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Comment by Symmetry | Hacker News Reader

Scientists' and doctors' views on questions of "ought" can also be influenced by their background in weird says. A dermatologist might insist that people always wear long sleeve shirts and pants outside. Even if moderate sun exposure causes people to statistically live a bit longer on net they see lots of people who die of skin cancer and no more people dying of heart attacks than anyone else so the former are a lot more salient for them.

As the famous saying goes, "nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it".

Every scientific discipline inculcates values that may be different from those held by the general public ranging from how important it is to give credit to the originators of ideas to the relative importance of difference species to whether naturalness is valuable or not. This isn't bad, its probably necessary. But it's something that has to be accounted for.

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I see all the time PhD's who, when dealing with matters in their own field, assiduously adhere to reason, facts, the scientific method, evidence, etc.

But step outside that field, and they latch on to something that emotionally appeals to them, and all that reason, facts, etc., flies right out the window.

Of course, I never do that myself.

Critical thinking is domain dependent. For example, just because you can kill it on white board interviews doesn't mean you will be able to navigate relationship issues. The way I imagine many PhD's I've talked to is like the RPG character where you max out one line of development at the expense of all the other lines. The counter-example would be the "T shaped" development profile which is the ideal imo.

A research PhD should be able to instantly recognize logical fallacies outside their field, but in my experience they fall for them every time.

Absolutely!

I often wonder whether the epistemology we are "born with" can actually be improved very much (in a general sense), or whether the best we can do is teach domain-specific techniques to override our defaults on those topics.

We all fall for it. Just search for: biases

We also need to deeply care and understand ourselves.

INT and WIS are separate, orthogonal stats

And it would be great if the public debate was about what outcome is better given two policies produced by honest but differently focused scientists.

It would also be good if all those models were used as basis to discuss divergent interests and that politics would remain politics as a tool to select policies that maximize a majority (but not everyone's) best interests.

I feel, instead the issue is that it's become unacceptable to disclose what are someone's own best interests and to defend those.

Instead everyone produce fallacious models that show that their prefered policy is in everyone's best interests.

I agree completely: much of science now is highly politicized. We have seen what happens to professors or research scientists who try to take a position that countered popular opinion on a sensitive topic - they have protests against them, they are spat upon and assaulted, and they lose their jobs.

All of the other scientists and researchers see this and adjust their own behavior and areas of study to avoid being mobbed.

I have had to become increasingly cautious and wary of trusting all published science, especially that in social areas now.

Politics is a fundamentally alien experience to most STEM people.

Politics is manifestly not about the public good - not even with compromises.

It's mostly about a few unpleasant - sometimes charismatic - individuals pursuing power for their own personal benefit, and covertly that of their funders and sponsors.

Science has nothing to contribute to this, because the entire business is so hopelessly toxic and corrupt that rational debate about policy doesn't even get to first base.

If you want rational policy you don't want politics. It's perfectly possible you don't even want democracy.

What you want is administration - a very different process where mature competent executives and managers who do not have Dark Triad personality traits make intelligent, informed, and compassionate decisions in the public interest based on evidence, expert guidance, and their own good instincts. And their power is strictly limited to the lightest possible enforcement required to do the job.

No country has even been run like this, but a few have managed to operate like this in selected subfields.

The purpose of this particular device was to permit a vote in the National House of Representatives to be taken in a minute or so, complete lists being furnished of all members voting on the two sides of any question Mr. Edison, in recalling the circumstances, says: "Roberts was the telegraph operator who was the financial backer to the extent of $100. The invention when completed was taken to Washington. I think it was exhibited before a committee that had something to do with the Capitol. The chairman of the committee, after seeing how quickly and perfectly it worked, said: 'Young man, if there is any invention on earth that we don't want down here, it is this. One of the greatest weapons in the hands of a minority to prevent bad legislation is filibustering on votes, and this instrument would prevent it.' I saw the truth of this, because as press operator I had taken miles of Congressional proceedings, and to this day an enormous amount of time is wasted during each session of the House in foolishly calling the members' names and recording and then adding their votes, when the whole operation could be done in almost a moment by merely pressing a particular button at each desk. For filibustering purposes, however, the present methods are most admirable." Edison determined from that time forth to devote his inventive faculties only to things for which there was a real, genuine demand, something that subserved the actual necessities of humanity. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/820/pg820.txt

> What you want is administration - a very different process where mature competent executives and managers who do not have Dark Triad personality traits make intelligent, informed, and compassionate decisions in the public interest based on evidence, expert guidance, and their own good instincts.

Which is basically inhuman. For an administration of any sort, you need a selection process and the selection process will then be gamed by exactly the people who seek power.

Which is why we have large bodies of political representatives: people will not stop seeking to acquire power and act in their interests and the interests of their backers, but they will be counteracted by people doing exactly the same but pursuing different ends. That’s a very human thing.

I only have some experience in low-level politics in a parliamentary system based on proportional representation, though I know a number of mid-level politicians and kind of know some top-level politicians in my home country.

Based on what I have seen, most politicians genuinely believe they are working for the common good. Their understanding of what the common good is obviously varies.

In a system like that, politics is mostly about playing the long game. You build a personal brand that gets you elected and re-elected and gives you influence within your party. You build and maintain your networks, you collect political capital by supporting others' goals, and you spend the capital to advance your own goals. You try to find a balance between short-term and long-term goals, because your opponents today may be your allies tomorrow, and you don't want to alienate them by playing too hard.

Unpleasant and toxic people may sometimes survive in politics. They are rarely successful, because politics is all about people skills, at least in the system I know of. (Such people are more common in administrative positions, because their status is more secure in a meritocratic hierarchy.) People focused on specific topics often also have a hard time in politics, because they have a tendency of becoming unpleasant when things don't go their way in the niche they are interested in.

The public image of politics can be toxic, because the current publicity game requires it. The same politicians often appear quite different behind closed doors, where they are allowed to speak off the record.

This is what the article is getting at, there are questions to be answered before you ever get to scientists evaluating evidence for and against different policies aimed at solving a problem.

What problem are we solving, what is or isn't a problem, what constitutes a better outcome, and what types of policies are allowable may be informed by science but are often (and often appropriately or at least inevitably) decided by culture, law, art, force majeure, etc.

I think the article wants to argue against that.

It isn't rational that you love your wife more than other women. Why constrain yourself to such rules for policies?

Is dying for your freedom rational? Investing in symbolic architecture? Skydiving could be seen as fundamentally irrational. Some still do it.

All depends on how exactly you define rationality.

Overall it might be prudent to value rational arguments, I complete agree with that.

edit:

> It isn't rational that you love your wife more than other women. Why constrain yourself [...]

Reading it again, this can transport something different than the point I tried to make...

I think you can rationally assert that the feeling of loving your wife or paragliding is more important to you than the risk of missing out or the risk of death.

It is a preference and that is what form the basis of interests.

> dying for your freedom Is somewhat different, it's already the execution of a policy (fight) for a preference. And I think it can be perfectly reasonable outcome as it's not even hard to find chapters in History during which conditions made it the only acceptable choice

True, but you meet the same difficulties. A preference doesn't really have to be rational. Fund the park or the bath, paint the city hall blue or yellow. Especially in a democracy there often is no pure rational solution.

> Even if moderate sun exposure causes people to statistically live a bit longer on net

This reminded me that the weight range we term "overweight" has lower all-cause mortality than the weight range called "normal weight". (There is another tier above "overweight", "obese", which has high mortality.)

I'm pretty sure the study you are thinking of [1] only applies to ages > 65 [2] for which there are a lot of possible explanations. Other studies have found that past a certain age no lifestyle choices matter including smoking & diet since it takes too long to influence when you die.

If you look at [1], a ton of the studies they looked at adjusted for preexisting illness like hypertension and diabetes. It's basically like saying people who fall off sky scrapers don't die of cancer.

It is also important to remember the associated costs and decrease in quality of life associated with being overweight.

That said it is possible the lower-end of the overweight BMI range could be moved up a point or two but that's probably less than the variance between populations anyway.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/99/4/875/4637868?fbcli...

[2] https://agsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/...

Reminds me of the stereotype of dentists giving out toothbrushes on Halloween.

Maybe if you're life is about preventing cavities you think that's what kids should always have in mind, but life would suck if before every action we asked "will this contribute to tooth decay" - much more than it would suck with a few cavities.

> As the famous saying goes, "nothing is as important as you think it is when you're thinking about it".

That seems like a very dangerous saying! As a scientist, I am biased, but I think it's also important to remember that nothing is as simple as you think it is when you're not thinking about it.

Scientists often think about one topic at length, and therefore tend to overestimate it's importance. This is a bias that needs to be corrected for. Thinking that a topic with which one isn't familiar is simpler than it really is is another unrelated bias.

I remember an ad on the radio from the American Podiatrist's Council or some such organization, recommending that everyone get their yearly foot exam.

Sure, it was trying to stir up business; but I think that ad mainly existed because podiatrists really did, in good faith, think everybody should get their foot examined once a year.

You just lose perspective.

As a (former) scientist, I should also admonish that it is generally in the professional scientist's best interest to prolong the perceived complexity of any given thing to keep the grants coming. Even if they're not influenced by an interest outside of their scope, it's a mental habit that can be hard to break.

Perhaps wisdom starts by accepting the conjunction of both the saying and your retort, which is not so far from a better-known saying, "the devil is in the details".

Presumably this only applies to scientists and not to politicians, economists, think tanks and PR firms, and so on.

Fun fact: incidence of skin cancer in notoriously cloudy and rainy WA is substantially higher than in almost always sunny HI or CA or TX. I bet the vast majority of "scientists and doctors" don't even know this.

https://gis.cdc.gov/Cancer/USCS/#/AtAGlance/

The rates are extremely similar once you control for race (which the page you linked allows you to do, by the way). White people get skin cancer at much higher rates than non-white people, because melanin acts as permanent mild SPF, and white people have less skin melanin than non-white people: that's what makes them white, after all. Since Washington is more white than Hawaii, California, and Texas, if you don't control for race it looks — counterintuitively — like Washington is more risky than the others in terms of skin cancer. But it's not, it's just that you're selecting different population demographics.

Also notable is that sunniness doesn't really determine UV exposure; partial cloud cover can actually result in more UV-B exposure, counterintuitively: https://www.drgurgen.com/are-the-suns-uv-rays-really-stronge... And even full cloud cover doesn't completely block UV. So WA and CA aren't as different as you might think.

Meanwhile, as one might expect, most states that get freezing cold for months at a time have lower skin cancer rates than those that don't when controlling for race: if you don't go outside for more than a few minutes a day, while bundled up under multiple layers, for months at a time, well — you see less skin cancer. Some heavy farming states seem to have more skin cancer, but again that makes sense since farm workers are outside a lot.

Vermont and New Hampshire seem like odd exceptions to this rule — but I suspect there's also just some other selection bias at play. UV exposure from the sun causes skin cancer at high rates in white people; trying to make assumptions about states isn't necessarily an easy thing to do, since many other factors are at play when considering who lives where and how much they go outside.

That could have something to do with it, but as someone who lived in WA for quite some time - you don't go outside without clothing for ~7 months in any given year in WA either because it's raining and unpleasant. So that's where this hypothesis falls apart a little. My hypothesis is that constant relatively low level exposure to UV is more beneficial than acute exposure for just a few days / weeks in a given year. I don't have any data to support this hypothesis though.

> you don't go outside without clothing for ~7 months in any given year in WA either because it's raining and unpleasant

Also because one doesn't want to get arrested.

There was (and maybe still is) Solstice parade where people ride their bikes through Seattle completely (or partially) naked. So that's only partially true.

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