I couldn't agree more. Throughout the pandemic there has been an infuriating pattern of terrible research coming from medical doctors, followed by dismissal of any/all critiques by people much more qualified to make these critiques, because "they're not doctors".
The average medical doctor has next to zero ability to evaluate a study, and is easily fooled by elaborate statistical techniques into concluding that up is down and left is right. Meanwhile, scientists and statisticians with enough experience to see the methological flaws are dismissed, and policy makers turn to MDs -- who are often wildly out of their depth -- for pronouncements on "science".
Yes, but...
> dismissal of any/all critiques by people much more qualified to make these critiques, because "they're not doctors"
... unfortunately, no. While it's true that most MD clinical researchers are depressingly bad, it is also true that pure scientists who never set foot in the clinics are very limited when evaluating practical aspects. So the situation cannot be trivially solved by allowing scientists to do more. In my experience, the problem has no real solution right now and I expect we'll have to wait on technological progress to allow improvements.
Yes, but most medical/epidemiological papers fall over under the lightest methodological scrutiny. Even advanced scientific concepts like "have a control group" is seemingly beyond the analytical capacity of a fair number of MDs. When you get into things like "comparing small effect sizes with confidence intervals", they're positively adrift. We really are talking about table stakes, here.
I'd love to live in a world where MDs were sufficiently knowledgable of experimental design so that domain expertise is the limiting factor, but I can count the number of such papers I've read in the last two years on one hand.
I could write a much longer post on the arrogance of researchers when interpreting medical data or extrapolating lab results into humans...but that's a different subject.
Regardless, the bigger problem comes when we're told that we can't possibly be seeing that fatal flaw, because we don't have an MD.
While it’s a bit of a problem that sometime during the last century a skilled profession got equated with a research one (I remember hearing somewhere that a commercial pilot’s education costs about as much as a tenured professor’s, and it seems plausible to me), there’s also the fact that the people you call “workers” are more distanced from research than they used to be; my impression is that this is even stronger among engineers than it is among medical professionals, but I can hardly claim any deep knowledge here.
MIT is originally an engineering college, so is the École polytechnique, and the École normale is a school for bureaucrats. Cauchy’s seminal work on wave propagation was presented at the French academy, had an epigraph from Virgil (“how many waves / come rolling shoreward from the Ionian sea”), and was signed by “Mr. Augustin-Louis Cauchy, road and bridge engineer” (this being the title the Polytechnique awarded him).
It used to be normal (AFAIK) for articles in medical journals to be essentially “hey, look what a weird thing happened with this recent patient of mine”, and some of seminal (if not the most high-brow) mathematics journals started as “hey, solve this problem I have recently done / want to know the answer to ... if you’re not chicken to try”.
What happened to all of this was, in a word, specialization—necessitated in part by the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit and raising of epistemic standards, so not entirely pointless, but I have to admit the comparative conservatism of medicine in this regard always looked more hopeful to me than the, at times, raging anti-intellectualism of engineers or the fiddly, illogical, invented world of law.
Certainly medicine is more engineering than science in that it is driven more by immediate goals than by the pursuit of truth alone (not the only possible definition of science, but a useful distinction when it comes to the feeling of the field, cf the 50s adage about physics and military physics being like music and military music). And I certainly won’t say you’re wrong. But I’m sad, and I can’t help feeling the drive for industrialization has done a disservice to us, scientists and craftsmen both.
What makes you think engineers are anti-intellectual?
Engineering is an intellectual discipline, after all.
Which I'd agree with - most Engineers tend to hate that kind of thing.
FWIW, I’ve encountered the thing I call anti-intellectualism here among experimental physicists as well, and even in some theorists and mathematicians as well, to varying degrees. I don’t mean being stupid or not using your brain for work; I’m sure some of the people I’m thinking of here are much smarter than me and/or have contributed much more to society than I ever will. I’m not thinking of all engineering or science people, either; the maths teacher I had in high school is perhaps the strongest counterexample of this stereotype I know.
What I mean is a certain lack of wonder and ... suspension of disbelief(?) when it comes to other kinds of intellectual pursuits (sciences, arts, humanities, philosophy, mathematics), like a feeling you’re doing Real Work while those other quacks do pointless things to amuse themselves, and are not even particularly successful at that. “Shut up and calculate”, if brought out among people who are past the basic level of understanding of the subject in question, is a manifestation of this (even though the originator of the saying in the context of quantum mechanics, David Mermin, is now a proponent of the “quantum Bayesianism” school of philosophical thought). Lest it seem that I’m dunking on physicists here, the “Two cultures” essay and Hardy’s “Apology” also contain some of this.
If you’ve read the book, the shortest definition is perhaps to say that my “anti-intellectualism” is the opposite of The Glass Bead Game, even if Hesse intended it as his anti-Enligtenment manifesto.
And I cannot say this sort of skepticism is always wrong—that way lies Fashionable Nonsense and New Age mysticism, and epistemic relativism scares me like little else. We do owe some advances in quantum foundations to New Age people, though, so sneering in that direction might not be right either.
(If you think that this anti-intellectualism thing and the negation of the hacker spirit seem remarkably similar, you’re getting it.)
This is especially evident towards fields one knows little about, towards the so-called "soft sciences" and the humanities.
I know the term scientism came to be used as a pejorative in humanities discourse and consequently in journalism, but I’d prefer not to use it here, both because of the contemptuous connotation and because it was originally coined to mean something much more interesting: a counterpoint to a naive, maximalist sort of positivism, of attempts to dismiss any picture of how the world actually is as unverifiable and therefore the question itself as meaningless. (This is the pop culture impression of Popper, though AFAIU Popper realized the problem and said far more nuanced things than that.)
The argument went along the lines of, “if talking about the ‘real world’ is meaningless and science is exclusively about experiments in labs, then it sure is peculiar that those experiments appear to be so remarkably coherent, even with things outside of labs—almost as though there actually is something worth calling the ‘real world’ and that science is in fact about that thing?” Thus, scientism.
(Cf. Liberalism Unrelinquished[1] on a similar issue of terminology.)
Psychology and sociology are just as much sciences as mathematics, computer science, physics, chemistry, and biology.
Engineers love to convince themselves that older and simpler is always better.
So, you might have someone who can solve a differential equation, but seriously looks down on anyone with an Alexa, and thinks we will never be able to transition to all electric cars cleanly with future tech.
They are sometimes biased toward their senses much more than numbers. An engineer could totally still say "Metal is always better than cheap plastic crap" and make a power drill with a solid steel case or something. The technical analysis only matters if you actually do it.
They can do tech on a personal level but they don't trust the large scale process of technical improvement.
The other commenter mentioned disregard for the humanities and I think they are related.
"My intelligence is more valuable than your education" is a common belief. People seem to see life and work not as a series of projects, but like a sport, where the goal is to test yourself in a pure way, without "cheating".
The humanities often don't have objective success criteria, they are seen as nonessential, and often have lower barrier to entry(Some people can learn to draw from zero in a few weeks, math takes months to years before you can do anything you can't do with an app). These people judge value by amount of challenge.
It just doesn't fit the "Living off the land, surviving on your own skill, being practical instead of academic, trusting your eyes not math" kind of paradigm as well.
Science was literally invented as a reaction against academia, and the world was better for it.
I say this because while I agree with the notion of what you are saying, but you are making the same error.
Real, and amazing science is being done right now at Monsanto, at Intel, and at every medical company around the world. None of these problems you mention exist in this real world of science.
It hurts more than science, it injures, kills, maims, and blinds humans. These are people's children, mothers, and fathers.
Note that the root cause (unfamiliarity with the tools of science, especially probability and statistics) is largely the same.
It is worse. A highly experienced practitioner who would've done the right thing might get led astray by new bogus research. Precisely because most practitioners don't have the ability to judge scientific work on their own.