Scientists: Don’t Feed the Doubt Machine

Yes, scientists must absolutely be aware what ties authors have if those authors are arguing in bad faith to push an agenda:

> First, researchers must learn to identify authors of research, and their relationships with industry and with non-profit groups that have specialized agendas. How the tobacco industry paid scientists and physicians to serve as advisers and consultants to undermine the body of evidence pointing to the harms of tobacco is extensively documented. More recent examples abound. For instance, the non-profit International Life Sciences Institute, based in Washington DC and funded by leading companies in the food and chemical industries, promotes doubt about science that links ultraprocessed foods with health concerns, and provides experts to promote personal responsibility rather than regulations on junk food in policies to combat obesity.

Edit:

> What we need is scientists who have backbone, who have an unwaivering unaltering desire to get to the truth at all costs.

This is one part of what this article is demanding. It's arguing against efforts of entrenched interests - often businesses - to obscure the truth or make it harder for the general public to tell truth from untruth.

The second part is about taking action. Informing is one part, but at some point courses of action have to be decided - and for many problems, it's not enough to delegate this to individuals, the decision has to be taken on a collective level. Because we will never have 100% knowledge, a certain amount of uncertainty has to be tolerated when deciding on a course.

What this article also argues against is tactics that specifically target this unavoidable amount of uncertainty with the interest of delaying action.

"What we need is scientists who have backbone, who have an unwaivering unaltering desire to get to the truth at all costs. "

Well, they also need to eat. So you'll have to pay them for it, as directly as possible.

> So research is not allowed to be respected by scientists if done with underlying business interests?

Not quite. It's more in the line of identifying potential bad actors to not grant them oportunities to poison the well, waste resources, and outright sabotage progress.

> So you should intentionally bias your results if they don't fit the narrative you wanted?

Not quite. It's more in the line of exercise critical thinking when analysing said work, and there are doubts or extraordinary claims or editorialized nuances (i.e., claims that glasses are half full to undermine and attack findings supporting the emptying glasses theory).

> This gets to the core of the problem. It assumes scientists know the truth and the 'correct' studies.

The job of a scientist consists of gathering data, analising results, and help explain and model phenomena so that we learn more about a subject and understand it better.

As part of this job, experiments are made and reproduced, and observations are reported in studies.

Non-"correct" studies are those that include claims and data that are not credible, reliable, and are outright unbelievable. With enough work, some of those are recanted, but they still cause problems as supporters of fringe theories, conspiracies, and outright lunacy have been known to continue using them to support their wild claims.

It's interesting how this author is essentially guilty of the very thing she accuses others of. She has simply taken for granted the totality of the Official Position as true almost as a matter of principle, and even though there is divergence of legitimate opinion on the subject.

"First, researchers must learn to identify authors of research, and their relationships with industry and with non-profit groups that have specialized agendas."

Conflicts of interest can be useful to know, but this borders on ad hominem. The whole point here is to engage with the argument being made. As I wrote elsewhere, doubt must have a rational basis. If someone is sowing irrational doubt, then you can counter it by showing why it's irrational and unjustified. You can't stop others from spreading manufactured FUD, but you can respond to the FUD by showing that it is FUD.

"Second, scientists should consider what kinds of argument the data and conclusions serve."

So begin with an official narrative and official political ends and advise scientists to refrain from publishing anything that goes against that narrative or those ends? No, thanks.

Also, the author does not seem concerned about the pervasive low trust in our political institutions today and how enacting certain polities feeds into that distrust, even though that concern falls entirely within the bounds of things that she seems to think are worthy of consideration.

>It reminds me of the web site "The Motley Fool" that would post an article such as "Should you buy AAPL?" that would always hem and haw and come to no real conclusion. Perhaps the reader felt they were being diligent by considering so much contradictory information.

Yeah I also hate it when articles give me the arguments for and against some issue and let me come to my own conclusions instead of just telling me what I should think. /s

Yep. Also related and relevant is how the brain works with regard to encoding falsehood; essentially, there's no delete button. Once a statement of possible fact has been discovered, it takes more energy and reinforcement for the brain to remember that it's false as opposed to just assuming it's true.

What's the solution to Gish Gallopers?

The issue this article is talking about is you can very quickly generate hundreds of bad studies and outright lies that take decades to discredit. And even after all that effort, those studies will STILL be cited not because of the validity, but the narrative.

For example, vaccines an autism. We have so many high quality studies proving with as much certainty as you can in medicine that vaccines do not cause autism. Yet that's a claim that hasn't died off yet (And Mr. Wakefield's fraud study with the initial lie is STILL cited as if there were some sort of conspiracy to cover it up).

So what's the solution? It's easier to quickly lie than it is to experiment and prove. It's easier to falsify data than it is to prove data was falsified.

What other choice is there but to lean on consensus and reputation?

This article aside, it isn't. This idea stems from Cartesian methodological doubt which is the death knell for all knowledge. Methodological doubt is irrational. It is not rational to doubt things for no reason. You must have a reason for doubting something just as you must have a reason for believing something. Irrational doubt cannot be overcome through reason precisely because its genesis is not in the intellect, but in the will. It is arbitrarily assigned to something and so you cannot rationally resolve the cause of the doubt one way or another because there is no rational cause to resolve.

Rational doubt is the result of coming to know something credible that contradicts or undermines something you take to be true. This casts doubt on your prior belief. To resolve it, you must verify your prior belief and/or the new information.

Part of the issue is recognizing adversaries and bad faith. In much of science, disagreements are still in good faith. But engaging bad-faith actors with the same tactics as good-faith ones, and engaging with the journalling public in the same way that you engage with other good-faith scientists, leads to losing the game that they’re playing.

How much do we really want scientists writ large trying to optimize for the job of ensuring that the public is properly educated at the appropriate level of doubt?

The adversaries we're trying to defend against will only have something else to point to and say "they have an explicit goal of manipulating public opinion to downplay climate/covid/round-earth skepticism", which isn't really that far off from what you're describing.

Trying to properly gauge how new information is processed among hundreds of millions of people just seems like an expertise that is totally orthogonal to having a deep understanding of a scientific discipline. What you're talking about not only seems wrong, but just doesn't seem like the best way to go about solving the problem.

Less activist, more puritan priest trained as a new institutional clergy.