isn't likely to produce any measurable results.

My iota of advice: Just vote to increase any school funding you possibly can (bonds, liens, mill-levies, etc). As many parents found out this last year, teachers don't get paid nearly enough for this. The rest will get sorted on it's own.

Has anyone heard of a setting for discussing doing transformatively better than this?

Not in PER sense of "if only we could teach intro physics classes successfully", or bio's "if only undergraduates had a firmer grasp of central dogma", but more like Larimore's[1] suggestion, in the context of preK science education, that students have a human right to make sense of their world, now. Big hairy audacious goal. And the heavy lifting for it, would have to come from the science community.

As in, kindergarten students have a right to be told the Sun isn't yellow, to not be given popular intro astronomy college textbooks which have that wrong, and to not grow up to be first-tier astronomy and physical sciences graduate students who are still confused about that, and about color in general. Students have a right to chemistry education content which chemistry education research doesn't describe using adjectives like incoherent. A right to content which reflects current insight and understanding of the physical world, not "it's traditional to teach it this way" wretchedness.

Consider a dedicated professional teacher, in a hypothetical country, whose education system is focused on call-and-response rote memorize-and-regurgitate, who argues the implausibility of teaching US-style intro-physics problem solving. That can be both individually correct, and still reflect a profound collective failure of their community and society. Now consider a system focused on plug-and-chug toy problem solving, with no feel for reasonable values, narrow scopes, and topical descriptions divorced from current understanding. That can be both a professionally-pursued local maxima, and still reflect a profound collective failure. Including a failure to explore how to do transformatively better.

Imagine a speculative early-primary atoms-up progression, one emphasizing atoms as nucleons, and building from nucleosynthesis, through a sense of physical size/scale, to a broad grasp of modern material science. Insane amount of interdisciplinary work. But I even found ways to explore it, sort of kind of, and explorations like it - mainly conversations with "the usual suspects" before/after research talks around MIT and Harvard. Then covid. Now... has anyone heard of an online setting for discussing transformative improvement of science and engineering content? Even if we're back to normal next year, I'd appreciate finding a less ad hoc and restricted setting. Thanks.

[1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C22&q=Lar...

* I see individual scripture references cited (out of context). (Called "proof texting"... "See, here's the proof!")

* One can find a verse which says anything (if you ignore the context).

* Once an idea has been poked at from enough directions, it becomes a belief and then a creed (or a part of one).

Science, like religion also has a method: exegesis vs. the scientific method. A source: scripture vs. creation. Etc. etc.

Sadly, this is not a problem which can be "fixed". You can have your die-hard zealots on either side. The evidence can be placed before them. You can show them that their error (heresy) has been denounced for a thousand years. But yet erroneous beliefs are still rampant.

>* Circle of mutual adoration hiring processes

>* Cursory-at-best peer review in many disciplines

>* Impact over integrity in hiring

>* Selection biases in science reporting (and more generally, the pay-per-click incentive structures places on games-of-telephone)

None of these are part of the scientific process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method

You are missing the logical flaw buried within the scientific method itself.

Nothing in science and therefore reality can be proven to be true. We can only falsify things in science.

What this means is every claim ever made by anyone or any scientist from now to eternity can never be proven to be true.

We can only make repeated attempts at falsifying things. After we fail to falsify a thing enough times we can say, hey this theory is maybe true. That is the best science can do and that is what nobody, including most of the people on hacker news do NOT understand.

There is literally no such thing as an actual “fact” in science and therefore in reality as we know it.

This flaw is the origin of most of the distrust in science it is also the reason why blind trust of the scientific method itself is wrong. No claim made by a scientist has actually ever been proven.

Rational thinking and the idea to look at data seems to be completely foreign to most people I know. Higher educated people seem to absorb and repeat dogmas and propaganda unfiltered even faster.

Some patterns I have come across:

Alpha-Rational: Claiming that ideas that come from authority (dogma) or self (narcissism) are rational - rejecting to look at any data.

Anti-Rational: Reject the idea to look at data "life is uncertain", "data is garbage", "it's immoral to look at data" - although there is a lot of good data and drawing conclusions is not even difficult.

Malicious rational: Know your science and cherry-pick data for profit to support the highest bidder.

Maybe some of the people who are using that are rhetorical, but as somebody who was very invested in the Evangelical Christian community in Arizona for the better part of a decade, there are a lot of people who believe it genuinely, that when scientists use the word "theory", it should be understood to mean "guess".

The blinders came off when the majority of people finally saw that you could pay doctors and university researchers -- two of the most respected types of people in the post-war world -- to produce "studies" to show that, say, smoking was GOOD for you, against all data on the subject.

I'm 50. I can't tell you how many headlines I've read over my adult life that flip-flop between eggs being good for you, versus that they're killing you.

In my 4th-grade science textbook, I was told that we were entering a new mini ice age, and that we'd be completely out of oil by the year 2000. (Which kind of sucked, because I was going to be driving by then.)

We all know where the climate thing is now, and I don't hear ANYONE making noises about "peak oil" any more.

THIS is precisely why it's so hard to sell the public on the dangers of climate change. The BUSINESS of science has destroyed their credibility, and they only have themselves to blame.

Probably you don’t either. Did you know it is axiomatically impossible to prove anything to be true in science?

Every claim made by every scientist from the beginning of science to eternity has never ever been proven true. In science you can only falsify things.

If you don’t know this or don’t logically understand why this is the case then you never truly understood science.

People understand science from a cultural and political perspective. From a logical and axiomatic perspective, in science you cannot actually prove anything to be true.

This flaw within the actual framework of science itself is the origin of much of the misunderstandings and debates in the cultural and political arenas of science. For example no scientist can actually definitively prove global warming is real.

It is literally fundamentally impossible. Hence the politics.

Well, heck, predicting the future and pointing out other people's mistakes is dead easy when you have access to a time-machine, isn't it?

The same cannot be said for proving something to be true.

That is not to diminish the problem. Over-reliance in purely statistical methods has gotten us in trouble -- in some fields more than others. Probably the main issue is that the fields affected are ones that happen to the biggest right now, with potential impact on quality of life and public policy.

Fields that are doing a better job of weathering the storm, such as physics, have tended to have a larger tool belt, and the use of statistics is kept in check by other methods such as the development of theory, and the ability to study problems from multiple vantage points. Also, physicists can choose our battles, and only look at problems where more robust statistics can be used.

Don't get me wrong--public officials should base policies on the scientific consensus, when it exists. But a scientific consensus can't tell you what to do about it. It can't tell you what trade-offs to make, or how to integrate a scientific truth into a social framework. Most important, politicians must deal with the fact that science often doesn't have clear answers on important matters. Something as simple as "should pregnant women get the COVID vaccine?" is the subject of dispute.

Most people are searching for definitive truths. The problem is it doesn’t exist, and science is the closest thing it.

But just picking up your satellite argument. A quick google search reveals many articles disputing that satellites show no increase in global temperatures. One article [1] even claims corrected sattelite measurements show a higher increase than surface measurements.

[1] https://www.carbonbrief.org/major-correction-to-satellite-da...

If you'd like to convince scientists to come around to your line of thinking, explain the problems with current research papers. Tell them about the problems with publishing papers only, how others struggle to reproduce their research, and how it leaves much bad research that would be invalidated far sooner except that the information to recreate their trial was absent.

Then explain how sharing the code and data with Git (or similar) can solve this problem. You'll find that you are much more persuasive.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3173574.3174241