Stop Equating “Science” with Truth (2017)
slate.com
slate.com
I think the pro-science side during Covid shot themselves in the foot with zealotry and false sense of certainty. Science , unlike religion, should be amendable. It's supposed to be provisional. A major part of science is debate, the inquiry of knowledge, not just being told to shut-up for the sake of science.
> "There is no specific evidence to suggest that the wearing of masks by the mass population has any potential benefit. In fact, there's some evidence to suggest the opposite in the misuse of wearing a mask properly or fitting it properly," Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of the WHO health emergencies program, said at a media briefing in Geneva, Switzerland, on Monday.
This was science not that long ago [0]... Then whoops, mandatory masks... "but trust science now, we're surely 100% correct now!".
[0] https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/coronavirus-who-mas...
This what doing science looks like. This is working correctly. You haven't pointed out any flaws, you've pointed out a success case.
The Effectiveness (or lack thereof) of specifically the masks has been investigated in many settings with the flu many times before.
e.g.
This was published back in 2014:
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Page 44-47 of the PDF goes over in length masks used in a community setting. They specifically talk about compliance, what sort of mask was being worn and whether the mask was fitted and how that may have affected the results of various studies, transmission rates etc. Many studies found that people stopped complying after a certain amount of time, other found it varied on the culture.
What did we see with mask usage during COVID? Many people wore the same mask for days on end, or they put them in their pocket, or just stuck one of the passenger seat of their car (like my neighbour did). Some stopped bothering wearing the mask after a few weeks, and there was differences in compliance dependent on the culture.
A lot of this was known back in 2014.
You can find numerous other studies going back years now on the relative effectiveness of masks and different types of masks and the result for cloth masks (which the types that people were using) weren't great.
Are you telling me that all these medical professionals that had the ear of officials didn't know about any of this?
Edit: I'm from Europe so don't assume I'm a Republican just because I criticise him.
1. The initial statements were not guesses. They were an accurate summary of the state of the scientific literature at the time and were presented as such ("there is no specific evidence", "there is some evidence to suggest the opposite").
2. The later change, which occurred with whiplash-inducing speed, wasn't based on any new evidence or studies. That's why Fauci had to come up with this story about how they'd been engaging in a noble lie: there was no new evidence for him to point at.
3. There is now clear evidence that mask mandates don't work, namely the real world data, yet recommendations have not changed and all this new evidence has been ignored.
Specifically, if large-scale mandates did work then it would be clearly visible in the case curves of each country that introduced them, by definition, because creating clearly visible drops in those curves was the only reason they were introduced. Yet no such drops are visible. You can't look at a country's data and work out when masks were introduced or removed, it's impossible, people have tried. Thus mask mandates failed on their own terms and no further studies or experiments are actually necessary to answer the question of whether they're effective.
I don't really know why you're trying to defend "science" in the abstract like this. COVID science is the work of specific groups of people, it's not an abstraction, and it turns out to fall far short of the lofty standards we were taught to expect at school. COVID science in the real world is riddled with obvious hypocrisy and contradictions, routinely ignores or even rubbishes any evidence that would undermine collectivist social policies or make scientists look bad, and just in general is a sad joke. Arguing that this obvious failure is actually a success, and this is what all science looks like, can only make things worse by harming trust in other groups of scientists with higher standards (e.g. maybe physicists?).
I am sorry, but this is a BS argument. First of all, COVID-19 (classic variant) had a 7 to 14 days incubation period. Upon infection rate curves it acts as a low-pass filter (aka smoothing filter). You will not see sharp drops even if contagion abruptly stops. The curve will decay over one or two weeks. Also, mask mandates were not introduced at random moments of time. Typically they were enacted or enforced when infection was on the rise. At best the expectation was that masks will slow down the up-trend.
Obviously, masks do not fully protect against inhaling the virus. But they do limit the blast radius from infected people coughing and sneezing. This is why in Asia people are routinely wearing masks during a regular flu season. Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree. Common sense is oftentimes better that shaky science on top of questionable data.
"Masks do not stop infection but they reduce spread to some degree"
So you assert yet nobody can show it doing so in the real world data. Places geographically next to each other that differed in mask mandates saw no impact. The UK removed its restrictions in the summer and cases immediately fell. Etc etc.
When you impose mask-mandate related events with the case curves this becomes especially obvious:
https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-a...
Then notice that the made up straw man quote, which no one actually said despite being between quotation marks, you say "trust science now, we're surely 100% correct now."
You choose to read "maybe X, maybe Y, we recommend Z" as "we're surely 100% correct now." That's on you.
That’s because when you put things into millions of people, you are guaranteed to run into an edge case here or there. The fact that you can point to so few significant AEs caused by the COVID vaccines is a pretty incredible achievement given the unprecedented scale of rollout.
The point is that no one with any credibility ever said we could expect zero adverse events from the COVID vaccines, nor 100% efficacy. No one.
So basically, covid is less dangerous for young people than swimming (more than 5 people drowned this year) and still, most of the anti-covid measures affect them the most (and old people the least).
Way to go Romania, standing for the test group.
The findings from the scientific method are not infallible, just better in every way than the findings from any other method. Better than the words of charlatans, better even than the words of the wisest humans to ever live.
It's not perfect and it's not magic. It's just significantly better than anything else by leaps and bounds.
I think it's fucking amazing and I wish you could see that too.
People who were buying masks then were branded as conspiracy theorists, loonatics, got lauged at by commenters everywhere. And our scientists still claim, that the current findings are true, that they won't change, and that everyone not doing as instructed by the expert groups is an idiot again.
Is there specific evidence that vaccines don't cause long-term harm? And if in time, evidence shows that they do cause harm, who will be responsible? (in slovenia, all the vaccines were safe and effective, then we first stopped using astrazeneca due to clots and a woman dying, then israel said they don't work enough, and mandated a third shot, then a girl died in slovenia due to Janssen, and only mrna vaccines were recommended for young people, then sweden and denmark stopped using moderna, so we're down to one safe vaccine).
Even the stupidests little things, like sanitizing the living crap out of stuff, even before the mask mandates, was something that was 'true' back then, then the 'truth' changed, and we still had to pay for all the useless crap... we had mandated sanitizers in elevators, all the high buildings paid a shitton of money for them (because the dispensers were expensive then and hard to get), then someone though about fire codes, and "woops, remove them".
TLDR: the problem is not that science changes, the problem is, that we do very socially and economically dangerous and expensive stuff now by blindly trusting whatever the current scientific idea is, not thinking about "what if the science is wrong?" (eg. if covid is transmitted mostly by air and not by touching infected surfaces).
"No specific evidence" is weasel-wording. I have family in China. Before the spread here in the West, people were buying up N95 masks and sending them to Asia because they knew what was coming.
I'm of the opinion that the advice to not bother with masks early on was intended to address an expected shortfall for medical personnel. That is, it was manipulation.
Scientists discover what they can (falliable as they may be).
Politicians take scientist's best understanding at the time, balance the concerns of various groups, and make a decision.
Politicians decisions are backed up with violence (always, not just for this) because states having a monoply on violence is just how states work.
Scientists discover what they can.
A healthy media informs the public so they can decide to act on this knowledge.
At the same time politicians find ways to help or subsidize desired behavior, and lend weight to the media message. Harmful behavior is prosecuted (the word you're looking for is "force"... not violence).
That's how it's supposed to work. It doesn't work that way anymore, but it's supposed to.
Yes its regrettable that the media seems to be mucking up its role as the fourth estate (or at least sowing division and acting in ways that seem less than beneficial to the well being of the group). However, that's hardly unique in history, and arguably one of the primary functions of a free press is to spread dissent in order to keep the power of the state in check.
> Harmful behavior is prosecuted (the word you're looking for is "force"... not violence).
Is there a difference? or is it "force" when it happens to other people, "violence" when it happens to you or you disagree with it?
Well that's the problem... during an emergency (like a pandemic) there are extreme time pressures to get results. Things like debates, inquiry of knowledge, peer review, etc. take time (and taking time = deaths). I believe that is why people were being told to "shut up". Not saying bludgeoning the masses to blindly accept the bleeding edge consensus was the right route to go, just trying to understand why that was the route chosen in the USA.
Closing borders was racist. Fauci admitted he intentionally misled people [1]. It was totally natural and totally not even conceivable that it had been engineered or part of a program that intentionally makes viruses more infectious. Masks don't work. Masks do work (even though we now know it to be aerosol, not droplet like the flu). So on and so forth.
It is hard to maintain an air of credibility when you are consistently proving to not be credible.
[1] https://www.medpagetoday.com/opinion/vinay-prasad/90445 (the source NYT article was paywalled)
It is no wonder that people took a position opposite this.
Personally, I was vaccinated the moment it was available to me and I encourage people to be vaccinated. But we're at the point where people are being told to trust the science on vaccinations by the same people lying at each previous step along the way.
The naked power grab under the name of "emergency" has been going on for a year and a half now. A lot of places are just trying to increase their emergency powers where a significant portion of the people have just had enough.
Then there is the matter of preferred treatment for certain groups. Kids in California will be required to vaccinate -- but not the big union prison guards. The major league sports require all their employees to vaccinate -- except the players. BLM gets a pass on gathering, but just living one's life and being able to pay your bills isn't sufficient.
Feels to me like an oxymoron.
That's exactly why I trust the science and try to shut-up in discussions on topics that I have no idea about (with varying results, I'm only a human).
I trust that people who spend their lifes doing research can and do have productive debate (to certain limits - they're also just humans).
A good example of how badly wrong COVID science can go was the discovery at the start of the pandemic that the most influential epidemiological model had lots of programming bugs in it that made its predictions wildly vary from run to run. The cause was a mix of thread safety bugs, out of bounds reads, floating point error accumulation, mixing up variables due to horrible coding style in a 15,000 line C file with hardly any comments and almost all variables being single letter/globally scoped etc. They'd never teamed up with computer scientists even though their simulations were big complex programs, their code had never been peer reviewed because scientists don't do that, and when programmers pointed out their bugs, they tried to claim scientific models don't need to be reproducible anyway.
https://dailysceptic.org/code-review-of-fergusons-model/
https://dailysceptic.org/how-replicable-is-the-imperial-coll...
There was no inquiry of knowledge or productive debate. There was a bunch of amateurs, out of their depth, desperately trying to cover up how inadequate their own research was - and mostly succeeding. The institutions turned out to have no interest in the question of whether their scientists can actually program the models they're proposing, and nothing happened to Ferguson or his team.
That's what science is actually like, in the 21st century. Look too closely and it falls apart.
The worrying trend without a counter force is authorities like Big Tech and institutions masquerading imperfect science as truth.
Just look at the Covid shit show we’ve seen. Makes you wonder if these people should hold any power whatsoever.
We should strive to be transparent. Whether that’s debunking bad science or doubling down on good science.
I think it's a matter of triaging problems. The situation we are in is that thousands of potentially preventable deaths are happening every week because a significant portion of the public trusts polemicists and Facebook memes for medical information more than their own doctors (this isn't intended to be hyperbolic or to strawman that position, I believe that to be a fair assessment of the situation.)
Is so-called Big Tech really being too tough on misinformation? And even if it is, is that an issue we should prioritize ahead of other measurable harms caused by that same misinformation?
Sounds fine and dandy as long as you, the consumer of information, is aligned with the authoritative sources, but history has shown time in and time out that regimes change and that power is intoxicating and that those that want suppressed speech can eventually become the suppressed.
Nobody says this better IMO than Ira Glasser who led the ACLU from '78-2001 and defended the rights of Nazi's to march. Check out the documentary Mighty Ira.
What science can't do is the following:
* Science cannot make risk-management decisions for people. Weighing the known and unknown rewards and risks of some human decision and choosing what human action to take based on objective information is outside of the realm of science. No, the science cannot make choices for humans. Rational and smart people, when presented with the same scientific evidence, can make different choices. For instance, there have been many times in the past when the European Medicines Agency and the US Food and Drug Administration have had differing opinions on whether or not some drug ought to be approved. Risk management is a different topic than science, yet they get wrongly conflated every day on TV these days.
* Science cannot make value judgements or ethical decisions for humans. There are some hills that humans find to be important enough to be worth taking some risk for. Science cannot decide whether "freedom" is important enough to risk dying for, yet rational humans have made and will continue to choose freedom as long as free will exists.
But when it comes to risk-management, I think science plays a big role, it can allow you to assess risk and predict probability of outcomes. That's super important in risk-management. What science cannot do is decide your risk appetite, risk tolerance as well as risk preferences.
You also need to choose which scientific model you also believe in the most, and when limited experimentation has occurred, science cannot help you choose, though more scientific research could give you comparative data between two scientific models that can help you choose. But all this takes time. And when time is limited, science can't take its normal course, that's where human judgement is necessary.
Now, let's talk about another area of science. The structure of DNA, or whether electron spin exists or what the shape of the earth is. There are no questions in my mind (beyond the normal ones I have about Descartes' Great Deceiver) that the structure of DNA in aqueous solution at room temperature with 15mM Mg is B-form, very close to what was described by Watson and Crick, or that electron spin exists and that we can use it to do NMR to determine molecular structures. And the planet Earth is an oblate spheroid.
All three of those are so true that if you were able to disprove either, massive areas of science would fall. I cannot imagine any set of data which could falsify any of those three hypotheses in a way that didn't completely tank science.
Throwing out psychology, as the author of the original piece wants to do, is a double edged sword. You may knock the legs out from under Damore's stool, but you have no evidence left to use to argue against him. Indeed, quite a few people's "gut feelings" are going to be aligned with his argument.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080130023006/http://www.presid...
Anybody who cares about Damore's message one way or the other should go back and read what Larry said, and internalize it. A brilliant leader was cancelled because he spoke what is the most likely hypothesis to explain the observed data.
Are you talking about the Internet or the bible?
Actually I'm talking about post web 2 era. I've seen increasing amount of people very "knowledgeable" about the "scientific method" but who never made derived one proof in their life or never made up a concept from zero. It's very painful to see sheeps throwing wikipedia paragraphs pavlov style.
Talking about the bible, there was a talk about the printing press and the fact that it made debates a bit saner since people could avoid hearsay. The Bible might not be the most refutable piece but it seems it gave some kind of stable ground for discourse.. (according to the people at that conference)
Unfortunately, we appear to be quite fundamentally, in the vaguest sense of the word, religious beings...
The body of knowledge produced by scientists includes real truths, but also a lot of work produced by people without good methodology, and a lot of things that were thought to be correct at the time but were later disproved. And as the author mentioned, none of this is exempt from whatever society-level base assumptions were thought to be indisputable at the time.
For all that, the scientific process, while imperfect in many ways, is still the best way the human race has so far discovered to learn and advance. You could say that the pursuit of science is, by definition, the pursuit of truth.
The way I see it - it's really successful in some domains and is worse than useless in others - because it rides on credibility it acquired in the domains it is effective in, it creates false confidence in results it produces in domains it doesn't fit.
Provable things often point us toward certain answers - but provable science has historically shown us that it isn't afraid to pull the rug out from under us and throw a curveball. Physics is highly deterministic and ordered - extremely so - under you get subatomic - then everything goes out the window.
Philosophy obviously needs to not go directly against things we have a high confidence in - but there's still a lot of grey area in there especially where the philosophy of motion and ethics are involved.
A lot of ethics argues that acting in such and such "ethical" way will result is some outcome, like more happiness, less harm to the environment, less harm to workers, less injustice, etc.
It would be great to test those assertions empirically as well. If it is true, devise an experiment, implement your ethical framework, measure outcomes, validate it, prove that it does improve on your claimed metrics.
Just to be clear, there is a place for thinking through first principles in science, that's part of the hypothesis phase. In that phase you can use inductive and abductive reasoning to guide yourself to a likely hypothesis. But science will want you to go further and test the hypothesis, to ascertain more strongly that it is a likely hypothesis.
The only part which isn't really applicable to science is deductive reasoning, because it relies on assuming truths and perfect formal logical rules of derivation. These can hold within a total imaginary setting, mathematics does this all the time for example, and so does a lot of philosophy, but when applied practically (which is where science comes in), you need to show that those assumptions hold in the real world and its current setting, and that the deduction rules do as well, and that brings you back to inductive and abductive reasoning, because you no longer control the range of the domain, it is now dictated by reality or our perception of it.
I don't really have a problem with people doing this kind of research either, I'm bothered when they try to use these models to prescribe behavior.
I don't think that's correct, people simply love to extrapolate beyond the evidence. You do a study where you take 6 grad student and tell them to push a button that sends electricity (supposedly) to a subject. You measure their behavior in that context. Okay, you've got a pretty small sample of something.
Now here comes the non-scientific part, a professor looking for fame and glory, a bunch of news site looking for clicks and views, and you get an article: "Science proves that people are willing to hurt others on command if told it is for an experiment."
See, the thing is that science is about slowly acquiring more knowledge and understanding and updating our mental models and understanding of things as more information shows up.
Here the experiment wasn't useless, it tells us one small extra bit of info we didn't have before. Doing experiments, testing hypothesis, those are still valuable. Extrapolating the result of those to mean more than they demonstrate is just a follow up hypothesis that then itself needs an experiment, etc.
As a physicist the headline has an air of truth but this interpretation does not go far enough. Science is not even "about" the narratives it generated! Go to a science museum with your little one. There's no science on display. There's technology, sometimes discussions of what was done, very rarely you even get to peek inside how it was done. Even that isn't science, but it gets closer.
What you miss is setting the child up for certain expectations only for them to be subverted. The process of starting to develop a test that would really discriminate between two options so that you can ensure your guesses are on the right track. The process of sticking with a problem for months. The process of doing something an absurdly hard way that you know works but will be very very tedious, then looking at the final solution and finding out why that solution would have "made sense all along," then using what you know to find a simpler way to do it.
The kid never comes out of a science museum with new heuristics to use to evaluate how they fool themselves and what might be done about it. They hardly even will come out with new technologies to see the world from a different perspective.
So the narratives that were generated by science were substituted for science itself, just as much as when you watch Sabine Hossenfelder you don't learn how to solve the Schrodinger equation. Nothing wrong with her work, mind, pop-science just is this way. People are interested on what the latest theory is because that's something that you can recite at a dinner-party. To learn actual science would require more than the 3-minutes standing in front of an exhibit that feels "natural" at a science museum, more than a 10-minute YouTube video. What is at stake is no less than a conversion from the passive to the active attitude.
Stop equating Science [active, transformative, bubbling, at-hand] with Truth [passive, informative, cold and still, inaccessible], indeed.
With all the fancy criticisms and reminders that science is about the method, being skeptical, etc., people sometimes forget that the results of scientific progress are often tangible and there has been an undeniable increase in knowledge which has accelerated during past century. It's ironic to hear from people how science is not about knowledge while relying in daily life on phones, airplanes, nuclear power, new types of batteries, new construction materials, satelites, minimal invasive surgery, and so on and so forth.
An art museum isn't about teaching kids about the process behind making art -- the brush strokes, the dedication, the frustrations, the frequent failures, the occasional successes. It's about showing "this is what some artists that we consider 'great' have produced". Similarly, science museums are about showing some stuff that we've learned using (very broadly) science. So high-level overviews of engines, and tesla coils, and pop-science illustrations of how some math principles work, are all perfectly within the goals. I think that optimistically, a kid might come out of a science museum thinking "look at all the cool things that science has led to -- maybe if I'm a scientist, I can contribute to something like that one day too!", and that could be a different perspective than they otherwise would've had. They can learn what it actually means to "do science" later on in life.
And I think your point about "body of knowledge" implying "level of truth" is also interesting, but I take perhaps the opposite view. The scientific process does produce what we consider truth -- it's just that a deeper understanding of it is that anything we understand today comes with a degree of uncertainty, even if that degree is pretty small. But this is a perspective that's hard for a lot of people to grasp, and this article was written for a pop-science audience, which doesn't generally have a solid understanding of this principle ("What do you mean, we can't really be sure? I know lots of things for sure. Science is stupid."). Given this caveat, I think it's actually dangerous to say to this audience "the scientific body of knowledge is never truth", because while this is technically true, it leads the pop-science reader to think "huh, well in that case, my totally unfounded opinion is just as good".
I don't disagree, but it has to also be pointed out that this does not imply that science is the only way to the truth, or that truth can only be reached strictly by science.
Science is a quest in models. With a somehow high degree of self consistency (poetically so). But that's it.
I don't think she was saying that the conclusions of science-like processes are worthless. Just that they shouldn't be treated as inscrutable fact, for the reasons stated in the article.
She even implied that a straw-man claim she attributed to science was wrong for no other reason that that it was the year 2017. The very first sentence is critical of the fact that people are trying to understand something scientific!
The process of science, that is, actually checking to see if one's beliefs are consistent with reality, is essential to distinguish truth from falsity. Scientific institutions can and have done terrible things though. TFA references scientific racism; the eugenics movement is related to it and still-existing scientific institutions had a significant role in promoting eugenics. See [0] for a self-critical overview. That's the "flaws of the institution" part.
The "deification of science" part refers to how the effectiveness of science as a problem-solving tool gives a sort of halo effect (truthiness) to anything that adopts the semblance of science. That's kind of unavoidable; if something works, it gets status, and people will try to have some of that status rub off on them.
I sort of disagree with the article's statement that "pseudoscience has always been a core feature of post-Enlightenment scientific knowledge and it remains that way because scientists refuse to integrate contemporary science, technology, and society studies research into university curricula." Scientists are critical of themselves and their fields and teach and discuss the material covered in TFA. The author was trained as a scientist, and their critiques mirror those expressed within science; again, see [0] for an example. If you do human subjects research as a professional scientist, you receive an intensive education in the ways science (and medicine) has failed to treat people as people, and accept strong limitations and oversight on your own research activities. I also sort of agree with the author though because the same level of education is not generally provided with regards to science's role in sexism or racism, at least not to the same rigor as human subjects research.
[0] U.S. Scientists' Role in the Eugenics Movement (1907–1939): A Contemporary Biologist's Perspective https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2757926/
Consider two possible perspectives, both "science-positive": 1. Scientific consensus is true. New findings add to our understanding of the topic and relates to the literature in that space. 2. Scientific consensus represents our best understanding of the evidence. New findings add to our understanding of the topic and relates to the literature in that space.
We don't need to say that science is True to conduct meaningful research. In fact, doing so may hide paths of inquiry that question fundamental components of scientific literature, to give one example that comes to mind.
Does current flow positive to negative or the other way round? Well electroncs flow negative to positive but current flow can be however you define it. If we all decided to change current flow to a different direction and invert a load of maths, it wouldn't be wrong, just another way to be right.
I think the missing piece is education of philosophy to people so that they understand how to evaluate, how to disagree, how to define terms, how to communicate what they know, what they think and what they don't know.
Is a window still a window if the glass is painted black?
The scientific consensus is largely political whereas the scientific method produces many results which are politically inconvenient.
In the years since 2017, there has been a strong push for scientists to take upon themselves the responsibility for not just conducting research but also for the way the public discussion unfolds. To so do, they collaborate to create uniform messaging so that bad actors cannot find disagreements over details and implications and use them to sow divisions among the general public or, at worst, inflict harm on populations deemed vulnerable.
This creates problems in that scientists are pressured to be silent with their own disagreements. (e.g. One should not value one's individuality over solidarity.) This is particularly acute if one is in the minority of opinion. My concern is that over time, this pressure will diminish variance in opinion on any given topic. Variance will become invariance, and that invariance will then be misinterpreted as proof of Truth. Any research or even opinion at odds with it become outrageous.
As this unfolds, more and more people will fall into the same trap as the author --- dismissing unpalatable albeit tendentiously backed arguments as unscientific and reflective of deep, un-measurable cultural evils while accepting extrapolations from similarly tendentious research that backs a more acceptable narrative, e.g. "because the authors of the paper are women, ... we can expect 10 percent fewer citations."
I find all of this deeply dispiriting. The capacity for science to produce models that reflect the natural world depends on the free dissemination and interrogation of all ideas. Though John Stuart Mill wrote on free speech, his works are even more important in science. If people cannot freely question broadly and deeply held beliefs, they risk losing the knowledge of _why_ they are so deeply held by so many. If that ever happens, we will have lost something truly precious.
I feel like this leads to further separation of actual physical communities as well with subsequent separation of governance styles, further polarizing the country in a fly-wheel effect.
I'm actually struggling to articulate this concept myself because I'm having trouble picking two existing words to describe it. When I say "significant and unlikely to change" I'm referring to thinks like physical laws, kinematics, chemistry, that sort of thing. The "science" of these fields is essentially "settled" and there is not a reproducibility crisis in this domain. There is a high level of trust in this kind of scientific knowledge.
Contrast this to "specific, moment in time" studies, with things like nutrition, social sciences, economics, policy, etc. You could call these soft sciences, but I don't think that concept does it justice. We deal with this domain constantly when arguing via back-and-forth citations online. You can find dozens of studies that assert X is true and dozens of others that assert X is false. A paper might have been published in a reputable journal but that does not mean it is now the "Truth" in the same way that we ascribe studies in the first category. For instance, a paper published about evolutionary psychology is not as true as evolution itself. Yet, we bucket both into the same category of "Science". There is a massive reproducibility crisis in this domain and it really does seem like many studies are only "true" in the confines of that study when it happened. When people cite this kind of science they piggyback off of the reputation of the first kind. I think that is the crux of the issue mentioned in the article.
Truth is nice because it's simple. No thinking about it required. No energy spent puzzling. It's just truth. No how, why, who or anything about it. It's just truth.
The best truths are gotten from authorities. They're the best because the truth comes preformatted in statement form. Thus it's ez to consume. And the truth clicks nicely into your fantasy like a lego into a bunch of other legos.
I am interested in hearing about how you escaped the game, should you wish to say more.
That being said, I'm down with people exploring psychedelics if they wish to do so.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (the SEP) has a long article [1] on the subject of Truth. There are multiple competing claims as to what is meant when we say that something is true.
There is a reason why we use the scientific method, and why we know that our knowledge is inherently limited, and presents itself as a dance between inductive model-building, and deductive model extrapolation.
Science-as-truth should generally be always thought of as nonsense. Well done, falsifiable, repeatable, science-as-really-good-prediction is a much better model.
It's important to remember that even in the standard model of physics, behemoth of human achievement, is both incomplete and limited in scope.
Not only not read a bit of philosophy, but it's almost as common to find trained scientists who scoff at the field as a whole. Of the trained scientists I've met, only two didn't immediately respond with condescension when I brought up philosophy as a subject worth paying attention to. Several have actually tried to tell me that science and philosophy are "opposites", or went with the the tired line of "philosophy is just science that does not have any proof for it". That last one there fundamentally misunderstands the point of it all. An ignorance philosophy in general I think is a problem right now.
Science can be equated with Truth, but not what passes as science these days. All the author talks about are papers, peer reviews and academia, which at this point everyone is aware, is full of fabrication. Countless peer reviewed papers don't have findings that can be reproduced, a lot of them are just summaries of other questionable studies. I think it's important to define what is considered science and what is not science before we get into the discussion of whether science is the Truth or not.
Or at least we'd have to distinguish what we call science.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/spacetime-bebecome/
Science is the best sword we have to separate truth from falsehood; to say that science is wrong and biased whenever it doesn't say what we like is to commit the exact same sin against scholarship as Damore. Damore didn't like what he was hearing from the diversity experts so he went and cherry picked the studies that supported his gut feeling. Cherry picking is still cherry picking even when you're doing it in defense of diversity.
I think one of the under-discussed aspects of the whole debacle was the is-ought problem [0], i.e. the gap between statements about "what is" and statements about what "ought to be."
Science works very well on "what is" questions. It can tell us that the earth is warming. It can tell us all the things that will happen as the earth warms, and all the things we could do that that would stop the earth from warming. But when it comes time to decide what temperature the earth "ought" to be, we can't ask science; we have to first decide what our goals are. If our goal is to maximize short term profit, we will get a different answer than if we want to maximize long term sustainability.
In the same way, science can't tell us what the gender ratio "should" be. Its on us to decide what our priorities are. If our goal is short term profit, we will undoubtedly prefer a different ratio than if we are trying to achieve a more egalitarian society in the long term.
So that is why the author's assertion "In fact, science has often made its living from encoding and justifying bias, and refusing to do anything about the fact that the data says something’s wrong." is a misrepresentation of science. Science tells us "the earth is warming", we are the ones who have to add "and that is wrong." Science tells us "there is bias", we are the ones who have to add "and that is wrong." That scientists in the past have failed to add that last bit (or even added "and that is good!") is not adequate justification for the author to simply dismiss science.
A quick check shows me we have several universities with this name, one example is here: https://stiinteexacte.uav.ro/prezentare/prezentare
Mathematics is not a science, it is a deductive framework based on axioms that are effectively arbitrary. Engineering is a exercise in applied use of physics, chemistry, and other sciences. Wide of margins for error are employed in most engineering exactly because most engineers know what variables they don't know, and even still there are engineering failures that regularly occur.
To take it a religious way, science is the lantern in this story from babylon 5 https://youtu.be/JjnpTcvGvts .
The latter is toxic to the very fabric of society and erodes the value of expertise in all fields and stifles useful and informed public discourse.
The difficult part is that life is much more nuanced. Even if a woman's brain is objectively different than a man's, there might be a social or environmental reason, it might or might not have an effect on their abilities in different areas. Maybe if women and people of colour were given 500 years of time like white men, then maybe their brains would be the same as men. Who knows?
The danger is probably not science per-se but the pressure to find nice summaries to difficult problems. You would get a PhD on "women aren't as clever as men" much more easily than "the differences between mens and womens brains are really complicated and hard to understand"
Actionable truths are black and white.
Anyone can say "Oh, it's nuanced, it's complicated, it's hard to say for sure." The challenge is in penetrating that nuance and identifying what it is possible to make definitive, black-and-white statements about (i.e., to find the truth). To the extent that any group in society does this for a living, it's engineers.
She is neither an expert in the philosophy of science, philosophy, or any of the fields she is critiquing.
She also fails represent what science actually is: a way to organise the best set of information we have collected thus far.
Science has never claimed to be the absolute truth on anything, and that an implied assertion the author is attempting to make.
In the end, the author is only able to prove that science, like all human endeavours, is imperfect. She let all of us down by failing to say what she would replace it with, or simply articulate reasonable boundaries through which science ought to be seen.
Having a p-value of 0.05 is incredibly weak, even if nobody is cheating. It's just a garbage process that's guaranteed to produce high % of falsehoods, where the exact % depends on the prior probability of starting with true hypotheses.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/882/
I mean think about the Newtonian mechanics, there really isn't almost any room for error. And once the model was pushed into more and more extreme applications and errors were eventually spotted the theory was refined into new mechanics.
It's especially frustrating in medicine, perhaps most in behavioral medicine, because there are so many degrees of freedom in human behavior and value judgments assigned to behaviors.